Why Europe has so few skyscrapers | BBC Global

I'm from South America, and in the cities of my country skyscrapers are multiplying, in a disorderly way, the result of poor urban planning.

I'm a Malaysian and lived in KL where we have numerous skyscrapers. Although many tourists are impressed by these buildings, I don't, because they are soulless steel & concrete without personality whereas Europe's architecture has long history and uniqueness. We have 1000 shopping malls and office occupancy rate is 75% yet we keep on building more despite malls are struggling to survive in today's online shopping trend and lower birthrate, respectively. I suspect twenty years from now KL office occupancy rate would be 50%.

Why have you completely ignored Frankfurt?

Cathedrals > skyscrapers.

Tallest skyscrapers are quite often built for Ego, not Functionality.

I’m sorry, what you heard of Warsaw’s skyscrappers?

Haven't you forgotten Warsaw?

If you look at any list of most livable cities in the world, they are all dominated by European cities. That's what I call real progress.

As a civil engineer I can give a little oversimplified technical insight for those wondering Skyscrapers are extremely unpractical and inefficient. They consume (on average) several times more electricity, about 30% more gas and the windows need to be changed relatively often. A lot of this is a result of hostile temperatures at high altitudes and strong winds. Moreover, skyscrapers are an urbanistic nightmare since you have to adjust for traffic, plumbing, etc infrastructure that is often centuries old and just overburdened too much. Moreover, their use of land is vastly overstated. Skyscrapers only make sense in very few places usually large financial centers like London or NY. For example London has a regulatory region called "The mile" (since it`s 1 sq m) and you need to build skyscrapers in order to cram more people in said mile. Super low building are also a waste for the most part (think US suburbs) since the population is spread thin over a large area meaning there isn`t enough tax base to support the overextended piping, plumbing, cable, electricity lines, roads etc. There is also great difficulty in organizing public transport, having shops etc. The best buildings are middle height buildings with mixed area use. Since you have enough population density to generate a tax base to support the infrastructure but you also don`t overburden it and it requires less maintenance than a skyscraper thus making it cheaper. Moreover, there are lots of added benefits. For example, US households throw on average 30% of their groceries since they have to drive to business zoning areas to get stuff say once a week instead of just going down the stairs and buying from the first floor. The necessity of cars is also a factored expense instead of walking/cycling/public transport. Moreover you get less bone density, hearing damaging noise pollution and more obesity by living in car centric resource inefficient cities. Hope that helps!

China isn't 'catching up fast' -it has 4x as many skyscrapers as the US, plus the the world's two tallest cities (and 6 out of the top 10) in terms of buildings over 150m. NYC for example has one third less skyscrapers than Shenzhen, and almost half as many as HK.

In India, we too have such a tough beauraucracy that almost NO skyscrapers get built ( except Mumbai, but there too restrictions are very high ), we desperately need a tough leader who can break through all this age old stupid beauraucracy that has ruined our cities.

Haven't you seen what happened to the tower in Pisa, Italy,?

I am so happy, we do not have skyscrapers in Europe ❤

I love the way euro is ..rich in history and memories

What about Frankfurt germany?

because europe has history! i mean good protected and preserved history

Please preserve Old Europe..should always be like that..

My sincere thanks for sharing it.

Frankfurt?

America is a baby compared to Europe. We simply don't have classic buildings the same way Europe does. So it makes sense for us to have more skyscrapers.