It’s not news but I didn’t really find a place for it.

  •  dax   ( @dax@beehaw.org ) 
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    210 months ago

    It’s my understanding that a lot of cities are built on the bones of previous iterations - even my current major metro, Seattle, is built on top of a lot of old ruins. That doesn’t mean it’s not a problem, it just means we’ve previously been able to conquer it by just… building up from the lower levels. It’s kinda crazy that that’s our best effort for the littoral cities - but I think even Denver is built on some “old” ruins and they were exposed (to my absolute fascination) when they were replacing the streets way down town (like 16th street mall / wynkoop, iirc). I was absolutely fixated on the … legacy city that was going down like 8’ below current denver!

    Anyway, I don’t want to act like this fact makes it not a problem; I simply can’t imagine all of lower manhatten wanting to raze every skyscraper and start over either. I’m pretty sure most of these city-on-a-city situations are after major fires kinda force everyone’s hand, so it really is a huge catastrophe!

    •  alyaza [they/she]   ( @alyaza@beehaw.org ) 
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      10 months ago

      Anyway, I don’t want to act like this fact makes it not a problem; I simply can’t imagine all of lower manhatten wanting to raze every skyscraper and start over either. I’m pretty sure most of these city-on-a-city situations are after major fires kinda force everyone’s hand, so it really is a huge catastrophe!

      hence, the levee solution. in the future future even that’s probably not going to work (at least not for NYC) and it’s pretty likely then people will just have to abandon levels of buildings to rising sea level if they want to continue using them, but for right now most cities just want to buy their populations time to adapt further. (and for residential structures it’s probable people will move or be forced to move)