As U.S. cities compete for the title of “Greenest” and vie to attract green industry, Portland State University is launching an initiative to use the city as a laboratory for sustainability studies. Portland was recently named America’s most sustainable city for the second year by SustainLane. PSU hired noted Dutch urbanist Wim Wiewel as its president this year, and the city as laboratory may be the first fruit of his administration.
While I was looking this up online, I came across a link to Paul Hawkin’s great piece on cities as environmental assets. Here’s a key line:
Urban migration represents a kind of collective wisdom, and how we configure our cities will be critical to our survival. Regardless of the myths about living close to the land, cities are where human beings have the lowest ecological footprint. It takes less energy, wood, material, and food to provide a good life for a person in a city than in the country.
November 19th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Also less roads and sewers and other public infrastructure!
November 20th, 2008 at 7:44 am
Per person, surely. Someone in the country takes just as many dumps as someone in the city…
Yet there are so many areas where the economies of scale created by lots of people living in close proximity with one another are just not realised: energy creation, food production, pooling of resources or assets (cars, tools, childcare, political pressure, even social pressure)…
And surely there’s a point where diminishing returns render economies of scale meaningless - take massive energy plants where the energy from a nuclear reactor is more expensive than several smaller district level CHP plants because of the costs of safety, maintenance, dealing with the waste, sourcing the amount of fuel necessary just to keep it running efficiently.
So yes, cities are probably more resource efficient but there comes a point where there are costs associated with living in close proximity with each other - mental health problems, loss of social capital, respiratory problems, costs of treating road traffic accident injuries etc. I imagine there’s a host of research on “optimal development size” that looks at the equilibrium between tiny rural settlement and megalopolis.