‘Bristol should learn from cities like Barcelona and ban high rises from its centre’

There is a housing crisis and we need to house more people.

Many UK cities, noticeably London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Leeds, are filling their cities with high rises, as a solution to the housing crisis.

Instead of spreading out and building into our green belt, we’re told, we should make our cities denser by building high because “either you build up or you build out”.

The argument is so popular that it has almost assumed the status of dogma. If you want more housing, better health and less pollution – you have to encourage high rise.

Many good consequences will follow, it’s argued: there will be more housing and our housing will also occupy much less space.

However – it isn’t true.

Let’s look at density. The densest city in Europe is Paris, at 71,056 people per sq mile, followed by Athens (49,560 people per sq mile) and Barcelona (41,417 people per sq mile).

None of these cities are “high-rise cities” although all of them have some high rise.

Residential property in the core areas of Paris mostly peaks at seven storeys but many central streets are five storeys – hence those rows of Parisian streets all the same height.

Like many other historic cities, Barcelona has allowed high rises on its outskirts, but there are none in its centre. Lisbon is the same.

Yet all these mid-rise cities are, surprisingly, denser than the USA’s largest, densest and highest city, New York, which although very tall has only 29,095 people per sq mile.

Chicago, famous for its spectacular high rises, is the USA’s second densest city, but has only 12,000 people per sq mile.

Chicago’s high-risers as seen from the Chicago River – photo: Choose Chicago

So it is not true that you need to build up like a typical Chinese or American city in order to enjoy the advantages of density.

In Bristol, the desire to build tall seems partly an aesthetic one: mayor Marvin Rees thinks that a tall city is more beautiful than a traditional mid-rise city and shows “ambition and energy”.

But whose ambition? We may think, not his citizens’ ambition, because when citizens are asked what they prefer (which they never are by him) they don’t share his love of high rise.

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Read more: 10 Questions: Marvin Rees – ‘I’m Bristol’s most transparent person’

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Continental cities have tended to build less tall. Paris has built a tall area in La Défense, mostly for business, and in immigrant areas.

The social effects of the latter have been so bad that they’re now recognised as mistakes, but again, the main objection is aesthetic and environmental, and Paris has now banned new buildings taller than 37 metres.

Such a move is frankly harder for the UK’s major cities, though the City of London has taken steps.

We Brits have traditionally liked to live in houses with gardens, rather than flats, and the side-effect is that our cities are less dense, i.e. house less people per square mile.

Contrast Paris, Vienna or Berlin, which have mostly tight, gardenless blocks of flats.

The UK’s less dense pattern is where the “up or out” slogan comes from, because if you want more people in your city, you have to build on the fringes (which unfortunately encourages them to use cars), or yes, you can build up.

2023 marks the 150th anniversary of Vienna World’s Fair – photo: Vienna Tourist Board

But there is a third choice. You can adopt the continental pattern and build mid-rise.

St Philip’s could be a new, dense, mid-rise city, near the station, well-served by roads, built on the pattern of Clifton (quite dense).

But such cities have to be planned. In Vienna (for instance) trams are built first into new city sections, streets are planned first, the dimensions of housing are defined before the housing is actually built.

That’s how you get dense housing. But our mayor is incapable of such planning.

He simply indicates to developers that he wants high-rises, and lets them do the work for him. “Getting stuff done” he calls it, but it is not very intelligent stuff.

Why is it not very intelligent? Because high rises are much more expensive than mid-rises, and incidentally, more polluting.

So if Joe Rayment – whose recent opinion piece in Bristol24/7 said that our city is not a museum – is to get housing, he would need to pay less if Rees supported mid-rise housing, than he will pay for one of Bristol’s new central high-rise flats.

Incidentally, many London high rise flats have been left empty (they’re often used as a form of overseas bank accounts by cautious Chinese investors).

It would be ironic if we ruined our city’s appearance to end up with a lot of empty flats in central Bristol.

Castle Park View tower is now Bristol’s tallest building – photo: Martin Booth

High rise flats are also less happy places to live. Not for nothing are they called “suburbs in the sky”.

Much academic work has gone into showing that they are less sociable and that people are lonelier in them.

If you drop an envelope in the corridor of a high rise, the chances of it getting delivered to the right address is less the further up the high-rise you go.

They’re obviously inappropriate for women with children, who won’t let their kids out to play where they can’t be supervised.

High rises are particularly inappropriate in a historic city. Most people don’t like being in the shaded, windy streets that high rises cause.

Beauty is really a really important characteristic for a city; it makes people happier; it attracts quality staff (again a well-studied phenomenon) and attracts tourists.

European cities face just the same housing pressures as British cities do, but they are well aware of the positives of beauty, and mostly choose to house more people by building mid-rise, which after all is cheaper, makes people much happier, houses people densely, and creates housing which is adaptable in that it can either be a residency or an office or a shop.

These cities mostly know it makes absolutely no sense to do what Bristol is doing.

Cutting off our nose to spite our face, uglifying our city and making it less attractive will impoverish us all in the long-term. Now why would we want to do that?

This is an opinion piece from Matthew Montagu-Pollock, a journalist and campaigner

Main photo: Visit Barcelona

Read next:

• ‘A housing crisis should never be used to wreck the soul of our city’
• ‘Cranes are changing Bristol’s skyline, but our city is not a museum’
• In Their Own Words: Matthew Montagu-Pollock

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