Comment by ComposedPattern
7 hours ago
Living in a big city is usually better for the environment than living in a rural area. City-dwellers live in smaller spaces closer together, so they consume fewer resources and emit less carbon.
7 hours ago
Living in a big city is usually better for the environment than living in a rural area. City-dwellers live in smaller spaces closer together, so they consume fewer resources and emit less carbon.
That's assuming that city people do the same things as rural people, and the only difference is whether they own a car and a house. City people earn much more money which they spend more freely and use to do more things, which require orders of magnitude more resources, even if they may be slightly more efficient when traveling within city limits (just think about the multiple flights per year every urbanite I know takes, versus the one or two per decade everyone else takes).
I keep hearing this repeated but I have yet to read any proof of it. Might as well be a thoughtless meme.
Detached single family homes use more energy than apartments per resident[1]. You need more sewer pipe, more road, more wiring to service the same number of people living in detached single family homes.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2015/c&e/pd... (See site energy consumption per household member by housing type on page 2).
It's absolutely the worst place to be in any sort of crisis though, whether it's war, pandemic, rioting, natural disaster.
So many people, potentially desparate people, concentrated in one place, utterly dependent on supplies being shipped in from elsewhere.
And we can't have everyone living ever-smaller lives in ever-more-dense cities anyway, as you need all the food production, manufacturing, energy production, and resource extraction to keep those cities alive. And for now, that still requires a lot of human labour (far too much of it overseas, given increasing geopolitical instability)