The terrible outcome of building up
While visiting the mid-sized city of Gottingen in 2015 it does have a good feel to it, the city centre was active, bike parking is untidy similar to Delft (cool YouTube clip on biking in Gottingen), it is city well worth visiting.
In the early 1970s Göttingen started a building up project, the planning and location of Iduna Centre could be text book best practice and it did have a good start, made up of 17 floors and 407 apartments of reinforced concrete. Back then the apartments of the housing block in the German university city of Göttingen were considered chic and a good location. Lawyers, university staff and young families lived in these luxury apartments. The site was attractive, right between the university campus and city centre, equipped with swimming pool and sauna. Sadly over the medium term political leadership lost interest, (we have seen this in Hamilton with council flats). Like many large bulky/obese apartment buildings they have a long history of bad outcomes.
For photos ‘Hope and despair on the seventeenth floor’ by Ingmar Bjorn Nolting
Iduna-Zentrum (Gottingen) - It was opened in 1975. The new building with then modern usage concepts and apartments with further views on the upper floors ... it originally housed a shopping centre, as well as a swimming pool and a sauna. Two pedestrian bridges connected the Iduna Centre with the city centre of Göttingen as well as with the university. The apartments were partly rented out, partly sold ... In 1987, the building complex was taken over by a Göttingen real estate company. The swimming pool and sauna were closed. The two pedestrian bridges were demolished in 1993 and 2003 respectively. In 2020 a Google search of Iduna-Zentrum does not help its reputation. "There has always been this kind of resentment. Now it's getting more virulent," says Meinhart Ramaswamy. He is a member of the city's municipal assembly for the Pirate Party
The architect Terry Farrell wrote in his 2007 ‘Manifesto for London’ – ‘Paradoxically, the poorest live either side of Regent’s Park and are poorer, statistically, than the East End. There is a low level of mixed-use, little variation in tenancy types and virtually no historic building stock, as most of the estates date from the mid twentieth century. Though they may be high rise, they are not necessarily high density, compared with the rich, dense surrounding areas’. He uses habitable room per hectare (hrh) to measures density, typical higher rise social housing estates had between 331 hrh to 480 hrh, private housing in Nottingham place 800 hrh & Crawford Street 1,000 hrh.
High rise is not necessarily high density.