Be more like Manhattan to save the earth, and don’t go halfway

[marmar]

from Grist:




Be more like Manhattan to save the earth, and don’t go halfway

by Jonathan Hiskes
9 Aug 2010 5:03 PM


David Owen read all these books so that you’d only have to read his.Forget the back-to-the-land agrarian dream that environmentalists used to aspire to. The greenest place to live is a dense city like New York, David Owen argues in his 2009 book Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability. The New Yorker staffer writes that "what you actually do when you move out of a city is move into a car."

But he also says that creating dense, green communities won't be easy. What you're more likely to get is "density light" and "decorative" public transit that can actually encourage sprawl. We spoke recently about the book and the elusive quest for greener cities and climate solutions.

Q. I have to admit that your book's premise -- that walkable urban living is less energy-intensive than rural living -- didn't strike me as very provocative. People working for cleaner energy and mobility seem to understand this already. Did you find environmentalists who still needed to be convinced of this?

A. It's still kind of an alien concept to the average person. Even people who have reluctantly come to accept the idea that density has environmental value think in terms of density light.

Q. You argue that it takes density on the level of Manhattan or Tokyo to really allow us to make a dent in climate pollution. Why is that?

A. Americans have shown that if there is any possibility of driving, they will drive. Seventy-seven percent of Manhattan households and 54 percent of New York City households don't own even one car. That is completely off the scale in the rest of the United States, where we now have more registered passenger vehicles than licensed drivers. And New Yorkers who do have cars use them in very different ways from other Americans. In Manhattan, they use them to basically escape from Manhattan. In the outer boroughs, they use them infrequently to do things like grocery shopping.

So in a place like Portland, Ore., you get a lot of people talking about light rail, but if you look at the city from the air or from the ground, you see it's still a very heavily automobile-dependent city. There's this sort of decorative public transit, but it's not the way most people actually move around. To get to where transit does work, and to where it's more energy efficient than driving, you really have to achieve pretty significant density. The threshold is something like seven households per acre, but that's the absolute minimum.

I don't think that everybody ought to move to Manhattan. It obviously isn't going to happen. But everybody who talks about public transit needs to think about why there just aren't that many places where public transit actually works, where it's efficient, and where it has a lot of riders. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.grist.org/article/2010-08-09-new-yorker-author-be-more-like-manhattan-to-save-the-earth/

[Odin2005]

1. Green Metropolis is a brilliant book

Owen gives a lot of stuff on how to build a truly sustainable society and ruthlessly critiques romantic twaddle.