Economists have for a long time shown how land values rise in the centre when the city grows. The larger the city, the more attractive it is to have premises in the centre, especially for the growing culture, IT and service industry that requires easy access.
Sociologists have called attention to new urban lifestyles which attract more and more people. They find their expression in café society, event culture and compact living. The internet certainly has a place in the passion for urban meeting places and social integration. More and more people want to live in the centre, where "it is all happening", and this has created a shortage of housing and sky-high prices for flats in central positions.
Even ecologists have come to terms with the compact city nowadays. Densification saves valuable nature, forest and farming land, and it results in less demand for transport and thus lower emissions. When energy and fuel costs increase, it will also be cheaper to live in a compact community which, in a concrete manner, connects up economics, sociology and ecology.
The question therefore is not WHETHER cities are to become compact, but HOW.
Unsustainable sprawl
What is called Urban Sprawl means a reduction in density through dispersion. A lot of international research is in progress at present, showing how unsustainable urban sprawl is, for example through increasing our dependence on the car.
What has received less study is the ongoing densification. But there are examples to be studied: In Stockholm we have, during the past decade, seen the suburbs Hammarby Sjöstad, Liljeholmen and Lindhagen developed on brownfield sites.
In an investigation I have carried out together with the Stockholm City Department of Planning and Building Control, we have found that suburbs from the 1940s such as Björkhagen and Rågsved can double in density and still remain only half as compact as the city centre, and that there is scope to accommodate the growth of Stockholm over the next 100 years inside the suburbs covered by the underground rail network. Access to green spaces can be preserved, or even improved, catchment areas and social integration can be promoted by joining up separate urban enclaves.
This contradictory challenge may be named compact sprawl. In my thesis of the same title I enlarge upon the term Compactness as a measure of an urban environment that is both dense and green; "green" in the sense of a high quality public urban space comprising parks and nature but which can also consist of squares, quays and play areas.
In my analysis of Stockholm I can say that environments which are compact, in the sense of being both dense and green, have higher property values, better health indices, a greater mix of residential and non-residential floor area, and a higher development pressure. It therefore seems that parks together with high density are a key to the mixed city that is so sought-after in planning.
Author
:
Alexander Ståhle
DSc, is a landscape architect MSA, works in the Department of Town Planning at the Royal Institute of Technology KTH, Stockholm, and is MD of the consultancy Spacescape
Literature:
Ståhle, Alexander: Mer park i tätare stad: Teoretiska och empiriska undersökningar av stadsplaneringens mått på friytetillgång. Licentiatavhandling, KTH 2005. (More parks in denser cities: Theoretical and empirical studies of urban indices for access to open spaces. Licentiate Thesis. (In Swedish).
Ståhle, Alexander: Compact Sprawl: Exploring Public Open Space and Contradictions in Urban Density. Doctoral Thesis, KTH 2008.