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Living smaller and closer

As population density increase, the distance between people and their destinations decrease. Can reduces energy use, carbon emission, and waste in all sectors of city. The most important factor is automobile use, which is bad for the environment not only because they directly consume fuel and emit pollutants but because they facilitate the creation of far greater sources of energy and environmental damage. Automobile usage also encourage sprawling communities, over sized dwellings, inefficient commerce, and huge networks of redundant urban infrastructure. Density allows people walk from place to place due to proximity of services.
Dense urban centers offer one of the few plausible templates for addressing one of the world’s most discouraging environmental illness, climate change. We need to find ways to reduce the size of our living spaces, and decrease the distance between ourselves and our destinations, and begin to step ourselves away from our near total dependence on automobiles. We should focus on how to make a city more attractive and tolerable for people to live closer together. For example, while planting trees in a neighborhood is important for improving air quality, trees are more important for creating attractive, dense neighborhoods people want to live in. Keeping safe in a neighborhood is one of the best ways to make a dense neighborhood appealing and has a huge impact on sustainability of the city.
Urban density has such high environmental value, we must find ways to shift new residential and commercial development away from places where population growth and economic growth exacerbate critical environmental problems and toward places where population growth and economic growth help to relieve them. First understanding and then extending the benefits of population density and the thoughtful mixing of uses, as well as acknowledging that in a dense city the truly important environmental issues are less likely to be things like amount of solar panels on building roofs than they are to be quality of life concerns like education, culture, crime, street noise, bad smells, resources for the elderly, and the availability of recreational facilities, all of which affect the willingness of people to live in efficient urban cores rather than move out to the suburbs.
Thousands of people walk across the famous Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo Japan



Living in dense city can lead to healthy lifestyle as people need to get out of their cars and walk or bike due to traffic. Some might say that living in the country have health benefits but imagine living in country where public transit is non-existent and most daily destinations are too widely separated to make walking or bicycling plausible as forms of transportation. People tend to think of dense cities as despoilers of the natural landscape, but in fact urban density actually helps to preserve natural environment. The way to protect natural landscapes is to concentrate human development, not to spread it out so that each of us can claim a small piece of it as our very own.

Source- http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-problem-with-sydney-and-melbourne-20151106-gksy2p.html
Image credit- https://www.shutterstock.com/video/search/cross--walk/?ref_context=keyword

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