2,780 unit apartment building with 6,800 tenants, one of largest buildings in the world

[Liberal_in_LA]

I had no idea such a large apartment building existed until a few weeks ago. Fascinating





Housing Debate Unfolds in Shadow of a Living Wall


VERNIER, Switzerland — Alexa Magalhaes has no plans to move from the apartment building where she has lived for the last six years, and why should she? As one of the largest such buildings on earth, it provides for just about all her needs, she says.

“I love this building; it’s a little village, you have everything here — school, medical center, families with children,” said Ms. Magalhaes, a woman in her 30s who shares a bright three-and-a-half-room apartment with her young daughter.

Her sentiments are not universally shared.

“It’s a monster,” said Jean Paul Laurent, 53, whose work for the local public utility occasionally brings him to the area. “I’m from a small village, I live in a three-story house, I call that a human scale,” he said. Yet he admitted that tenants of Ms. Magalhaes’s building, known as Le Lignon, after a river in nearby France, praised their apartments as large and bright, with splendid views and many conveniences.

The debate over Le Lignon is pertinent because the behemoth, with its 2,780 apartments, more than 10 million square feet of floor space and about 6,800 tenants, was thrown up four decades ago largely as a response to an acute housing shortage in the region around Geneva, including towns like Vernier. With immigrants streaming into the area every year, it faces a similar housing shortage today.


If larger cities take pride in the height of their skyscrapers, Vernier, population 34,000, has long boasted about the length of Le Lignon, which at nearly seven-tenths of a mile, was for years thought to be the longest residential building anywhere. There were celebrations to mark the anniversary, and the canton of Geneva, the larger region in which Vernier lies, bestowed landmark status on the huge building.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/world/europe/geneva-area-housing-shortage-renews-debate-on-le-lignon-complex.html#h[]

[Fire Walk With Me]

1. "Arcology".

[ChandlerJr]

2. How dreary, I'd rather be here

[Liberal_in_LA]

3. lol. largest place I lived in, had about 150 units. It wasn't so bad

Los angelenos used to living in close company.

[TheMadMonk]

11. You'll be there soon enough. Why hurry?

My questions centre around why it is possible for most of Europe and Asia to live relatively hamoniously in extremely high density housing, but in English speaking nations, high density living and high crime rates are virtually inseparable.

[lurky]

16. Absolutely not true. Check out Manhattan.

Most of the safest, most desirable neigborhoods are extremely high-density. The Upper East Side has 120,000 people per square mile. The Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village complex has over 200,000 per sq mile and is highly sought-after.

The second most densely-populated big city in the US is San Francisco, also a place with great quality of life. Followed by Boston, which is also not a high-crime city.

And the cities with the worst crime rates are not especially dense: Detroit, St. Louis, Memphis, Oakland.

[Odin2005]

4. Wow, a real arcology! I'd love to live there!

[Liberal_in_LA]

5. I've never heard this term "arcology"

[Saving Hawaii]

6. you've never played sim city

[Liberal_in_LA]

8. oh I have! one of the older versions. Didn't have the patience to continually

to get my people out of bed and prompt them to go to work so never got far in the game.

What's an arcology?

[Odin2005]

9. Wiki page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology

[valerief]

7. So when one apartment gets cockroaches, almost three thousand apartments get them, too?

[shanti]

10. that sounds like family apartments for students

at CSUS. the roach population was WAY out of control when i lived there!

[WinkyDink]

12. Uh, this is SWITZERLAND we're discussing.

[pipi_k]

13. Do cockroaches not live in Switzerland?

I dunno...

According to this, they do...

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GVK/is_3_15/ai_n31445146/

[valerief]

17. Ha! Apparently not! nt

[pipi_k]

14. I find it hard to believe, but...

some people actually do enjoy living like sardines in a can.


My closest neighbors are more than 1,000 feet down the hill. that's close enough for me.

[MattBaggins]

15. I would last 6 months tops living like that

Just couldn't do it.