How do megastructures/hive cities make any practical sense...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziggurat_Pyramid,_Dubai

How do housing projects/apartment buildings make any practical sense? Why have a crowded vertical behemoth that is hard to access and subject to all sorts of structural problems when spreading a city out is an option?

You are a moron, OP

They're an esthetic choice before thinking about practicality, much like every single thing in 40k

A lot of the time spreading out ISN'T an option OP. Most of the time when you're looking giant vertical cities or hive cities etc, they are surrounded by thousands of miles of fatal shithole.

Stuff like 2000ad's Megacities came about partially from existing cities sprawling out to the point where they ended up joining up (Like London's original villages IRL). Then nukes fly, and there's no more space to go outover. Hence, up.

40k Hive Cities are what you get if you take one part of MegaCity 1 (and a few other influences) put through 40k's "Must be Gimmer and Darker" filter.

After that it tends to just be either Rule of Cool and/or as a deliberate visual choice to emphasise that the characters operating within them are the "little people"

It's extremely compact. When you're doing stuff in three dimensions, you deal with volume rather than surface area. What this means is that you have a LOT more room in practice. That might mean more room for more population, farming and industry, or a world covered in parkland and nature despite housing tens of billions, depending on what you want to do with it.

Google "elevator problem" or "elevator paradox"

Basically, the higher you go, the more elevators you need or travel time slows significantly. To the extent that at certain heights more than half of your building's footprint is elevators

>or a world covered in parkland and nature despite housing tens of billions, depending on what you want to do with it.
This. I like the idea of a civ getting to the point that they have the technology to turn 80% of their home planet back over to nature without really impacting their growth at all.

Isaac's videos about Arcologies and Ecumenopolises are great shit
youtu.be/TqKQ94DtS54

So they make the elevators faster.

Or elevators become a natural way of separating the populations. People on top of the city take the jobs on top of the city.

Or maybe use a system like those automated elevator/cars from Minority Report.

>ywn have a curved window in your floor

This is kinda complicated, but I'll try to break it down.

Very dense urban living minimizes living cost per person, maximizing the efficiency of heating and cooling systems and allowing people to get to their jobs, schools, shopping and entertainment in easy to walk areas. This is true of urban cores now.

Sprawl is the enemy of efficiency. The wider the city spreads out the harder it is to efficiently distribute energy, communications, food, supplies, ect.

This is a very good point. A single huge conventional high-rise building isn't really an option. You can however create towers on the upper surface of an archaeology that maximize the number of housing and public areas with natural light and outdoor views. The "Street" level holds freight transport, while the lower levels hold support structures, industrial areas, warehouses, ect.

>practical sense
>40k

>40k
You erred.

You're assuming people travel from various floors routinely.

The various strata of megastructures tend to become isolated, in part due to a lack of transportation options.

Other times only the heights are properly inhabitable due to the others being ruined. They just build on top, and let the lower floors become their sewers and rust.

youtube.com/watch?v=TqKQ94DtS54

>when spreading a city out is an option?

spreading out the city usually isn't an option in settings that use Arcologies/hives/blocks.

>cursed earth
>rad wastes
>ocean planet
>not terraformed yet

and once you have something started it'll become popular, once it's popular land prices increase and it becomes cheaper to build upwards or there simply isn't enough room (london, hong kong, new york etc)

>when spreading a city out is an option
It usually isn't In Blade Runner particularly, the world is too overcrowded and presumably there is nowhere left to grow. 2049 implies society has reached a sort of equilibrium with hive city cores surrounded by miles of favelas, the rest of the world being landfills or ecologically devastated wasteland.

Science fiction is full of ways to make land more valuable.

Maybe an industry is reliant on a utility that is too expensive to service more than a few city blocks. Maybe this is another world, and those pyramid bases are (incredibly expensive) gravity concentrators to make citizens healthier. Maybe this is the exact opposite, and those are gravity distributors to make citizens happier with being obese.

Or maybe some mega corporation is so terrified of losing secrets that it wants to make sure no one can enter or exit their arcologies except on the ground floor.

>a building going impossibly high straight up
I'm ok with this
>a building going into an impossibly high dome/arch
I shit my pants

...

They don’t, really, which is the main reason why we don’t build them. Yeah, we have stuff like , but those aren’t arcologies or megastructures.

>One single resource trumps all others: human time and work hours.
Any system that reduces inefficiency and travel time for the common person, and puts them within short distance of all the interesting cultural / commercial leisure activities that they want access to, is going to be a breddy good system.
I’m under the impression that cities happen when you have some high-value economic activity that is strongly suited to a particular small area or exhibits large gains from high density. So... yes, more or less, up to some point where the increase in density is no longer worth he cost. You hit that theshold before you reach the “megastructure” scale.

(But then you have things like Kowloon, which are hard to explain with that sort of framework.)

It’s possible that construction is really cheap in future worlds with megastructures, so even slight gains from concentration justify building at a gargantuan scale.

How do you feel about spheres?

Ah, so you too are a man of good taste.

>when spreading a city out is an option?
Usually in these settings they’ve already covered the entire planet so the only place to go is up.

Dude, that are what Skylobbies are for.

Also this "problem" assumes that you need an elevator going from the bottom directly to the top. For a Megalopolis this is like saying a direct elevator from a Sewage Plant to the doorstep ofthe White House wuld be needed.

not really the same feeling

>How do housing projects/apartment buildings make any practical sense? Why have a crowded vertical behemoth that is hard to access and subject to all sorts of structural problems when spreading a city out is an option?
You were trying to be clever, but this is what Americans already believe.

Because it looks cool.

Because it's NOT an option in most cases.