This piece in the New York Times Magazine is getting a lot of positive references.
(Physicist Geoffrey West) saw the metropolis as a sprawling organism, similarly defined by its infrastructure. (The boulevard was like a blood vessel, the back alley a capillary.)
This implied that the real purpose of cities, and the reason cities keep on growing, is their ability to create massive economies of scale, just as big animals do. After analyzing the first sets of city data — the physicists began with infrastructure and consumption statistics — they concluded that cities looked a lot like elephants. In city after city, the indicators of urban “metabolism,” like the number of gas stations or the total surface area of roads, showed that when a city doubles in size, it requires an increase in resources of only 85 percent.
This straightforward observation has some surprising implications. It suggests, for instance, that modern cities are the real centers of sustainability.
After a resource is exhausted, we are forced to exploit a new resource, if only to sustain our superlinear growth. West cites a long list of breakthroughs to illustrate this historical pattern, from the discovery of the steam engine to the invention of the Internet. “These major innovations completely changed the way society operates,” West says. “It’s like we’re on the edge of a cliff, about to run out of something, and then we find a new way of creating wealth. That means we can start to climb again.”
But the escape is only temporary, as every innovation eventually leads to new shortages. We clear-cut forests, and so we turn to oil; once we exhaust our fossil-fuel reserves, we’ll start driving electric cars, at least until we run out of lithium. This helps explain why West describes cities as the only solution to the problem of cities. Although urbanization has generated a seemingly impossible amount of economic growth, it has also inspired the innovations that allow the growth to continue.
Steven Johnson also covered some of this ground in Price Tags nomination for Book of the Year: “Where Good Ideas Come From.”
You can find an excerpt in this Price Tags post that also explains the connection of Kleiber’s Law to West’s work:
But the most fascinating discovery in West’s research came from the data that didn’t turn out to obey Kleiber’s law. West and his team discovered another power law lurking in their immense database of urban statistics. Every datapoint that involved creativity and innovation – patents, R&D budgets, ‘supercreative’ professions, inventors – also followed a quarter-power law, in a way that was every bit as predictable as Kleiber’s law.
Philip Langdon adds some commentary here – and finds some of the data a little shaky.
i have a different takeaway from the (alleged) ‘sustainability of cities’ — i’m wondering just how sustainable cities (comparatively) are when they consume more ‘stuff’ (15%, noted in the article), don’t actually grow any of the food they consume, ship all of their waste to far-away places, have tall buildings which are often used only part-time, etc.
i don’t claim to have the full picture yet, but i’m very skeptical that cities are any more sustainable than ‘non-cities’, or that they would need to be.
Admittedly, cities aren’t able to grow their own food, so it’s likely they use more resources in that matter. But, many rural areas also import food. Not to mention import exotic foods that can’t be grown in their locality.
In addition to these things rural areas can be quite wasteful too, and I doubt many rural areas get rid of their garbage locally or are a lot more inclined to recycle than cities. Besides which, garbage collection probably requires a lot more per capita energy in a low-density rural municipality than in a high density city.
Rural infrastructure is used a lot less per capita than city infrastructure, yet there’s a need, requirement and expectation for rural areas to have infrastructure that’s at least relatively on par with what’s on offer in urban areas, meaning they often get more service per capita to compensate for the greater distances involved and to make it practical to deliver those services to rural residents.
Rural residents are more likely to own cars and not use public transportation than city residents. They have a more limited capacity to build their own district heating systems, or benefit from the amount of energy that’s saved by dense living arrangements like apartments that share heating with each other (unless their residents want to live in communes or something).
I think if you control for affluence, on balance, city residents have a lower environmental footprint than rural ones. What makes city residents use more ‘stuff’ per capita is probably a direct relation to the fact that there are more affluent city residents per capita than there are rural residents, per capita. If you take the average mid-income city resident and compare them with the average mid-income rural resident, chances are the rural resident will use more stuff.
“Admittedly, cities aren’t able to grow their own food, so it’s likely they use more resources in that matter. But, many rural areas also import food. Not to mention import exotic foods that can’t be grown in their locality. “
to me, the fact that many/most cities can’t now, and never will be able to, grow their own food (at least, not without major drama) is a big deal. i’m not as worried about the state of the world right now as i am for what it could be in 50 years. my problem with cities not being able to be self-reliant is, i would argue, ultimately a question of sustainability. it kinda makes me think of a primitivist-type argument against cities — who cares how energy-efficient you are if your supermarket shelves are empty?
so, i get that cities have denser living arrangements, and that helps them conserve fuel/energy, etc., but i think the more important question is — what is the optimal living arrangement? is it small city? a big city? a small town? a mega-super-duper city? is it a city with small buildings, mid-rise buildings, or skyscrapers, or one mega-super-duper tower that everyone lives/works in? the building heights debate in DC is being driven, in part, by folks claiming that tall buildings are wonderful for sustainability. i’m skeptical. if a 10-story building is ‘green’, then 100- and 1000-story buildings must be orders of magnitude ‘greener,’ no? if you take into account the full costs of constructing those tall buildings, maybe they don’t look quite so ‘green’ anymore.
and, yes, suburbs use more energy, but they can and will change. some roads in the burbs, for instance, are going to gravel instead of being paved (cost savings measure). biking can and will become possible in the burbs (tho, it’ll prob be a lot slower than the transformation happening in cities). can they change enough to become more sustainable than cities? maybe.
Vancouver is talking about becoming ‘energy neutral’ in the next decade or so (I think). and SF is talking about becoming a ‘zero-waste’ city. as usual, i’m skeptical, but we’ll see!
the ‘affluence question’ is exactly why i think all the self-congratulatory stuff about cities is more than a little dubious — city residents got money, and they spend it on stuff – namely, products that are not sustainable, not generally recyclable, not built in a sustainable fashion, etc. so, cities seem to me to be highly efficient from a high level financial/energy consumption point of view because, like corporations, they’re highly efficient externalizing machines. Cities grow their food elsewhere, ship their waste elsewhere, etc.
so, take a Cradle-to-Cradle view of a corporation like Apple — and look just at the environmental costs they manage to externalize — at first glance, they seem sustainable, and may even win sustainability awards — they probably have recycling bins in their cafeteria, their employees probably drive fuel-efficient Priuses, etc. But there are poor children in India being irradiated by toxic, discarded iPhones, there are miserable workers in China suffocating in toxic-air-filled factories, the energy for the Priuses was generated by coal blasted out of some mountain in West Virginia (tho, some came from ‘clean’ hydro power), etc.
point being, there’s _always_ a hidden cost — my guess is that studies suggesting that city living is more energy efficient are looking at things in a very narrow sense, instead of doing ‘full cost accounting’ — that is, using a Cradle to Cradle analysis, which might be what really matters when talking about sustainability.
and, i’m probably a bit cynical about the whole ‘cities are awesome!’ line of thinking b/c it just seems wrong to celebrate the fact that us city-dwellers may be destroying the earth a bit more slowly than non-city dwellers.
😐
I think the second part that Gordon linked to was probably the key part. Cities solve problems cities create. It’s kind of like drinking more to solve the hangover. As much as we city dwellers use less energy, infrastructure, etc. per capita than rural dwellers, without cities and everything else they entail we likely wouldn’t be doing all those things that are unsustainable, we likely wouldn’t have such a large population, we likely wouldn’t ship food across the continent, and we’d likely wouldn’t possess the same technologies that create these situations, either.
Given our current population and economic and social structures, yeah, I guess cities are preferable, but that’s a lot of assumptions to make.
It’s still quite interesting, though, the research involved. And please don’t take my above comments as anything close to a repudiation of cities.