Not gonna lie, I don’t think that’s enough recreation space for the number of units there.
And I don’t see any commercial space at all. That’s got to be enough units for several thousand people. Like, think about how much store space would be needed to make sure they could get all their groceries.
I don’t think that’s enough recreation space for the number of units there.
Yeah, I got that impression as well. Looks heavily overbuilt, with the amenities being more there to attract new residents than to serve the community.
And I don’t see any commercial space at all.
Probably because this is a top down view at the center of a ring of impossibly tall housing units, not a skyline view of Hong Kong, a city that's got commercial spaces from seaside to Shenzhen.
I mean, that’s kind a huge issue in Hong Kong, like, how concentrated the commercial areas get. Creates a lot of unnecessarily long travel from housing to commercial, culminating in a lot of pedestrian congestion along stairways, elevators and escalators.
Pedestrian congestion is a big problem in lots of major urban centers. Go down to Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo or Times Square in NYC and you'll find the same problem of big crowds of people clogging areas that weren't designed to accommodate the sheer volume of traffic.
Idk if I'd call it "unnecessarily long travel" so much as "a necessary consequence of this many people living in a limited space". If you don't want that level of crowding, you've got to move outside this hyper-dense city.
I mean, NYC has a fairly healthy level of pedestrian traffic in most areas. Times Square is mostly just full of tourists. I’m not as familiar with Tokyo but my understanding is a a lot of the more dense areas have a sort of 2/3 level layout of commercial, but there is level interconnects or they’re set up in conjunction with transit. So like, there are fairly large underground commercial strips at subway level, or sky bridges between blocks for 2nd story commercial.
They all get backed up during rush hour. It took me ten minutes to get into Shinjuku station one sunny afternoon, because that corner of town was so crammed with people.
Similarly, if you've ever been in the subway tunnels of NYC or DC, you'll know when a game lets out at Madison Square or a parade is happening though the Washington Mall, because these otherwise spacious underground enclaves are stuffed with people.
At some point, you have an issue of induced demand. These urban centers are designed to encourage the free flow of pedestrian traffic and... that's exactly what they create.
Not everyone plays tennis and the commercial spaces would be on the first level facing the road, not the inner courtyard. Good complaints in general but not really applicable here.
I also think those recreational spaces may be raised from street level. The perspective is not not meant to show any of that. Could be grocery stores etc. below it as well.
I don’t think that the first level would be enough TBH. Like; it would probably have to be 2 or 3 stories of commercial to serve just the bare minimum needs of that volume of people, and now half your commercial is off street level, complicating pathing from public transit.
Also, it’s tennis, what I assume is racket ball, a swimming pool and a couple basket ball court, so I think it’s actually a pretty good variety of activities, but still, not enough space for the volume of people, if all the blocks around it were the same density and had different varieties of activity, there still just wouldn’t be enough recreational space for the volume of people, even if the variety was absurd between them all.
Like, maybe the density is warranted somewhere like hongkong where the government is largely funded by land sales, so maximizing the density is important for making the land sale valuable enough to fund social services, but like, there’s just not enough visible recreation and comercial, maybe they’ve got a strip underground by a subway station or something. I’d be curious how they make this work.
Yah but you’re gonna need a lot of escalators and they’re gonna be very congested. Like, I’m sure it can be made to work, I just question the wisdom of having the commercial be separated out like that.
most chinese malls mainland or not are used to and designed for handling that many people; in fact probably the rest of east asia too. they do have a lot of escalators. hong kong’s got 7M and the mainland 1.4B after all
...yeah, urban hellscapes are pretty bleak but it's obvious someone tried here to make the best they could of what they had to work with...dense as it is in hong kong, the other nice thing is that you don't have to travel too far to experience open parklands...
Oh come on… Hellscape is pretty dramatic don’t you think? I don’t wanna hear that from anyone who hasn’t been to America…
I know it’s played out at this point but the building I’m working in is 10x worse than this and they keep letting one company build them and block the view of the river !!! We could use some more trees and tennis courts here!!!
It takes about two acres of agricultural land to feed a human. Every single person in every single one of those apartments is using two acres somewhere else.
Instead of living comfortably in small settlements somewhere in the vicinity of those two acres, they have decided to move hundreds of miles away, and stack themselves in disgusting concrete blocks. The ground supports about 320 people per square mile; they've decided to miserably cram 50,000 of themselves into that same square, pushing out everything alive but the rats, cockroaches, and other vermin thriving on their detritus.
There should be more trees than windows through which to see them. When that ratio inverts, it's time to call a demolitionist not an architect.
Yesterday I tried to watch a How Ridiculous video (I have mixed feelings about them but they've metaphorically grown on me). In this particular one they're experimenting with the Magnus effect by throwing things off of a cliff.
They've done similar things before, mostly off of what they say is the highest dam in the world. However ... That has at least a guardrail. This was just a cliff and they had to stand right at the edge of it with no PPE.
I tried to endure but when they opened an umbrella over the drop I had to turn it off. It was surprising to me; they're usually at least half decent about safety. At the beginning of this video, one of them even commented on his "jelly legs."
I was having the same fear. Good news! I watched to the end, and spotted the safety ropes they all had on them. They were safe the whole time. Even Scott.
I wish they'd pointed it out clearly, because they are an example to lots of kids. However, it seems they were not in fact totally stupid.
You could also just take a couple of pictures and if people are moving, do an image stack and it removes the people from the images. Pretty classic technique to get rid of people from busy photos. These days you could also just use AI to remove people from pictures as well.
I assumed it was roughly 5am as well but my friends and I used to play tennis that early, and so do many tennis players. With how many apartments shown here, I'd figured there'd be more people.
It's credited to nat geo - this isn't a snapshot by a tourist, if that photographer wants an empty street photo of times square at noon they will get it.
This could be multiple photos stacked to average out anything that moves.
Holy shit that looks and feels depressing. Let's give as little as possible to the peasants?
Sure, there are some activity spaces there for a small fraction of the people to enjoy, but that is nowhere near enough, and even then of course there is a road going through it
It's an interior shot from a forced perspective. If you're in a unit looking out on the city or at street level mixing with a crowd, I suspect the vibe is very different.
I'm also sure it's Efron depressing still. I count some 13 buildings there, each likely over 250 apartments, each apartment likely an average of 3 persons, you do the math. That is a LOT of people with very little recreation area
Then the view... You can see a few hundred neighbors, and that is about it. I can make a fair guess that the other side of these apartments aren't going to have a much better view either
I count some 13 buildings there, each likely over 250 apartments, each apartment likely an average of 3 persons, you do the math. That is a LOT of people with very little recreation area
In the courtyard, maybe. No idea what it looks like outside this tower block.
You can see a few hundred neighbors, and that is about it.
From the inside window, sure. From the outside window, presumably you can see something different.
I also have no idea what the rent is in a place like this. Or the utilities. Or space of each unit. Or any other amenities the building might have. I don't even know what the interior looks like. Very hard to judge based on a single shot of a single wall from a weird angle.
Stereotypes exist for a reason… when I stayed in Hong Kong, I got a room at a local chain for a night and my feet were hanging a good 3” off the edge of the bed (I’m only 6’). While walking through the city, I was a good head taller than everyone else there.
I know Kowloon was awful in pretty much every way, but there's just something so fascinating about it. I wish there was like an interactive "street view" type thing that let you walk through the entire complex.
Very few people even knew the navigation of it and there were guides for a reason. I dont think you would ever be able to get what you are looking for without just rebuilding Kowloon.
Look at all that space dedicated to a vanishingly small number of cars. This could be a nice inner courtyard with some grass or at least way more trees, but nah, we gotta have a road and weird alley with two parking spots per building.
thats not a main road, its usually reserved for bikes and usually some cars that are driving out or driving in. Its reserved for the people living there
That's what the picture is meant to do, but in practice it's not quite as bad, depending on what kind of high-rise city you're used to. I feel a lot more claustrophobic in Paris or some other French cities, no contest.
It's impossible to know everyone coz a 1000+ people will be too many for that, unless you're very extroverted. But in common spaces like that sports area you'll run into several familiar faces repeatedly.
Not gonna lie, I don’t think that’s enough recreation space for the number of units there.
And I don’t see any commercial space at all. That’s got to be enough units for several thousand people. Like, think about how much store space would be needed to make sure they could get all their groceries.
Yeah, I got that impression as well. Looks heavily overbuilt, with the amenities being more there to attract new residents than to serve the community.
Probably because this is a top down view at the center of a ring of impossibly tall housing units, not a skyline view of Hong Kong, a city that's got commercial spaces from seaside to Shenzhen.
I mean, that’s kind a huge issue in Hong Kong, like, how concentrated the commercial areas get. Creates a lot of unnecessarily long travel from housing to commercial, culminating in a lot of pedestrian congestion along stairways, elevators and escalators.
Pedestrian congestion is a big problem in lots of major urban centers. Go down to Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo or Times Square in NYC and you'll find the same problem of big crowds of people clogging areas that weren't designed to accommodate the sheer volume of traffic.
Idk if I'd call it "unnecessarily long travel" so much as "a necessary consequence of this many people living in a limited space". If you don't want that level of crowding, you've got to move outside this hyper-dense city.
I mean, NYC has a fairly healthy level of pedestrian traffic in most areas. Times Square is mostly just full of tourists. I’m not as familiar with Tokyo but my understanding is a a lot of the more dense areas have a sort of 2/3 level layout of commercial, but there is level interconnects or they’re set up in conjunction with transit. So like, there are fairly large underground commercial strips at subway level, or sky bridges between blocks for 2nd story commercial.
They all get backed up during rush hour. It took me ten minutes to get into Shinjuku station one sunny afternoon, because that corner of town was so crammed with people.
Similarly, if you've ever been in the subway tunnels of NYC or DC, you'll know when a game lets out at Madison Square or a parade is happening though the Washington Mall, because these otherwise spacious underground enclaves are stuffed with people.
At some point, you have an issue of induced demand. These urban centers are designed to encourage the free flow of pedestrian traffic and... that's exactly what they create.
Where you see the tennis courts probably isn’t street level, and the area below is commercial, restaurants and parking.
Tennis games are 50 vs 50
Not everyone plays tennis and the commercial spaces would be on the first level facing the road, not the inner courtyard. Good complaints in general but not really applicable here.
I also think those recreational spaces may be raised from street level. The perspective is not not meant to show any of that. Could be grocery stores etc. below it as well.
I don’t think that the first level would be enough TBH. Like; it would probably have to be 2 or 3 stories of commercial to serve just the bare minimum needs of that volume of people, and now half your commercial is off street level, complicating pathing from public transit.
Also, it’s tennis, what I assume is racket ball, a swimming pool and a couple basket ball court, so I think it’s actually a pretty good variety of activities, but still, not enough space for the volume of people, if all the blocks around it were the same density and had different varieties of activity, there still just wouldn’t be enough recreational space for the volume of people, even if the variety was absurd between them all.
Like, maybe the density is warranted somewhere like hongkong where the government is largely funded by land sales, so maximizing the density is important for making the land sale valuable enough to fund social services, but like, there’s just not enough visible recreation and comercial, maybe they’ve got a strip underground by a subway station or something. I’d be curious how they make this work.
10–12 stories, a little mall
the lower stories would be more valuable. i would think there’s at least one grocery store on the ground level.
i think people are used to taking the escalator in malls
Yah but you’re gonna need a lot of escalators and they’re gonna be very congested. Like, I’m sure it can be made to work, I just question the wisdom of having the commercial be separated out like that.
most chinese malls mainland or not are used to and designed for handling that many people; in fact probably the rest of east asia too. they do have a lot of escalators. hong kong’s got 7M and the mainland 1.4B after all
You're assuming there are commercial spaces, not you don't know anymore than he doesn't know. So it's not really applicable here.
I’m not assuming anything, but I get that reading is hard. When you hit third grade it’ll get easier.
Beats living on the streets.
...yeah, urban hellscapes are pretty bleak but it's obvious someone tried here to make the best they could of what they had to work with...dense as it is in hong kong, the other nice thing is that you don't have to travel too far to experience open parklands...
Oh come on… Hellscape is pretty dramatic don’t you think? I don’t wanna hear that from anyone who hasn’t been to America…
I know it’s played out at this point but the building I’m working in is 10x worse than this and they keep letting one company build them and block the view of the river !!! We could use some more trees and tennis courts here!!!
It takes about two acres of agricultural land to feed a human. Every single person in every single one of those apartments is using two acres somewhere else.
Instead of living comfortably in small settlements somewhere in the vicinity of those two acres, they have decided to move hundreds of miles away, and stack themselves in disgusting concrete blocks. The ground supports about 320 people per square mile; they've decided to miserably cram 50,000 of themselves into that same square, pushing out everything alive but the rats, cockroaches, and other vermin thriving on their detritus.
There should be more trees than windows through which to see them. When that ratio inverts, it's time to call a demolitionist not an architect.
Pool's closed?
For summer.
Pool's closed for ever.
Due to AIDS?
And stingrays
Courts are full again, damn!
They were all empty when I looked out my window. Full by the time I got there.
I wonder how many social credits you'd lose for rappelling from your window...
How did they fit so many tanks in there??
i remember i lived in an apartment complex with a pool. we only had three warm months out of the year and i never used the pool anyway
Better than Florida, we get 3 months out of the year where the pools not bath water warm.
It's tough. We have to clean it year round because we can swim in it year round.
Canada?
Same. I was there like 5 years. Used the pool twice.
This is cool and all but it also triggered my fear of falling specifically so fuck you. Still a neat picture.
Just try and land in the pool
The empty pool?
Yesterday I tried to watch a How Ridiculous video (I have mixed feelings about them but they've metaphorically grown on me). In this particular one they're experimenting with the Magnus effect by throwing things off of a cliff.
They've done similar things before, mostly off of what they say is the highest dam in the world. However ... That has at least a guardrail. This was just a cliff and they had to stand right at the edge of it with no PPE.
I tried to endure but when they opened an umbrella over the drop I had to turn it off. It was surprising to me; they're usually at least half decent about safety. At the beginning of this video, one of them even commented on his "jelly legs."
I was having the same fear. Good news! I watched to the end, and spotted the safety ropes they all had on them. They were safe the whole time. Even Scott.
I wish they'd pointed it out clearly, because they are an example to lots of kids. However, it seems they were not in fact totally stupid.
I am watching it again now with my wife here to comfort me. I am glad to observe that you are correct.
I also wish they'd made it more obvious, both for people like us and for kids.
This looks like one of my Cities:Skylines cities.
Thats a lot of house
Anyone else surprised by how empty the courts are?
The photo may have been taken at 5 in the morning or some equally unsociable hour for playing sports.
I assume the photographer wanted the courts and streets as empty as possible to create the right mood for the shot
You could also just take a couple of pictures and if people are moving, do an image stack and it removes the people from the images. Pretty classic technique to get rid of people from busy photos. These days you could also just use AI to remove people from pictures as well.
I assumed it was roughly 5am as well but my friends and I used to play tennis that early, and so do many tennis players. With how many apartments shown here, I'd figured there'd be more people.
It's credited to nat geo - this isn't a snapshot by a tourist, if that photographer wants an empty street photo of times square at noon they will get it.
This could be multiple photos stacked to average out anything that moves.
That's what I was thinking, super easy technique in Photoshop to remove moving things from photos.
No, because it's 6:30am bro
There must be several thousand people living in those surrounding buildings. Not two of them get up early for a game of tennis before work?
Maybe they are not all allowed to use the courts.
Not if the courts are closed off so the photographer can get a clean shot.
I bet people there interact with other humans more often than suburbanites who only ever leave their property in a car.
Sure, if they want to or not there isn't much choice with such density. The choice is a perk of suburban living.
I was thinking the same exact thing. I'd be running on those basketball courts all the time.
I can see my house from here!
Holy shit that looks and feels depressing. Let's give as little as possible to the peasants?
Sure, there are some activity spaces there for a small fraction of the people to enjoy, but that is nowhere near enough, and even then of course there is a road going through it
It's an interior shot from a forced perspective. If you're in a unit looking out on the city or at street level mixing with a crowd, I suspect the vibe is very different.
I'm sure it'll be different
I'm also sure it's Efron depressing still. I count some 13 buildings there, each likely over 250 apartments, each apartment likely an average of 3 persons, you do the math. That is a LOT of people with very little recreation area
Then the view... You can see a few hundred neighbors, and that is about it. I can make a fair guess that the other side of these apartments aren't going to have a much better view either
In the courtyard, maybe. No idea what it looks like outside this tower block.
From the inside window, sure. From the outside window, presumably you can see something different.
I also have no idea what the rent is in a place like this. Or the utilities. Or space of each unit. Or any other amenities the building might have. I don't even know what the interior looks like. Very hard to judge based on a single shot of a single wall from a weird angle.
One bathroom
despite all my rage...
Love the angle
This is mesmerizing. But I just can’t help but wonder how full those tennis courts will be. Or maybe not all the apartments have access to the courts.
I wonder how big the apartments are
161-484 sq ft according to this information. https://www.happyhongkonger.com/why-are-hong-kong-apartments-so-small/
15-45m², that's... not big
But neither are they, so I bet it all works out proportionally.
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler And thats my racist ration used up for today. :::
Stereotypes exist for a reason… when I stayed in Hong Kong, I got a room at a local chain for a night and my feet were hanging a good 3” off the edge of the bed (I’m only 6’). While walking through the city, I was a good head taller than everyone else there.
They had to add some football courts too, some green.
Even though it’s just a photo the perspective and the height makes me feel dizzy 😵💫
Touching grass impossible.
how so? it seems like every apt comes with a balcony that most have gardens on.
Like a modern Kowloon.
I know Kowloon was awful in pretty much every way, but there's just something so fascinating about it. I wish there was like an interactive "street view" type thing that let you walk through the entire complex.
Very few people even knew the navigation of it and there were guides for a reason. I dont think you would ever be able to get what you are looking for without just rebuilding Kowloon.
Wow... 😮
Look at all that space dedicated to a vanishingly small number of cars. This could be a nice inner courtyard with some grass or at least way more trees, but nah, we gotta have a road and weird alley with two parking spots per building.
shudders
So claustrophobic
Aw this looked really cool until I saw the road going right through it.
Looks more like the inner driveway. Usually for people whose car is parked outside. If it's like in China, it's not for driving per se.
thats not a main road, its usually reserved for bikes and usually some cars that are driving out or driving in. Its reserved for the people living there
My claustrophobia is flaring up just by looking at that picture.
That's what the picture is meant to do, but in practice it's not quite as bad, depending on what kind of high-rise city you're used to. I feel a lot more claustrophobic in Paris or some other French cities, no contest.
"I'm a unique individual!"
this may look liminal but I get a weird sense of community there
it looks one of the areas where everyone knows and trusts eachother
You'd need a spreadsheet just to keep track of your neighbours.
I mean if you’ve ever lived in a big city in general you have a fuuuuck ton of neighbors
It's impossible to know everyone coz a 1000+ people will be too many for that, unless you're very extroverted. But in common spaces like that sports area you'll run into several familiar faces repeatedly.