Do We Really All Have To Live Like New Yorkers? Does Density Matter?

by Lloyd Alter 

07.27.10

Reading David Owen's The Green Metropolis, one would conclude that density is everything, that New York is, as he wrote in the New Yorker, "The Greenest City in America":

"Barring an almost inconceivable reduction in the earth's population, dense urban centers offer one of the few plausible remedies for some of the world's most discouraging environmental ills. To borrow a term from the jargon of computer systems, dense cities are scalable, while sprawling suburbs are not. The environmental challenge we 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."

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