Cities and Climate Change

If we intend to continue with any consistency in our numbers, health and opportunity, then civilization requires a great deal of radical change.

Some would see these radical changes be a return to an idealized vision of an historical period. As perhaps the best example, James Howard Kunstler would propose a future that looks a little more like an agrarian Western Canada in the late-1800s, full of polymath yeoman farmers. It is an appeal to a time that is simpler, intensely self-reliant, and non-urban.

Though it could be dismissed as a form of cultural ludditisim, arisen from insecurity and fear, it is more than that. Here, The New Resilient is focused on localism, genuine prosperity building, and building resilient communities — all elements of this vision — yet I disagree with much of the imagined response recalling Jefferson or Thoreau.

I’ve always considered this response model to be a type of Romanticism. Surely, there is a place for this in a decentralized and diverse response — there must be and it must be accommodated and utilized.

People and communities must always make choices about what models to encourage and projects to support. And here, the real promise of human persistence and prosperity comes from engagement, dense interaction and community, not retreat and isolation into the pursuit of self-security.

Cities and the climate change

Many of our problems today arise from the City, especially at its periphery in the disastrous experiment of the low-density suburbs.

While there is much to discuss I’ll emphasize climate change in this post. We have begun to see around us, in the previous two decades and especially in the last few months, the many negative impacts of climate change. The risk to our food and water systems, entire national communities, and health and physical security is well-understood and well-researched, if not well-distributed.

Climate change and cities are deeply connected. Edward Glaeser has shared new research on carbon emissions from urban and non-urban areas in the United States, through his blog at the New York Times.

Imagining a family of fixed size and income, his team calculated energy use from driving and public transportation, and carbon emissions from home electricity and home heating. For this research, they didn’t examine the more complicated and difficult to compare usages in the commercial and industrial centre (though similar conclusions would imaginably be reached).

In nearly every case, the difference between families living in central cities and suburban areas was about two tonnes of carbon less for the city. Outliers were as high as seven tonnes difference between Manhattan and Westchester County. Surprisingly, cars represented only one-third of the gap in carbon emissions in this case in New York City. The gap in electricity usage between the City and its suburbs was about two tonnes, the gap in home heating almost three tonnes.

Glaeser perhaps mischaracterized his research in summing it up: “living surrounded by concrete is actually pretty green. Living surrounded by trees is not.”

I’m not sure why Glaeser thinks you can’t be surrounded by trees in a city. Or that cities made of concrete are green. This is perhaps why he is an economist and not in marketing. The revealing aspects of his research had more to do with density, than tree-coverage or concrete.

Density is resilient

Preparing for my move to Vancouver from Calgary, it’s easy to over-compare the two cities. Since the end of WWI, Calgary has sprawled out with few concerns other than profit and false romanticism. (See Expansive Discourses: Urban Sprawl in Calgary, 1945-1978 by Max Foran)

My (soon-to-be former) city and province squandered the assets and opportunities of our region through unsustainable and vicious shortsightedness to develop an exploitive fantasyland. This sprawl was not cheap, nor was it natural — it was encouraged and enforced through tax and planning policies, subsidies and corruption.

Only now is the City waking up, and only then just barely. New draft plans from the City suggest a turn, but Bronconnier’s and Council’s backers in the development industry are pushing hard to protect a deadly and profitable status quo.

Density can reduce the cost of living, improve food security, support regional economic development, and dramatically reduce our carbon footprints. Urbanization can be a tool of resilience and climate security, if it can be wrested from those who’d use it as a tool for commercial exploitation.

Tagged as: Calgary, cities, climate change, edward glaeser, james howard kunstler, urbanization