Since tall buildings have been around, there have been many ways they’ve fit into cities: towers in downtown, towers in the park, and most recently, towers on a whole-block development. Let’s look at a 4th way, the Tower in the Village.
Unlike the others, the Tower in the Village does not aim to be the center of attention. Instead, the upper floors are hidden behind a low front that fits in with the rest of the block. It faces a village green instead of a busy road.
Why highrise infill? Growing cities have two choices: 1) Redevelop a lot of sites to medium density, or 2) Redevelop a small number of sites to very high density. Highrise infill requires less demolition and can get more homes built faster.
Sometimes there’s a Heuristic That Almost Always Works, like “this technology won’t change everything” or “there won’t be a hurricane tomorrow”.
And sometimes the rare exceptions are so important to spot that we charge experts with the task. But the heuristics are so hard to beat that the experts themselves might be tempted to secretly rely on them, while publicly pretending to use more subtle forms of expertise.
…Maybe this is because the experts are stupid and lazy. Or maybe it’s social pressure: failure because you didn’t follow a well-known heuristic that even a rock can get right is more humiliating than failure because you didn’t predict a subtle phenomenon that nobody else predicted either. Or maybe it’s because false positives are more common (albeit less important) than false negatives, and so over any “reasonable” timescale the people who never give false positives look more accurate and get selected for.