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Honestly though, why increase height and density still further? There are stupendous issues here with efficiency with regards to food, water, and HVAC - if nothing else.

Can you back up your impression that there are stupendous efficiency issues with numbers?

In the USA multiple studies have been done on the question. They find that the per capita carbon footprint of people living in major metropolitan areas is lower than those living in smaller cities and the country. And NYC, that concrete jungle that epitomizes a disconnect from anything natural, is actually per capita the one of the 10 most ecologically friendly cities in the nation!

It may be unbelievable to you that it is environmentally friendly to pack people densely enough that walking and public transit become favored options. So I point you to http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2008... for a citation.

Can you back up your impression that there are stupendous efficiency issues with numbers?

I would have thought that the cost of hauling food and water up 60 floors was self-evident? While I could go invest time finding numbers, to be honest I find it a bit rich that you ask me to provide sources while making equally unreferenced, sweeping and IMHO dicier claims in response.

For example, claiming the carbon footprint of city dwellers is low might be possible if it doesn't consider the cost of hauling the products they routinely use and throw away at rates far higher than other people on the planet... but that doesn't make it a realistic or truthful stance on the matter.

I am not surprised that NYC is low on obvious evils when considering this form of skin-deep environmental statistic, because it produces very little of... well, anything. As the center of finance, NY derives a great amount of wealth from achieving effectively zero of utility to the rest of the world.

For something more concrete, let's try measuring garbage. (I'm not going to get in to the interesting question of Wall St.'s facilitatory role in greater evils.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues_in_New_Yo... In September 2012, Travel+Leisure named New York City the #1 "America's Dirtiest City," from the results of a readership survey rating 35 "Favorite Cities" in the United States. It continues: In 2006 Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed legislation establishing a new solid waste management plan, which will use barges and trains to export 90% of the city’s 12,000 daily tons of residential trash. I can tell you that country people don't generate that much trash, and they can often dispose of it in a decentralized fashion (eg. via compost). Even Mexico City only produces 10,000 tons per day (random stat online), and its population is far higher and they probably actually make some tangible goods. But I'm not going to go build a well-referenced numerology of truth here. I hope you might be motivated to research further yourself.

The bottom line is that nature loves decentralization, and 'taxes' centralization. Cities are unnatural conglomerations that abhor nature. While we can sustain them, it's not the smartest thing to do in a finite world. Society is just beginning to learn from and invest in this with concessions to green architecture, urban design, public transportation, public communications infrastructure projects (Australia, China, France, New Zealand...), decentralized energy generation, etc.

Up 60 floors perhaps, but getting it there required only bringing it a few miles from the nearest depot (having been brought there en-masse) rather than a giant star (or worse) network, replicating the same effort 1000 times to transport said food and commodities and to provide infrastructure to every one of the many parties in the decentralised model you propose as more efficient. :/

Point of obvious fact for you. When I provide a citation, that's not an unreferenced claim. And, unlike you, I'm not cherry picking my references.

What do I mean by cherry picking? Let's take your Wikipedia link, one sentence before the travel and leisure survey. New York City accounts for only 1% of United States greenhouse gas emissions while housing 2.7% of its population.

This is all consistent with what I said. NYC has a ton of people. Having a ton of people, it is inevitably an environmental eyesore. However, per person, it is environmentally better than the alternative.

Let's look at your garbage claim. NYC produces 12,000 tons per day of garbage. NYC has about 8.3 million people. That's 2.89 pounds of garbage per person. From http://www.cleanair.org/Waste/wasteFacts.html we see that the average American produces 4.5 pounds of garbage per day, of which 66.8% is sent to landfill. That's 3.01 pounds. Again, per capita, NYC beats the rest of the USA. Of course this is slightly unfair. Again, as you note, NYC has mostly outsourced its manufacturing. Manufacturing generates lots of garbage. I don't see an easy way to quantify that. However I do note that NYC has a high density of very rich people whose consumption can be expected to be above average.

I've lived in the country. Based on my experience, people who live in the country create tons of garbage, it is just not centralized.

It is true that Mexico city does better. However Mexico city is also poorer. Poor people, out of necessity, cannot consume much.

Next let's move on to your points about raising water. First of all, as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper#Environmental_impac... makes clear, it is true that it takes energy to put stuff high in the sky. But there are tradeoffs and it is not at all clear whether a skyscraper is or is not environmentally efficient.

But that's irrelevant. The population density of NYC doesn't require high skyscrapers. I've lived there. It is really dependent upon having small apartments, packed closely together. Most of the city is made up of buildings that are 5 stories high. (Because at 6 stories you need to install elevators.)

As for your general hate of cities, I submit that the facts don't support it. It is true that cities are unnatural, expensive things. However, per capita, they tend be more efficient. But fundamentally there is no way to support an unlimited number of people in a finite world.

I think GDP was shown to grow almost quadratically with density. It wasn't so much about efficiences, as omnipresent services. If you can walk past 10 hotdog vendors on the way to work, you'll probably buy one.

Interesting stat. Got a source?

Good for health? No. Good for the environment? No. Good for corporate profits, ease of taxation, and established measures of economic trajectory including GDP? Yes. This is the story of the city, and its inhabitant is you.

"Good for health?"

Manhattan has some of the lowest obesity rates in the country due to inhabitants reliance on walking/public transit over driving. There are few studies that show a 2 year life expectancy vs rural areas in the UK, but it's not a totally clear cut win for rural areas overall.

"Good for the environment? No."

Yes, actually - it's a lot more efficient to deliver services to people in densely populated areas than when they're spread thinly across the country side.

"Per capita emissions in New York, Toronto and Barcelona are only a third of their national average, and the emissions of Tokyo, London and Seoul come in at about half of their countries' level." - http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16819-city-dwellers-ha... - http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/the-comparatively-... has a ton of other sources, including a brookings institute study and some others

No disagreement on corporate profits. Cities are also great as birthplaces of movements, musical genres, schools of art, and political theories. Think the east village during punk, detroit in the 50s for rock, the salons of paris around the French Revolution, etc etc.

There are definitely great reasons to live in rural areas, but being a city dweller is far from inherently worse.

Health: Correlation is not causation. Those people also have cash, access to the best care, preventative care, etc.

Environment: What services are you talking about? Remember that to squeeze people together in the first place you have to import and maintain costly networks for moving food, water and energy. So dealing with decentralization from an efficiency standpoint should take this tradeoff in to account. As for the emissions references, I suppose they don't take in to account the ridiculous amount of pollution that goes on overseas or in other areas for products shipped in to cities (or the overheads of shipping itself).

I agree that historically there's great social and intellectual wealth in cities, but I personally believe that's now being eclipsed by non-geographic movements, many of which are largely fostered through the internet.

You seem to assume that you don't need to create and maintain costly networks for moving food, water and energy for people to live in rural areas. Not many people in rural areas farm their own food and sort out their own local water and energy supply.

Cities benefit because you can bring in resources using more efficient means in larger quantities.

The availability of water varies regionally, but in many areas it is not a big deal to drill a well and have clean water (and septic is usually just a matter of meeting building codes).

Energy and food are still a big deal, but the mix today is that shipping fuel has less impact on food prices than real estate value (that is, the food at rural stores isn't particularly expensive and they usually aren't that far away). They may be less economical than city stores, but they seem tenable.

I sort of think the trick is to figure out a set of policies that lead to healthy medium-high density areas, as it is most 'great cities' seem to be at least partly accidental.

> but in many areas it is not a big deal to drill a well and have clean water

Yet that is not how more than a miniscule fraction of houses in less densely built areas gets their water.

> Energy and food are still a big deal, but the mix today is that shipping fuel has less impact on food prices than real estate value (that is, the food at rural stores isn't particularly expensive and they usually aren't that far away). They may be less economical than city stores, but they seem tenable.

The real estate cost is irrelevant to the discussion of the efficiency of urban vs. rural energy and food delivery.

I was responding to you calling the distribution networks costly. If rural distribution ends up costing less, the efficiency isn't something you are going to get people to give much consideration.

This is why I then start talking about making more good cities, because that should presumably remove some of the costs that are more or less associated with lack of supply.

* Environment*

In theory, cities are better. It's cheaper to build a road network for 10 million people than 1000 road networks for 10,000 people. You can ship stuff in with container ships, rather than trucks.

But this might cause people to be more wasteful. Everything is cheap and accessible, so they consume more stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_West

From wiki: 15% increase in service per capita with a doubling of city size (so it's not a fast quadratic).

There's TED talks, google talks, articles, and NYTimes articles on the wiki.

It seems like you have a lot of misconceptions about cities and there health and environmental impacts, which have been proven multiple times to be lower in per capita then suburban and rural communities, often by great amounts. I'd like to understand why you think the decentralized model is more sustainable, It requires cars and roads to live outside the M25. Other comments have dealt with these numbers already.

Anyway, to my point. I see no reason why new technology and interconnectedness is going to lead to the decline of the western city. My Experience suggests its more likely to lead to a greater desire among young adults to move to the urban cores (as they always habe), for Sex/Marriage, Culture and Nightlife as they see there own friends partake, so to speak. At the end of the day, extremely few people would find the internet an acceptable replacement to living amongst ones peers

my bet is that, broadly speaking, emerging labour markets (our type of industry, for example) based on new technologies for communications and a reformed education system will cause a mass migration of professionals away from cities, back to a more sustainable, decentralized model.

You never heard of the economy of scale that comes with urban density? How would lower density makes the environment more "sustainable"?

In short, being closer to nature breeds efficiency.

For some basic examples: with more privacy, less pollution and lower rise building, people have a viable option to open a window when they're hot instead of turning on the air conditioner. Eating food from your own garden. Being more conscious of which food is in season, thus consuming more of it and less of the other stuff, saving on transport and artificial production overheads. Realistic capacity for grid-independent energy generation, wastewater disposal, rainwater capture, etc. There are plenty more.

(Edit: Seeing as people are apparently voting this down, I am honestly curious what they disagree with?)

Do you have some numbers? All the ones I know point to rural populations having significantly larger pollution footprints than urban populations, despite those advantages.

I don't think it's realistic to lump all rural populations together. For example, the unabomber's woodsman hut style existence probably had effectively zero pollution footprint. Whereas, the also American example of a large scale industrial farmer with a four bedroom house, two cars and a family, large scale farming equipment, and expectations of 24x7x365 electricity, water, sewerage, cell phone signals, non-local products and in-school education for his children is going to be worse than an urbanite.

If you are ever lucky enough to get the chance visit some more traditional cultures, you can see for yourself just how slight an impact they make on their environment, with houses, food, and clothes alike built from nature. It's amazing.

So, my position isn't realistic because it doesn't take into account the possibility that large parts of the population may choose to go back to a pre-industrial life?

No, I was pointing out the methodological problem with your suggested use of statistics, and that of course we have a spectrum of options when moving away from cities. My own feeling is that most of them are going to lead to less impact on nature, but perhaps you are right and in the short term many people will demand the same level of convenient consumption. Time will tell. Eventually, however, it seems clear to me that practicality will triumph convenience, since it's widely acknowledged that the first world presently consumes on a level that is ridiculously unsustainable and we will simply run out of the capacity to continue.

The biggest reason that cities are expensive to live in isn't so much a lack of land, it's a lack of properly zoned land. Even in limited areas like Manhattan, we have imposed extra artificial limitations on ourselves in the form of zoning laws. Remove those laws, and there will be much more housing built, and it will be cheaper to live in cities. Forced low income housing is another restriction, by only giving developers reasonable exceptions to draconian laws like minimum parking requirements if they set aside a certain portion of the units to low income housing, the government again restricts density. Better to remove ridiculous zoning laws in general, and housing will become more affordable for everyone.

My personal view is that cities of the present are essentially serving the same purposes they have served since the 19th century: meeting places for like-minded participants in labour markets, social and cultural gatherings, and sex.

As the cost of living in cities rises due to the shortage of land and the requirement for importing food and water, those seeking life partners can increase not only their number of prospective mates, but the feasibility of finding one who makes a lot of money. Not to mention the availability and acceptability of almost any persuasion, hobby, or kink. Those souls most interested in health will have no problem finding a vegan delicacy at any mealtime, no worry of being stuck with some "salad" at McDonald's as the only option being any points A and B, and they can always hop a train to commune with nature.

Broadly speaking, the desire of people to live near thousands of their peers after graduation will cause young professionals to keep moving to cities, eschewing a life more connected with nature for one with a greater diversity of local work opportunities, events, and beautiful bodies. Just like London.

Sex is a reasonable point to bring up. I guess you argue that cities are little more than vast, non-stop, multi-generational orgies. But London? http://www.allaboutfrogs.org/stories/well.html