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>the huge elephant in the room is that it is insane that cities are more expensive when city dwellers consume less resources 50% of the world lives in cities y
by tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>the huge elephant in the room is that it is insane that cities are more expensive when city dwellers consume less resources
50% of the world lives in cities yet they consume 70% of the worlds energy.
- aqme28 5y agoWhat are those numbers for American suburbs? We're not comparing to the third world here, we're comparing across models of living in the developed world.
- Swizec 5y agoIs that because the 50% who don’t live in cities spend half their typical day in the nearest city?
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoI assume it's because people in cities are richer so they tend to consume more.
- othello 5y agoTo enjoy modern standards of living, medium to high density urban arrangements are much less resource intensive than suburban sprawl, which the relevant comparison point. The figure you quote, aggregated at the global level, entirely results from a comparison of city lifestyle with pre-industrial countryside lifestyles in developing countries. By contrast, living in the countryside or in suburbia in rich nations is much more environmentally damaging than in dense urban areas, which is what gp was referring to.
- akiselev 5y ago> The figure you quote, aggregated at the global level, entirely results from a comparison of city lifestyle with pre-industrial countryside lifestyles in developing countries. Literally pre-industrial [1]. Last numbers I saw from the UN estimated 2 billion subsistence farmers as of 2015, all living without the benefit of modern agriculture except the occasional bag of fertilizer or engineered seeds. The future is very unevenly distributed. [1] http://www.fao.org/3/i5251e/i5251e.pdf http://www.fao.org/3/i5251e/i5251e.pdf
- Ericson2314 5y agoAlso keep in mind that turning nature into agriculture also has huge environmental costs not captured in energy usage. If "developed cultured" is fixed by pricing the externalities, it would be absolutely better to pack people in cities, replace subsistence farming with sustainable industrial agriculture (no tilling, no aquifer depletion, etc.) and decrease the portion of land devoted to agriculture.