High Density and Sustainability

The premise of the article seems to be that high density cities are less energy efficient and therefore not sustainable. I think that might be debatable in itself. But in any case, that's only true if you use non sustainable sources of energy. Australia particularly has no excuse to not power it self using just wind and solar (+ batteries). They'll probably get there eventually. Switch to clean energy and then sustainability has to be about other things than energy usage.

The biggest problem Australia has is climate (heat waves) and water shortages. Even that is a solvable problem given that they are surrounded by oceans that you can produce clean water from with sustainable energy. Sustainable farming is a solution here as well.

The counter argument argument to this article is that spreading millions of people all over the place would be hugely disruptive to nature. Wherever we go, we chop down trees, turn forests into farmland, and quite often into dessert eventually. We cut roads through nature, pollute our rivers, etc. Not sustainable at all. There are soon going to be 10 billion people on this planet. The only way to sustain that is to keep most of those in cities.

The author's use of facts is much appreciated and sets a good direction.

However, although welcome, this is certainly not definitive. High density environments might be especially good for building high-productivity economic clusters [0]. I expect the average service quality in the CBD to be higher for example. In fact, I'd also expect higher per-capita emissions by people in the CBD on the assumption they are probably wealthier than suburban counterparts.

There are advantages and disadvantages to high density living, so even if the current rationale were faulty that is not the end of the matter.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster

Direct link to the paper PDF :

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/207354655.pdf

Lenzen, Manfred, Dey, Christopher and Foran, Barney (2004). Energy Requirements of Sydney Households. Ecological Economics 49

This is just silly. Before asking for double blind experiments or other types of scientific proof, one needs to first apply some common sense? Did the author ever live in a low density and a high density environment, so they can compare?

I did. Or rather, I lived in a high density (3500 people/sqmile) and I'm currently live in an ultra-high density area (45000/sqm). I used to have a car, and now I don't. I can now find most things I need within a distance of 2 to at most 3 blocks: the elementary schools my kids go to, grocery, pharmacy, movie theater, mall, gym, playgrounds, parks, a ballfield, gym with pool, liquor store, a few restaurants, a few docks with public bicycles (Citibikes), a bookstore (Barnes and Noble), a department store (Target), quite a number of cafees, etc, etc. In the past, whenever I needed something I would hop in the car and drive 5-50 minutes, get the thing, and drive back. Now I just cross the street.

If you want to keep the same level of economic activity, then low density requires a really good transportation system (be it more highways for private cars or better public transport). Roughly speaking, every person living in a city cluster should be able to reliably get to any other person living in the same cluster in 60-90 minutes tops, otherwise they are much less likely to interact with each other. More people inside this radius, more economic activity you will get (of course, it's not a linear dependency, the principle of diminishing returns applies here as well). High-density provides double win in this regard, not only you shrink distances, but also more people live inside the same area.

So until we get a transport revolution (be it autonomous cars, flying taxis, advanced concepts of public transportation or something else), I highly doubt low-density will be economically viable for core clusters.

Huh the author claims low density living is more sustainable, but I don’t see how that’s supported by the underlying paper (Lenzen et al. 2004). It presents some interesting (albeit unsurprising) findings, e.g., energy use positively correlates with income, larger households generally require less energy per capita, etc., but it doesn’t make any statements as to whether dense or non-dense living is more preferable from an environmental standpoint.

Also, haven’t been to Australia in 15+ years but can you really make an argument either for or against dense cities by comparing different parts of Sydney? Central Tokyo is dense, NYC is dense, Singapore is dense. Sydney seemed medium density at most in comparison.

I'll leave to pros to come up with accurate estimates, but it doesn't seem hard to back the intuition that higher density let's your save on a bunch of duplicated infraestruture, services, goods, and energy expended on driving things across distances.

Also, sprawl invariably increases human territory in areas that could be left for wildlife

Either Australian digits are vastly different from everywhere in the world, or the author has some major problem with elementary arithmetics.