7 things to know about urban planning (Part 6)

RYAN DARMANIE

In his book Triumph of the City, Harvard urban economist Edward Glaeser recounts a story about Henry David Thoreau, whom he refers to as the “secular saint of environmentalism.” In 1844, Thoreau went into the woods to be closer to nature. He decided to light a small fire to cook some chowder with fish that he caught in the river, and eventually caused the burning of over 300 acres of forest – the same man who praised the virtues of isolation in nature, rather than interactions in cities, in his famed book Walden.

As Glaeser points out though, “Would Thoreau have been able to write so well about living alone if he had not also connected with so many smart people in towns?”

Glaeser’s takeaway message from this tale is: “We humans are a destructive species, even when, like Thoreau, we are not trying to be. We burn forests and oil and inevitably hurt the landscape that surrounds us. If you love nature, stay away from it.”

In our mad rush to suburbanise, we end up killing existing thriving eco-systems on a massive scale, while replacing them with barely functional human ones.

Sixth Thing to Know: Concrete jungles are far more beneficial to the environment than grassy lawns and suburbs.

In a landmark study, Locational Efficiency and Housing Type, the US Environmental Protection Agency considered the effect of various decisions on household energy consumption. They compared use of hybrid versus conventional vehicles, single-family versus multi-family housing, conventional construction versus green building technology, and living in drivable versus walkable neighbourhoods.

They concluded that the single most effective way of reducing energy consumption was living in a walkable neighbourhood.

It essentially means that transport energy usage is substantially high, and that walking and public transport are superior to fuel-efficient vehicles. Dense cities have the potential to be far superior at reducing transport energy consumption than suburbs or rural areas.

We certainly should not depend on energy-efficient vehicles to save the day. Philosophy professor Firmin DeBrabander explained, in 2011, how experience in Sweden has made this abundantly clear. “Through subsidies, Sweden pushed its citizens to trade in their old cars for energy-efficient replacements. To everyone's surprise, however, greenhouse gas emissions from Sweden's transportation sector are up. What do you expect when you put people in cars they feel good (or at least less guilty) about driving, which are also cheap to buy and run? Naturally, they drive them more. So much more, in fact, that they obliterate energy gains made by increased fuel efficiency.”

Data on energy usage by state shows how New York State, home to the ultimate concrete jungle, uses less energy per capita than California, the land of suburbs, tree-huggers, and hybrid vehicles.

Glaeser tells us that it is largely due to the transportation energy savings from the New York City subway system.

An obvious benefit of cities is that efficient land use slows the rate at which we consume undeveloped land. The land that is usually best suited for agriculture is also best suited for building on. It is a delicate balancing act, one that we continue to handle without much care.

Still, cities are the opposite of nature, right? How can cities be beneficial to nature?

Cities represent the habitat of human beings, just as bees build and live in hives. An anti-city attitude is like an individual bee requesting his own hive, so that he can escape the unnaturalness of living too close to other bees.

Of course, no one is saying that we have to live in unbearably cramped conditions. It is unnecessary, as the population density of the country does not dictate this. But we have far to go before our urban areas get to reasonable densities like Philadelphia, or anywhere near to the super-high densities of Tokyo.

I will conclude with one of my favourite quotes from the late Jane Jacobs: “(Humans) are a legitimate part of nature too, and involved with it in a much deeper and inescapable way than grass trimming, sunbathing, and contemplative uplift. And so, each day, several thousand more acres of our countryside are eaten by the bulldozers, covered by pavement, dotted with suburbanites who have killed the thing they thought they came to find. Our irreplaceable heritage of Grade 1 agricultural land (a rare treasure of nature on this earth) is sacrificed for highways or supermarket parking lots as ruthlessly and unthinkably as the trees in woodlands are uprooted, the streams and rivers polluted and the air itself filled with the gasoline exhausts required in this national effort to cosy up with a fictionalised nature and flee the ‘unnaturalness’ of the city.”

Ryan Darmanie is an urban planning and design consultant (facebook.com/darmanieplanningdesign) with a master’s degree in city and regional planning from Rutgers University, New Jersey, and a keen interest in urban revitalisation.