A little dense

Here is a neat website if you have some time to kill. Its fun to play with the buildings and I like their attempt to quantify the benefits of density in tangible terms.

http://www.shapevancouver.com/

With that said one of my goals is to get better at decompacting these type of things. Obviously, this "survey" is designed as a way to get people to think about more density in the City, which is not in and of itself a bad thing. However, as the main sponsors are Concord Pacific there is obviously some profit motive at work here as well. Density serves their interests as more density means more condos sold and higher profit margins.

This has got me thinking about my earlier post about the concept of space and how the ways in which we live, the architecture we use, and the planning policies in place reflect changes in the means of production.

We are currently going through a major economic shift, and its interesting to see the local effects of this change.

For whatever reason there is a major push throughout the developed world for more public transit, urban density, and other "sustainable" ways of living. A naive view would say that these changes were demanded by regular people and then implemented by governments on their behalf. An opposite view would say we are being brutally manipulated by power forces outside of our control, in order to have a functional economy in a world without oil etc...The truth lies somewhere else as the relationships between these concepts is complicated. In any sense, these changes are perfectly able to function within capitalism and do not represent an alternative in any real sense even though they are often presented as such.

The key is to make these changes work for everyday people rather than just those in positions of power. What kind of city and what type of social relations are required in order to get rid of capitalism?

With that said lets get me one of those air parcels