Why Cities Matter — Green Manhattan

David Owen’s argument that the greenest place in America is its densest — “everywhere else should be more like New York.”

Part of the New City reading list — the books Kyle worked through while building the The New City thesis. Indexed on that page.

Notes

• Green Manhattan
• “Everywhere else should be more like New York.”
• By: David Owen
• It is the tight gathering of individuals that does less damage and promotes more efficiency in places like New York City. The environmental challenge we face face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s non-renewable resources, is not how to make our teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The true challenge is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan. This notion has yet to be widely embraced, partly because it is counterintuitive, and partly because most Americans, including most environmentalists, tend to view cities the way Thomas Jefferson did, as “pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.” New York is the place that’s fun to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. What could it possibly teach anyone about being green?
• A little town has about four thousand residents, spread over 38.7 thickly wooded square miles, and there are many places within our town limits from which no sign of settlement is visible in any direction. But if you moved eight million people like us, along with our dwellings and possessions and current rates of energy use, into a space the size of New York City, our profligacy would be impossible to miss because you would have to stack our houses and cars and garages and lawn tractors and swimming pools and septic tanks higher than skyscrapers. Conversely, if you made all eight million New Yorkers live at the density of my town they would require a space equivalent to the land area of the six New England states plus Delaware and New Jersey. Spreading people out increases the damage they do to the environment while making the problems harder to see and to address.
• The Sierra Club, an environmental organization that advocates the preservation of wilderness and wildlife, has a national campaign called Challenge to Sprawl. The aim of the program is to arrest the mindless conversion of undeveloped countryside into subdivisions, strip malls, and S.U.V. clogged expressways. The Sierra Club’s website features a slide show demonstration that illustrates how vapors sprawling suborn intersections could be transformed into far more appealing and energy-efficient developments by implementing a few modifications, among them widening the sidewalks and narrowing the streets, mixing residential and commercial uses, moving buildings closer together and closer to the edges of sidewalks (to make them more accessible to pedestrians and to increase local density), and adding public transportation—all fundamental elements of the widely touted anti-sprawl strategy known as Smart Growth.