Vishaan Chakrabarti knows how to fix New York. He’s an apostle of density with
a relentlessly optimistic energy and a persuasive grin, and as Manhattan city
planning director, he helped shape the coming thicket of skyscrapers at Hudson
Yards. Later he went to work for the site’s developer, the Related Companies.
Now he runs the real-estate program at Columbia’s architecture school, prodding
students to think sweepingly about design, land, and money.
“This emphasis on the Copenhagen/Amsterdam model is a distraction,” Chakrabarti
says, waving away all the genteel tinkering with bike lanes and sidewalk cafés.
“We have a lot more in common with Hong Kong and Tokyo. Our counterparts are dense,
mixed, financial-services cities, not cute European towns.” For Chakrabarti, density
and public transportation are the conjoined twins of rational city planning. “We
have to wean Brooklyn and Queens off cars, but they’re not dense enough. When
I go to P.S.1, I get out of the subway—there are four lines converging there—and
all I see is one- and two-story buildings. There’s way too much blue sky.” Stacking
families and offices in vertical cities conserves energy and steers people out
of their cars and into less-polluting subways. It also creates wealth, because
so much more is salable on each lot. Hong Kong’s transit corporation, MTR, makes
fortunes by erecting agglomerations of skyscrapers on new landfill and simultaneously
building the rail lines to serve them. “When they’re talking about transit-oriented
development, they’re not talking about a little trolley line,” Chakrabarti says.
Density can go bad. The wriggling masses of Karachi and Mumbai do not speak well
for the environmental benefits of packing so many people into so little space.
But some wealthier East Asian cities manage to make density exciting rather than
claustrophobic. In 2003, the shrewdly starry-eyed developer Minoru Mori opened
his Roppongi Hills in Tokyo, a teeming zone of corporate offices, restaurants,
and luxury apartments revolving around an ungainly tower. A few years later, a
similarly massive project, Tokyo Midtown, opened a few minutes’ walk away. East
Asia bristles with these vertical towns where it’s theoretically possible to sleep,
dine out, work out, go to work, see a movie, buy underwear or a ball gown, go
dancing, visit a museum, catch a train, and park the car, all without leaving
the premises. Even if nobody actually lives this way, the cumulative effect of
all these options is constant, round-the-clock bustle, with nightspots emptying
just as offices flicker to life.
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