[Editor’s Note: This is the first piece in a multi-part series examining the City through the lens of the Green Metropolis, by David Owen]
David Owen’s book Green Metropolis has been described as ‘controversial’, yet perhaps ‘counterintuitive’ is a better moniker.
The city and its structures of transportation and economic exchange are inseparable from the lives of most North Americans. Our work, pleasure and dwelling are guided by the civic infrastructures in which we find ourselves. Our bodies are shaping and being shaped by these constructs. Quite literally we gain weight as our car-commutes grow longer or healthy food less available. We get cold without shelter, and hungry without income. Metaphorically our desires for emotional permanence are expressed through outings to the park, time at home with family, or kisses on the rooftops and bars. Every moment we impact and are impacted by our surroundings.
With some exceptions, these structures of the contemporary North American lifestyle have been determined by the automobile. Highways allow suburbs, strip malls and business parks to spread themselves thin. The car connects this dispersion and in doing so becomes a powerful symbol of freedom. Freedom from the smells and forced collectivity of the city. The car is a beautiful, independent ‘nation of one’. Just you (and maybe your equally well-dressed boyfriend/girlfriend in the seat beside you).
David Owen suggests that this model is fundamentally flawed, or at least outdated, especially given the ongoing challenges of peak-oil and resource shortages. In order to move the North American lifestyle towards something approaching long-term stability and security, he suggests we need to live smaller, live closer and drive less.
This is achieved through hybrid densities of housing, services, and workplaces, connected by low-emission, effective public transit and safe, walkable streets. Basically, we need to live like New Yorkers.
This is where the ‘counterintuitive’ comes in: Mr Owen suggests New York is the greenest city in the United States. This seems absurd when we are confronted with the fact every 24 hours the city generates a pile of trash as big as a 70 storey building and that the vast majority of its ‘landscape’ is concrete or glass. However, Green Metropolis backs this idea up with a set of highly considered, nuanced arguments that also systematically deconstruct notions typically considered ‘sustainable’. For example:
Dedicated High Occupancy Vehicle [HOV] lanes reduce single-occupancy vehicle use.
Every vehicle that uses a dedicated, two-person HOV lane on a highway effectively removes two cars from the other lanes. This makes traffic flow smoother and faster therefore encouraging more people to drive on the highway. A congested highway discourages people from driving, the HOV does the opposite. Does this mean the HOV lane is not an effective long-term car-use reduction strategy?
Greenery and open spaces encourage walking.
In suburban and rural areas the distance people are willing to walk is much lower than in dense urban areas. This is not necessarily because of lack of sidewalks or curbs(although this does not help). Rather, distance is perceived as longer, because there are no shop windows, offices, street signs, or other people to occupy your attention during the journey. Does this mean open spaces and greenery actually discourage walking?
Small, low-emission or electric ‘urban cars’ such will allow us to keep driving and stop climate change.
Smaller cars allow more vehicles to occupy an urban environment in a less congested way, encouraging people who might have used public transit or walked to drive. Parking becomes more available, encouraging more people to use cars. Where is all of that new electricity coming from?
And so on (read the book yourself).
In the book, New York is positioned as the anti-suburb, and therefore its citizens have no choice but to live a relatively low-energy lifestyle. Its extreme congestion, so hated by car-owners means that around 80% of New Yorkers take transit on a regular basis; a significant portion of the remainder walk. All of this occurs not because of an ideological commitment to a greener world, or regulation, or a carbon-trading scheme, but just because of density.
Sheer numbers of people packed into a tiny island require highly efficient social and civic infrastructures to co-exist. Mahattan refined itself, and in doing so created a relatively low-emission city.
While compelling, Mr. Owen’s arguments in favour of hybrid density are not too different than those found in the City of Vancouver’s Eco-density Charter or one of the many academic manifestos on the sustainable city found on any ecologically-aware urbanist’s bookshelf. And while the arguments he makes are watertight in themselves, other utopian ‘sustainability‘ issues such as increasing ratios of social and economic equity, access to healthy food, or education and housing for the poor are not directly addressed.
It is clear that the book does not intend to be a prescriptive manifesto on the future-city; it simply describes the problem [sprawl and consequently an excessive reliance on fossil fuels] and offers Manhattan as the alternative.
So let’s all move to Manhattan?
‘No way’, he says. This simply ‘shuffles the pieces’.
Selling the suburban home and moving to the city does not stop the suburban lifestyle, it only de-guilts the former suburbanite.
[Look for Heroin and Prostitutes, part two of this series]