Cities - Efficiency, Sustainability and Quality of Life

Cities are great places to live, and plenty of urban dwellers will attest to that, but they've always had a bad reputation with a large segment of the population, often for reasons that were once, though not currently, true or other types of misconceptions. For example, they often are given a very bad view by environmental groups, despite being far less impactful per capita than almost all alternatives.

So I was encouraged by two tidbits form Gristmill. The first, mentions a study comparing the health benefits of rural vs urban. The study shows that young people, babies and those under 24 years of age fare far better health wise, on average, in an urban setting.

Another article from the New Yorker extols the value of New York city itself. In short, the life expectancy for residents of New York is now longer than the rest of the United States, and increasing faster too. Admittedly, cities got off to a rough start with the dawn of industrialization and a lack of insight into the problems of pollution, sanitation and safety. But all over cities are finding their groove, are discovering how to cope, defeat and excel in areas in which they did horribly.

It's an encouraging trend, because when you truly consider the world, and its large and still growing population, it's clear that heavy usage of cities are the only sustainable option to support them all. If cities have bypassed a turning point, where they can not only balance efficiency, sustainability and quality of life, but increase them all simultaneously, it's very encouraging.

As an aside, I've been reading, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. It's a great book, but one thing I disagree with Bill McKibben is his inability to consider some alternatives. Sure, we all know there is a greater need for community, for less resource intensive behavior, but he makes the mistake of thinking his way is the only one. Worse, McKibben seem highly biased toward the rural lifestyle with his emphasis of the farmers markets, and myraid other small details. On observing all of this I can't help but notice how much damage some things he takes for granted actually cause.

Take farmers markets as an example. Sure, they have the benefit of not having carted tomatoes 1700 miles to reach their destination, but there are plenty of costs involved with the extra miles associated with the farmers and consumers driving to their markets. Does it add upto 1700 miles? No, but there's no reason the giant grocery chain can't change it's practices to avoid 1700 mile tomatoes, and thus gain both benefits. But McKibben is almost dismissive of the chains heading in that direction.

That brings me to the second tidbit from biodiversivist. He's obviously aware of the problems with "off-grid" living, and the lack of sustainability involved. Placing a home inside a natural environment is not environmentally friendly. It's nice that people who do this try and minimize the impact with solar panels, but there's two major problems with the idea. Number one is except for some very extreme examples, there is an impact, and it's much larger than an urban dwellers impact. If you drive in and out of your rural cottage, and it is 50 miles to the next town, that's not good. Worse if you still work in the city.

If you're on the grid there's an awful lot of wire (and power loss), and you're house is going to be comparable in energy consumption to a suburban house of the same size. If you are off the grid, there's certainly some impacts associated with you're power generation facilities. If it's solar, you've probably bought many more panels then necessary because you need to meet your own "peek" needs. Any personal energy source is going to appear to have a minor impact compared to a coal burning power plant, but when you divide that plant's impact by it's number of consumers, you may be very surprised. Even more, if you compared your personal energy source per capita to a wind, solar or other commercial clean energy source, the comparison will be even worse.

The second problem is how many can actually live that lifestyle, before reasonable sites are exhausted? The answer is astonishingly few. And the sad truth of the suburbs, I've noticed, is many, perhaps half, of the residents didn't want to live in the suburbs at all. They wanted to live in the country. Problem is, they edge of the suburban landscape, the barely rural, and then their neighbors moved just a bit farther out, and so on. This is how sprawl was born, and how it continues.

The fact that yet another suburb was not the intent, changes the outcome not at all. The hermit should be careful never to proclaim the superiority of his lifestyle, or he may inherit a great deal of fellow hermits. And thus the original proclamation would be laid low by the unsustainable nature of the promise.