Green Metropolis - review

While others will do a better job of reviewing this book (here and here) I want to share my thoughts too. David Owen, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, has written a book about how and why dense cities may be the answer to some of our environmental problems. Having just moved to Hong Kong, which has some of the highest urban densities of any city in the world, this subject is very much in my thoughts.
While it has been distressing to feel like I can no longer compost, or recycle many things that I could in Australia, in actual fact my carbon footprint is almost certainly much lower in my life here. Having made the decision to give up driving a car (no regrets there) and living in an apartment block, as most Hong Kong people do, we are almost certainly consuming less of the planet's resources than we would otherwise be doing in Australia. Being a New Yorker, David Owen naturally focuses on New York city, though Hong Kong does get a brief mention. Depending on which statistic you are measuring, whether water consumption, gas/petrol consumption, or electricity consumption, New Yorkers use somewhere between one third and a quarter of the national average. It is this not-so-well-known information that inspired his book.
Owen is at his best when pointing out the absurdities of many environmentalist's opinions. It is common among environmentalists to look at the pollution and energy use of cities and see them as part of the world's problem. He points out that this is akin to 'trying to fight obesity by putting skinny people on diets' [p.17]. The problem that most environmentalists have, as he carefully points out, is that they cannot distinguish between total amounts of energy use, and per capita energy use.
Perhaps his most compelling point in writing the book, though, is to point out that dense cities represent a real world answer to many of our environmental problems, and, most tellingly, that this answer does not rely on people going without. All across developed countries huge amounts of money are being devoted to trying to persuade their citizens to use less energy and live a less carbon-consuming life. By and large these efforts have been useless, or at least have only had a very small impact. While I am much more an optimist than a cynic, I do know that most people find it very hard to change their behaviour even a little, especially when they perceive those changes to mean a less enjoyable life. I have read too many individuals on blogs daring environmentalists to 'pry my [insert high-energy-use technology] from my cold, dead hands' to think that such changes are going to be made willingly or without suitable tax incentives.
What Owen points out is that no-one in these dense cities is feeling deprived, or deliberately going without things that they want. This is incredibly significant. What he makes clear is that the nature of dense cities is that it is easy to access what you need close-by, and even if it can't be found close by, it is usually far easier to get there by walking or by catching public transportation than it is to drive a car. Add to this the fact that apartments use less land, less energy for heating and cooling, and tend to be smaller than comparable free-standing dwellings, and you realise that city-living tends to reduce or eliminate two of the major elements of most citizens' carbon footprints.
This is not to say that it is any easier to move everyone into dense city living than it is to get them using less resources. Far from it! However it is a reminder to all of us, whether self-professed greenies or not, to stop equating the good environmental life with getting back to the earth. While that might feel good to you personally, with almost seven billion people on the planet, it is not going to solve the world's problems.
It is also a direct challenge to the pervasive NIMBYism that prevents any sort of high(er) rise development in my former home city of Melbourne. This sort of attitude, whether cloaked in the language of building preservation, neighbourhood character, or whatever, is simply people protecting their own privileges at the expense of the planet. In fact we should be saying, 'bring it on', because more buildings means more people, which means more chance of local shops being viable (less travelling), more chance of public transport frequencies improving, less car journeys (as parking and congestion discourage all that induced traffic) and less chance of urban sprawl on the city fringes consuming valuable agricultural land (thus indirectly forcing our food to be farmed even further away). Perhaps what we need to do is have rules like they do in Japanese cities, that aim to preserve each person's access to sunlight, while not necessarily preventing building upwards.
Owen is not trying to be holier-than-thou about this. He freely admits that he moved out of Manhattan to a more rural life about twenty years ago, and in many ways regrets this decision in the light of what he now knows. As he points out quite clearly though, simply selling his house to someone else so that he can live in the city again does not necessarily help the problem at all. As long as all the existing dwellings keep being occupied, this is largely a zero-sum game, with the world's total carbon emissions remaining much the same. It would be a brave, and a rich person, who knocked down their house to move to the city, which while it would certainly solve part of the above problem, is not necessarily a wise use of resources either.
I also liked the way he honed in on some more counter-intuitive aspects of this larger environmental crisis that we have on our hands. One of a number of examples he points to is of the tech-whizzes from Massachusetts Institute of Technology trying to invent radical new examples of private cars for city dwellers. As he rightly points out, ANY invention that encourages people who currently choose not to drive or own a car to take it up again, is achieving the opposite of what they intended. It gets us back to the proverbial skinny person on a diet. City dwellers already have access to low-carbon forms of transportation, and don't need less efficient ones, even if they seem 'green'.
I could go on and on, but why don't you instead read this book for yourself. By all means borrow it from a friend, or from a library, but have a read. It is not heavy-going, and you may find yourself surprised by some of the things that come in for scrutiny in the book. In that sense it puts me in mind of another similarly counter-intuitive book that I read on this subject, called 'Time to Eat the Dog'.
So all you big city dwellers, give yourselves a pat on the back, and remember, you may be doing more for than planet than you thought.