Lukas
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Historically prosperity is created when many people work together while not needing more than is created. This surplus of wealth and resources can be used for the betterment of the urban environment. Dense urban living provides a place for many people that create wealth, while using little space, requiring less infrastructure to connect people, therefore reducing spending.
Simply put, it is about how well-connected people are, how much they earn and how much they spend. Cars promised to connect us and enable us to drive anywhere fast, but as demand has risen exponentially because of a lack of public transport alternatives and generous government subsidies for something ineffective in the city, we are now stuck together in traffic jams. Every tool has its purpose. Cars are great at connecting people from sparsely populated areas to dense urban environments, but they are terrible at providing the necessary throughput in densely populated and industrialized areas, where the wealth of our nation is created.
We should plan dense cities because they provide the economic foundation for a richer, more sustainable environment. In a high population density environment cars are a terrible mode of transportation because of space requirements and lack of throughput. Rail based public transport can transport 30 - 60 times as many people as car-based transport.
Additionally, trains could be automated to reduce labor requirements and ensure around the clock transportation. This would provide a much more cost-effective and user-friendly transport experience in a city than cars ever could.
We should really question if road infrastructure should be used regularly by cars in a dense urban environment. There should and will always be roads to highrises for emergency vehicles and heavy deliveries but those can use multi purpose roads that are mainly used by bicycles and micro cars. These roads should be access controled and built in a way that there is no option for through traffic.
Ideally the housing is built in a dense highrise fashion to enable wide green spaces between the buildings for recreational use, temperature dampening and sounds separating the balconies between the buildings.
To make building fast and sustainable, the buildings should be constructed out of prefabricated wood elements. This would essentially create long term co2 storage while using esthetically pleasing materials.
The facades should be sloped to enable enough light to reach shrubs and small trees planted in big planter pots on the edges of the balconies. This provides a more natural surface area than a traditional facade would. These should be pre planted as leaving it up to the residents often leads to lackluster results. There could be different plant configuration options to choose from.
Newly developed quarters should be built along current mass transit corridors where there is a lot of open space. This will reduce the amount of infrastructure that needs to be built and reduce the cost of the land that needs to be acquired.
Below is a tool in which you can choose a spot and select an area to visualize how many people would fit in an area with half Alterlaa density to Alterlaa density (40.000 people per km²). You can pick any place in the world but ideally along a current railway corridor. The blue line is the Westbahn corridor in Austria.
Ideally a place near an existing city is picked to be able to utilize some of the existing infrastructure but land prices might make it more financially viable to move the satellite city a bit further out. Depending on landscape elevation and bodies of water around a city, additional cities could be built outwards in a star patter or even better in a grid patter to minimize commute times. A mix between the two as shown below would be ideal.
The blue city and existing railway corridors are the original infrastructure. Along existing railways, new cities in green can be built and then connected with radial connections in yellow. If the radial connections bow out, the new city locations in yellow will later on form a grid with the cities in the second ring radial connection in orange. Right of way to connect the orange ring line with the yellow ring line should be considered in the original planning to provide the upgrade path for grid based public transport network.
Building cities along already existing infrastructure (transit oriented development) and filling in the gaps provides a efficient, scalable and cost effective way of building cities that have much more green spaces then our current way of building and don't rely at all on individual public transport. They could house millions of people at a fraction of the cost and land use, which would be much more sustainable economically & ecologically.
