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.

The city is not a tree - it's a graph

Where I grew up there weren't many trees
Where there was we'd tear them down
And use them on our enemies
They say that what you mock
Will surely overtake you

And you become a monster
So the monster will not break you

(U2, Peace on Earth)

The way we organize the world around us is a major concern when designing architectural products, whether it might be a house or an apartment, a building, a street or even larger urban components.

Easy to use architectural products are ones that fit with the way we perceive the world, ones that can be seamlessly added to our mental system of connections. The problem is that this pattern of connections is quite hard to define. It's rarely linear and it has a hierarchy, but there aren't any clear rules other than that. So how do we construct our environment? How do we connect the different parts into a comprehensible system?
When we design small scale architectural products we tend to do it intuitively, the connections are few and all the details are comprehensible, but how do we design lager architectural products? how do we design an urban tissue? a city?

Christopher Alexander had used, in his 1965 article "the city is not a tree", the mathematical structure of a tree to demonstrate the problems with the zoning based modernist concepts of a city as structure that originates from a certain point and expands in a clear direction.

Instead Christopher Alexander had chosen the mathematical structure of a semi lattice to describe the city, a fact that seems to indicate that he hadn't read enough in his discrete math book, which seems right enough as he was busy fighting modernism.

Although Alexander was quite right to point out that what defines cities is the overlapping of zones, the mixture of systems, where the natural conjunction and density creates a multi centered city, he seemed to have missed the fact that the city is not composed of zones, as modern architecture wants us to believe.

The city is composed of urban functions which are combined together to create an interesting environment, rich with multi sensory stimulations. The city is not a reserved old man; it's more like a hyperactive child – an ever surprising and creative creature that can never fit into any traditional system.

A city can't and shouldn't be tamed into strict patterns but rather follow predetermined guidelines. In order to do that we need a much more flexible structure which we can build our cities around, the skeleton of the city to which urban tissues will be attached.

Such a structure needs to have two main attributes: the ability to express hierarchy and the ability to define connections in a non linear fashion. These two attributes are the basis for the creation of intricate systems that are seemingly complex and yet can be separated into clear sub-systems.

The ability to define for each component it's hierarchy level and to which elements it is connected enables us to create a system that can grow to be complex and yet clearly defined and easy to understand.

The structure which provides us with both complexity and hierarchy is the mathematical graph. I'll skip the technical detail (what is wikipedia for?) and just do with the basic definition that graph is a data structure which is composed of two types of components: nodes and edges, when each two nodes are connected by an edge.

Each node can be assigned a value, which can be used to place node along the hierarchy scale, and when we connect all the nodes together we can get a spatial skeleton of our system.

Further more, when considered in an urban context the system gets more meanings. For example, a node with many edges connected to it has relatively more intensity. Some features of the system are byproducts of other attributes and it is almost impossible to control them as the system grows, much like in real life cities.

The question is what exactly the nodes represent? it's clear that each one is an urban function but that hardly a value, and barely constructs any kind of hierarchy.

In order to find out the units of the values, we must first define the scale of the hierarchy, what is at the top of the scale and what is in the bottom? Does a shopping center is ranked higher than a public park and where it stands in relation to housing or offices?

I suggest a definition of what can be called an urban mass, a term which represents the relative effect an area has on the urban fabric. The unit would consist of a combination between density (and how the measure that is another topic) and land area, or more correctly volume. Such a scale that recognizes the fact the large low density areas has an effect on a city as much as high density areas. Take for example the Central Park in Manhattan and Time Square, both of New York's landmarks with completely different nature.

When the urban mass of a function and its intensity (the number of edges) are combined we are able to define urban centers and the relations between them, and combine them into a complex yet coherent system, which is the basis of designing urban tissues.

Abstract – How we deal with density and how we can do it better

One of the earliest human behavioral patterns is the way we design and build our cities. The clear template of two dimensional streets which wraps urban functions is with us since the dawn of history. Even though that in the course of history the building blocks which the city is composed of have become much more diverse and the way we design and build them have changed significantly, the way we organize them in space remained almost unchanged.

The main paradigm which dictated the way we think about urban design was two dimensionality – the drawing of streets which encapsulate colored stains that represent different land uses, like nothing had changed since the days of the Roman Empire.

In fact thinking in two dimensions is so rooted in urban design (and in architectural design in general)' that even if a design is not a straight forward two dimensional, it is almost always a superposition of several two dimensional designs which keeps on existing individually. The technological advancement only affects the height for which we can extrude those colored stains drawn on urban plans, but the way these stains are organized was accepted as an axiom which defines that the biggest architectural component is the building – which stands as a clear antithesis to the street.

The reality of increasing density in the centers of the cities has virtually transformed any urban design plan to a variation of the modernist zoning concept, when the created building are like islands in the urban space. The land uses plan, no matter how sensitive and complex it might be still focuses on it literal meaning of how to use the land level and its immediate periphery, employing minimal reference to the vertical dimension.

There for even if in street level we get a mixed use design above it we get the same paradigm that the new urbanism is trying to contradict, when the street is experienced mainly by the random user rather than by the people which regularly work and live in it. As the building gets taller it gets more detached from what is happening on the street level and the urban design is losing its meaning.

The solution for this problem might be a fundamental three dimensional design. By defining the street as the largest building block opposed to the single building, while "pulling" the street upwards and organizing the built mass around a street all the way up, and designing it on a volume based method transforming the traditional concept of land uses to a more three dimensional concept of Space Uses.

The three dimensional reference to space uses allows us to create a more interesting environment containing much more uses, such an environment which allows the creation of many connections between the urban function enveloping the "street", enabling us to receive large amount of information without overloading our senses.

A system which emphasis the connections between different parts might be the basis to an organic like structure which is able to expand and evolve by connecting to specific functions. Just as grass shoots (or strawberries if you prefer) expand by sending extensions so does a system can expand by creating new masses and connecting them to existing ones.

Such an expansion method enables the creation of a reach environment which has minimal footprint, touching the ground level on select points and growing in space. In fact due to the nature of such system it is possible to use it as extension to existing urban tissues that can no longer follow their original design by creating new intensive urban focal points while maintaining high quality of life to their users.

The ability to pinpoint the exact location of the system's entry points/connections can produce a surgical treatment to urban tissues planting the seeds of a three dimensional structure and allowing it to grow in order to match its needs.

No one understands me (again) or Why I'm writing this blog

This blog, or should I say collection of writings is an attempt to document my final project in my architecture studies, not so much the process, but mainly thoughts, theories an insight about the more theoretical sides of my project and related ideas.

As the faculty of architecture at the Technion regards reading as something you can do only if you haven't got any better way to waste your time, and writing as borderline obscene I needed to find a platform where I can discuss my ideas, not so much for the purpose of getting responses (or any other kinds of feedbacks) but more of a way to formulate ideas, namedropping and quoting songs.

Mainly, this blog was created to help me contemplate thought that, as the title suggest, I can't really talk with anyone about and get a proper response.

As these texts might turn out in some form or another to be the base of my thesis, it will most likely take the shape of a collection of articles which might require a certain theoretical knowledge (I'd suggest Greg Lynn and Rem Koolhaas as a descent beginning) which I'll make an effort to mention although some ideas might pop up without appropriate reference.

Oh, and just to make things clear my project is about creating urban structures in high density situations and why an how we can create them as three dimensional structures.