“They’re still billing it as God’s gift to the world, and it’s not.” “I was convinced it would be the best building in New York,” said Sarina Abramovich, one of the earliest residents of 432 Park. Engineers privy to some of the disputes say many of the same issues are occurring quietly in other new towers. Less than a decade after a spate of record-breaking condo towers reached new heights in New York, the first reports of defects and complaints are beginning to emerge, raising concerns that some of the construction methods and materials used have not lived up to the engineering breakthroughs that only recently enabled 1,000-foot-high trophy apartments. Only a few cities exist even today with life existing uniformly over large areas like what the OP is describing - except on the ground-level - such as NYC, Tokyo, Bangkok, and others.The Downside to Life in a Supertall Tower: Leaks, Creaks, BreaksĤ32 Park, one of the wealthiest addresses in the world, faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high-rises may share its fate. When I think of what the OP is describing I think of a city so large and dense that this type of life would be possible for miles and miles, not just in the small downtown areas for the super rich, but even the common people could experience such life above ground. If you look at the picture above of lower Manhattan, it wouldn't really be what the OP is describing if such life atop the skyscrapers was only possible in the very small central business district or extreme downtown core of the city. Lastly, a problem I see is that such a city would need to be a megacity with around 50 million people with density spread relatively evenly over the city's borders. But, I've seen the 10-story megamalls that exist in Asia in places like Bangkok, and I can envision shopping places like that cobbled together in tall skyscrapers, occupying a few floors. I don't see a Wal-Mart or Target existing easily on the 70th floor. That would need to change.Īnother obstacle would be supply chain and economic problems, such as getting inventory up to such heights, and the economic problem would be that if you were to have life completely exist 70 stories up, there could only be small shops like Dollar General-sized stores, or even smaller. The city the OP is describing would have public spaces people can just walk into through the skybridge and there would also be privately-owned shops lining them, but many skyscrapers as they exist today are just apartment buildings and aren't designed to accommodate such public spaces. Some buildings won't be structurally able to support such walkways, or won't be be able to fit public 'common areas' akin to 70th story sidewalks or common public spaces. First, to make skybridges and connectways there needs to be either cooperation between the different owners of the buildings, or some government mandate to get everyone on the same page. I think there's a few big problems standing in the way. I just hope that all future city designs account for a changing planet. Globe will continue getting smaller for us as more stuff breaks down, so vertical living seems like the way to go. Combined with extreme weather doing a number on bad infrastructure and horrific city planning and our still poor desalination efforts, we're going to see an ever increasing amount of systemic problems with our current 'spread it' scheme. But droughts are increasing everywhere and glaciers and mountain packs are decreasing.

In those terms, the space we're talking about is decreasing on the planet - and we're not just talking global coast lines being reshaped by rising waters (lot of humans concentrated today near all of the coasts.) or the increasing wet bulb temperatures in ME/Asia wiping out livable spaces this decade and next.Ī lot of areas get their clean water from glaciers and/or seasonal rains. If we're talking about livable land space, then there's land space as a Google Earth view from space metric, and then there's the land space being suitable for long-term mass human habitation metric - which includes steady and efficient access to clean water, food, and clean energy for all in it.

The downside supertall tower creaks