maybe people don't need to live in two mile long ten level flats anyway. I think they're incredibly ugly and wasteful. People can live better and less expensively in apartments built using 21st century 'green' building techniques. They should tear down those soviet monoliths to human exploitation and build some of these.
Not exactly beautiful but who cares when the utilities are close to nothing and you're not packed in like a prison block.
Sorry but you' have no idea what you're talking about. Yes, they are ugly but how exactly are they "wasteful"? Wasteful would be to tear them down just because they're ugly and building new houses at huge expense. How the hell would living in new apartments be "less expensive"? And they aren't particularly dangerous. With proper maintenance they could be perfectly fine for another 50 years.
Sure, eventually they will be replaced by new buildings but it will take decades.
new apartments use less energy because of advanced insulation and double pane, gas filled windows. They use energy efficient utilities. Especially in cold climates where the heater is run for most of the year you can save a lot of money. Also, there's no reason to repair buildings that were low quality when they were new when building them better the first time saves even more money down the road.
I doubt people would be willing to switch to a new building if it was a case of saving 20% on heating a year, At the cost of $50000 per flat to rebuild
Save say $200 a year if u spend $50k doesnt add up...
the energy saving between a state-of-the-art efficient apartment and those gulag flats is probably more like 50% plus an improved quality of life. I don't see a reason to try to patch up the increasingly inefficient, decaying soviet flats to last another 40 years when a new building could be built to last much longer with less decrease in efficiency over time. Plus no one buys flats, they rent them after financiers and real estate developers invest in building them.
Due to expansion of Lithuanian capital Vilnius plenty of new buildings are being built. I've seen how some of them are built (mostly with cheapest flats), and honestly i feel safer in a soviet built 50 year old house. I'm not saying anything about more expensive houses, but very little people in post-soviet countries are willing to live in those. Soviet built houses aren't that bad, they're a bit inconvenient and old fashioned, but they are still standing (with exceptions of course).
Yes, they do! Almost all the flats are privately owned and you rent from flat's owners. Real estate brokers are the annoying middle man that most people try to avoid.
I'll add that most apartment blocks here are already renovated with new roofs, windows and insulation. The flats themselves are how their owners have made them but also mostly renovated.
New buildings are more energy efficient but the lesser cost of heating would take a lifetime to even out compared to how much more expensive new flats are to buy or rent.
The entire nation is not saving money, the estimated 3.4 billion is in saved energy costs for the people who live in the apartments (not houses) that I'm talking about. Maximum efficient and comfortable living should be a goal for all developed nations. Where Eastern Europe has miles of grey soulless blocks, the US has miles of beige soulless tract homes. (which are exceedingly comfortable, but not exactly inspiring or efficient)
I'm failing to see how newly built houses are more energy saving than properly renovated old ones?
You can change windows (wich 90% of people here have already done), add insulation on existing walls as a noob said above, correct/fix the heating system etc...
Newly built houses are being forced to be extremely "green". Not only in the sense by adding extra insulation for roofs/walls and double-glazed windows, but a myraid of other stuff.
New houses built after 2016 need to be zero carbon (I know!) according to the UK Government. The houses are expected to produce their own power - geo-thermal heat pumps, PV panels, biomass CHPs etc. I agree, that's pretty over the top. But then again 2016 isn't that far away - and there are loads of trials on zero carbon houses.
These houses will be purpose-built for saving energy. Right from the roof to the foundations. Glass walls/partitions will be used to provide natural light, and not depend on electricity (at least during day-time). Likely to be close to air-tight; using mechanical ventillation and heat recovery (MVHR) systems will save further losses. All the electrical-stuff need to be highly efficient.
Old houses/flats can be renovated to some degree, but would not be practical due to costs.
Not all of us would be able to afford purpose-built energy efficient houses in the near future. So tearing down all the blocks and moving the people into "green" houses ain't gonna work...
Those flats and many many other houses will be around for ages. So you just need to find the right balance between the energy savings (in the long run) compared to the renovations that you are planning to do to save energy.
We are not there yet though...that seems like an expensive building plan, wich means higher rents and maintenance costs, though you might save in energy and heat but it backfires with other costs i'm afraid. Even now rents in new houses are almost double the cost as in older ones.
The goal (imo) is to have the expense of tearing down and replacing old, inefficient buildings be entirely offset by energy savings and the positive global economic effects of using far less energy. Obviously this goal will be closer at hand for the countries that are actually inventing these technologies, but countries that are farther behind can benefit greatly when they become more widely available. I hope that within 50 years there will be no tenement buildings or wasteful tract housing communities left, and that the materials used to build them will have been recycled to build entirely humane housing for the poor, and almost miraculously advanced and beautiful custom homes for the middle and upper classes.
But that is sort of the thing that we could expect in the near future.
Even now, in the UK, there are loads of regulations where all newly built houses should have a certain percentage of recycled material. And these are becoming ever so stringent. Not only regarding the approval of the finished house itself, but the whole construction process; clearing the land, building, water and waste management during construction etc. are all need to be efficent.
There is no way one could justify tearing down fully functional (albiet comparatively inefficient) buildings and make energy efficient houses and say you are going to make a saving. Imagine all the energy input to acutually make a new buliding + new fittings/furniture/appliances etc.
Looks like temporarily shelters for quake survivors. Made by IKEA?
Don't expect one solution to work everywhere, population density (buildings are tall for a reason, you need concentration to free up public greens spaces), cost (many country can't afford to build with first world techs), earth quake and typhoon resistance etc.
Although I agree buildings can be more efficient with only alternation in design without expensive add on: proper orientation, air circulation, water collection system etc can be achieved rather cheaply.
Big concrete boxes ain't ugly and inhumane in nature, as long as the human condition is thoroughly considered. A box is often the most efficiency solution when considering people movement and creation of views (and gross value).
most often than not an alternation base on the box can solve many problems.
renovation can't change building orientation (and how it stores heat/dispense heat, use of natural light, hence effects energy bills on lighting and air conditioning), can't change air circulation, can undo wasteful landscape changes made before, unless the core structure is touched won't benefit from improved material efficiency. etc etc.
while old buildings can be touched up by improved systems, new buildings can sometimes achieve the same result without the system all together, for example a building well ventilated can do without air conditioning for most of the year, just by the change of form itself.
with increased connectivity via the internet, and more automation of manual labor with robots, I hope that people in the future will be able to live wherever they want and population density in cities will greatly decrease. Tenement houses are designed to have as many people as possible as close as possible to the factories etc. where they work. When and if robots replace humans in the production of mass market products and food, people can live farther from cities and form smaller, closer communities with like-minded individuals. I think packing people into enormous cities with squalid conditions was a necessity of the last century that will not define advanced human civilization in the 22nd century.
JJ that link was interesting and makes me wonder if habitation systems in the future will resemble natural biological systems more and more. Very cool!
This is Mustamäe, a typical Soviet apartment block part of Tallinn.
There isn't room to build without tearing down old buildings. In order to tear down old buildings one would have to buy all the apartments (as I said before individual flats are private property of different people) in the building which is practically impossible because there would be many people who wouldn't want to leave their home. So in the end buying all the apartments, tearing down a building and building a new one would mean that the flats in the new building would be hugely expensive to make up for all the cost and noone would buy them. No real estate developer is crazy enough to try it. They have trouble selling new flats that are in buildings that were built on free land and thus less expensive.
As ugly, boring or inefficient they may be, right now there is no viable alternative to them.
