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There are many discussions on density and sprwal on these forums. I often wonder what is most damaging to the environment; either a city of high density or a city of sprawl. Now I am caveats there are elements of both in many cities.
So I am curious and hope to informed and educated:
What are more harmful to the environment? Dense cities or Sprawl cities?
Location: Cleveland bound with MPLS in the rear-view
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I am certainly not an expert but one simple reason is transit -- cars are major emittors of CO2 and with sprawl mass transit becomes more difficult and inefficient.
Umm a good question to ask would be how many people is too harmful for an environment. While all cities don't sprawl their metros most certainly do. Some of the densest cities in the US still make quite a tremendous environmental impact, whether that's more or less is at issue, especially when you realize that some of the densest metros have just as many people or more commuting to a smaller area.
Location: The Greatest city on Earth: City of Atlanta Proper
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Both are in reality.
The effects of massive suburban sprawl (which all cities have) are obvious. Acres and acres of trees are destroyed along with the natural flora and fauna just plop down a few hundred or less houses. Then there are all the CO2 emissions from the amount of cars needed to support that lifestyle.
Dense urban centers aren't free from fault though. For one, no city is built in a barren waste land, so even the densest cities had to similarly lay waste to the environment before they could be built. Also, every urban center is or was at some point in time was an industrial center. This means hundreds of factories spewing toxic chemicals, toxic waste contaminating the ground, and not to mention the consumption of massive amounts of natural resources that it takes to actually make things in factories.
Of course, once things are built there is always waste and that waste has to go somewhere. Most usually it is just dumped in a river or other body of water or shipped off to some remote place to be someone else's problem. A good example of this was how populated the Cuyahoga river in Cleveland is. It was so bad at one point it literally caught fire.
There is also the fact that in order to support a settlement that is hundreds of thousands or millions of people large it takes an incredible amount of food and water. Likewise, once those materials are consumed the waste has to be taken somewhere. Again it is either just dumped in to a river or other body of water or shipped off somewhere else to be someone else's problem.
So in effect, every type of settlement except for small hunter-gather villages are harmful to the environment just in different ways. That is the nature of our species.
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