FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

The Mile-High Cities of the Future Will Be Miserable

In the year 2025, there will be buildings that stand over a mile high. There were, at one point, concrete plans for a skyscraper in a Middle Eastern nation that was to tower one and a half miles into the heavens. That one was shelved, but major...

In the year 2025, there will be buildings that stand over a mile high. There were, at one point, concrete plans to build a skyscraper that would tower one and a half miles over a certain Middle Eastern nation. They were shelved, but major architects insist that there will be others.

Why? Because the future awaits. Our sci-fionized conception of the future comes replete with buildings that poke through the cloud cover, that loom over the flying taxis that whizz along just below. It’s the Jetsons, it’s Star Wars, Blade Runner, Fifth Element, it’s all that.

Advertisement

Because tall buildings are awesome; we humanfolk have always thought this. The taller the awesomer, obviously, and Dubai already has one that stands half a mile high. And the future must be full of awesome things. Ergo, the future will be full of mile-high buildings.

Click to expand

Now, there will probably be buildings that hit the mile-high mark sometime in the near future, but Bloomberg is right to frame its profile of the world-renowned architecture group seeking to make it happen as propelled primarily by ego. Because we don’t need mile-high buildings, and we never, ever will.

Even the most ardent pro-density urbanists—Edward Glaeser, Ryan Avent, David Owen, etc—might balk at the prospect of buildings that tall beginning to populate cities. They’d be incredibly expensive to build, incredibly expensive to maintain, powering the thing would be a nightmare, and moving people around it even more so. The benefits of dense urbanity—energy efficiency, namely—would be out the window. Lloyd Alter has long pointed out that there’s a Goldilocks density when it comes to urban development, and that towering domiciles that cram a million people into each city block aren’t required for low-energy living. There’s really no reason to load our cities up with towers that tall, or anywhere close.

Frank Lloyd Wright famously already designed what was to be the tallest building ever—the Illinois. And he imagined its elevators would be powered by localized nuclear reactors.

We get carried away with our futurism, and that’s fine. But the general trend is still to push for taller and taller buildings; we want gigantic residential skyscrapers and vertical farms to welcome the millions of people moving into our metropolises. Yet even if massively tall buildings weren’t financially infeasible and wasteful of energy, they’d likely make for miserable cities nonetheless.

Jane Jacobs thought that it was important for cities to house a diversity of buildings and neighborhoods, that it was important to the social fabric of the community that skyscrapers not tower over the throng of humanity below.

“Densities are too low, or too high, when they frustrate city diversity instead of abetting it,” she wrote. We need to interact with our neighbors, engage in our communities, observe and take part in civic affairs. That becomes more difficult to do if you’re perched on the 192nd floor of a mega-skyscraper.

Our egos will no doubt drive us to continually build Babel-like structures, just to prove we can. So be it. There’s little we can do to stop the next cash-flush corporation or resource-rich nationstate from wanting to outdo the Burj Khalifa. But we should at least recognize that this rampant vision of the urban future, this conflation of our subconscious dreams of sci-fi grandeur and the rosy forecasts of pro-density economists, may not end up as triumphant as we’d hope.