>The idea that we should all live this way to conserve space—a resource which is only scarce in these urban places—seems excessive to put it mildly. We're not

>The idea that we should all live this way to conserve space—a resource which is only scarce in these urban places—seems excessive to put it mildly. We're not only conserving space, we're conserving distance. Consider a uniformly populated city with a circular boundary (spherical cow). For a density of X, the mean distance from anyone's residence to nature is L. If that density becomes 2X, that distance is now 0.7L. A denser city directly puts its residents closer to nature — real nature, although we can't move the mountains! Your argument is a complaint about the size of cities, which is mostly orthogonal to density (Honolulu is much denser than Atlanta!).