Reddit mentions of Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability

I'm actually a town planner and while your idea may be well intentioned, it isn't rooted in any reality I'm aware of and the problems it would arise are too numerous to count. Over a century of town planning has worked on the best ways to structure cities considering transport, livability, economic efficiency, infrastructure efficiency ect and they've pretty much concluded the exact opposite of what you're suggesting.

All economic powerhouse economies are centered around large and dense urbanised cities and there are many good reasons for that. The big one being businesses want to be centrally located with access to the largest pool of skilled employees with efficient transport networks for goods and people. Decentralising everything into widely dispersed car-dependent business parks flies in the face of what a modern economy wants. Google just pulled out of the White Bay redevelopment because of the lack of mass transport options.

If you want a walkable CBD with no cars then how are people going to get there from their 2 acre home 50km away? Mass transport is out since they're only efficient in denser areas. So roads? That's how you build a car dependent sprawling mess where people sit in traffic all day, reducing worker productivity and quality of life along the way.

You'd need to sprawl suburbia endlessly outwards to cater for people living on such large lots and forget about parks and nature reserves, they'll be consumed by the sprawl. By living denser you free up the amount of space that can be used for public and national parks.

I could go on and on but if you actually want to know why your idea wouldn't work start out reading Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of American Cities which is the cornerstone for modern planning. Worth noting that environmental sustainability isn't addressed much since it was written in 1961 so if you want additional arguments for denser cities then David Owen's Green Metropolis is a good entry point.

This book makes a great case that New York City is about the most environmentally friendly city in the country.

I buy into the case. It is the only city where over 50% of people take public transportation and a big chunk walk. So gasoline usage is about as low as you will find anywhere in the country. Electricity usage is also about as low as anywhere in the country because large buildings are more efficient to heat and cool.

No, they all have much smaller block sizes and narrower streets. Even though NYC's are fairly long in one dimension, there's s fair number of avenues in NYC that cut their blocks in half, much like the mid block streets I mentioned in SLC.

There's a few interesting books that talk about how the layout of streets affect the development of a city. Green Metropolis specifically talks about NYC and The Death and Life of Great American Cities talks generally about city planning.

Some of what you are saying is correct, bad regulation plays a large role, but the solution is better regulation, not less. It is cheaper for builders to build out instead of up, building out has all of the problems of sprawl without the efficiencies of dense urban centers.

So this is not a problem that free markets can solve on their own, in states/areas with limited zoning/development planning the default is suburban development, it's cheaper.

I think you might also be mixing up styles of development/zoning planning, yes cities like SF have stupid height limits, and barriers on density... but suburban places have just the opposite, so like I said the problem is not regulation and the need for the free market, the problem is bad regulation. No regulation can go either way, yes maybe some dense development, but also the possibility of tenement slums and unsafe conditions, think no fire code, no sanitation requirements etc... or really spread out expensive (an unsafe) if it encroaches on wildlands with fires.

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Check out this book The green metropolis its all about dense urban development and how it is better than what alot of our zoning right now promotes.

I'd amend my above post to say **good** energy analysts take carbon leakage and the like into account. And those analyses still show urban centers as being more environmentally friendly, especially after controlling for income.

Dense cities are much better for the environment than suburbs, and usually quite a bit better than rural areas. https://www.amazon.com/Green-Metropolis-Smaller-Driving-Sustainability/dp/1594484848