[HN Gopher] Verdichtung
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Verdichtung
Author : kenty
Score : 39 points
Date : 2025-12-27 08:42 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (alexeygy.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (alexeygy.github.io)
| xtiansimon wrote:
| I suppose here's the type of story where it's all sounds good and
| you say show me the data. And then, if you're inclined, run a
| notebook and look for comparable metrics from other cities.
|
| https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/about/open-data.page
|
| This was particularly interesting:
|
| "Neither cooperatives nor the city typically sell flats. Mostly
| because ...they really love recurring revenue and absolutely
| would hate to deal with short-term income as they are generally *
| _non-profit institutions*_." (My emphasis)
|
| Doesn't seem like NYC can run their buildings at a profit,
| considering all the repairs that are reported as unfixed.
| tonfa wrote:
| > "Neither cooperatives nor the city typically sell flats.
| Mostly because ...they really love recurring revenue and
| absolutely would hate to deal with short-term income as they
| are generally _non-profit institutions_." (My emphasis)
|
| FWIW that was a bit misleading, the goal of the city or the non
| profits (Genossenschaften) is to provide housing, not selling
| flat. (There's a goal that 1/3 of all housing in the city has
| to be non-profit by 2050, this was voted back in 2011)
| kenty wrote:
| Yes. Thanks for pointing this out. I was hesitant to keep it
| in the article too as it's a bit too much of a simplification
| since I pool in different actors like Baugenossenschaften,
| the city and e.g., pension funds together. Further analyzing
| would have indeed been better but I wanted to keep it
| compact.
| tonfa wrote:
| Yeah, it felt a bit weird to me since if anything to reach
| the stated goals they need to buy a lot more
| land/buildings. (The recent failed cantonal initiative
| would have helped them)
| kenty wrote:
| Will remember it for the next article to run some more
| empirical number crunching, thank you! This was more of a
| rationalist view on things and focussing on Zurich only.
| wvh wrote:
| This is what is called "tiivistettava" in Finnish. I live in such
| an area, with traditional wooden housing, in the city core. If
| some houses get in bad state, the city orders to throw them down
| and some low-rise apartment blocks are built on top of them, thus
| increasing the number of people that can be housed per square
| meter.
|
| It's a fine line between the noble intentions of the urban
| planning concept and creating a horrible mismatched pot-pourri of
| different building styles and ages, though. Ideally buildings in
| an area are somewhat congruent with each other.
|
| Urban sprawl is an issue here in part because of the abundance of
| water, land-locking expanding city centres.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| I live in Zurich-wollishofen and love it here. There are some
| areas of dense housing (Green City, Entlisberg, etc) but despite
| that there's a farm that's a 5-minute walk to get to, two other
| farms that are about 30 minutes, a fourth farm that's 45-minutes,
| and finally a fifth farm that's over an hour and includes a 400
| meter climb up a ridge. We do much of our shopping at the farms.
|
| The lake and swimming is a 10-minute walk with many green areas,
| and I gather mushrooms on the uetliberg/Albis ridge that takes me
| about 25-minutes to get to on foot.
|
| Zurich has dense housing areas but its also well-integrated with
| nature and it's not just my neighborhood - there's lovely forests
| all around the city with streams and waterfalls, wild garlic and
| berries and mushrooms..
| FabHK wrote:
| Hong Kong (while obviously quite different) is similar in the
| sense that many urban areas are fairly compact and walkable,
| and regions of very high density housing alternate with parks,
| forests, playgrounds, zoological gardens, water front, etc., so
| that groceries, restaurants, public transport, but also
| recreational areas are never more than a few minutes away.
|
| Quite a contrast to suburban sprawl.
| teiferer wrote:
| That sounds great, but that experience of the 15000 or so
| people in Wollishofen can't be provided for the half a million
| folks living in Zurich. That's the whole point of Verdichtung.
| That you get higher density in exchange for short distances. If
| everybody lived like Wollishofen does, then you'd have suburbia
| as far as the eye can see. In a sense, Wollishofen has the cake
| and gets to eat it too (because it's so close to the dense
| Zurich center but is itself only sparse). Which is nice for the
| small minority living there, but not a model that can really be
| applied everywhere.
| tonfa wrote:
| Isn't it what they're saying? Wollishofen is getting
| densified (Green city, etc.), so that access to green space
| stays the same.
|
| It's similar for people in Altstetten, in 10-15 min walk
| they're in a forest in one direction, and can go swimming in
| the Limmat in the other.
| thijson wrote:
| My first experience with this was in Maastricht. We started
| walking in the city center and before I know it we were on the
| outskirts. This was unexpected to me at I'm used to North
| American cities.
| Zak wrote:
| > _Zersiedlung is the Swiss-German term for urban sprawl_
|
| That is perhaps a more interesting word than Verdichtung.
|
| Zer is a prefix that gives a destructive meaning to the base
| word. Teil is piece. Teilen is to share. Zerteilen is to break
| into pieces. Druck is pressure. Drucken is to push. Zerdrucken is
| to crush.
|
| Siedlung means settlement.
| wvbdmp wrote:
| It's not always destructive as in "to crush", it can also lend
| an air of diffusion, dispersion, fraying at the edges, which is
| perhaps closer to the idea of "sprawl". I'm not Swiss, so it
| could be different there, and I can't speak to how common
| "Zersiedlung" is in Switzerland. In Germany I would say it's
| probably strictly a governmental/admin term of art, if
| anything.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| In my German-speaking opinion, Zersiedlung is more about
| destruction of landscape than about fraying of settlements.
| You don't say that a village is zersiedelt, you do say that a
| landscape is zersiedelt.
| Propelloni wrote:
| You are right. "Zersiedlung" is a term of art in land-use
| and development planning to describe the undirected
| expansion of settlements into rural areas. I happen to work
| in the periphery of planning and approval and the term
| comes up quite often. The English equivalent would be the
| mentioned "suburban sprawl".
| vedmakk wrote:
| "Verdichtung" is almost funny considering that Zurich is a city
| with not even half a million inhabitants. For example in the
| greater Moscow area live roughly 35 million people in an area
| about 1/4 the size of whole Switzerland with its 9 million
| people. THAT is "Verdichtung".
| kenty wrote:
| Megacities are obviously a different beast. Interestingly
| though, as far as I know, Moscow is heavily expanding
| into/incorporating/eating up the neighboring towns, expanding
| borders and building metro stations instead of mainly doing
| Verdichtung. I guess there are/have to be some projects where
| they build a bit higher but it is not the main shtick.
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