CityReads│Urban Environmental Impacts: Advantages or Penalties?

CityReadsVol.78

Urban Environmental Impacts:

Advantages or Penalties?

In his book, The environmental advantages of cities: countering common sense antiurbanism, Professor William Meyer discusses the environmental outcomes of cities. He weighs instances of “urban penalty” against those of “urban advantage.” He finds that many urban environmental penalties are illusory, based on commonsense preconceptions and not on solid evidence. In fact, greater degrees of “urbanness” often offer advantages rather than penalties.

William B.Meyer,2013. The environmental advantages of cities: countering common sense antiurbanism,Boston: The MIT Press.

Source:http://news.colgate.edu/scene/2014/11/urban-legends.html

Picture source: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/environmental-advantages-cities

Do cities produce more or less satisfactory environmental outcomes than other forms of settlement?

Professor William B.Meyer at Colgate University addresses this question in his book, The environmental advantages of cities: countering common sense antiurbanism.

Meyer borrows some useful terminology from the public health literature, urban penalty and urban advantage, to describe the environmental outcome of cities. An urban penalty is incurred when conditions or results produced by urbanization or recorded in an urban setting fall below those achieved otherwise or elsewhere. An urban advantage arises when the opposite occurs.

Conventional wisdom about the environmental impact of cities holds that urbanization and environmental quality are necessarily at odds. Cities are seen to be sites of ecological disruption, consuming a disproportionate share of natural resources, producing high levels of pollution, and concentrating harmful emissions precisely where the population is most concentrated. Cities appear to be particularly vulnerable to natural disasters, to be inherently at risk from outbreaks of infectious diseases, and even to offer dysfunctional and unnatural settings for human life. In this book, William Meyer tests these widely held beliefs against the evidence.

Meyer weighs instances of “urban penalty” against those of “urban advantage.” He finds that many supposed urban environmental penalties are illusory, based on commonsense preconceptions and not on solid evidence. In fact, greater degrees of “urbanness” often offer advantages rather than penalties. The characteristic compactness of cities, for example, lessens the pressure on ecological systems and enables resource consumption to be more efficient. On the whole, Meyer reports, cities offer greater safety from environmental hazards (geophysical, technological, and biological) than more dispersed settlement does. In fact, the city-defining characteristics widely supposed to result in environmental penalties do much to account for cities’ environmental advantages.

In his book, Meyer discusses 7 commonsenses environmental antiurbanism: intensive hotspots of ecological disruption; ravenous consumers of natural resources; severely polluted and polluting; particularly at risk from natural hazards; disproportionately beset by technological hazards; inherently prone to the spread of infectious diseases; and such dysfunctional and unnatural environments that they cannot form a satisfactory setting for human life.

So, let’s consider some examples of commonsense environmental antiurbanism.

Which is more hazardous?

living here? 

or here?

1.Ecological disruption

 Suburban areas are far greener than cities.True or false？

Literally, true. Suburbs, of course, have more green cover like lawns and trees. Metaphorically, false. Green cover usually replaces the natural ecosystem and sustains an imported one by drawing upon heavy inputs of chemicals, water, and energy. The geographers Paul Robbins and Julie Sharp found that the same homeowners who described themselves as environmentalists were the ones likeliest to manage their yards intensively, adding higher-than-average inputs of lawn-maintenance chemicals. Taking care of a lawn may indeed represent a highly valued interaction with “nature” in the eyes of many suburbanites, who seem less aware that it is a kind of interaction involving the aggressive transformation of the predevelopment land cover.

 And, high-density urban settlement reduces the area over which intensive development alters the ecosystem, whereas low-density occupation deforests, fragments, or otherwise disrupts much-larger areas per household. A study of the urban heat island in Atlanta illustrates this: parcels developed for low-density suburban residence contributed proportionally more heat to the urban warming than did ones developed for higher densities.

A confusion between what is literally and metaphorically green may do much to hide the real environmental advantages of cities.

If you believe that population growth is a major cause of environmental degradation, you should be especially worried about the growth of cities. True or false？

False. It is true that population growth contributes significantly to the growth of cities. But not vice versa. Indeed, one of the best-proven generalizations in the social sciences is that urbanization reduces population growth. And it’s not because urban mortality is greater than rural — the opposite is usually true. Rather, urbanization lowers the number of children that families choose to have, for reasons including the higher cost per child and women’s greater access to education, employment, and contraception.

Trying to slow or reverse urbanization would hinder the process of reversing environmental degradation.

2.Resource consumption

If you wanted to reduce your consumption of natural resources, where would you move in the United States today: a city, a suburb, or a rural area？

The smaller living and yard spaces, less dependence on automobiles, and more efficient use of infrastructure (roads, utility connections) among urban dwellers mean a lower per capita consumption of key resources from land and water to energy and materials. The misconception involves thinking about where the greatest total resource consumption occurs, rather than measuring levels of demand by population.

Cities have much larger “ecological footprints” than rural areas. True or false？

In absolute terms, true, but an absolute measure is seriously misleading. The population of an American city, logically enough, consumes a greater aggregate of resources than that of a less-populous rural unit. But again, per capita consumption is what really matters. The per capita footprint of a city dweller, all else equal, is smaller. To put it another way: a given number of people living at their country’s characteristic standard of living would consume a smaller quantity of resources if they lived in an urban (high-density) pattern than if they lived in a rural or suburban (dispersed, low-density) one.

3.Pollution

The world’s worst air pollution exposure levels are found in third-world cities. True or false？

False, surprisingly. Third-world cities indeed have appalling levels of air pollution. But it is never enough to point to environmental problems that occur in cities, without comparing them to conditions in rural areas. Third-world rural areas are even worse off in air quality, because the most important component of total exposure is indoor pollution. Rural households rely disproportionately on smoky biomass fuels for cooking and heating. For example, a study revealed that in southern China, total urban exposure to airborne particulate matter was only 65 percent of what it is in rural ones. But exposure in rural and indoor settings is far less visible to observers than in the urban outdoors — another frequent source of misconceptions about cities and the environment — and so the image of the clean countryside and the polluted city persists.

Where in the United States is it safer to drink the water: rural areas or cities？

Taken straight from the source, naturally, it is likely to be safer in rural areas. But that’s not how we get our drinking water. Rural residents rely much more heavily than urbanites do on wells and on small municipal systems. Neither have the safeguards against harmful contaminants that large city systems, with protected sources and purification facilities, can offer.

4.Natural hazards

Rural areas in the United States are safer from tornadoes, earthquakes and hurricanes than urban ones. True or false？

False. One’s first thoughts might focus on the greater thickness of flying debris in a city. But tornado death rates in the most urban counties of the American heartland are lower than statewide averages, and those in the most rural counties are higher. Urban settings offer such advantages as easier access to safe shelters, more timely dissemination of warnings, quicker post-disaster aid, and better construction encouraged by stricter building codes.

Again, one’s first image might be one of urban danger, of falling debris and collapsing buildings in a crowded city. But the one study to make a controlled comparison found that death rates from earthquakes increase as population density declines. The reasons that help explain the difference in tornado safety also apply here. They apply equally well to hurricanes, the other acute weather hazard of the developing world.

5.Technological hazards

Where are traffic accidents (the world’s leading cause of accidental death) more deadly: in cities or in rural areas？

Surely, where the streets are most congested? In fact, it’s just the opposite. Traffic accidents are least deadly in cities, where speeds are most restricted, roads are better designed, and emergency aid is closest at hand. In the developed world, suburban rates fall between urban and rural ones.

The most dangerous occupations are typically urban ones. True or false？

False. We tend to think of industrial accidents when we think of workplace hazards. But industry is not the most hazardous kind of work (nor, for that matter, is it any longer predominantly urban). Farming, the classic rural livelihood, is also particularly dangerous; likewise lumbering, mining, and trucking. Not only are injuries more frequent, but, as with traffic accidents, help is farther away when they occur in rural settings.

6.Infectious disease

Malaria, the world’s worst vector-carried infectious disease, affects city dwellers more than rural residents. True or false？

False. It might seem that infectious disease of any kind must be more common where people live most closely together. But clustering has other effects that, on the whole, more than offset this urban penalty. For one, the land cover of cities is far-less hospitable to the mosquitoes that transmit malaria than that of urban-fringe and, especially, rural areas. In fact, urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most hopeful trends in the continent’s struggle with the disease.

Drug-resistant tuberculosis is most prevalent in cities. True or false？

True. Not all urban penalties are myths! But even this one grows out of an underlying urban advantage. Concentration of population facilitates the provision of medical care, including anti-TB drug treatment. This, in turn, facilitates the process by which strains resistant to the drugs arise and flourish.

7.Human habitat

High-density living is unhealthy for animal species, human beings included. True or false？

A famous article published in 1962 by John B. Calhoun described a shocking deterioration in the behavior of rats when their populations increased exponentially in confined spaces. Many took his findings to mean that human behavior in cities will do the same as densities increase. But rats do not represent all animals. Others — ants, honeybees, schooling fish, prairie dogs, for example — are social creatures that can only survive and thrive in high densities. Human beings do not have the same biological territoriality as Calhoun’s rats, and their most important qualities depend on society and interaction for their full development.

The question is, if you value and want to preserve the earth, where would you live to make the least impact?

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