[PartyOperator]

Towers in the park is not a new idea. Le Corbusier was a big fan. In practice it tends not to work well. Additionally mandating a very low population density almost guarantees failure.

Staying below 2000 people per square km will make it difficult to provide good public transport or other amenities, including shops. Anyone able to afford a car will want at least one per household, further reducing the population density and making it harder to get around on foot/bike/bus. Ultimately the only people who would choose this form of low-density living over conventional suburban homes would be those unable to afford their own house. Pleasant landscaping is expensive to maintain and almost guaranteed not to happen for a handful of poor people so you'd either end up with impenetrable forest or bare grass and concrete between buildings.

There are a few cases where something like this works quite well, but generally only the highest density versions when located in or near a large, prosperous city that already has excellent amenities. Otherwise it tends to be a disaster.

Optimizing for one thing alone rarely works in urban planing, even if the idea of ample green space for everyone seems uncontroversial.

[jnurmine]

Why does low population density guarantee a failure (failure of what)?

About Le Corbusier. His core idea is interesting but from what I've seen the "towers in a park" implementations are basically "massive ugly badly designed towers surrounded by a malnourished slivers of grass". Also, for those: 1. the population density is invariably way too high, 2. the towers are always massive, 3. the green space sizes are absolutely too small, 4. the "green spaces" are boring and/or half dead, many times only grass (why not have gardens that actually produce food for people who live there, or forests)?

For example, Stuyvesant Town is one "tower in the park". It is IMO too crowded with too high towers. Reduce number of towers to 4 or 5, make towers lower, and it'd be more like it.

To give an exaggerated example, if one were to put a 6 floor tower right in the middle of Central Park, that's what I'm kind of after...

Why does having a car reduce the population density or impact foot/bike/bus at all?

As for the density cutoff of 2000 people / square km. Here we'd have a building of 100 people, 40 apartments (assume family of 2.5 people), 5 apartments/floor, 8 floors. Tower footprint won't make a huge difference, let's say it's > 500 m2, and this would be 1..2% per tower total area. In 1 square km (100 hectares) we'd have 20 such towers á 100 persons, thus 2000 people per square km. The towers would be quite low, and this would still be "dense enough" per that cutoff.

(This is napkin math so the real number is slightly lower or higher depending on various parameters)

Anyway, this an idea I'd like to see happen. I'm not an architect/planner (perhaps for a reason, say the shouts from the audience).

PS. https://www.sweco.se/projekt/satra/ this project (in Sweden) aims to build greenspaces where inhabitants can produce food. That's the theory at least, it will be interesting to see how it turns out. I do think this is again way too dense, but greenspaces to produce food is a great idea.