Are cities the green solution?
Sorry for the title. It’s quite an oximoron, but I read on Businessweek the article Cities: Smart Alternative to cars and I found that something makes me believe on the need to think lateral instead of being tough green fighters that only dream on green areas with green trees and where nature looks like they’ve been painted on the old romanticism drawings. We probably will never find this world any more, at least close to our European cities. The metropolitan influence is so strong that urban life is almost everywhere.
But let’s go to the point of this post. The author(Alex Sreffen) claims that a dense populated city (I imagine that there should be a limit for density too) is more easy to move from one part to the other, so that people can avoid using their car and instead they can see public transportation or even walking as alternatives for using the car. And this would reduce a lot the greenhouse effect, after Steffen.
There’s a lot to think about that, because cities are the most inconvenient places in the summer, and with climate change, summer is going to be the most present season inmost places. Temperatures in the cities are almost 3 to 5 degrees higher than on the country. The concrete and the heat coming from city lamps and all sort of electrical engines, work as a heating in the summer, so that life inside those cities is impossible when temperatures go beyond 35 degrees in the country. The nights are as hot as the days and only in connecting the air-conditioning people can survive, jumping from the heat in the street to the freezing ambience at home, in the shops or at the office.
Dense cities means also a city center with towers that need electricity for the elevators and where glass walls let the heat come in. That is more energy consumption. On the other hand, I’m not sure that the metro or the underground is a good transportation in the summer, because if yo have to condition the temperature inside the stations, it also becomes a waste of energy.
So where is the green side of the city? But if we consider how dependent are people on the country from their cars, things look different. How much energy do people waste when living in the country? How many people travel most of the time alone in their car and cannot use public transportation because most lines have been cancelled?
I suppose that we are living a period where the model of growth, that has been considered as a trend for the eternity (the modern life with comfort and individual mobility) is submitted to a strong criticism. Now experts and governments have to think about the solution for living better with less energy and better use of natural resources.
Good ideas have always difficulty to shine in this world of media stars. Let’s see how things will evolve.
