Suburbs in the sky – On urban density and what it really means

Even when the evenings aren’t so shitty
I can’t see any stars because I’m too close to the city

(The Lucksmiths, I Prefer The Twentieth Century)

Density is an urban fact, city centers all over the world are becoming more and more dens by the day, an while the reasons for that process are unimportant, what is important is that this trend is not going to end in the foreseeable future or even to slow down.

Density is not only the byproduct of the need to squeeze many people into a limited space but rather of the need to efficiently provide services to an ever increasing number of people. The equation is quite simple – less people per area means more money is spent on infrastructure, big cultural or commercial centers have smaller potential users base and in general any urban tissue become less intense and less varied.

Urban tissues are creatures which live of people – the more they get the more they thrive. People are like the red blood cells of the city, the more there are and the bigger their flow, the more vigorous the city is. In general we can assume that the more people and function we can get into a certain space (up to a point of course) the better it will perform, or in other words – the higher the density the better.

The problem with density starts when the need to express it in a physical form arises, or in other words, the need to squeeze al these people into buildings. The traditional method is to simply stack them one on top of the other as high as we can, which at the current status of technological advancement is getting pretty high.

This situation leads to what Rem Koolhaas calls the theory of bigness, which points out that at a certain point the urban fabric simply starts crumbling into buildings, when every building becomes an independent entity without any context or connection to it's surrounding, when the city becomes a collection of artifacts instead if a coherent unit and the main mean of transportation is the elevator.

This theory is based on the fact that as the technology is advancing and the buildings grow taller and larger they become more important than the city. This fact although documents a fast materializing situation is far from being ideal or desired.

Instead of calling for the formation of the theory of bigness Koolhaas should have called for an inquiry for the causes of bigness, for the reasons that makes us buy the air above neighboring buildings just to ensure view from our building or at least a minimal space, an inquiry of how density ha turned into crowding, of how buildings have become small scale suburbs detached from the city.

When a building is 30 floors tall and in the best case scenario the first two floors are designated for commercial uses you can hardly claim that everyone who lives in such a building is living in the city, they are merely living inside the city but they are hardly a part of it.

It's no accident that Rem Koolhaas doesn't mention density. It's because bigness is not a result of density, bigness is a result of technology and of outdated conceptions, when we get a certain area of land and to live our mark upon the earth.

Remember, urban density is not about filling as much space as we can with built mass, urban density is about services and connections, about infrastructures and life quality.

When you stack apartments or offices one upon of another you're simply pushing them away from the city, disconnecting them from the urban fabric in every possible way. This zoning technique simply creates vertical suburbs with no gardens but with porches and the people who live there drive the elevator to work every day.

In order to avoid the problem of bigness we should stop thinking of building as byproducts of the street and instead treat them as equal variables in the city.

This is the place where urban density comes into play. The best way to connect many functions together is in a three dimensional way, when we arrange objects in space we can make many objects much closer to each other than when we arrange them in two dimensions.

If we can define the network of functions in the urban tissue, and optimize their spatial arrangement than we can apply this network in the three dimensional space and use building to host it. The result of that is not a building which host clear and defined functions but rather a collection of units which may or may not be a part of one mass.

When we remember that buildings are simply a tool used to arrange the city we can abandon the misconception that buildings have any real meaning and stop treating them as the end point of every architectural design.

Our urban building block doesn't necessarily have to grow out of the ground, they can as well grow out of other buildings, or if needed even in the air, Their origin and location is secondary to their connections.

The transformation of the connections network from the two dimensional grid of the streets to the three dimensional grid of the buildings gives us the chance to create diverse and stimulating urban density without having to encounter the problem of bigness, to expend the urban fabric to another dimension without losing any of it's basic attributes.

When we will stop planning suburbs in the sky we will be able to start designing high density urban structures.