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Hong Kong’s Massive High-Rise Neighborhoods
61–70 of 77 posts
Re: Hong Kong’s Massive High-Rise Neighborhoods
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many of those apartments are subdivided into smaller apartments. Entire family may live in just 40-square-foot apartment.
You don't mean 40 square meters?
No, he means 40 square feet. As in about 4 square meters.
Note that the average size of these arrangements, from spacehunt's link, is about 2.8 sq meters per person, so about 11m^2 for a 4-person family. And some are presumably below average.
Re: Hong Kong’s Massive High-Rise Neighborhoods
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Grass is always greener on the other side. Living in Hong Kong right now I do miss living in a detached house in suburban Melbourne. A lot. And no, we rarely see anyone else in the hallway, and even when we do we don't say hi to each other.
Whenever I pass someone in a quiet street and there's often that awkward moment, I think about the thousands of years we've evolved in smaller tribes and communities. And how poorly we are prepared as animals for purposeless encounters with others.
I'm not sure if this makes sense from a scaling perspective looking at the ratio of perimeter to area as size scales up, we are now far more likely to only casually meet members of our own "tribe" than ever before in history.
Think of multiple tribes "sharing" a watering hole or a hunting ground or simply plain old common borders.
I think we're pretty well prepared for it, as long as we're not at war we seem to have a pretty good ability to be casual, ignore them, yet unconsciously keep an eye on them and if they start acting weird (about to stab us in the back).
Re: Hong Kong’s Massive High-Rise Neighborhoods
#64Up to 60 floors / 20,000 people in an apartment building? I didn't realize that existed. I don't think you'd find an apartment building in the US that has even a fraction of that. The largest hotel in New York is the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. It has 49 floors / 1,949 rooms, which I don't think comes close to 20,000 people; I couldn't find the exact occupancy.
US Naval academy, the entire 4000 person university lives in one gigantic dorm building. That's the largest dorm I can think of, at least in the USA. I've never seen it personally, but I've heard its spectacular and seen some interesting pictures of the luxurious common areas.
If you permit skywalks to make one large building, technically most of downtown Minneapolis and (I think?) Toronto would be one big building. If you define "a building" as you can walk from one place to another indoors.
I don't think interaction scales as well as some think, I lived in a 13 floor roughly 600 person dorm at university and as I think back I never set foot on perhaps a third of the floors, and spent the vast majority of my time on just two floors. So making it 100 floors tall would primarily mean I'd almost never visit about 90 of the floors rather than almost never visiting about 10 of them.
This also happens horizontally, not just vertically. I live in a 580 square mile county. I spend the vast majority of my time, probably over 99%, in about 4 of those 580 square miles. That's just kind of how life is, lots of sleeping, gathering and consuming food, working, raising/educating kids... I believe my county nears the size of the state of Rhode Island, however I don't think social interaction is much different merely because the lines on a map are closer together.
I have lived rural, suburban, and urban, and my limited observation is ignoring each other is a defense mechanism. So in rural areas we were all practically blood brothers simply by virtue of being neighbors, but in urban apartments I would not even know my neighbors names. Suburban is somewhere in between.
Re: Hong Kong’s Massive High-Rise Neighborhoods
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spacehunt and gotrecruit are on the money. Even if you spend 3-4x more than the average household's entire monthly income so that you live in a flat that's almost got half as much usable space as a typical suburban home in, for example, the US, you've got your neighbors to contend with. The exorbitant rent or mortgage that you're paying only buys you a bit of extra elbow room (likely translated into more bedrooms and…
My dad always tells me any apartments look glossy only in their first year of construction. After that, things start to degrade pretty quickly. Start with paint, then window glasses and then leaks and then what not. All the best trying to get every one to pay up to fix the issues related to the general apartment building. It never happens. Unless you are living in a super luxury apartment, I see high rise residential…
I see high rise residential buildings as nothing more than modern day slums and ghettos.
Some people prefer to live in cities, for example people who are driven to earn lots of money, people seeking higher education or cultural experience, people looking for partners, etc. For those people, depending upon the density of the urban environment and their will to dedicate significant portions of their waking hours to a soulless commute, sometimes that means there's no other option but these buildings.
That said, I basically share your perspective. After living in apartments throughout Asia and London for a decade, I really enjoyed being in a house again in Los Angeles and am currently considering building one somewhere in remote New Zealand. My thinking is that high density cities are lovely to visit, but quality of life for the nine-to-five cityslicker typically sux. The 'burbs aint that much better, given commute overheads, an often broadly similar lack of nature and, per capita, not entirely dissimilar rents (despite the extra space afforded).
One point nobody seems to have made is that capital for buying houses is virtually free in Hong Kong .. something like 1-3% interest IIRC.
Re: Hong Kong’s Massive High-Rise Neighborhoods
#66> After years of living in a small house in Hong Kong’s countryside... Hong Kong has countryside?!?
Open google map and turn on the satellite mode. You will see there are lots of green areas in Hong Kong.
Green != countryside (at least not what I think of as countryside). If you look at a map of Manhattan you'll see a big swatch of green in the middle (Central Park) but that's not countryside. I've actually been to Hong Kong, and I've even been outside the city. I saw a lot of undeveloped hills. But I didn't see anything I would call "countryside." But maybe I'm just quibbling over terminology, and what the author means by "countryside" I think of as "the outskirts of the city."
Re: Hong Kong’s Massive High-Rise Neighborhoods
#67> After years of living in a small house in Hong Kong’s countryside... Hong Kong has countryside?!?
Most of Hong Kong is undeveloped land (and a lot of that is undeveloped because it is protected national park). This is why you end up with such high density despite so much land with only 7 million people.
Re: Hong Kong’s Massive High-Rise Neighborhoods
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whenever I pass someone in a quiet street and there's often that awkward moment, I think about the thousands of years we've evolved in smaller tribes and communities. And how poorly we are prepared as animals for purposeless encounters with others.
I'm not sure if this makes sense from a scaling perspective looking at the ratio of perimeter to area as size scales up, we are now far more likely to only casually meet members of our own "tribe" than ever before in history. Think of multiple tribes "sharing" a watering hole or a hunting ground or simply plain old common borders. I think we're pretty well prepared for it, as long as we're not at war we seem to have…
Cities aren't "tribes," they're far too large. In fact, they're tribe destroyers. From an evolutionary perspective, interaction with other people was meaningful: either you were interacting with a tribesman (basically a member of extended family) or with an outsider. In neither case was "indifference" a desirable response (outsiders evoke competitive fear or interest). In a city you interact with so many different people on a daily basis that almost all human interactions are, by necessity, marked by indifference.
We're not designed to simply ignore people. However, more and more that's what we are required to do.
Re: Hong Kong’s Massive High-Rise Neighborhoods
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Re: Hong Kong’s Massive High-Rise Neighborhoods
#70> After years of living in a small house in Hong Kong’s countryside... Hong Kong has countryside?!?
Less than 25% of the total land area of HK (~400 sq. mi.) is developed.[1] [1] http://www.gov.hk/en/about/abouthk/facts.htm
Does the total land area include the mountains, or only the habitable regions?