I live in Zurich-wollishofen and love it here. There are some areas of dense housing (Green City, Entlisberg, etc) but despite that there's a farm that's a 5-minute walk to get to, two other farms that are about 30 minutes, a fourth farm that's 45-minutes, and finally a fifth farm that's over an hour and includes a 400 meter climb up a ridge. We do much of our shopping at the farms.
The lake and swimming is a 10-minute walk with many green areas, and I gather mushrooms on the uetliberg/Albis ridge that takes me about 25-minutes to get to on foot.
Zurich has dense housing areas but its also well-integrated with nature and it's not just my neighborhood - there's lovely forests all around the city with streams and waterfalls, wild garlic and berries and mushrooms..
That sounds great, but that experience of the 15000 or so people in Wollishofen can't be provided for the half a million folks living in Zurich. That's the whole point of Verdichtung. That you get higher density in exchange for short distances. If everybody lived like Wollishofen does, then you'd have suburbia as far as the eye can see. In a sense, Wollishofen has the cake and gets to eat it too (because it's so close to the dense Zurich center but is itself only sparse). Which is nice for the small minority living there, but not a model that can really be applied everywhere.
Hong Kong (while obviously quite different) is similar in the sense that many urban areas are fairly compact and walkable, and regions of very high density housing alternate with parks, forests, playgrounds, zoological gardens, water front, etc., so that groceries, restaurants, public transport, but also recreational areas are never more than a few minutes away.
My first experience with this was in Maastricht. We started walking in the city center and before I know it we were on the outskirts. This was unexpected to me at I'm used to North American cities.
This is what is called "tiivistettävä" in Finnish. I live in such an area, with traditional wooden housing, in the city core. If some houses get in bad state, the city orders to throw them down and some low-rise apartment blocks are built on top of them, thus increasing the number of people that can be housed per square meter.
It's a fine line between the noble intentions of the urban planning concept and creating a horrible mismatched pot-pourri of different building styles and ages, though. Ideally buildings in an area are somewhat congruent with each other.
Urban sprawl is an issue here in part because of the abundance of water, land-locking expanding city centres.
I suppose here’s the type of story where it’s all sounds good and you say show me the data. And then, if you’re inclined, run a notebook and look for comparable metrics from other cities.
“Neither cooperatives nor the city typically sell flats. Mostly because …they really love recurring revenue and absolutely would hate to deal with short-term income as they are generally *non-profit institutions*.” (My emphasis)
Doesn’t seem like NYC can run their buildings at a profit, considering all the repairs that are reported as unfixed.
> “Neither cooperatives nor the city typically sell flats. Mostly because …they really love recurring revenue and absolutely would hate to deal with short-term income as they are generally non-profit institutions.” (My emphasis)
FWIW that was a bit misleading, the goal of the city or the non profits (Genossenschaften) is to provide housing, not selling flat. (There's a goal that 1/3 of all housing in the city has to be non-profit by 2050, this was voted back in 2011)
The lake and swimming is a 10-minute walk with many green areas, and I gather mushrooms on the uetliberg/Albis ridge that takes me about 25-minutes to get to on foot.
Zurich has dense housing areas but its also well-integrated with nature and it's not just my neighborhood - there's lovely forests all around the city with streams and waterfalls, wild garlic and berries and mushrooms..
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