Housing Density 101

Join us for an engaging conversation on the complexities of housing density with Dr. Emily Talen, professor and director at the UChicago Urbanism Lab! Dr. Talen has authored numerous influential works, including "New Urbanism and American Planning" and "City Rules," and her forthcoming book, "Neighborhood". Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from one of the field’s foremost experts about urban design, social equity, and how housing density can be balanced with community needs!

This is a members-only event. If you are not already a UE member, tickets can be purchased for $35, which includes a one-year membership. Current members will receive a promotional code and can bring one guest free of charge. If you plan on bringing a guest, please purchase two tickets - you will be prompted to enter your guest's name and ZIP code after clicking "Register".

Note: Ticket sales will end 48 hours prior to the event so that the RSVP list can be shared with building security. To RSVP after ticket sales end, please email [email protected] so that we can add your name to the building list.

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More from Dr. Emily Talen:

Density is essential to cities, and sustaining it in ways that minimize social and environmental cost, while reaping its many benefits, is an apt definition of what city planning is supposed to be about. While urban dwellers have had a kind of love-hate relationship with density – loving the services and vibrancy it engenders but not loving the congestion externalities—it is now well recognized that cities need to be compact, and therefore dense, to maximize access, promote productivity and innovation, sustain civic life, limit environmental harm, and foster social connection.

But the realization of these benefits is, in many cases, dependent on context. Research on density has exposed counterfactuals, unintended consequences, and mixed outcomes, often as a result of poor locational choices. Chief among these problems is the case where density is located without access to amenities, especially public transit. Density without transit has been shown to result in more, rather than less, environmental harm through increased car dependence, which runs counter to one of the main reasons for promoting density in the first place.

This is a study of the context of density – and how it often fails us. My approach is to take three major urban assets – transit stations, parks, and pedestrian-oriented retail corridors – and answer two questions: 1) how much does density correlates with these assets, over time and relative to other parts of the city, and 2) what might explain the lack of spatial correlation? I use the city of Chicago as a case study and look at data spanning 100 years.

Recent interest in 15, 10, or 5 minute city concepts rely on personalized access, i.e., how far an individual has to travel within an allotted time frame in order to access the services and amenities they need for daily life: grocery stores, health care centers, schools, and recreational spaces, for example. But there is another way of thinking about optimal spatial relationships in the city: the maximization of the number of people close to fixed urban assets. What are the greatest assets a city might offer, and is density maximized around these assets? If not, what would explain the lack of co-location?

Using Chicago as a case study, I evaluate the question of density near assets longitudinally and spatially. I first track density change around three major assets in every decade for 100 years, and then compare density near assets with density in other locations. I find that density is not well correlated with assets, and that this correlation has been in steep decline for decades. Zoning was an explanatory factor in higher density near stations in the 1920s, but now has little explanatory power.

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