Mythbuster: Why Cities Are Cleaner Than Suburbs
Catie Park Professor Aaron Krall English 161 12 March 2013 Mythbuster: Are Suburbs Really Cleaner than Cities? The beautiful scenery of American suburbs persuades us that suburbs are cleaner than cities. Since greenery is more visually attractive than brownness filled with mobs of people and congestion, this claim must be true. Well, is it? Edward Glaeser and David Owen attempt to bust this myth through their works, Triumph of the City and Green Metropolis. They defy the myth and claim that suburbs are actually main culprits for increased carbon footprints in the United States.
They attempt to provide compelling arguments of why and how cities are much more energy sufficient than suburbs. I support their ideas, because I also believe we can protect the environment more effectively in close proximity than wide sprawl from my own experiences of living in both Chicago and its northwest suburb. Urban lifestyle is a key to conservation. We must make necessary efforts to accept this counterintuitive fact and ultimately bring ourselves back to cities to sustain our planet earth.
Before we discuss why cities are cleaner than suburbs, we must first acknowledge how sprawl began and what made Americans fall in love with suburban lifestyle. According to Glaeser, it is largely due to public policies in the late twentieth century (193). Our government made a mistake by restricting developments in urban centers and encouraging new developments outside of cities. It caused the cost of living in cities to skyrocket, and people got pushed out to suburbs for cheaper housing (191).
When there is a large supply of housing built in a particular region, its price of housing becomes affordable. People respond well to this elastic housing supply by moving to into such area to benefit from cheaper housing, and this is how American suburbanization began (190). The emergence of inexpensive automobiles accelerated suburbanization, since people were able to enjoy living in trees and work in the city simultaneously (204). However, our preference for suburban lifestyle has been worsening the pollution and making the environmental issue more difficult to resolve (Owen ). Most of us have been living in the fantasy of “garden living”. We often think that surrounding ourselves in greenery and clean air helps us to express our love of nature (Glaeser 202, 203). Owen disapproves our fantasy by insisting, “The apparent ecological innocuousness of widely dispersed populations – as in leafy suburbs or seemingly natural exurban areas, such as mine – is an illusion (8). What we have thought and practiced to conserve the environment, ironically, has been producing negative effects.
Our love of suburbs requires extended commute time into the city, and more time on the road means more wasted energy (Glaeser 201). This is only the beginning. There is so much misspent energy associated with suburban lifestyle. Living in greenery might make us “feel” more environmental-friendly, but it is increasing carbon footprints in reality. The wide availability of cars and cheap energy here in the United States, as a matter of fact, is the largest contributor to the energy inefficiency.
Unlike other densely populated countries in Europe and Asia, we pay a relatively smaller amount of tax on energy. Less cost involved in using energy of which includes all of gas, electricity, and heating led us to become more wasteful than any other countries in the world creating more damages to the environment. A very simple example is found in our daily lives: thinly spread population and associated dependence on automobiles. We must drive to get groceries, to go out to eat, and to go to school in suburbs whereas all of these can be located within a few blocks in cities. (Glaeser 207).
Owen adds to this by using numerical data to explain how suburban living consumes more electricity and heating on a per-capita basis (14). It is quite clear that suburbs are not the cleanest place to live by now. “To the great majority of Americans who share these concerns, densely populated cities look like the end of the world. Because such places concentrate high levels of human activity, they seem to manifest nearly every distressing symptom of the headlong growth of civilization – the smoke, the filth, the crowds, the cars-and we therefore tend to think of them as environmental crisis zones” (Owen 7).
Since the energy inefficiency of suburbs are revealed, we must now discuss why cities are environmental-friendly, despite their stereotypes of being “ecological calamities” (Owen 10). Owen uses New York City as his example make further explanation: “New Yorkers, individually, drive, pollute, consume, and throw away much less than do the average residents of the surrounding suburbs, exurbs, small towns, and farms, because the tightly circumscribe space in which they live creates efficiencies and reduces the possibilities for reckless consumption (7, 8). He argues that when people live in close proximity, we are prone to waste less energy. Glaeser supports this idea as well. He believes, “[…] living in a concrete jungle is actually far more ecologically friendly (201). ” His research shows that “[…] the average urban family consumes more than three hundred fewer gallons of gas per year than its suburban counterpart,” not to mention they use less electricity (208). I personally believe Glaeser and Owen’s beliefs to be true as an individual who commute from suburbs to cities everyday.
I utilize both automobile and public transportation for my commute depending on my schedule. When I drive to the city during morning rush hours, I occasionally think to myself, “how much gas am I wasting right now? ” The amount of gas I waste during congested hours is directly related to the increased greenhouse emissions. This problem does not ease even when I come home to the suburb. I have to drive at least five to ten minutes to go anywhere to take care of my necessities. No car means no mobility in the suburb.
The city, however, is completely different. Since everything is in close proximity, I can walk or take benefits from public transportation. Walking and using public transportation, which almost do not exist in suburbs, give me enough reasons to believe that cities are greener than suburbs despite their brown images. Now the myth has been busted, and clear points are made to explain why cities are greener than suburbs, we must now discuss how to bring people back to cities for more effective conservation solutions.
This is especially more important, since the third world and developing countries’ cities are quickly emerging. These places tend to be more heavily populated, and if they end up wasting energy like we Americans have for the past few decades, we will have to face some serious environmental issues. If you are compelled by this message and afraid of increased risk of global warming, you should consider urban living as an option. There are many implementations that need to be made from all levels.
Educating why cities are more ecofriendly is first step. We must learn our ways to “give up our antipathy to concrete” before anything else and realize that cities are “a powerful generator of environmental benefits (Glaser 201, Owens 12). Then we must attempt to reduce our carbon footprints by using less cars and more public transportations. However, this cannot be done at the individual level. Government must propose effective solutions to compensate for the public policies failure regarding sprawl, cheap energy cost, and widespread of cars.
Possible implementations can be: making public transportation more energy efficient, increasing bike roads, congestion pricing, and making cities more attractive place for people to move back in. Glaeser asserts “it would be a lot better for the planet if their urbanized population lives in dense cities built around the elevator, rather than in sprawling areas built around the car” (198). It may sound paradoxical We must begin taking initiatives to conserve our planet earth by thinking counterintuitively and know that cities are much more ecofriendly than suburbs.
We must stay away from cars and sprawl in order to protect the earth. Our society’s ultimate goal for environmental conservation is “to devise ways of reconfiguring our lives so that civilization as we know it can be sustained through our children’s lifetimes and beyond” (Owen 7). “Even for people who live in sparsely populated areas far from urban cteres, dense cities like New York offer important lessons about how to permanenetly reduce energy use, water consumption, carbon output, and many other environmental ills. Owen 10) “Thinking of crowded cities as environmental role models requires a certain willing suspension of disbelief, because most of us have been accustomed to viewing urban centers as ecological calamities (Owen 10) Because urban density, in itself, is such a powerful generator of environmental benefit,s the most critical environmental iuuse in dense urban cores tend to be seemingly unrelated matters like law enforcement and ublic education Unfortunately, much conventional environmental activism has the opposite effect, Unfortunately, environmentalists are no exception when it comes to understanding the paradox of understanding how cities are greener than suburbs (Owen 18). since it reinforces the view that urban life is artificial and depraved, and makes citiy residents feel guilty about living where and how they do (Owen 12, 13) Glaeser 208 – using less gas and less electricity Glaeser 222 Works Cited Glaeser, Edward. Triumph of the City: How Our Gretest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. New York: Penguin Books, 2011. Owen, David. Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability. New York: Riverhead, 2009.