This means that if they simply occupied all the land and went up for 5 floors they'd have more floor space.
Example, the Pentagon in the U.S., with 5 floors and 6.5 million square feet has more usable square footage than the Burj, the tallest building in the world.
The Pentagon is interesting as a building because it was put up very quickly and remains one of the largest buildings by usable square footage in the world. But of course it's not a raw optimization. There's a 5+ acre center courtyard that's non-structural and each part of the pentagon is composed of 5 concentric "rings" with space between them for natural light to get into the building. Despite this, it's still a more efficient use of land acreage vs. the Burj.
Edit: For anyone who hasn’t spent time in the twin cities, the skyways are public transit.
And buildings have a height limit. With brick, it was the point where the bottom storey had walls so thick, it became a pedestal of brick. So making them taller than 20 stories or so got you no more space.
With steel construction, its elevators. The point where the bottom storey was entirely made up of elevator banks, and making it taller gets you no more interior space. The Twin Towers were there. The Sears (Willits) Tower is there.
We have these in downtown Cedar Rapids. Its awful.
I'm not commenting about London in particular. Maybe a landscraper in London doesn't make sense. I don't know. But landscrapers do make sense in other places.
Except when real-estate prices aren't high, you're usually super far away from industry and population... the things that drive up real-estate prices.
If proximity to related companies wasn't important, why does Silicon Valley or Hollywood even exist instead of a peppering of low-cost buildings across the midwest? We already know the answer.
Companies like Amazon can afford to "create" new hotspots and ship engineers there. Literal tiny towns with a gigantic new data center that can attract "support" business like new restaurants. But for most companies, there's a benefit to being around other companies. (e.g. My software company buys hardware and services hard drive failures from an IT company across the street.) And what happens when you have lots of companies around? The competition for space drives prices up. And what happens when so many companies want that space? The buildings start moving upward into the sky.
It's simple economics. Land is valuable. Especially in tiny overpopulated places like England and many EU states. This should not be surprising or new knowledge.
It's like saying a metro carries more people faster, so they're better than roads. They're better only where the density justifies their construction. Likewise, skyscrapers are better only in some situations.
India is also overpopulated, with a population density of 382 people per sq km vs the world average of 51, but that doesn't mean it makes sense to build skyscrapers everywhere in India.
Apple's new campus for example is basically a landscraper.
Apple's lot in Cupertino is approximately 2400 ft by 3400 ft (although it's trapezoidal, not rectangular). For comparison, that's roughly the entirety of downtown Providence. Or, superimposed on Manhattan's grid, 9 streets by 4 avenues. It's roughly the dimensions of the elevated loop tracks in Chicago.
The Empire State Building occupies 1 street by ½ avenue. Sears Tower is on a lot about 450 ft square (one slot in the Chicago grid system). You just simply can't acquire the land in cities that you would need to build landscrapers.
Except, the OP case is London, which has some of the most expensive real-estate prices on the planet.
Not that I disagree with your overall point, just this final statement doesn't ring true.
Let me check the bottom of my purse. Just a little bit short (measured in decimal places, about 8 of them).
TLDR: this landscraper is Google's way of storing/investing it's offshore cash, at it's heart it's a tax dodge (funny how it isn't mentioned in Mr. Khan's comments that a LOT of companies in London are in fact there purely as a tax dodge).
I get the complaints about having to travel by elevator all the time and not having as much ground level community. Which is why I don't understand why sky-ways never became popular. There's no technological reason you couldn't have an interconnected upper level with shops and public/commercial space. Perhaps its just a problem on getting all the different developers and governments to agree on the standards for a modular interconnected second level.