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Verdichtung

51 points by kenty

by Zak

2 subcomments

> 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. Drücken is to push. Zerdrücken is to crush.
Siedlung means settlement.

by comrade1234

3 subcomments

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..

by fp64

0 subcomment

The house in Zurich I live in was initially built something like in the 12th century, but the floor I reside on was added in the 17th century. This is the case for most houses in the old town. So this is going on for a while.

by wvh

0 subcomment

This is what is called "tiivistettävä" 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.

by vedmakk

1 subcomments

"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".

by Kenji

0 subcomment

by xtiansimon

2 subcomments

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.