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.
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