Some architectural and city planning with relation to climate seems counterintuitive to me. Can someone explain?

I would assume living in more pleasant warm climates would incentive less dense planning since walking/travel between locations would be less unpleasant and also energy consumption for heating wouldn't be as in high demand. Meanwhile cities in colder climates would incentives dense planning that allowed for people to get what they needed without having to leave a building, or not having to walk far. Also housing more in less buildings could conserve heating energy.

Yet here is a picture of Rio Di Janeiro

And here is Nuuk Greenland

In fact looking at a lot of extreme north communities, it seems they prefer single family housing that's fairly spread out, this is the case in Scandinavia, Alaska, Greenland and Russia. Idk, just seems weird to me.

4 comments

Neither place is planned. They build according yo their conditions and the anarchy of capitalist production.
In Nuuk land is cheap and there are not many people. They build Nordic style things imported from Denmark etc. They are decent for retaining heat and withstanding snow and are made from mass-produced parts.
In Rio there is a wide diversity of density, but in short, lots of people live there. They build with thr materiaps they have. Large dense buildings there are semi-planned as large real estate ventures. Their goal is to make money, primarily a form or monopoly rent via geographical constraints. The bankers living near work, the financial companies working near each other, etc.

You're observing a problem of scale. There's basically no people in Nuuk relative to Rio. It takes a lot of resources to create dense efficient layouts, and those resources are easier to concentrate and more profitably invested in places with more people.
There's enough people in Rio for density to make economic sense. Space is cheap in Nuuk and resources are more scarce.
- My assumption was basically a less succinctly and well laid out version of this so that makes sense.

Whittier, AK is a whole town in pretty much one building, but yeah, that's not the norm.