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1. Soil is a natural water filtration system. If rainwater can sink into the ground it will end up cleaner than if it ran on cement and through storm drains picking up pollutants and into a river, lake, ocean, ect. Lots of soil and plant material can naturally process and neutralize pollutants too.
Suburbs are not free of cement. They have a higher proportion of roads and parking lots, and those parking lots block water just as much as a building footprint. Office space for one worker takes up 250 square feet--their car's parking space takes up 400 square feet. Take the car out of the equation and you save yourself 400 square feet of concrete per capita.
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2. Cities soak up and hold more heat than areas with greenery, which negatively effects the city environment.
Suburban "power centers", malls, and the parking lots around everything hold massive amounts of heat, especially due to dark-colored parking lots and roads. Sure, you can add some trees to a parking lot, but you can do the same thing in the city or the country.
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3. Suburban areas aren't great for wildlife, but will support a much higher diversity of wildlife than an urban area.
Why, and how? Trimmed suburban lawns and office parks are no more a "natural habitat" than trimmed city parks and street trees. Proximity to undeveloped land is a bigger factor.
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4. Greater densities of humans will create greater amounts of garbage, sewage and power/resource consumption than a less dense area. Disposal becomes a bigger problem because there is less land area to absorb the damage.
I suppose that's true if all else is equal--but in a city vs. suburb comparison, these things are not equal. Power/resource consumption is less--housing tends to be smaller with shared walls, so energy use to heat/cool is less. You don't have to water your lawn if you don't have a lawn, so water use (and thus sewer runoff) is less. Garbage would be about the same per capita, and generally neither cities nor suburbs store their garbage internally so the issue of "less land to absorb the damage" is moot--both ship their garbage elsewhere for disposal.
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5. All your green city ideas can help, but honestly how often do you see them in real life?
Some of them were just plain inherent in the way we used to build cities, often ideas that were abandoned when we assumed that the government would always be rich, gas would always be cheap and atomic power would result in electricity so cheap we wouldn't need electric meters. Some of them are starting to become very fashionable in city planning circles, so yes, I do tend to see them often in real life, and expect to see them more often as the abundance of gas, electricity and government funding continues to ebb.
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6. Cheaply built wooden buildings would rot away faster and the environment would recover much more quickly than an area of steel, glass and concrete towers, should humankind happen to leave the area. A suburban zone would revert back to nature MUCH faster than an urban area.
The problem is that those buildings rot away faster whether or not the area is abandoned, so they constantly have to be rebuilt! This point assumes that we would be leaving the area, moving on to virgin territory constantly, instead of staying put and making a more permanent investment in a particular place. And, once again, remember that those cheap wooden buildings are just the most obvious part of suburbia--they wouldn't exist without those very permanent concrete and asphalt roads, the concrete and steel malls and big-box stores and power centers and corporate "campuses."
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The bottom line: both are bad for the environment for different reasons, but we also need a place to live. I would rather see green urban areas surrounded by open space and/or agricultural areas myself, but suburbia isn't going away anytime soon. Suburbia isn't as bad at as a lot of people want to believe either.
Neither is urban living. In the near future I expect them to grow to resemble each other more and more--more walkability and mixed use in the suburbs, more trees and families in the city, and more public transit in both.
My bottom line is that a per-acre comparison between city and suburb isn't fair: the whole point of urban density is that it takes up fewer acres. The real impact should be measured on a per capita basis, and when taken that way it is clear that higher density can be a heck of a lot greener--but that "high density" certainly does not have to mean walls of concrete and steel high-rises.
My bottom line is that a per-acre comparison between city and suburb isn't fair: the whole point of urban density is that it takes up fewer acres.
That only works if the area of density is isolated. The NE on the other hand are areas of continuous urban areas that spawl into one another to form areas that take up as much space as any sunbelt city. Granted they are not one city, but the building patterns of the multiple cities, and the space it takes up is just the same as the sunbelt cities.
SO it is more concrete in the same amount of space.
Look at the East Coast. NOVA runs into DC, which runs into Baltimore, then Newark, then Wilmington, Philly, Trenton, Newark, NY, Jersey City, Stamford, New Haven.
The northeast is just one urban sprawl form NOVA to Boston
Having never visited the east coast, I don't have any personal experience, so I went to Google Maps and scrolled around the coast between Virginia and Boston--not every inch, of course, but just looking at landforms and the built environment. There are certainly a lot of cities there--natural for a highly populated part of the country that has been around for 400 or so years. But when you zoom in, the areas of high-steel dense urbanity are comparatively limited. Mostly, you see single-family homes on cul-de-sacs, or, in older neighborhoods, in traditional street grids. In other words, suburbs, often with little interstices of trees in between neighborhoods. There are a few wilderness areas, of course, and large areas of uninterrupted green,
This is called "sprawl." Not the kind of urban sprawl you are trying to assign (something entirely of concrete, with nary a front lawn or split-level rancher to be seen) but suburban sprawl around every American city. It takes up the same space as the sunbelt cities because every American city experienced sprawl--the ones that couldn't expand their physical spread jumped water barriers to sprawl into nearby geographic areas (like the five boroughs of New York and its many suburban feeders, or the greater San Francisco Bay Area surrounding the mere 49 miles of San Francisco.) The actual areas you would describe as "urban," high-rise concrete, are a very small percentage of what you're describing.
I guess I'm completely missing what your point is with all this. People take up a lot of space. In the past century, that amount of space has multiplied on a per-person basis, and the amount of energy and waste he generated has also multiplied on a per-person basis. There is a definite and clear relationship between those two multiplications of our effects on the landscape in terms of both space and resources/mess.
Besides, if we stopped building dense cities and instead only built low-density automobile suburbs, the amount of people and stuff currently between Northern Virginia and Boston would be difficult to cram into the space between the Florida Keys and Newfoundland.
Having never visited the east coast, I don't have any personal experience, so I went to Google Maps and scrolled around the coast between Virginia and Boston--not every inch, of course, but just looking at landforms and the built environment. There are certainly a lot of cities there--natural for a highly populated part of the country that has been around for 400 or so years. But when you zoom in, the areas of high-steel dense urbanity are comparatively limited. Mostly, you see single-family homes on cul-de-sacs, or, in older neighborhoods, in traditional street grids. In other words, suburbs, often with little interstices of trees in between neighborhoods. There are a few wilderness areas, of course, and large areas of uninterrupted green,
This is called "sprawl." Not the kind of urban sprawl you are trying to assign (something entirely of concrete, with nary a front lawn or split-level rancher to be seen) but suburban sprawl around every American city. It takes up the same space as the sunbelt cities because every American city experienced sprawl--the ones that couldn't expand their physical spread jumped water barriers to sprawl into nearby geographic areas (like the five boroughs of New York and its many suburban feeders, or the greater San Francisco Bay Area surrounding the mere 49 miles of San Francisco.) The actual areas you would describe as "urban," high-rise concrete, are a very small percentage of what you're describing.
I guess I'm completely missing what your point is with all this. People take up a lot of space. In the past century, that amount of space has multiplied on a per-person basis, and the amount of energy and waste he generated has also multiplied on a per-person basis. There is a definite and clear relationship between those two multiplications of our effects on the landscape in terms of both space and resources/mess.
Besides, if we stopped building dense cities and instead only built low-density automobile suburbs, the amount of people and stuff currently between Northern Virginia and Boston would be difficult to cram into the space between the Florida Keys and Newfoundland.
My point is the people from the North east are always looking down on how we build cities in the south and in the west, when in fact the NE areas are built just the same landwise. Only Difference is the City of Houston would take up the space that New Jersey takes up, but that doesn't mean there are less trees in Houston than in New Jersey. New Jersey is a highly dense state so that may not be a good example.
The Sunbelt cities may be large but driving between them there is a lot of virgin land.
It is 250 Miles between Houston and Dallas. Look at all the empty forests between the tow. It is about the same distance between Wilmington, DE and and Hartford Connecticut, but look how few natural space has been left untouched.
My point again is that high density would have a lower impact on the environment if nothing was built between them
In other words, high-density areas would have a lower impact if it wasn't for all the low-density areas?
I suppose you're talking to the wrong guy. Having never been farther east than Chicago, my only direct experience is with western cities. Eastern cities' suburbs run together because eastern cities were closer together before the age of suburban expansion, while western cities were, for the most part, farther apart. And where cities were built prior to World War II, they were for the most part built exactly the same way as East Coast cities. And there are plenty of places on the west coast where low-density suburbs run directly into each other--in the case of places like Orange County, there is often no dense central "city" at all. The main exceptions are places where deliberate limits were placed on urban growth.
I think the smarter development overall would be beneficial in all areas. Reliance on the car overall without alternatives is not conducive to smart growth. More cohesive zoning would also be beneficial
In other words, high-density areas would have a lower impact if it wasn't for all the low-density areas?
I suppose you're talking to the wrong guy. Having never been farther east than Chicago, my only direct experience is with western cities. Eastern cities' suburbs run together because eastern cities were closer together before the age of suburban expansion, while western cities were, for the most part, farther apart. And where cities were built prior to World War II, they were for the most part built exactly the same way as East Coast cities. And there are plenty of places on the west coast where low-density suburbs run directly into each other--in the case of places like Orange County, there is often no dense central "city" at all. The main exceptions are places where deliberate limits were placed on urban growth.
If they have the same problem they should not be looking down on others.
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