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Greener cities: A necessity or a luxury?
- darthoctopus 3y agoWhy not both? Green spaces and buildings are necessities insofar as they provide important amenities for mental health, pollution/heat island management, and placemaking, and in this sense they are critical infrastructure. But many cities, even big ones, operate at scale without investing in important infrastructure, such as public transport, traffic engineering, third places, and affordable housing; it is unsurprising that the operators of such cities should see green spaces as luxuries in a similar fashion.
- graphe 3y agoYou can't have something be a necessity and a luxury. An iPhone is one or the other, but not both.
- ponector 3y agoIphone is a luxury. The same way as a personal car is. Or automatic coffee machine for at home use.
- davkan 3y agoIs coffee itself a luxury? Cause automatic coffee makers are just as cheap as any other method of making coffee these days.
- ponector 3y agoAluminum moka is cheaper than machine. To pour boiling water into the cup with ground coffee is even cheaper. And we are not talking about beans itself, which are all sorts of quality.
- davkan 3y agoI would have guessed you could get a coffee maker for $10 anywhere but it seems they cost $20 nowadays. Still even a $10 mocha pot would be a luxury by that definition when you can make folgers cowboy coffee and drink it out of the single pan that you use for everything.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoSomething can be neither luxury nor necessity. Coffee is one example.
- graphe 3y agoCoffee is a luxury. It is a very carbon and labor intensive product of growing fruits in tropical areas, only using the seeds, throwing away the pulp of the fruit, transportation, roasting grinding and then the semi boiling of the seeds before it reaches your cup. White sugar might be cheap in price but it's unnatural and has many processes which are also very intensive in labor.
- ponector 3y agoAnd then also think about carbon footprint of keeping animals in cruel tight cages and force then to eat only coffee fruits to gather coffee beans in their poo and sell for 100$ per kilo.
- _Algernon_ 3y agoIphone is a commodity. Think different.
- pc86 3y agoiPhones are only commodities to iPhones, which if you accept that definition means that everything is a commodity. An iPhone is not a commodity to most other phones.
- vdaea 3y agoA personal car is only a luxury as long as you feel good about mooching off your friends whenever you need one.
- ponector 3y agoWhy would you do this? You can use a bus. Or scooter. Or bycicle. Or walk. Or dismiss journey, maybe it is a luxury itself?
- ghaff 3y agoIn the US, in Manhattan, you can probably make do. And there are other cities where you can probably manage with some combination of Uber and short-/longer-term rentals. And just foreclose on certain types of activities for the most part. But I suspect for a lot of people out of school, "I don't need a car" means the same thing I did as an undergrad, namely lean on people who had one.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoYou can get by in a lot of cities, like Seattle, without a car if you don’t have kids. You don’t even need to bum rides. Even in LA, I wouldn’t have bought a car if it wasn’t for my wife getting pregnant.
- ghaff 3y agoIn Boston/Cambridge I could probably get by if I mostly didn't leave the city but I know lots of people outside the city and I do lots of activities that would be outside the city. Unlike Manhattan, the assumption is that you have a car as an adult if you aren't right out of school. There's one job I had (for about 1.5 years) that I could have managed without a car. I think you're generally OK if most of your activities work via transit and Uber. As you suggest, as well, kids and pets probably make things more difficult.
- jandrewrogers 3y agoIn several parts of Seattle you genuinely don't need a car, with few compromises. Virtually everything is walkable. Even many of the popular trailheads in the mountains have seasonal bus service. Just about the only time I use public transportation is when I take light rail to the airport. I know quite a few people that live this way. I do own a car but that is only ever used for traveling to another State or to get into more remote parts of the mountains. For anything else, using a car would be inconvenient.
- ghaff 3y agoWell, green spaces do involve tradeoffs. Someone living in Manhattan who is at least OK with the price of housing may wholeheartedly approve of Central Park (and all the smaller parks) while someone who might want to move there would rather some more apartment blocks were built in some of the space. Of course there are other ways of making space not all of which are totally voluntary to current residents/owners of property. Cities (including NYC) used to be much more cavalier with remaking areas in this manner.
- marcosdumay 3y agoA city doesn't have space restrictions. It has transportation restrictions. If you manage to make people travel around faster, you increase the housing supply by a much higher amount than you can by converting local land into housing. So, everybody would be better by increasing the reach and area for train tracks, even if you convert a reasonable amount of nearby area into parks, if also, while you are at it, you provide some way for local transit to integrate with the long-distance one. The dichotomy on the article is just plainly wrong. Transportation enables you to improve on both, and without transportation you will have neither.
- ghaff 3y agoGeography also matters of course. And many many companies are not actually located in a city. Better commuter rail/light rail is desirable. On the other hand, a commute is still a commute. I'm actually quite convenient to a commuter rail station that ties into the city's subway quite well. But I pretty much hate commuting into the city on the few days I have to do it because it still takes a big chunk out of my day.
- kiba 3y agoBetter commuter rail/light rail is desirable. On the other hand, a commute is still a commute. I'm actually quite convenient to a commuter rail station that ties into the city's subway quite well. But I pretty much hate commuting into the city on the few days I have to do it because it still takes a big chunk out of my day. If the speed isn't actually fast, then transportation needs to be improved.
- photochemsyn 3y agoTrees also generate oxygen, which can be an issue in cities since (BBC Science Focus): > "A human breathes about 9.5 tonnes of air in a year, but oxygen only makes up about 23 per cent of that air, by mass, and we only extract a little over a third of the oxygen from each breath. That works out to a total of about 740kg of oxygen per year. Which is, very roughly, seven or eight trees’ worth." You might think the problem would be minimal due to atmospheric circulation, but like with smog accumulation, some weather patterns can lead to problems: "(2021) Declining Oxygen Level as an Emerging Concern to Global Cities" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33904720/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33904720/
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoSo you would need at least one adult tree per person to make an impact; for most cities that would amount to a forest.
- dvdkon 3y agoThat doesn't sound like that much, especially in less-dense cities and if you count "embedded" forests/parks. Looking at local newspaper articles suggests Prague has possibly more than that, but mostly in forests, not on streets. I don't know enough to say if/how much that would help with air quality.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoI live in a city with trees, an adult tree normally takes up the space of a big block, you can have maybe 20-30 on a space where 400 live if you cover the street. Most likely plants can be more a efficient way. Probably everything fast growing is more oxygen converting, and co2 storing
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoI did some reddit research, bamboo seems highest oxygen convertor, so plant a few bamboo forest if the climate allows it. Would also look cool
- 3y ago
- graphe 3y agoI agree. Singapore is the greenest city but it's hardly green. Construction is always dirty, a few trees won't change that. The sands are stolen from other countries. They dress up the carbon causing steel beams and concrete with trees but don't forget the tree roots also destroy infrastructure, and at the end of the day it's (toxic) lipstick on a pig, and the continuous maintenance of the lipstick until the pig dies. Cities and human habitats are either being reclaimed by nature or fighting it. Until that fundamentally changes green cities are as realistic as carbon negative oil.
- HPsquared 3y agoHumans themselves also need constant care and maintenance. It's a fact of life. Nothing exists in static equilibrium. The way I see it, humans and human settlements are also a part of nature.
- cassepipe 3y agoI now think of this video when I see "verical forests" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajdd9LeKwTQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajdd9LeKwTQ
- JoshTriplett 3y agoWhenever I hear "vertical forest" I think of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdUUx5FdySs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdUUx5FdySs .
- HPsquared 3y agoLuxury on the personal level, necessity on the societal level. Like getting married, doing the deed, having kids etc.
- diego_sandoval 3y agoMost cities are hostile towards people. Maybe we should make them non hostile first, and then we can think about the green part. The biggest factor contributing to this hostility seems to be personal motorized vehicles. Reducing the number of motorized vehicles (and the space dedicated to them) whenever possible should have a much better impact than introducing greenery. Put another way, I think people live better in a city made of concrete with few cars than in a green city with lots of cars.
- ProDemoNo 3y ago[dead]
- mytailorisrich 3y ago> I think people live better in a city made of concrete with few cars than in a green city with lots of cars. Definitely not. The former is easily an oppressive 1984-esque metropolis while the latter easily feels nice. Another key parameter is density. Low density with plenty of greenery and people will feel and be happy even if they may need a car.
- pc86 3y agoIsn't low density by definition not a city?
- mytailorisrich 3y ago"Low density" is a relative term and there are ranges in everything. You can have a city mostly made of huge, packed tower blocks, or a city mostly made of small buildings with some space in between.
- kiba 3y agoCars will easily make a place feel like a 1984 metropolis. They need space intensive infrastructure to drive on, which is asphalt and concrete.
- vivekd 3y ago
- xyst 3y agoThe solution will involve a multifaceted approach with significant investment from all levels of government (federal, state, local). In general it involves working towards sustainability. We keep coming up with “solutions” that solve or partially solve one part of the equation. In the article it mentions in order to prevent another incident of Hurricane Sandy, the city decided to build a massive flood mitigation project. But has anybody stopped to think that maybe our best protections against nature is nature itself? Trees are a good start and definitely help brighten up a concrete jungle, absorb and store CO2. But this is only one aspect. For decades, cities around the country have been destroying natural ecosystems in favor of single family developments (ie, suburbs) and highways. These concrete structures and monoculture ecosystems that replaced once diverse green spaces are terrible at absorbing and mitigating the effects of nature. Man made drains get clogged or overwhelmed. Mitigation techniques fail quickly over time if one or more designs were built poorly. The build up of water slowly erodes the soil beneath the concrete and thus leads to formation of sinkholes. I think it’s expected that man made infrastructure will only last 25-30 years before needing a full replacement. On the other hand, those once diverse ecosystems were great/amazing at absorbing the effects of Mother Nature. Trees, woodlands great and thrive here without any intervention from human beings. They also used to support living organisms — insects such as bees, and animals. Some intervention needed in case of fire prevention (ie, “controlled burns”). But it’s otherwise self sustaining. I think federal protection is needed on all green spaces. Not just national parks. Freeze and stop future development of the suburbs. Divest from car centric transportation and infrastructure (highways, roads, parking lots, parking garages, street parking). Destruction of highways. Return the land to the people to build places where we can live, play, eat, and work. Scale up. Do not scale horizontally. End implied and direct subsidies given to SFH developments. End all subsidies on O&G (a multi trillion dollar industry by the way). Regulate O&G and use fines to pay for a greener future. This needs to be tackled at all fronts.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- rfwhyte 3y agoGreener cities are absolutely a necessity for humanity, but sadly will be reserved for the wealthiest who can afford the "Luxury" of such things as clean air, clean water and greenspace. Until the extreme inequality at the core of capitalist society is addressed in a meaningful way (so never really), any so called "Green cities" will just be gated enclaves of the wealthy, and the poor will be forced to live surrounded by the pollution the rich are ultimately responsible for, yet are able to afford to isolate themselves from.
- Spivak 3y agoIf you live in a med sized city you likely have the chance to be the change you want to see if you're willing to be in somewhat questionable legal territory. I'm part of a local arborist group that has the goal of getting my and the surrounding neighborhoods up to 40%+ tree cover. It started with two guys who planted hundreds of (now) 60-100ft native trees under the city's nose in alleyways, hellstrips, the yards of rental properties, newly sold houses. By the time they got found out neither the city nor the residents could really be mad at the positive vandalism and so they went legit and now the city just pays our little group to keep doing it. It's so fun going door to door and being like, "would you like to accept our lord and savior the silver maple into your yard?" We recruited an ecologist recently so we're expanding into native gardens and grasses.
- andscoop 3y agoLove this - any articles or maybe a website for the group I can read up on?
- Moldoteck 3y agoA green city is a city with mixed use medium density housing, sidewalks, bike paths+trees, pub transport with own lanes and semaphore priority, a few parking spots with dynamic pricing. The next lvl would be good insulation for all buildinngs combined with solar panels on the roofs. Next level is requiring electric vehicles. The first lvl is not a luxury, usually this type of planing costs less money to maintain from a city perspective and the density is high enough to meet huge demand. Next lvls related to solar panels and electric vehicles are more on a luxury side imo but that's more due to the pricing