{"id":1905,"date":"2018-03-19T08:53:17","date_gmt":"2018-03-19T12:53:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeaftercarbon.net\/?p=1905"},"modified":"2018-03-22T10:11:57","modified_gmt":"2018-03-22T14:11:57","slug":"apartments-urban-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/2018\/03\/apartments-urban-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"Apartments Were an Urban Innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Like just about everything else about modern cities, apartments were a big change from what cities were like before the 20th century. &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/03\/19\/nyregion\/new-york-today-the-evolution-of-the-apartment.html?rref=homepage&amp;module=Ribbon&amp;version=origin&amp;region=Header&amp;action=click&amp;contentCollection=Home%20Page&amp;pgtype=Multimedia\">The Evolution of the Apartment,&#8221;\u00a0<\/a>a short article in The New York Times, traces the changes in the design of living space in buildings, and therefore buildings themselves, and eventually the entire cityscape.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">&#8220;The city\u2019s first apartment buildings, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/01\/02\/realestate\/02scapes.html\">like the Dakota, the Gramercy and the Chelsea<\/a>, were constructed <strong>in the 1870s<\/strong>. Unlike <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tenement.org\/\">the city\u2019s existing tenements<\/a> \u2014 those greasy, cholera-ridden death traps described in books like Jacob Riis\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/files\/45502\/45502-h\/45502-h.htm\">How the Other Half Lives<\/a>\u201d \u2014 apartments offered amenities like telephones, electric lighting, commercial refrigerators, private dining rooms and ground-floor restaurants that could deliver food to your unit.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This was but the first of a set of transformations triggered by consumer interests, technology, economic change, and public policies:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><strong>&#8220;In 1901<\/strong>, <a href=\"http:\/\/gvshp.org\/blog\/2016\/04\/11\/tenement-house-act-of-1901\/\">New York State banned tenements<\/a>, and toilets, natural light and ventilation were added to existing buildings to make them more sanitary. During the depression, our city\u2019s luxury apartments were chopped up and sold off, while servant\u2019s quarters were converted into bedrooms. <strong>And<\/strong> <strong>in 1935<\/strong>, the nation\u2019s first public housing units went up on the Lower East Side.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Today a new set of urban imperatives are gradually reshaping living space, buildings, and city scapes: the need to dramatically increase energy efficiency and reduce water consumption; the consequential challenge of affordability and sufficient housing; and the need to renature cities. The next evolution is becoming visible: Buildings that produce more energy than they consume and capture stormwater onsite to be recycled. Increased density of housing in already built areas and Transit Oriented Development. Green infrastructure, inside and outside of buildings, and biophilic immersion.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<span class=\"et_bloom_bottom_trigger\"><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like just about everything else about modern cities, apartments were a big change from what cities were like before the 20th century. &#8220;The Evolution of the Apartment,&#8221;\u00a0a short article in The New York Times, traces the changes in the design of living space in buildings, and therefore buildings themselves, and eventually the entire cityscape. &#8220;The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1908,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,159],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cities","category-modern-city-model"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1905"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1910,"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1905\/revisions\/1910"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in4c.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}