Since America is all about freedom, I think people should be allowed to choose. There should be both. The suburbs where I grew up are teeming with deer and bear, (although the kitty cats are hard on the songbirds). But in the city I don't need an auto and my utility bill is a fraction of a stand-alone house.

Of course, I remember New York in the late 70s. Not only was it economically sluggish, there was huge waste. No one painted the bridges for 20 years, prompting billions of dollars in renovation. It wouldn't have been necessary if someone had been on the ball. Only now are we replacing our hideously inefficient subway cars and buses, and flabby management practices. Up until a couple of years ago, most of our schools still burned coal.

Can we really discuss altering population densities without addressing population growth? There is a fundamental problem around the world, there are simply too many people. Moving people from NYC back into little towns in New Jersey isn’t going to help as long as the population continues to expand.

Tyler Cowen has obviously never lived in the same suburbs that I have. Every one of them has been terrible for burning gasoline, as well as other fossil fuels(heating/cooling single family homes and embodied energy of those homes and everythign required for upkeep of homes); terrible for buying local (both local production and local merchants are difficult to find, where they even exist); terrible places to work (commutes in the range of 15 to 60 minutes, many people in single occupancy vehicles); and terrible places to raise kids (as there is little sense of community).

He is, however, correct that you have to look at the production of everything brought into the city as part of the city's energy use; I suspect that when this is factored in, Manhattanites are only slightly better than, say, someone living in Portland, OR and using a bike for their primary transportation.

Dare I say "Tain't what you do it's the way that you do it"? A suburb can be a bleak nowhere a la James H Kunstler's worst nightmares, or it can be a good chance to have enough land area to grow a lot of your own fruit and veg and enough roof for a solar PV/HW...Of course being a Limey I'm thinking of a UK/European-type suburb with shops you can walk to, a Broadband connection to work and the odd bus into town...

I think it's a given that living in a dense city is more energy efficient - when you can walk to the store, take public transit, share common walls (less heating/cooling), etc - that does lower your energy usage per capita.

Does that mean it's better for the environment? Not necessarily. Something I always get a kick out of is that people neglect to think about their personal contribution to global warmnig. We drink water and put out water vapor; we inhale oxygen and exhale CO2, we eat food that has to be grown which "take up vast space" as the article says. Is that a bad thing? Could be.

If the population were to NOT increase... ever (yeah, that's not going to happen), then the answer is easy - yes, everyone should live in dense cities - as they are more energy efficient. That's a given.

Now, in the real world... population is going to increase. One could argue that we should buy up as much land as possible in the country to keep people from spreading and spreading to force higher densities (and the efficiencies gained from that density). Even without coal/oil... if the US were covered with the population density of NYC - the amount of CO2 and water vapor going into the atmosphere would have catastrophic effects.

So - which is better? Neither. Population control could prove to be more important. :)

Since America is all about freedom, I think people should be allowed to choose. - rob

I completely agree. However, I also think that people shouldn't force the cost of their choices on others. If you want to have an immaculate 15 acre lawn and a 4000 square foot house and a 60 minute commute, that's fine.

However, why should my kids, among many others, pay for the negative repercussions of your choices? I think the price of energy and other things should be raised to cover the externalities and then have a commensurate decrease in the income tax.

However, on topic, I think that small cities, connected by passenger and freight rail, are the best way to live. They're close to material sources to lower shipping costs, they're dense enough that walking is an option for getting around, and they're easier and cheaper to police than suburban areas since cops don't need to drive cars everywhere.

But, really, larger cities can be an amalgam of smaller cities. Organized into semi-independent neighborhoods, large cities can be just as sustainable as small cities.

Cities are probably the best option for our over populated world right now, but they are in no way self sufficient. They require massive amounts of resources and energy be imported from the countryside and now the enitre world. The only things cities ouput is waste and culture, they don't output food, or shelter for all the areas they import resources from. If sustainability is local, then cities are inherently unsustainbale because they don't produce any resources locally. Culture is not a resource.

Where's Linton? This is one of his favorite subjects, or a passionate one. I don't think there is a clear cut answer, nor will there ever be. Both can be "green" neither rarely are.

Cities have the potential to be very energy efficient, however they are not isolated entities. Where does your drinking water, food, electricity, and heat come from? Where do you compost or recycle your trash, sewage?

This is not to say that suburbia is better, only to point out that cities and suburbs have external effects and dependencies that extend beyond political boundaries.

you might want to think about how quickly the trash would bury most cities if they had to keep it within their boundaries.
here is an article discussing NYC trash http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update10.htm

Suburbs ARE becoming economically unsustainable, considering how property tax rates have tripled and quadrupled. It's self-limiting. Eventually people will have to densify.

The question is, how much should legislation lead economics? Is re-configuring the suburbs economically inevitable? It certainly seems so, unless our population stops growing.

If it's inevitable, legislatures should lessen the hardship for all citizens by providing economic incentives for smart development and mass transit, and economic disincentives for big-box stores and four-way interchanges.

I think there's a lot of assumptions going on here... In order for cities to be more efficient the rest of the land (in the world) needs to be devoted to greener purposes to offset the environmental impact of bringing food, energy, and water INTO the city.

On the other hand, a suburban area could have a local farmer's market, dairy, and stores that utilize other local sources for goods. Then there's the environmental cost of actually building high-density housing.

I think it is better to re-examine what makes a suburb bad (long drives for people and wasted greenspace e.g. lawns) and a city bad (building big, less greenspace, and imports of goods). If we can make it so that cars don't pollute (electric or hydrogen), suburbs suddenly become a hell of a lot more advantageous and the importing of goods into cities doesn't seem like such a waste.

Ditto for energy and water consumption. When we can transport goods with zero carbon dioxide impact, everything else becomes mostly moot.

-Riskable
http://riskable.com
"If you elect leaders that act irresponsibly towards nature, you'll find that irresponsibility is the nature of your leaders."

There was a recent study released about how living close to a road damages kid's lungs - 3% reduced capacity by age 18. It didn't even mention what the effects are if you are surrounded by vehicles like you are in a city. Granted, the perfect city of the future will be all electric , but then you'll run into problems with increased ozone production because of all those brushes arcing inside those motors. Ozone is even worse for the lungs, even after you have stopped growing.

Let's all cram into a tight space where you can't see the stars, are forced to breathe pollution, can't grow your own food or harvest your own electric or wind or hydro, and can't look our your window at the trees and wildlife.

Humans only started inhabiting small "towns" 5000 years ago, its a very recent invention relatively. Even then most were still suburb dwellers until 150 years ago. Massive cities like NYC only started to appear once coal and oil could sustain them starting about 100 years ago. 100 years from now they will only be able to survive by erecting massive wind and PV farms.... out in the suburbs and oceans (then loose a lot of the energy transporting it back to the city).

I would rather live underneath my own energy source (eliminating the energy loss), growing my own food, looking at the wildlife around me and teaching my kids how to treat nature. I've lived in cities and urban settings and my heart ached to return to the suburbs where I grew up as a kid. I'm hoping to put that same love in my kids - so far so good, since they love seeing the deer in our woods every morning and finding bugs in the meadow.

Location x3... Density density density.
I am sure it is arguable that there is an optimal population density.
Then there is a factor within the population itself - call it a G-factor or something?
The potential of people to be more environmentally sensitive or aware.
e.g. 10 houses in a suburban area using incandescent light bulbs vs 300 apartments in the same land square footage urban area burning CFLs or LED lights.
Or the rapid transit, biking, and walking required to get 400 people to work vs 15 people driving Stupid fUtility Vehicles to work, then yoga, then getting kids from soccer practice.

Is there an optimal pop.density? Possibly... let's see THAT get legislated (or does it happen through taxes?) !!

Sustaining a city with resources can possibly be done more logistically efficiently and energy efficiently than sustaining a population scattered over a few hundred square miles.

In some ways, years ago, NY and the surroundings had some pretty green practices in place- trolleys, a pervasive network of rail freight delivery lines, close in ports, we actually made stuff here, etc.
Of course there were massive emissions of noxious stuff from manufacturing processes and other things that went on.

At the turn of the century there were much more intense recycling efforts conducted in NYC than there are now. "1896 - the first recycling center in the US is established in New York City"... "1899- New York City's Street Cleaning Commissioner organizes the first rubbish sorting plant for recycling in the United States" ... www.epa.gov/msw/timeline_alt.htm

An interesting read is from a website that follows-

To these ends, the colonel banned large-scale ocean dumping and instituted systematic recycling, performed by municipal workers. Ashes were collected by one set of workers and taken to landfills, while animal wastes were rendered for fertilizer. Another team collected only rubbish--dry materials that included rags, paper, and other recyclable goods. Whatever couldn't be recycled was burned in the new municipal incinerators, which generated enough electricity to run the plants. In time, Waring expected the city to sell residential electricity; one such incinerator, under the Williamsburg Bridge, was actually built.

"Waring wanted to light Manhattan with its garbage," says Fee. "You can imagine how delighted the power company was." Not to mention many other business interests, "and councilmen who had their hands in the pockets of the businessmen." Waring's many opponents were pictured by one cartoonist as dogs yapping at his heels.
http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/495web/garbage.html

The urban setting presents hurdles as well as advantages. Many things have been tried through the years. One of the keys is to implement those things that impact positively and cut back or eliminate, where possible, those things that have a negatice impact.
Another is the public awareness. Usually impacts to the wallets are felt more than a few extra degrees on the thermometer throughout the year.

I apologize for all the tangents. NYC represents a massive potential for great ideas, I hope some get realized.

In contrast to New York being compact, Los Angeles on the other hand is both dense and far flung at the same time. Maybe that will be the subject of a future article.

vsk

Cities can grow food too. Check out Havana.

Havana, home to nearly 20 percent of Cuba's population, is now also home to more than 8,000 officially recognized gardens, which are in turn cultivated by more than 30,000 people and cover nearly 30 percent of the available land. The growing number of gardens might seem to bring up the problem of space and price of land. However, "the local governments allocate land, which is handed over at no cost as long as it is used for cultivation," says S. Chaplowe in the Newsletter of the World Sustainable Agriculture Association.
http://www.foodfirst.org/archive/media/news/2001/cubacensored.html

"Cities are probably the best option for our over populated world right now, but they are in no way self sufficient. They require massive amounts of resources and energy be imported from the countryside and now the enitre world. The only things cities ouput is waste and culture, they don't output food, or shelter for all the areas they import resources from. If sustainability is local, then cities are inherently unsustainbale because they don't produce any resources locally."

The same can be said for suburbs as for dense cities. Take a million people, and unless they're working the land or somesuch, they'll all need to import resources. The difference comes in how they're arranged, and a million people on quarter-acre sections are going to use up a lot more resources for transport etc than a million people in medium- to high-density cities.

Really big cities may be more exciting, but they're not necessarily what we chould be comparing here. A moderate sized city (say, 200k to 1 million) at good urban densities should be enough to support high-quality electric mass transit and a lot of walking and cycling, while still allowing its inhabitants to be close to nature when they want it.

"Culture is not a resource."

Au contraire - culture (ideas, imagination, innovation, tradition, discourse) is the greatest resource we have.

Good question. Which is greener, cities or suburbs or living out in the countryside. I think the answer really is quite impossible to answer for several reasons. And if it could be answered, it would depend on several things. I believe in the basic tenent that cities are in many respects more energy-efficient than suburbs or living out in the countryside. Cities can be designed to have much more energy-efficient buildings than suburbs or countryside because of their usually relatively smaller size and because they are stacked together. Apartment buildings COULD be extremely efficient in the amount of energy they consume. And the transportation needed could be much smaller because everything is much closer. You could walk or bicycle to many places if a city is designed properly. Or take a metro, tram or bus - if the city is designed properly to provide these effectively. But cities contain extreme densities of people. The resources needed must be trucked in because they simply can not all be produced in the city. A city could produce many resources, like energy, water, food, by harvesting resources in the city. Plenty of roof space that could be used for rainwater harvesting, food growing, PV panels, wind generators, etc. But most definitely not enough to meet the needs of the cities inhabitants. A lot still needs to be trucked in, or pumped in. A lot still needs to be trucked out or pumped out. So cities COULD be designed to be extremely efficient in a host of important areas. But they would not be able to produce or deal with most of the resources they need. Efficiency yes, but they only exist by stripping other areas of resources. So it is difficult to say that they could be completely renewable without including a wide radial expanse of tens, maybe hundreds, of miles of land and calling this land part of the city. Living out in the countryside is the opposite. I live in the countryside. I have the ability to grow all my own food, provide all my own water, and energy, recycle most of my waste, provide most of my own heating and cooling, etc. I could be completely self-sufficient with renewable, sustainable resources that I get own my own property - and hopefully I will be 100% self-sufficient in this way. I am slowly getting there. Even self-sufficient in transport. If I had an electric car, I could power it with PV and wind and hydro. That car, plus my biking and walking, would enable me to be self-sufficient in transport without need of non-renewable energy resources such as fossil fuels. However, it is true that living in the countryside is less energy-efficient than living in a city. Work is far away if your job is in town or in a city. Stores are far away. Everything is far away. Houses tend to be bigger - but they really don't need to be. And since the homes are separate and not stacked and enclosed like apartment buildings, heating energy requirements tend to be higher - but don't have to be because individual homes could insulate much better. So homes in the countryside could be compelety self-sufficient in practically all aspects if one could spend the needed money, but the amount of energy required to get the a large number of things done could be greater than inhabitants of a city. Probably less energy-efficient, but the possibility of complete self-sufficiency and use or only renewable resources. Surburbs lie somewhere in between city living and country living. They could be very self-sufficient and renewable but would require more energy for a number of things. I used to live in cities for many many years but opted for country life for the health reason. Cities tend to be loud, stressful, congested, polluted places. They could be much healthier than they are, and probably would be if they tried to be greener. But as is many, most, cities are not healthy. When cities are truly green, then they will become much healthier places to live in. Anyway, point is that it is very difficult to say what COULD be more greener. Too many variables, too many of which are completely uncontrolled. For now, people simply have to take cases individually and compare a particular city, or section of a city, and compare it to an individual suburb or an individual countryside home. Individual comparisons of what actually exists is the only thing we can objectively do for now.

First of all Doug, a bit of a history lesson. Large scale urban environments have existed since before the use of oil/modern industrial agriculture. One only look at the sprawling mega cities of antiquity from Egypt, to China, to Japan (where Edo, the former name of Tokyo, once was home to 1 million people sometime in the 1700's/1800's) to see that people have lived in urban configurations for a good chunk of human history. Even your claim to "suburbia" is off the mark, since the "suburbias" of today didn't exist until the widespread commodification of housing, which occurred mostly in response to the various Federal programs instituted under the New Deal. The small towns you're talking about are mostly dead, fallout victims from the death of American manufacturing, or the kind of Agricultural towns that are becomingly increasingly pushed out of the way by Corporate AgGrowers.

Suburban sprawl is more responsible for the destruction and the slaughtering of America's natural resources than the handful of large scale cities in America, and the continuing push for getting "back" to the sanitized nature of large acreage houses, and supposedly living "off the land" (something very few people do honestly) is only pushing things to more ridiculous heights.

I think NYC is hardly green. Only place in the world I've ever bought a coffee and been offered a plastic bag to go with it! When you get a sandwich you get a stack of napkins two inches thick and everyone runs the radiators full blast in the winter withe the windows wide open.

In theory, i should agree. But in practice, NYC is hardly green!

"One only look at the sprawling mega cities of antiquity from Egypt, to China, to Japan (where Edo, the former name of Tokyo, once was home to 1 million people sometime in the 1700's/1800's) to see that people have lived in urban configurations for a good chunk of human history." - Sean S.

Well, Sean, you are forgetting that the few large cities that existed in the past only existed by pludering the countryside. The Mayans only thrived by stripping the forests around them and eventually destroyed so much of their forests they collapsed. Destroyed their own food source. Cities under Khan thrived from his pludering of any town he came across. Egypt thrived because of slave labor and plunder. The list goes on. However, even those cities were few and far between in time and across the globe. Bottom line is that big cities require large inputs, and that only happened in special cases until very recently. Never in human history have there been more than one or two "large" cities at any time until we started taking the energy from fossil fuels to make all the concrete, steel, water pipelines etc. so we could make our modern cities. Instead of plundering other towns or our forests, we switched to plundering a much denser energy/material source - fossil fuels.

There are safety issues to consider, too. Cities are targets. 9/11 proved that. Centralized water and electric systems are targets. All the money spent after 9/11 to "secure" nuclear plants and water supplies is proof of that (we are just lucky they haven't been targeted yet). The solution is to decentralize. Put a 2kW PV system on my roof and all my neighbor's roofs out here in the country and there is no target left for the terrorists. No centralized high-rise buildings, no centralized electric system, no shared water supply.

You are still ignoring the pollution and lack of exposure to nature you get when you live in a city. Considering that 90% of the US population does NOT live in a city today, it is lunacy to think that 270 million people can be convinced to move into a city, or that it would even be possible. I consider myself to be a full-blown environmentalist. But logic and personal experience prove that the green dream of moving everyone into cities is unrealistic, impossible, and unnecessary. The majority of the US lived on farms and ranches for a long time and were quite self-sufficient when they did because they could meet all of their basic Maslow heirarchy of needs. You can't do that in a city. The current TV show Jericho shows this very well - Jericho can get by with its crops and local water supply, while the cities become chaos (the ones that survived the terrorist attack...) and the people leave for the countryside. Cities can ONLY provide basic needs artificially, because of fossil fuels. My 3 acres gives me all the firewood I need to survive the winter (I do this now) and plenty of space to grow my own food if I had to. Lots of deer around for protein, too (yes I eat deer).