Intro
This is how I envision what would be a great way to guide the development of high density living. I mean this not in the sense of centrally planned communities, but more in the sense of blueprints to be improved upon by the specific needs of specific communes.
Me
I was not born on a big city here in Portugal, my home-town is a medium sized municipality of ~100k people.
My family home is a 1950s building 4 stories. Each house is 2 stories with three rooms, big living room, everyone had a small garden plot, everyone had a storage space in the back of the building, many used these as workshops when I was a kid. They look more like a bunch of houses squeezed together than modern apartments, they look just like these:
The municipality at the time was mostly composed of farm fields, factories, and housing with a central urban core. You can probably walk the urban part in less than 1h even today, and yes we did walk a lot in my family since we didn't own a car.
Yet we could do mostly everything, even though in my home-town public transportation inside the municipality was very scarce until recently.
Why does this matter?
Well we also had something that sadly has been dying ever since: the ground floor of most buildings were businesses, sometimes even small shopping malls.
You had the usual Portuguese style café and bakeries, hair saloons, grocery stores, hardware stores, stationary and printing, etc.
Nowadays some of these are still open, but many have been closed for more than a decade due to greedy landlords trying to maximize rent. Others have been completely taken over by tourist honeypots: stores that sell expensive instagramable items as if they were representative of the country's cultures.
But back to the point
What really happened in the past was that these small stores also functioned as a place of community, let me explain: People would meet just because they were on the same spot for coffee or groceries or whatever. New neighbours would rapidly get to know their new nearby community due to this as well.
This was one example of people having their third spaces. This was also a good and natural way to meet your neighbours as an adult moving to a completely new city, especially when you have no kids.
It's just not the same if the supermarket you go needs a 5-10min car trip and serves 50k people instead of 20-200.
In many cities this third space was basically replaced with more poor quality housing, now more than ever. Want some groceries or just some bread? Well better get into the car. Your neighbours are likely also just faces that you sometimes cross in the elevator.
High Density Communities
I like the idea of high density living: and I mean it as a large amount of housing that is designed as a large amount of small bubbles of community.
I'm not talking about a dystopian skyscraper filled with housing with nothing else there!
I'm talking about groups of high buildings that also provide services bellow those same buildings. Between them lay large green spaces, small factories, power generation, waste treatment, small community plots, firefighters, healthcare, schools, etc. Probably more akin to a large kibbutz than to whatever dystopian nightmare usually is associated with "high density".
You have housing, services, education, jobs, etc. Most of all you have a semi-organic community: we humans tend to like that.
This way also improves resilience: even if for some reason one of these communities has a problem, the others are likely unaffected due to all redundancies and can help.
Hobbies and Free Time
I would add here community workshops and meeting spaces. Workshops as a space for tools and simple trades like carpentry, sewing, electronics, weaving, etc. Meeting spaces like sky observatories, community gyms, playgrounds, etc.
Why? Well most of the time the advantage of a big house is to have place for a small space for your activities, but having that available to all would be great and foster even more community interactions.
People getting back to having proper hobbies and off-work activities is important, more important than paid work.
Capitalism will eventually die, but your hobbies will stay and be useful all the same, even if just psychologically.
Transportation and services
We also have a place where efficient public transportation is trivially possible: just do one subway station per group of buildings.
This is also something way more environmentally friendly than a bunch of isolated huts, taking over nature space, to house 5k people with little to no sewer and garbage treatment.
Why do that when you could have them housed in 10% that space with proper services.
If you're thinking this rings a bell, well it's because this was what most Europe (at least) was still partially doing before we started copycatting the trend of having completely isolated residential buildings.
What about industry and farming?
Residential buildings isolation with zoning that separates services and jobs from people serves only the ones selling us fuel and "consumer" products, and is a complete waste of time.
They want us tired from commuting so we can't get much done outside work, so we consume way more than needed. They also want us together but alone so we can't organize efficiently.
The only exception I accept to isolation is industry when this industry either generates noise or other nuisances. Anything really that makes it unsuitable to be nearby a residential building. And efficient public transportation can help here.
Farming... well it's probably about time we started to think about high tech farming, if islands like Singapore can do it so can we.
If it seems strange that factories or farms are nearby apartment housing: in my home-town we even had urban factories (textile and carpentry mostly) which were a 5min walk away from home. They were sadly killed by a combination of incompetence, greed, and idiotic politicians that wanted to fund tourism instead of helping the communities to be more self-reliant.
Why this matters?
But more important that any of this is to remember: community serves the purpose of you getting to know people in very different lives compared to yours, with different beliefs, different lifestyles, different incomes.
This means you won't be easily manipulated into thinking idiotic things like: "poor people are lazy" or "migrants are criminals". After all you know them because they go to the same café as you and the same grocery store. You'll probably even join a protest or strike if it helps your community just because you know them.
If you think about that the blabber about 15 min cities: it's mostly either fascists seeing it as a way for people to organize they need to squash; and other more hidden fascists taking these ideas and degenerating them into a tool for social isolation and control.
TL;DR
- High density living must form communities not just living spaces
- High density communities make for efficient transportation
- Inter-community connection is a necessity for guaranteeing human rights
- Let nature regrow, we don't need to occupy every plot of land
- Hobbies are great, keep having them
- Isolation of residential spaces serves only to sell more consumer products and fuel
- Lack of community means the labour force is likely to be less united and easier to manipulate
- Capitalism will die and it is just a matter of how many of us will be taken too before it does
But what do I know, right? Being that I'm not a trust fund boi with a management degree, or a consultancy using LLMs for "content".