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What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

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Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#51

Post by grumpydba »

eloisant wrote: post #12
keiferski wrote: post #9

Anecdotally, after having lived in Paris for ~6 months, one of the most noticeable aspects of the city is its relative uniformity. Unlike Berlin, London, or Prague, you can wander for awhile in Paris and essentially see the same style of architecture and urban landscape repeated. It has something of an “endless” effect on your time perception.

That's because Paris is stuck in the 19th century with its Haussmannian style. Usually a city lives and changes to adapt itself to its times, and Paris was no exception... Until the 19th century. Now the local government wants to "preserve" it for the joy of tourists, to the detriments of locals. Housing is scarce causing high prices. Buildings are old and inconvenients. Paris is a museum-city. Designed for tourists.

I live there. Its cohesive architecture makes its beauty. We parisians certainly don't want to make the city as ugly as London or Berlin. Some of us can enjoy art.

Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#52

Post by grumpydba »

woodpanel wrote: post #39
realusername wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you build taller buildings, you will need to have wider streets, thus resulting in the same density, it won't solve anything.

is it anecdotal or is it provable? There are dozens of open wide Rues, Avenues and Boulevards in Paris that don't have any dense housing compared to Manhattan or Hong Kong etc.

Yeah but we tend to think that it's a pretty shitty idea to replace those nifty Carved stone buildings with cheap and shallow stained glass/concrete/steel ones.

Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#53

Post by fiblye »

realusername wrote: post #37
woodpanel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Size of Paris: 104km^2 [1] Size of Manhattan: 59km^2 [2] Density Paris: 21,000/km^2 [1] Density Manhattan: 28,154/km^2 [2] Comparing arrondissements with a larger area like Manhattan is not good. If you compare Manhattan's wards with Paris's arrondissements you get a clearer picture: 11th arrondissement: 41.500/km^2 [3] Upper Westsides 25th district: 92.400/km^2 [4] Looks like the visual comparison of stories works o…

If you build taller buildings, you will need to have wider streets, thus resulting in the same density, it won't solve anything.

What? I've never seen this in practice.

Hong Kong is incredibly dense and full of high rise buildings (Kowloon has 110,000 people/square mile) and streets aren't exactly wide. Seoul packs in 42,000 people per square mile without many significantly wide streets. Tokyo streets are often only suitable for one way traffic.

Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#54

Post by CaptainZapp »

ovi256 wrote: post #17
keiferski wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I can’t agree, sorry. I’m not sure if you’ve lived in Paris or not, but these “it’s a tourist city” comments almost always come from people that haven’t lived there. There are dozens of incredible neighborhoods in Paris that have little-to-no tourist presence. It’s akin to saying NYC is a tourist city because Times Square is a mess.

Unfortunately, the rules meant to preserve the Haussmanian parts beloved by tourists are applied uniformly throughout the city, even in those neighborhoods without tourists which you mention. There were deviations from the rules throughout the ages, especially on the left bank with the newer, taller towers (Place d'Italie, Montparnasse, Berges de Seine). But these deviations were always one off, pushed through by an…

One deviation that comes to mind and smack in the center of town would be Beaubourg (Centre Pompidou[1]), which is a very massive, very modernist building, surrounded by some of the oldest parts of the city.

The canopy at Les Halles also pretty much puts a stop to the rumour that new, massive constructions are not possible in Paris, let alone in the center of Paris.

Granted, context certainly matters and Beaubourg was, charitably put, rather controversial when it was under construction, but it's absolutely not a given that no renewal is possible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_Georges_Pompidou [2] https://www.citylab.com/design/2015/05/paris-the-canopy-fix/...

Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#55

Post by cdoersch »

Scarblac wrote: post #11

Can this type of software be used the other way around, to turn any picture of some building into a picture of that building in Paris ? That's an effect I've seen with many deep learning things but that I don't understand.

The closest I'm aware of is this: http://papers.nips.cc/paper/6650-toward-multimodal-image-to-...

However, it requires rectified, segmented training data, unlike the above.

Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#56

Post by [deleted] »

grosjona wrote: post #34
eloisant wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because Paris is stuck in the 19th century with its Haussmannian style. Usually a city lives and changes to adapt itself to its times, and Paris was no exception... Until the 19th century. Now the local government wants to "preserve" it for the joy of tourists, to the detriments of locals. Housing is scarce causing high prices. Buildings are old and inconvenients. Paris is a museum-city. Designed for tourists.

I find modern minimalist architecture depressing; the ceilings are low, tables made of glass, everything tends to be white (made worse by modern LED lights), there are no decorative features. Big modern cities are designed to trick people into paying more money for a lower quality of life.

[deleted]

Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#58

Post by bilivar21 »

Density is at max. Transportation facilities and traffic are already totally insufficient. You might be able to stuck more people with big building but you won't be able to allow them to move.

EVERY morning Parisians have at least one colleague complaining about transportation. All Parisians are secretly malthusianists.

What makes Paris for me ? Money, smell of piss, latent violence.

Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#59

Post by realusername »

tormeh wrote: post #44
realusername wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To build taller buildings, you would need much wider streets than what you have now, unless you want half of the city to be in a permanent shadow. This would not solve the housing issue. The density of Paris is close to the maximum possible already.

What's the point of building taller if you just increase the street width so total livable area per ground area is the same? That's nonsensical. Of course people will have to live with shadow. It's the only way to increase density (unless you want people to live in basements).

I don't know if you have been to Paris but the streets are VERY small, if you would build skyscraper, it would not be livable at all. Additionally, you need extra land for the foundation of the skyscraper (very very difficult to get in a crowded city like Paris. The point of the skyscraper is that it's cheaper for the company building it, it only makes sense in that aspect.

Re: What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)

#60

Post by graeme »

tormeh wrote: post #44
realusername wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To build taller buildings, you would need much wider streets than what you have now, unless you want half of the city to be in a permanent shadow. This would not solve the housing issue. The density of Paris is close to the maximum possible already.

What's the point of building taller if you just increase the street width so total livable area per ground area is the same? That's nonsensical. Of course people will have to live with shadow. It's the only way to increase density (unless you want people to live in basements).

I don’t think any city does this. Humans need sunlight.

(OP is not talking about shadow on one side of the road. They mean perma shadow the whole day long.)

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