Densification is central to climate action dogma but I wonder how necessary it really is.
Perhaps it is to low-energy urbanism what hub-and-spoke was assumed to be for airlines before Southwest showed a different way could work.
Conversation
Most of the benefits are block level not agglomeration level. In per capita energy density terms a few blocks of 4-5 story buildings around a Whole Foods and trader joe is probably as good as a metro area high-rise. Don’t need bloody symphonies and football teams everywhere.
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Yeah, don't like them. I'm very suspicious of trad fetishism. If there's good in those chesterton fences, I'd rather recover them from first principles in a world where modern construction and architecture aren't dismissed out of hand as non-fractal profanity.
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Sure, that would be great. But many things just can’t, or can’t practically, be derived from first principles- e.g. medicine, or many forms of art. Judging by modern building styles from the past few decades, good architecture could also be one.
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Yep, that's the dogma in the christopher alexander world, and it's a good serious/strong case. It's just not the whole story. It's ludicrous to conclude that a society that can build the Burj Khalifa etc is somehow entirely impoverished of architectural imagination and knowledge
The Burj Khalifa is great at what it’s for, and it’s for something which modernist-y styles do very well - but it’s a very different thing than what we want a quiet residential neighborhood to do.

