marcszar_matrix_pt1_highrises

Part 1 - The environmental and social problems of high rise buildings
 * //The Matrix - The Diminishing Returns of Technology//**

We often assume skyscrapers are inherently "sustainable" buildings because they allow many people to be packed together into a relatively small area. But high rise structures may actually be detrimental to the environment (they operate at a scale that requires massive energy inputs), and it has already become obvious that they encourage social atomization.

The leftmost image is the cover of J.G. Ballard's excellent novel //High Rise// which describes a process of social stagnation that occurs within the context of a fictional high rise apartment building. The two images on the right illustrate a process of social decay that occurred in several real life high rises (in St. Louis' Pruitt-Igoe housing projects). The bottom right image is the architect's conception of what the project's communal hallways would look like when used by the residents. The top right image shows how the hallways were actually treated by the residents.

Complexity theory examines how societies create ever-increasingly-complex institutions to deal with the various problems they encounter as they evolve, but the theory also examines how complex institutions modify the behaviors, decision-making processes, and economic health of societies. The "diminishing returns of technology" branch of complexity theory argues that, while the development of complex institutions is not necessarily a negative process, the emergence of ever-increasingly-complex technological solutions to common problems may end up causing even worse unforeseen problems. That is, a technological solution designed to solve one problem may, over time as the technology becomes widespread and commonplace, generate new and even more difficult (complex) problems that are potentially more destructive than the original problem the technology was designed to solve. "Diminishing returns" refers to a process of entropy in which a new technology is initially embraced because it seemingly offers so many immediate advantages but that, over time, the disadvantages of that technology begin to accumulate and outweigh the formerly-obvious advantages. The technology becomes a burden and leaves us saddled with a host of newly-created problems to solve on top of the previously-existing problems, adding further strain to an already hypercomplex society. Since our economic system and world view does not usually encourage forward-thinking and careful planning for future results (the present is emphasized over the future), that makes it all the more difficult for us to predict any potential problems that may emerge from current technologies.
 * What are the diminishing returns of technology?**

Examples of diminishing returns of technology and our failure to concurrently examine the disadvantages of new technologies alongside their advantages are abundant in our society. Some of the more obvious are:


 * 1.)** During the postwar "Green Revolution" we became dependent on chemical pesticides to boost crop production. For a time, the pesticides seemed to work wonders: insects and other pests were immediately exterminated and crop yields soared. But after several decades the power of these pesticides seemed to be wearing off; strains of pests which were immune to the pesticide survived and reproduced, creating a new population of pests that were not affected by the pesticide. We naively believed that new technology (petrochemical pesticides) would solve the pest problem once and for all but the problem only worsened: in the 1940s farmers lost 7% of crops to pests but by the 1980s they were losing 13% of crops to pests //while using more pesticides!// See.


 * 2.)** The same phenomenon can be seen in the increased resistance of bacteria to various types of antibiotics. In the early 20th century penicillin was considered a miracle drug that could seemingly cure all types of infections but it is now nowhere near as effective as it was even 50 years ago and it is no longer seen as a miracle treatment. Again, the naive application of a new discovery to every problem in society (bacterial infections) reduced the effectiveness of the technology and created even worse problems (new and ever-more-dangerous strains of antibiotics-resistant bacteria).


 * 3.)** The diminishing returns of technology can even be seen in social interactions as mundane as telephone conversations. At one time the telephone was sparingly used (households typically only had one phone and seldom used it for idle social chatter). As telephones have become more mobile (they have been liberated from their former fixed position of limited practicality in one room of the house), they have //induced// a demand for constant, ceaseless use - today the issues of the workplace invade a person's home and vacation time. The omnipresent mobile phone has dissolved the barrier between "home," "work," and "vacation" to the point that someone can be bothered with work problems when they're not even working (i.e.- constantly being interrupted with work problems when out with friends). Vacation time remains stressful because the mobile phone forces a carryover of stress from one venue to another (again, constantly being interrupted with work problems when the time should be used to relax). The disadvantages of mobile phones (the easy transmission of social/workplace problems at all times of day) are beginning to outweigh the advantages of convenience. (How often do you //really// need to be within arm's reach of a phone?)

This presentation will focus on diminishing returns of technology that have a more concrete connection to the various environmental/sustainability problems we face today. More specifically, it will examine how the US's 20th century infatuation with the skyscraper has led to a slew of previously-nonexistent social problems and how the high rise, despite all the hype about "green skyscrapers," is actually a very inefficient and unsustainable building typology.

The architecture profession is currently obsessed with green "starchitecture" but many criticisms have emerged in recent years which suggest high rises are not at all "green" and have instead been "greenwashed" to appear sustainable. Salingaros, a mathematician and generalist urban thinker, has summarized most succinctly all the various arguments against using the skyscraper as a model to achieve sustainability:
 * What are the environmental problems of high rise buildings?**


 * 1.)** They exacerbate the "urban heat island" effect, especially with their creation of "urban canyons." Low rise buildings do not influence the above two problems anywhere near as much as high rises do (though the pavement that often surrounds both low and high rise buildings is a big problem as well).
 * 2.)** Despite the advances in glass made in recent years (double glazing, triple glazing, tinting, and other exotic glass treatments which require enormous amounts of energy to produce), our numerous glass-skinned skyscrapers act as heat sinks and/or drains - in the summer they require immense loads of energy for air conditioning and in the winter they require immense loads of energy for heating (the glass surfaces quickly sap much of the heat to the outside of the building).
 * 3.)** The engineering and structural demands of high rises requires the use of materials (glass, concrete, and steel) with VERY high embedded energy. Low rise older buildings can use locally-obtained masonry and wood - these energy-efficient, sustainable materials cannot be feasibly used in high rises.
 * 4.)** The floor plates (the programming and laying out of activities that occur on each floor of a building) of high rises tend to be inefficient because they require excessive space to be sacrificed for redundant circulation. The higher the skyscraper is, the more floor space needs to be sacrificed - the skyscraper is forced to grow taller and waste more and more space in a futile speculative attempt to acquire even more rentable floor space to be used to overcome the financial disadvantages of excessive height.
 * 5.)** Skyscrapers create negative wind effects ("wind tunnels") that make the street environments at the base of the skyscrapers very unpleasant.

James Howard Kunstler has argued that, apart from the inherent design flaws described above, the skyscraper may become an unsustainable building typology in the era of fossil fuel scarcity simply because we will lose the resources needed to maintain high rises. Skyscrapers require massive centralized systems for HVAC powered by either coal>steam (late 19th century), natural gas, or oil. No system of alternative energy will allow us to heat or cool high rises with the ease of coal, natural gas, or oil. Most of us quickly conclude that we can power skyscrapers via alternate means - maybe, but how will we //climatically control them// via solar panels and wind turbines? Smaller urban buildings can be individually controlled by localized renewable energy systems (i.e.- passive solar, but even a typical four-floor apartment building would need to be powered by scores of turbines or panels) so they are more suitably adapted (they are //better scaled//) to a future of energy scarcity. Again, just as suburbia will not be able to be powered by any combination of renewable energy sources, so too will skyscrapers not be able to be powered on renewable sources - there is a lot of truth to the running joke that the wind turbines once proposed for the top of the WTC project wouldn't even be able to power all the elevators' lights inside the building.

Perhaps the most comprehensive work on the subtle social disruptions skyscrapers cause is Christopher Alexander's //A Pattern Language.// He cites study after study that indicate high rise residential buildings alienate and disconnect people from society by (unintentionally, of course) psychologically disconnecting people from the street (hence disconnecting them from street life and thus disconnecting them from society). A good summary of the various findings can be found here. (A collection of excerpts from the book).
 * What are the social problems of high rise buildings?**

The findings cited by Alexander - that vertical social disconnection leads to a decline in social capital as people retreat into their own private lives and withdraw from engaging in the surrounding community - can be illustrated by studying the phenomenon of high rise public housing in the US and Europe. High rise housing projects such as Pruitt-Igoe and Cabrini-Green suffered from an unbelievable array of social problems - we are quick to assume that the physical structure of these projects (they were vertical slabs) was not responsible for the problems but rather that the extreme concentration of poverty led to the emergence of social problems. While it is obvious that the concentration of poverty //does// cause social problems, the assumption does not fully explain why the Cabrini-Green high rises fell into chaos but the nearby Frances Cabrini Rowhouses (an adjacent public housing project made up of low rise row houses) never descended into chaos? (Indeed the high rise Cabrini buildings have since been torn down but the low rise Cabrini row houses still exist and serve as public housing.) The same phenomenon can be seen with Pruitt-Igoe - the poor DeSoto-Carr row house neighborhood in St. Louis that was razed to make room for the high rises certainly had social problems, but the new Pruitt-Igoe high rises led to such incredibly bad social problems that the towers were razed less than 20 years after they were built. The social problems that high rise public housing cause have become so acute that most American cities have torn down their high rise projects - but they have often retained their low rise projects and have even built more. Thus we can conclude that the concept of public housing does not //in itself// cause social problems, but that //high rise// public housing may indeed be exacerbating them.

The same problem is present in Europe - the poor neighborhoods that were razed to make way for the Park Hill flats in Sheffield, UK certainly had problems, but they were not environments of anarchy. The new high rise that replaced the slums descended into an anarchy that had never plagued the original poor neighborhood - even though the architects tried bringing street life directly up into the vertical high rises by using the "streets in the sky concept," they failed to recreate the sense of street-level activity and psychological security that low-rise neighborhoods so easily exude. The list of examples of high rise construction turning former poor-but-stable low rise neighborhoods into even poorer and anarchic high rise holding pens goes on and on - France's decaying banlieues are another good example.

Now that we can see that high rises exacerbate and contribute to social problems, we should ask what is it about the //physical design// of the high rise that is responsible for this? Jane Jacobs used a poignant example in her book //The Death and Life of Great American Cities// to explain how high rise residences prohibit residents from taking a stake in the community. She contrasted two public spaces - one was a heavily-used lot in a poor tenement neighborhood that was safe and used at all times of the day for all sorts of activities, the other was a desolate landscape of lawns and paved areas around several public housing high rises that were always vacant and barren. Jacobs argued that high rises prevent residents from exhibiting a modest form of "ownership" over common grounds as smaller-scaled neighborhoods do (See also Oscar Newman's "Defensible Space" theory). It is easy for tenement and row house residents to maintain the small lawns and parks they have in their area because they have easy access to them and the building stock encloses them well. On the other hand, the green landscaping around public high rise projects is often left derelict because the residents are so removed from the activities at ground level that they have no particular inclination to care about what goes on there. These places are thus shunned by the residents, reinforcing a feedback loop of further avoidance by other neighborhood residents because they will not venture into an area that looks empty and unsafe. As a result, criminal elements move into the neglected area.

It isn't only public housing high rises that exacerbate social problems. High rise residences and office buildings for people of all incomes tend to fragment the urban fabric by encouraging the development of seas of parking around them. New York City is a noticeable exception (high rises there are tightly compacted together into a unified fabric), but high rises in most cities, especially in the sprawling cities of the sunbelt, tend to encourage the development of wide swaths of parking around them (See James Howard Kunstler's //Home from Nowhere// where he soberly describes how city after city have destroyed wide swaths of their urban fabric to make room for surface parking - Columbus, Ohio's CBD is 70% surface parking, for example). The excessive amount of parking required to service the high rises frays the community - people retreat into their private lives in the high rises because there is no longer anything on the ground worth looking at. Who wants to hang out in a parking lot or a desolate, barren concrete plaza? The desolate walls that modern skyscrapers often present to the streets they are situated on (the walls are often not full of shop windows but rather full of ventilation ducts, grilles, utility entrances, and dark entrances to gloomy parking garages) make the streets very unpleasant places to congregate on and people tend to avoid them, thereby reinforcing a perception of the street as being an unsafe place to be (which quickly becomes the reality). Also, there often is no phenomenon of "eyes on the street" in high rise neighborhoods since people are too removed from street life to pay attention to what goes on down on the street.

Environmentalists often argue that we need to pack more people into high rises to reverse the process of suburban sprawl. My previous presentation discussed how the wasteful strategy of suburban sprawl led to a decline in our social capital and destroyed valuable forests and farmland. (Much like skyscrapers encourage social atomization through vertical isolation, so too do suburbs encourage the same through horizontal isolation). Environmentalists are correct in arguing that we need to dismantle our 50-year experiment with suburban expansion, but we should not encourage suburbanites to move into an environment of the opposite extreme (high rises). As shown above, high rise sprawl causes many of the same social and environmental problems that suburban sprawl is responsible for. The New Urbanists and various other architecture/planning organizations instead advocate for a return to dense cities that are NOT composed of skyscrapers but rather composed of a building fabric that would rarely exceed seven stories (many European cities still retain this type of fabric). In such cities, the seven story building is the highest a person will typically walk up (hence the term "walkups" for NYC tenements) without having to resort to an elevator. Low-rise wall-to-wall urban fabric also promotes the development of organic (unscripted and requiring very little top-down planning) street life. See here and here.
 * What's the best solution?**

Alexander, Christopher. Beshers, James. Crary, Duncan, and James Howard Kunstler. Dalrymple, Theodore. Dupuy, Gabriel. Elhefnawy, Nader. Gehl, Jan. Gleiniger, Andrea, and Georg Vrachliotis. Jacobs, Jane. Kroeger, Alix. Kunstler, James Howard. Orio, Giarini. Pflieger, Géraldine. Salingaros, Nikos. Shaw, Peter. Tainter, Joseph//.// Thompson, William.
 * References**
 * //The Nature of Order.// New York: Oxford University Press, 2002 (4 volumes).
 * //A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction.// New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
 * //Urban Social Structure.// New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962.
 * //Is New York City the Green Metropolis?// KunstlerCast #85: The Tragic Comedy of Suburban Sprawl. October 22, 2009. 20:15.
 * //The Architect as Totalitarian: Le Corbusier's Baleful Influence.// City Journal 19, No. 4 (Autumn 2009).
 * //Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America.// Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.
 * //Societal Complexity and Diminishing Returns in Security.// International Security Journal 29, No. 1 (Summer 2004): 152-174.
 * //Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space.// New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987.
 * //Complexity: Design Strategy and World View.// Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008.
 * //The Death and Life of Great American Cities.// New York: Random House, 1961.
 * //The Other Side of Prague.// BBC News: July 10, 2003.
 * //The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition.// New York: The Free Press, 2002.
 * //The Diminishing Returns of Technology.// Oxford, NY: Pergamon Press, 1978.
 * //The Social Fabric of the Networked City.// Lausanne, Switzerland: EPFL Press, 2008.
 * //Algorithmic Sustainable Design: The Future of Architectural Theory.// Presentation at the University of Texas at San Antonio, 2008.
 * //The End of Tall Buildings (with J. H. Kunstler).// Planetizen: September 17, 2001.
 * //Reurbanizing the Projects.// City Journal: Winter 1996.
 * //Collapse of Complex Societies.// Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge, 1988.
 * //Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies//. Chapter from //Getting Down To Earth: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics.// Island Press, 1996.
 * //Social Complexity and Sustainability.// Ecological Complexity Journal 3, No. 2 (June 2006): 91-103.
 * //Complexity, Diminishing Marginal Returns, and Serial Mesopotamian Fragmentation.// Journal of World Systems Research 10, No. 3 (Fall 2004): 613-652.

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