  We think it is worthwhile passing on thoughts from an insightful posting on an urban design discussion forum we subscribe to. Michael Mehaffy was the author.
To clarify, the “Goldilocks Principle” is the principle that what is good at one scale may not be good – may in fact be very harmful - at another. For many things, as in the goldilocks fable there is a “just right” scale. To use a common example – if we take aspirin one tablet may be good, and two may be twice as good. But one hundred is not one hundred times as helpful! The same can be said about many urban phenomena, for example density. A doubling from say 15 units to the Hectare to 30 units to the Hectare can generally be a very beneficial thing, making public transit viable and bringing many other benefits at the neighbourhood scale. But 300 units to the Hectare is not beneficial – high density of this magnitude brings with it many negatives. Mehaffy’s final quotable quote “… the three most important factors in urbanism (with apologies to the real estate agents) are scale, scale and scale !...” Anyway a number of years ago we discussed this same topic of density at length in a previous posting on our website: we thought it might be worth re-visiting here http://www.neylan.com.au/conversation/inner-city-brisbane-a-few-comments-on-height-and-density Comments are closed.
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