Recently (thanks to James Nicoll) I found a couple of links to articles that claim that cities are actually the most environmentally-friendly way humans can live:
- What have cities ever done for us? (Requires registration)
- NYC is the Greenest City in America
The second article states that the average resident of Manhattan consumes gasoline at a low rate not seen in most of America since the 1920s. Because the city has such high population density, and car traffic moves so slowly, public transit is the preferred means of travel: 82 percent of Manhattan residents travel to work by transit. And the city’s larger buildings are more energy-efficient because less space is exposed to the outside world, which makes them easier to heat and cool.
And, as the first article puts it:
Every time a person chooses to live in a city rather than a small town or a village, she is preserving the environment for the rest of us, contributing to the concentration of people needed to spur commercial and cultural innovation, and adding to the resilience of the economy that surrounds her.
(Adding my own data point: I live in Toronto, and haven’t owned a car since 2003. In fact, this year, I think I’ve only been in a car about half a dozen times at most.)
On the other hand: if you look back through history, you can see why cities have been unpopular. They contained factories that emitted foul-smelling gases; when I was a child, the intersection of the Don Valley Parkway and the Gardiner Expressway was particularly bad, and the entire Don Valley reeked of emissions from pulp and paper factories. And cities have also historically been breeding grounds for epidemics – recall the SARS scare from a few years back.
Posted by davetill 