'suburban' is still a feature of the huge metropolitan areas. Suburban usually means that there is a big city or more around, where people drive to work. > Hav

'suburban' is still a feature of the huge metropolitan areas. Suburban usually means that there is a big city or more around, where people drive to work. > Having many people living in close proximity increases opportunities to optimize energy efficiency and control environmental impacts. Alternatively you could have a landscape with smaller and dense cities, which each are more self-sufficient. > Having many people living in close proximity increases opportunities to optimize energy efficiency and control environmental impacts. Look what happens in these large Megacities in China or India: there are lots of opportunities to optimize efficiency. But these opportunities are not exploited. China still creates their electricity from a zillion dirty coal power plants (that's today) and the air is dirty, among the worst in the world. There are a lot of mechanisms at play, and better energy efficiency or cleaner production is not the top mechanism. With larger energy providers, we see less modern energy creation. They tend to run huge systems for decades and avoid every pressure to modernize (-> invest money). They won't replace a paid dirty power plant with an expensive state-of-the-art gast turbine-based power plant. They are happy to invest into large scale nuclear, though. They tend to create corrupt political structures just to be able so. We've seen the effect of these large energy providers here in Germany. Without political pressure, they would not have installed one filter in a power plant, would not have invested in distributed/decentralized energy systems. Decentralized energy production can be MUCH more energy efficient, than the big generation systems we've seen for the last decades. A typical combined electricity/heating system is extremely hard to beat. These don't need large cities. Some of them need dense cities, but not all.