An interesting article by David Owen on the ecological sustainability of New York. He starts by saying:
Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it is a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the US, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes petrol at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the US was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's 10 times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but 11 states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank 51st in per-capita energy use.
I immediately think of Sydney as a pollution zone.Why Sydney? It is Australia's global city of power and money. And so it is our equivalent to New York. But Sydney is also a spawling suburban city, and does not have a Manhattan.
Owen acknowledges that Manhattan is "loud and dirty, the subway is depressing and the fumes from the cars and cabs and buses can make people sick." Then he adds:
"Because densely populated urban centres concentrate human activity, we think of them as pollution crisis zones. Calculated by the square metre, New York City generates more greenhouse gases, uses more energy and produces more solid waste than most other American regions of comparable size. On a map depicting negative environmental impacts in relation to surface area, therefore, Manhattan would look like an intense hot spot, surrounded, at varying distances, by belts of deepening green."
But Owen argues against this view of Manhattan as he is debunking some environmental shibboleths. New York, he says, has a lot to teach us about being green.
Own's is an anti-sprawl argument made by contrasting New York with a sprawling car-invaded LA and the empty spaces of Washington that enables people to move out of cars into public transport.Achieving sustainability means discouraging, rather than encouraging sprawl,and reducing people's needs for cars. So the idea is to work in a big office block in the inner city and live in an apartment nearby.
American environmentalism, like its Australian counterpart, advocates the preservation of wilderness and wildlife, and has an anti-city bias. Owen says:
"That bias is evident in the technical term that is widely used for sprawl: "urbanisation". Thinking of freeways and malls as "urban" phenomena obscures the ecologically monumental difference between Phoenix and Manhattan, and fortifies the perception that population density is an environmental ill. It also prevents most people from recognising that RMI's famous headquarters--- which sits on an isolated parcel more than 290 kilometres from the nearest significant public transit system - is sprawl."
But the return to the inner city from suburbia is not matched by a redesign of the old city so that it becomes more people friendly in Australia. It is still a car dominated city, and local authorities resist rolling back the car to make way for people.
Owen goes on to say that:
"Standing between us and any conceivable solution to our energy nightmare are our cars and the asphalt-latticed country we have built to oblige them. Those cars have defined our culture and our lives. A car is speed and sex and power and emancipation. It makes its driver a self-sufficient nation of one. It is everything a city is not.Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at January 21, 2005 12:41 PM | TrackBackMost of the car's most tantalising charms are illusory, though. By helping us to live at greater distances from one another, driving has undermined the very benefits that it was meant to bestow."