Gotham's autumn was always especially bleak. The vegetation here had never been lush, and after losing its last trace of green, even its dryness and decay lacked any real weight. It was more like stripping the soft outer covering from a skeleton of steel, returning this cold urban forest to its original form.
Calling present-day Gotham a steel forest was entirely fitting. During the time Bruce was applying for his doctorate, the Gotham architectural modification project had continued without pause. By now, the East End had been completely renovated.
The guiding principle behind the project had always been to house the greatest possible number of people on limited land while meeting their residential needs to the greatest extent possible, at any cost.
As a result, the entire East End, occupying less than one-fifth of the city's area, now solved the housing problem for more than eight million Gotham residents across all social classes. The concept of three-dimensional urban planning had played a major role in this.
Skyscrapers around the world were generally used for commercial offices rather than housing. Even residential buildings classified as high-rises rarely exceeded forty stories, let alone supertall buildings that routinely reached seventy or eighty floors.
Clearly, it was not that developers did not want to fit more people onto smaller plots of land. Buildings that were too tall simply became unsuitable for human habitation. Insulation, soundproofing, structural stability, even elevator capacity—all of these were problems that needed solving. With the effort required to solve them, it was easier to find a few more parcels of land.
But for Wayne Enterprises, these were not particularly difficult problems to solve. Once the core principles of the architectural modification project had been established, those technical obstacles were overcome one by one.
First of all, the buildings in the