I have no fear in suggesting that highrises -- buildings of more than four levels -- are unnecessary byproducts of a misconceived notion of civilization. I have said such things for half-a-century and escaped serious consideration. I write on the occasion of a disastrous fire in London which I have noted by posting the embedded tweet. This fire was in a building recently deemed safe to live in.
Premises
I have three premises which most cannot and will not accept. We do not need automobiles to have a free and prosperous future. Cars are the heart of the global warming economy and it is doomed to fail.
We can only achieve a just world if we accept the general viewpoint spelled out in cybercommunities. I shall explain these but first the terrible event that occasions this.
Questions Mount After Fire at Grenfell Tower in London Kills at Least 12 https://t.co/k0ZEa1HDfs
— Stephen C. Rose (@stephencrose) June 15, 2017
This is a textbook argument against highrises. The matter can only get worse given the fatal penchant of city planning which is slavishly wed to the car and its economic hold on the world. It is a textbook argument against Trump premises about oil being our future. Call it the one percent solution. And weep.
We should not need cars
Cars occupy more space that even appears to be the case.
They make alternatives in city design impossible. They frustrate anything just, long-term and ecologically sane. The only one-percenter who seems to understand this is Michael Bloomberg.
Christopher Alexander understood this decades ago when he wrote "Pattern Language" -- a routinely ignored classic. He did not advocate getting rid of cars and that is the major defect of his work.
We need structures of no more than four levels, We could easily accommodate every person in the world in safe, uncrowded communities no higher than four levels.
How to defeat warming
We can only defeat warming if we give up our car-oil economy. We can more than double GNP by switching to the components of new cybercommunities as an alternative to the endless construction and maintenance of roads and the entire business of oil and automobiles.
Even if we battle carbon down to survivable levels we will be doing little to keep a monstrous albatross from grabbing the neck of future generations. Cybercommunities are integral reclamations of reasonable density as the basis for economies that can scale. We now have a timid and exploitative capitalism that serves only the short-sighted rich.
The advantages
The advantages of cybercommunities are that they are without cars and therefore utterly walkable. They are compact and their design combines residence, recreation, work and everything else we want n a city. They are local democracies. They are open to all. They are affordable because the only thing you buy is your own room -- your private space. Everything else is semi -private, semi-public or entirely public. Investigate cybercommunities.
