The British have an aversion to density, yet most Brits who live in a city want to use vibrant places and even Brits who live in suburbia or a small village usually like to have a decent pub on their doorstep or a post office nearby. If you want a city to be vibrant with lots of shops, bars, and cafes, or village to have a pub or post office, then there needs to be enough people there to use them. Enough customers to make it worthwhile for someone to run those businesses. The higher the density of homes the more people live in any given area and that means more vibrancy as there will be more people to support local services and infrastructure. That can be seen quite clearly in the financial district of the City of London, pre COVID it was heaving in the week and almost completely dead at the weekend. For almost no-one lives there and most don’t work at the weekend- so no one goes there at a weekend.
When garden cities were first moved from concept to reality, many adopted the model of low-density semi-detached houses sat in large gardens. In 1950 an average of a little less than 5 people lived in each of this type of house. Most women didn’t work or drive so were around home all day and used the local shops to feed their family when they weren't spending half the week doing washing before the invention of the washing machine. Thank goodness we don't live in that era any more!
These days the average home occupancy is around 2.5. In the majority of families both partners work and drive. That means less people in any housing area, and therefore fewer local shops and pubs. If we want to achieve the same vibrancy as in 1950’s suburbia we have to almost double the density in order to get the same number of people living in the same space. In fact, we probably have to more than double it, since widespread car ownership means that residents now have access to a greater range of shops and services further away, and thus more competition for the local store and pub. Watch below see what density means using toy soldiers.
Driving infrastructure
To support a tram or train system, a regular bus service, or even a route frequented by an ice cream van, you need enough people living around the stops and stations that need to use it.
Imagine you have housing at 15 dwellings per hectare (dph) along a tram line, then for every adjoining hectare we have about 35 people who may use the tram. However, if we can increase density to say 100dph then we likely have about 240 potential fare paying passengers in each adjoining hectare. To serve those same 240 fare paying passengers at 15dph it is necessary to build a far longer tram line, which would cost more and have longer journey times. All that means the business case would be worse so it would be less likely to ever happen.
Density means it is easier and cheaper to provide and fund good infrastructure. It seems madness that in the post war era when vast sprawling suburbs were being built and the population was encouraged to become long distance commuters, that about half of the UK's railways were ripped up. Contrary to popular belief, for many of those railways it was the loss of freight that made them uneconomic, many had a pretty poor passenger service and the move of commuters to vast low density housing estates could not really deliver the level of demand necessary for a commuter friendly service of say a minimum 4 trains an hour. So if we want some of those railway lines reopened, then it will be far easier if any new developments around them are denser and so provide certainty over greater fare revenue from a greater number of passengers- simply because more people live there as potential users.
Brutalism
One of the key reasons the British have such an aversion to density is that density is a word that is associated with the "slums" cleared in the 1960’s and the brutalist social housing estates that replaced the "slums."
Many of those brutalist housing estates create a negative perception of density without actually achieving density. Many of these brutalist estates are no more dense than the terraced housing that often was demolished to make way for them. In fact many were built in response to a belief that density was bad. They just look dense because they have large poorly designed buildings sat in inefficient and unsuccessful urban structures- Urban structures that break all the aforementioned principles that underlay successful places.
Many pre-car cities are actually pretty dense, even the old market towns are generally denser than 20th century garden cities and suburbs. Yet few people think of these old places as being dense, whilst they are often successful, desirable and high value places. If we design a place well, we can hide density and make a place that feels comfortable and vibrant without it feeling unduly dense. Creating successful high-density development involves ensuring an appropriate relationship between the street and building, in particular the height to width ratio of the street- making sure the building fronts onto the street and ensuring there is a clear definition between the public and private space.
That is why dropping much bigger buildings into an existing street often doesn’t work very well. We can see this in Melbourne where it has become pretty common in the outer suburbs. We can see below each detached house is slowly being replaced by a monolithic apartment block, each new block has flats with the windows facing the side, so when the next block is put up there are flats with windows directly facing each other. Then to stop the people in the facing flats looking straight into each others homes, a screen is put up which largely defeats the point of the flat having windows.
CLICK HERE to see the street before the high density was delivered
CLICK HERE to see the same street with the high density slowly being built out
Chances are more will be built by next time Google updates Streetview, so try selecting whatever is the most recent data from the top left hand corner timeline.
So what do different densities look like:
Density doesn’t have to involve huge monolithic buildings: small changes make a big difference. Take the three scenarios below, each show 60 metres of road. The one in the middle is the standard Australian suburban/growth area house, with a large plot and single storey building typically built in the last decade or so. If we provide the same floor space but over 2 floors we can halve the width of the houses as in the example to the right. That means that each house needs half as much road in front of it so reduces the cost of delivering that and any services in it. It also means the area will be home to twice as many people so it will be more vibrant. That means there is perhaps a chance of getting more and better local services close by.
Strangely, this is pretty similar to the pattern of development that exists in Melbourne’s super desirable inner suburbs built in the pre-car era in the 1880’s image to the left. Yet in the outer city miles from any services they are still building the low-density stuff in the middle and expanding it as far as the eye can see.
So remember, if you want chance of getting more and better local services or even a good local pub, you are going to have to accept density. But density can and should be done well, and many of the historic places the typical opponents of density rather like, are actually fairly dense places.
Done with that? Move on to section 13 next.
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