Wow, do you reckon there're limitations/other considerations that give high rises value or, based on the study you linked to, is it fair to conclude that high rises are even worse than sprawl? I swear I've seen (quite general) stats suggesting apartment living has a significantly lower footprint but perhaps this is skewed by low/mid rise apartments?
Part of the problem is that a lot of those studies only consider operational carbon, not embodied carbon. If you take a full life-cycle approach, there is probably a density sweet spot where the reduction in transport emissions outweighs the increased embodied emissions of apartment towers. BUT as far as I am aware, no one has tried to model this conclusively yet. It would be very context dependent anyway so I think the best we'd ever achieve on the city scale would be a rule of thumb. Also, we're developing new lower carbon construction methods all the time - we could be building new apartments out of mass timber! But to be clear, I don't think you can conclude that high rises are worse than sprawl. Density is also very important for housing affordability which I will cover in a future post.
Wow, do you reckon there're limitations/other considerations that give high rises value or, based on the study you linked to, is it fair to conclude that high rises are even worse than sprawl? I swear I've seen (quite general) stats suggesting apartment living has a significantly lower footprint but perhaps this is skewed by low/mid rise apartments?
Part of the problem is that a lot of those studies only consider operational carbon, not embodied carbon. If you take a full life-cycle approach, there is probably a density sweet spot where the reduction in transport emissions outweighs the increased embodied emissions of apartment towers. BUT as far as I am aware, no one has tried to model this conclusively yet. It would be very context dependent anyway so I think the best we'd ever achieve on the city scale would be a rule of thumb. Also, we're developing new lower carbon construction methods all the time - we could be building new apartments out of mass timber! But to be clear, I don't think you can conclude that high rises are worse than sprawl. Density is also very important for housing affordability which I will cover in a future post.