It's worth noting that the "tower in the park" modernist ethos of building very tall towers to create lots of green space was largely a bust.
Parks need a certain level of activation, and developments like these tended to fall below those thresholds. If not active, parks become ill-maintained, desolate, and foreboding. In the worst case scenario, they become havens for crime, since there are no witnesses or bystanders to help out someone getting mugged.
I don't understand how that's different than a regular park in the middle of a city. Why would having a skyscraper in the middle of a park instead of beside it result in higher crime?
The problem is when the park exists just as negative space between the buildings, as a way to provide seperation.
Towers surrounding a park, like Central Park in New York (or any decent size park in Manhattan) works well. Towers as a city wall like Grant Park in Chicago also work well. In both cases the park is a focal point of the urban form which puts all attention on the communal area it represents.
The purpose of "towers in a park" was to break up the urban form, and have density without urbanism. One big problem they were trying to avoid is rooms where the "view" out the window was of a ventilation shaft between buildings. They wanted towers with "no such thing as a bad view" by positioning them in a staggered layout and with substantial setbacks. This creates a bunch of awkward negative spaces in the layout and the architect just stamps "park" on all the vacant areas.
The result might be good views from inside the buildings but the no-man's-land between them becomes an alienating place with broken sight lines and blind corners. Toss in a criminal element and you end up with some really unpleasant spaces.
Yes, in just about every large city across the world, including Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, especially in cities, and newer parts of older cities, that were developed since the 1950s. It still influences contemporary architecture and city layout, though today maybe it's less deliberate (i.e. artistic, conceptual) and more a consequence of car culture and not wanting to crowd tall skyscrapers. So you just turn all the empty space between skyscrapers into "park", which almost invariably becomes desolate green space. It's the status quo even though the original concept has become largely discredited (or at least lacking for advocates) among the urban planning crowd and, to a lesser extent, architects (the effect frames their buildings as monoliths, easier to be admired as signature pieces).
It originates with Le Corbusier and his Radiant City concept from the 1930s. See https://99percentinvisible.org/article/ville-radieuse-le-cor.... The influences quickly spread through Europe and North America before exploding everywhere post WWII. There are several Wikipedia pages about Le Corbusiers, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ville_Radieuse but in a simple search I couldn't find one that gives a good overview of how influential it actually was. A lot academic urban planning literature discusses it. OTOH, the idea of less crowding long predated Le Corbusiers, and his vision may have been inevitable, but it was Le Corbusiers who packaged it up into a comprehensive concept, which helped the practice to spread much more rapidly and uniformly around the world.
A city is about what you can do. The skyscrapper in a park is less useful because you cannot walk to stores, work, or other things. As such people living there become used to driving everywhere. Even if they want to go to a park they will - out of habit - get in the car, and drive - at this point the local park is no better than any other. All those cars in fact imply a large parking lot and so the park isn't in walking distance of the door so it is reasonable to drive across the parking lot if you do want to visit that park.
In short the park is too large compared to everything else and so it isn't enough of a draw for locals to keep out the rif-raf.
Note that I said drive, not take transit above. Although the density might be there, the sky scrapper in the park ends up acting like a cul-de-sac: all transit has to make long detours to get to each one and so the effective speed of transit is unacceptably slow for any trip thus forcing people to drive just to get a reasonable trip time.
No it wouldn't - too far to get to anything else. It would be expensive just because it is still NYC and a high demand area, but it wouldn't be the most expensive because while it is close to one great thing about NYC it is far from all the others.
Because Central Park is literally surrounded by skyscrapers that don’t have parks in neighborhoods with below average park coverage other than Central Park. It’s the exception that proves the rule.
It’s also not that safe and requires its own police precinct.
I think the encapsulation probably refers to the 'city in a building' aspect, i.e. residents have most needs satisfied within the building, and rarely need to leave the building itself.
Regular parks are generally a lot smaller, so it’s easier to keep them busy and above the desolate threshold.
The thing about the tower in the park ethos was that every building should be surrounded by park and the neighborhood should be more park than city. That’s way too low of a density to keep parks safe.
This is it. There are many regular city parks I wouldn't walk through at night even if they weren't closed. I walk around them not through them. I live in the park it becomes a problem.
What's the difference between a city park and e.g. the hundreds of miles of trails and national forest behind my house? Somehow that manages to be crime-free despite less usage. Would love a theory of how density works in your model.
It takes preparation, resources, a vehicle, travel to the trailhead, motivation, effort, and miles of walking to get into trails in a national forest. Potential victims on a trail aren’t carrying many valuables because they’re out hiking.
A city park is within walking distance, requires no vehicle to get to, can be visited on a whim, and potential victims are more likely carrying valuables (jewelry, electronics, nice handbags). Criminals can visit the park, commit a crime, and disappear back into the dense city on a whim, without planning or preparing.
Most crimes in this context are crimes of convenience. Hiking long trails is not convenient.
>> potential victims are more likely carrying valuables (jewelry, electronics, nice handbags)
Back when I was a daily hiker, I would have been carry seriously expensive gear. A few thousand dollars at least. Way more expensive than I would have walking around town. It would have been work to track me down in the forest though.
As one of the other commenters pointed out, in a national forest the crime occurs as car clouting at the trailhead. I would leave my car unlocked, and depending on weather, a window rolled down.
The parent poster must live next to a different national forest than the ones I hiked at, if you hiked at a popular trail it was completely normal to get back to the trailhead and see cars with their windows busted out.
A lot of towers in the park are located in places where the park is actually private property, so they are built to discourage through traffic or visitors that might help to keep it safe.
The other thing is that people visit their local, convenient parks unless there is a really good reason to travel far for one; and if everyone has their tower in a park, then why would they go to anyone else’s?
1. A low traffic urban park still has some traffic, and criminals want reasonable waiting times. You might wait all day on a hiking trail.
2. Escape routes. Harder to make a clean getaway on a trail. Often one way out, a single trail head, and then a drive. That's another thing, you probably need a car. In an urban park you can vanish back into the city from multiple exit points.
3. Crimes of opportunity. Most muggings aren't planned out far in advance. Driving to a hiking spot and patiently waiting isn't the psychological place typical criminals are operating from. Serial killers, maybe... and sometimes those killings do happen in secluded hiking areas.
I'd guess that the sort of people incidentally mugging others can't afford a car and so would generally be within walking distance of their home/haunts. Probably also not the sort to put in extra effort walking trails or chancing a long walk in case they found someone.
I've travelled and hiked in the US a lot. In outdoor tourism spots away from cities, I think the main threat for opportunistic thefts would be 20-30yo foreign tourists (shoestring travelling Europeans, South Americans, etc). Cities would be completely different.
but i'd assume that the main difference is that the hundreds of miles of trails and national forest behind your house doesn't have a residential tower stuck in the middle of it.
Wow, some of the complexes in those pictures look a lot like the cities I create when I'm playing Workers & Resources; if I didn't know any better I would have thought they were taken in the former Soviet bloc. I wonder how they managed to make it work where the West didn't.
Details matter and the Soviet examples must have got some details right that matter. The question for the reader is then what? (one answer already given is Soviets didn't give residents a choice - I have no idea if this is right or not)
the fact that they kept building them doesn't really mean it worked any better. the answer might be that it had all the same problems, they just cared less about solving those problems. the problem with towers in the park is isolation from services - in a society where services are more scarce to begin with, that's going to be less of a difference than other forms of planning.
but afaik the difference between "commieblocks" and towers in the park is that there was a lot less park per commieblock. you had more buildings clustered tighter together than the prototypical western towers in the park development.
My understanding is that the use separation wasn't nearly as strict. Some of them have markets and daycares in them, which increases the amount of people there at times that would be dead for a plain residential area.
Western academia got pumped chock full of former soviet bloc professionals after the walls fell so a generation of urban planners and other professionals spent their education hearing a fair bit about that kind of construction and planning.
Typically the built environment is going to be a better place to find action for ne’er do wells looking for action. Not being seen doesn’t matter much without opportunity.
To put it another way, hundreds of miles of forest trails sounds like a lot of work.
I'm assuming you live in a less populated area, which would also (on average) mean fewer criminals. Lower usage in high density vs lower usage in low density.
Parkland that is not often used to capacity that has less people near it would naturally also have less crime from people within it, because there’s not many people to commit crimes nearby in the first place. E.G. Los Angeles National Forest
Parkland that is not often used to capacity that has a lot of people near it would likely have more crime, because you’ve essentially created a glorified alleyway. E.G. Central Park in the 70s, when you didn’t want to be nearby it near sundown.
Central Park is a good case study of this phenomenon, because it’s now one of the most heavily used parks in one of most densely populated areas in the world, and billionaires pay premiums to live next to it. That didn’t always used to be the case, and it was considered dangerous.
I am not the person you asked, but it seems to me the key difference is concentration of accessible resources. If so, the areas where the trails behind your house intersect with wealthy suburban or urban areas are the areas most likely to conceal would-be robbers.
"towers in the park" is a pretty specific type of topology, where the only access to the tower is through the park without any type of through or cross traffic.
Emphasis on through or cross traffic. Generally there is a parking garage but it leads directly to a road around the perimeter of a very large block. If you think of the roads as basically long driveways to main roads, it’s not particularly inconvenient to drive around, or at least no more so than your average suburb with cul de sacs and loops.
Parking garages in these developments also tended to be centers of crime since they were big, desolate, and no one lingered in them to witness anything.
The Vancouver I saw (BC) didn't have any. I'm not saying they don't exist, but what I saw was towers surrounded by one and two story buildings. There were parks and a lot of dead area, but nothing that was tower surrounded by parks.
Beg to differ. I live in Yaletown in one of the Concord Pacific towers. David Lam Park and George Wainborn Park are vibrant as is the whole seawall. My kid goes to the daycare along one of the parks.
I'm sitting at my desk in an office in Gastown in a low-rise. The streets are covered in feces and broken crack pipes.
"towers in the park" refers to a pretty specific layout where the towers are surrounded and separated by parks. Yaletown has parks that are surrounded by towers, which generally seems to work better
To your point, it works best if the tower is a business related building (or a straight shopping mall), thus creating incentive to generate traffic and also properly maintin it.
Japan has plenty of those (e.g. Roppongi's Midtown, Tokyo Tower, Shinagawa's corp. park)
I would hardly argue that the Shinagawa corporate park, if you mean where the Intercontinental is and where Nikon used to be, works well. There's basically no human activity at ground level except people walking to and from the train.
Are you confused about what a question is and what a claim is?
The question is about whether you believe they are fake or not. I don’t have any claims in either direction.
e.g. “Didn’t pan out that well” according to what authoratative sources?
You can’t get around it via linking a wikipedia article with opinions expressed by other random people, without any more authority or credibility than many HN users.
Edit: And if there is no source with such, then it needs to be proven via logical arguments, observational evidence, etc.
He literally gave an explanation, which if you wanted more details about you could have enquired for him to expand. Instead you brought up the non-sequitur of fake pictures, and didn't engage him in the discussion. Just demanded sources while providing none yourself.
Why is your opinion about what another HN user wrote even meaningful?
Anything that user writes in the future will automatically supersede it.
And your opinion about the interpretation of someone else’s comment can never outweigh anyone else’s opinion on the same… so it seems empty of any substance.
Parks need a certain level of activation, and developments like these tended to fall below those thresholds. If not active, parks become ill-maintained, desolate, and foreboding. In the worst case scenario, they become havens for crime, since there are no witnesses or bystanders to help out someone getting mugged.