While visiting Europe, I missed most of the local debate on potential changes to DC’s federally imposed height limit (see – and contrast – the final recommendations from the NCPC and DC Office of Planning, as well as background materials and visual modelling, here). But I sure didn’t actually miss any tall buildings; I saw lots of them in just about every city I visited (several of which are documented in NCPC’s selected case studies).

Some thoughts on three of the cities I visited:

London:

London’s appeal for height is obvious, with skyscrapers emerging within the City of London. London has a sophisticated plan for managing heights, as explained by Robert Tavenor (transcript – slides) at NCPC’s event on building heights in capital cities (video available here), balancing London’s interest in quality of life, history, and the desire to maintain London’s status as a primary capital of the global world.

All of this planning effort focuses on the City of London, building upon the already existing transportation infrastructure while preserving specific view corridors, and ensuring that tall buildings that do break the existing skyline include high quality design and are clustered together in designated districts. Other such clusters exist outside of London’s center, such as Canary Wharf – more akin to the kind of cluster of tall buildings along the city’s periphery, as seen in La Defense outside of Paris.

Paris: 

Paris features a suburban cluster of skyscrapers, while the central city skyline remains almost uniformly flat. However, in recent years, the city has allowed taller buildings in the outer arrondissements. Socialist city officials pushed for additional height as part of a plan to increase housing supply and address housing affordability.

Comparing Paris to DC is superficially appealing. Paris’s almost absolute 37m limit (approx 120 feet) is similar to DC’s limit. NCPC’s summary of case studies highlight their lessons learned from Paris:

Paris demonstrates that restrictive building height controls can coexist with significant residential density. Among the case study cities, it has the greatest population density per square mile.

While this is true, it only highlights what is possible with a Parisian-style limit on height; it does not address what is required to achieve such residential densities. Payton Chung offered these comments on this blind spot in DC-Paris comparisons:

One oft-repeated line heard from the (small-c) conservative crowd is that height limits have worked to keep Paris beautiful. That comment ignores a lot of painful history: the mid-rise Paris that we know today was built not by a democracy, but by a mad emperor and his bulldozer-wielding prefect. As Office of Planning director Harriet Tregoning said in a recent WAMU interview, “Paris took their residential neighborhoods and made them essentially block after block of small apartment buildings… if we were to do that in our neighborhoods, we could accommodate easily 100 years’ worth of residential growth. But they would be very different neighborhoods.”

…

That path of destruction is why most other growing cities in this century (i.e., built-out but growing central cities, from London and Singapore to New York, Portland, Toronto, and San Francisco) have gone the Vancouver route and rezoned central industrial land for high-rises. This method allows them to simultaneously accommodate new housing, and new jobs, while keeping voters’ single family houses intact. By opposing higher buildings downtown, DC’s neighborhoods are opposing change now, but at the cost of demanding far more wrenching changes ahead: substantial redevelopment of low-rise neighborhoods, skyrocketing property prices (as in Paris), or increasing irrelevance within the regional economy as jobs, housing, and economic activity get pushed further into suburbs that welcome growth.

Another superficial point of comparison is in the effective height limit. While Parisian heights are capped at 120 feet and DC heights commonly max out at 130 feet, the exact mechanism for calculating those hieghts matters a great deal. The DC method, based on street width (height and street width in a 1:1 ratio, plus 20 feet), makes use of the extraordinarily wide streets provided by the L’Enfant Plan.

Paris has similarly broad avenues, but those avenues were carved through the existing cityscape (people often forget that the 1791 L”Enfant plan pre-dates the Haussmann renovations of Paris by half a century), and the absolute nature of the height limit allows for max-height buildings along the city’s narrow, medieval streets – with building height to street width ratios far in excess of DC’s 1:1 +20′.

Utrecht: 

Utrecht Centraal is the busiest rail station in the Netherlands. Thanks to the city’s location in the center of the country, frequent and fast rail connections are available to all points in the country. For pedestrians, the only connection to the medieval center of Utrecht is by walking through the 1970s-era Hoog Catharijne shopping mall. The entire station and adjacent areas are currently in redevelopment, upgrading the rail station to handle increased passenger volumes, restoring a historic canal, and providing room for new, tall development adjacent to the station.

Utrecht is not the only city in the Netherlands pursuing such a strategy. In Amsterdam, the Zuid and Bijlmer Arena stations feature substantial development and tall buildings; Rotterdam’s Centraal station is also a hub for a massive redevelopment project.

According to the Utrecht station area master plan, large areas around the station provide for a base height of 45 meters, with towers up to 90 meters (~300 feet), including the Stadskantoor pictured above. Even with that height, you rarely get a sense that such tall buildings exist. The city’s narrow streets (even with short buildings) constrain view corridors. Within the medieval city, the views you do see are mostly of the 368 foot tall Dom Tower, not of the buildings of similar height closer to the train station.