Back in March and April, there was a belief that big and dense cities were going to pose a serious problem in the fight against COVID-19. The narrative was that the benefits of urban density suddenly flip to glaring negatives during a pandemic. Elevators are… Read More
I posted this chart on Twitter last night. It’s from the WSJ showing new weekly confirmed COVID-19 cases in Florida, New York, and the U.S. as a whole. Now, the first thing I will say is that I relinquished my hopes of becoming an amateur… Read More
Urban environments can be dense in many different ways. This is a topic that we have discussed on several occasions here on the blog. But this working paper by Solly Angel, Patrick Lamson-Hall, and Zeltia Gonzales Blanco — called The Anatomy of Density — is… Read More
Garrett Dash Nelson recently published a study looking at urban density on a cell-by-cell basis for a number of US cities. Each “cell” is a 30 arc-second grid cell, but you can think of them as being approximately one square kilometer. The goal of the… Read More
Photographer Michael Wolf died at his home in Hong Kong this week. He was 64. Even if you don’t recognize the name, I am sure that many of you have seen his work. Perhaps his most famous project was “Architecture of Density”, which had him… Read More
This morning I took the mid-level escalators down to Hong Kong station so that I could catch the express train to the airport. At over 800m, it is supposedly the longest outdoor covered escalator system in the world. If you’ve ever walked the streets of… Read More
Today I came across this Reddit talking about how few census tracts there are in the United States with a population density greater than 150,000 people per square mile. Basically, there’s a bunch in New York, one in San Francisco (Tenderloin), and one in Chicago… Read More
“Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition – hyper-density – without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan’s architecture is a paradigm for the… Read More
The following diagrams were taken from LSE’s Urban Age website. I’ve sorted them from lowest to highest peak residential population density. In each case I’ve also included the year of the dataset. It’s amazing how much these simple extrusion diagrams can tell you about the… Read More
When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Toronto, I never played in the backyard. I played in the streets. That’s where all the kids came together. We would play baseball in somebody’s driveway, using one of the garage door “squares” as… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 