27 March 2008

High Rise Tenements Over London to House Incoming Wave of Immigrants

While France is content to settle its immigrants in the "ring cities" around Paris, the UK plans to build arcology-scale high rise tenements within the city of London for its new wave of immigration.
It is estimated that London will need to provide housing for almost 100 000 new people every year upto 2016¹. This is the result not only of migration...but also the need to replace existing housing stock that is reaching the end of its lifecycle.

At 1500 metres high (the average level of cloud cover), the tower would create a new and completely different scale to the existing city forming a separate layer superimposed above London's ancient and idiosyncratic street plan....The tower allows a massive intensification of the city without the need for dramatic alteration of London's existing fabric. Thus the gardens, parks and open spaces of London are preserved but its insatiable appetite for development is satisfied.___PopularArchitecture

UK company Popularchitecture is proposing to house all of the folks who will be moving to London town in the next eight years - all one million of them - in a single building.___Technovelgy
This will be a new approach to dealing with the huge influxes of immigrants expected to flee increasing turmoil in the third world in the coming decades. These new arcology style high rises will be, in effect, cities within cities. It is not unlikely that they will form their own governments, police forces, and defense forces. One can easily imagine wars breaking out between different high-rises occupied by immigrants of third world warring factions--carrying on wars also being fought back in their old countries.

Some human problems will not be easily solved by new technologies of construction.

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2 Comments:

Blogger Audacious Epigone said...

Well, at least these mile-high minarets might make for more attractive terrorist targets than say, the subway system...

Friday, 28 March, 2008  
Blogger al fin said...

Mile high minarets? Good visual symbol, AE!

The tall narrow design will require significant advances in materials and vertical transport design--I'd give it 20 years at least before becoming feasible.

The wide base with tapering top is more realistic for an arcology "city within a city". Horizontal transport (electric trains) and diagonal transport (escalators) are cheaper and have larger capacity than elevators.

Friday, 28 March, 2008  

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