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London Debates the Virtues of High and Low

A housing area in London has Canary Wharf as a backdrop. About 250 high-rises, mostly residential, are being built or planned for the city.Credit...Simon Dawson/Bloomberg

LONDON — London is on the rise.

Almost 250 buildings of 20 or more stories are being built or planned for the city and its suburbs in the next few years. About 150 of those structures are to be residential, including the Newfoundland tower in Canary Wharf that, at 58 stories, would become the second-tallest building in the city after the 72-story Shard.

The high-rises are hailed by some as the only solution to the city’s chronic housing shortage, and as the result of overseas investment that has flowed into the capital since the global downturn of 2008, most of it attached to high-rise projects.

But others argue that the buildings will clog London’s skyline. And they say that its post-World War II practice of grouping towers on streetless sites, in a kind of residential version of an industrial park, produces a sterile environment and less housing than traditional terraced homes, a local term for townhouses.

The long-running debate about the issue has intensified since the New London Architecture organization publicized the number of tower blocks earlier this year. And opposition has been encouraged by the Architects’ Journal and luminaries including the sculptor Antony Gormley, the author Alan Bennett, the Stirling Prize-winning architect Alison Brooks and two London mayoral hopefuls, Tessa Jowell and David Lammy, both Labour members of Parliament.

Prince Charles, a longtime advocate for alternatives to high-rises, joined the discussion about one North London development in July, saying the capital’s unique character as a “city of villages” was being threatened by “faceless” towers and “poorly conceived” developments.

In an earlier report commissioned by his charity, the Foundation for Building Community, the prince called for fewer high-rises for the wealthy and more “human-scaled streets, squares and parks,” as well as new mansion blocks — the kind of six- to eight-story buildings constructed from 1880 to 1910 as high-density housing for the rich.

But, for many in Britain, there really is no alternative to high-rises.

The Housing in London 2014 report, created by the Greater London Authority and the basis of Mayor Boris Johnson’s housing strategy, says the population is expected to pass its previous peak of 8.6 million in coming years and reach about 10 million by 2031. Yet only around 20,000 new homes, not including conversions or changes of use, are being built in the city each year.

The combination, the report says, is a major contributing factor to rising home prices and rents. (The average sale price in London reached 480,900 pounds, or $807,051, in May, more than twice the £172,011 average in the rest of Britain, according to the June figures of the Office for National Statistics.)

This spring Mr. Johnson described as “madness” the opposition to a development plan in North London that was said to have too many tall blocks, arguing the towers are needed to house the city’s rapidly growing population. His predecessor, Ken Livingstone, also advocated a rising skyline to meet demand for homes and offices.

Nevertheless, says an independent research institute, Create Streets, the solution is not to go high but to stay low, building terraced houses.

Nicholas Boys Smith, director of Create Streets, has said: “By initiating a major redevelopment program across London’s multistory estates, we could build many of the homes we need between now and 2020. By using streets, we could create 260,000 new homes on land previously used for industrial or other commercial uses.”

To prove its point, the organization compared the Aylesbury estate, a large post-World War II development in South London, and Pimlico, a well-established area in central London of streets lined with tall Victorian and Georgian terrace houses. (Aylesbury is to be rebuilt over the next 18 years, but in a similar housing estate-style layout.)

The organization said that Aylesbury’s 2,759 units on 59 acres do not compare well with the 4,140 residences it counted in an area of the same size in Pimlico.

Create Streets also insists that it is considerably more expensive to build high than low, saying a 10-story building is 10 percent more expensive per square meter than a five-story one, while the cost of an apartment in a 50-story building is 60 percent more expensive than the same space in a terraced home.

The anti-high-rise argument also reflects some Londoners’ increasing concerns about absentee foreign ownership. “Many projects are aimed at foreign buyers who want to live high,” said Peter Rees, professor of places and city planning at University College London and the former planning officer for the City of London. “Many of them buy off-plan and gamble that the price will rise so that they can sell on again. They never live in them. The buildings are like safe deposit boxes piled up in heaps.”

From an international perspective, Yolande Barnes, director of Savills World Research, noted in the real estate agency’s recent “12 Cities” study that “what is important is the urban fabric.”

“The most prosperous cities have stayed with grids of traditional streets. Surprisingly, it doesn’t matter to people whether the buildings are high or medium as long as there are streets,” she said. “Even the canyons of Manhattan are on a human scale — they are walkable, relatable and sociable at street level. The fact that there a few score stories above doesn’t matter because human beings are roughly the same height and we tend not to raise our eyes above the level of shop fronts.”

While many developers move forward with tower plans, some have a variety of housing styles in their projects.

At the 500-acre Olympic Park, where the London 2012 Summer Games were held, more than 10,000 homes are scheduled to be created by 2030 in a mix of high-rise apartments — at least four of which will be 24 to 36 stories — and family homes in five “village” developments.

Chobham Manor, a joint project by the residential developer Taylor Wimpey and the social housing landlord London & Quadrant, is planned to have about 850 homes, including townhouses, duplexes, mansion blocks and terraced apartments, on 23 acres. By its completion in 2020, the density is to be 500 habitable rooms per hectare — about the same as Pimlico — but the developers say they are not convinced that this housing mix alone could meet the demand in East London, or in the city as a whole, without high-rise blocks.

“There is a balance between the high-rise and trying to create a traditional low-rise property like a town house,” said Andrew Harrington, project manager of Chobham Manor for Taylor Wimpey. “I think we need a bit of both to help solve the problem of London’s housing. Each level of density has its place but has to respond to need and to locality.”

A version of this article appears in print on   in The New York Times International Edition. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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