The houses in these areas are not small; hence they use plenty of energy. About 70 percent of the homes in Celebration are single-family, and only 17 percent of Poundbury’s homes are apartments. The New Urbanist communities do have a higher concentration of condominiums than America as a whole, but they are still mostly full of traditional large homes that use lots of energy. For example, a quick look at Seaside, Florida, real estate for sale found houses between 2,000 and 3,800 square feet, a far cry from a 1,000-square-foot urban apartment. Kentlands, Maryland, another New Urbanist model, was similarly full of four- and five-bedroom homes that need plenty of air conditioning during humid Maryland summers.
While Prince Charles seems to long for a simpler, more agrarian world, Ken Livingstone’s green vision combines sustainability and dynamic urban growth. When he became London’s mayor, Livingstone took a dramatic step against driving. He initially required all drivers to pay £5 each time they entered an inner corridor of London; the charge later rose to £8. For forty years since William Vickrey introduced the idea, congestion charging has appealed to economists who think that people should pay for the social costs of their actions. One person’s driving creates congestion for everyone, so a tax on driving is a good way to use roads more wisely. Ken Livingstone was fearless, as usual, and congestion charges appealed to him for reasons beyond the economists’ customary love of efficiency. Livingstone saw congestion charging as a means of helping the environment by moving people out of cars and into subways. He also saw it as progressive legislation, as drivers tend to be rich and bus riders tend to be poor. By taxing drivers and spending the proceeds on public transit, Livingstone was playing to less wealthy supporters.
The congestion charge immediately had a dramatic impact on London’s streets. There was a greater than 20 percent reduction in driving in the first two weeks. Overall, congestion dropped by 30 percent over the next two years, and public-transit usage boomed. Livingstone’s pet policy helped make London more urban by favoring the trains and buses that are the modes of old urbanism, and he helped the environment in the process.
As mayor, Livingstone also came to see the virtues of high-rise construction in London. Despite the prince’s opposition, London was starting to grow upward. The postmodernist Number 1 Poultry Building, which Prince Charles likened to a “1930s wireless set,” rose on what would have been the site of the Mies tower. More significant, a Canadian development company was putting high-rises on the site of an old wharf. Their Canary Wharf development provided modern digs for London’s financial services industry.
Livingstone’s conversion from antigrowth advocate to supporter of scale reflected the broader perspective that came from leading a big city. Livingstone, like almost every other big-city mayor, wanted a larger tax base. Even if he didn’t much like London’s financiers, he recognized that their earnings would help him improve the lives of his poorer constituents. The fact that cities must compete in a globalized world can turn even the most antibusiness politician into an advocate of glossy high-rises, because those high-rises house the people whose taxes will pay for social programs. Livingstone also recognized that concentrating people in London would be good for the environment because they’d end up living in smaller homes and driving less often.
Prince Charles and Mayor Livingstone are both diehard greens. Ken Livingstone won the Climate Group’s Low Carbon Champions Award. Prince Charles has also received environmental awards. Indeed, he created something of a furor when he flew his entourage of twenty across the ocean to pick up a Global Environmental Citizen Award from Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment.
But their visions of environmentalism are starkly different. The prince’s is rural and traditional. He looks backward and hopes for a return to old ways of living and traditional structures. Livingstone’s environmentalism is urban and radical. He imagines a bold future full of tall structures and mass transit. The modernist architect Richard Rogers chaired Livingstone’s Architecture and Urbanism Unit. In the foreword to that committee’s report, “Housing for a Compact City,” Livingstone embraced higher-density building to protect London’s Green Belt and other community open spaces. By contrast, Charles has condemned skyscrapers as “overblown phallic sculptures and depressingly predictable antennae that say more about an architectural ego than any kind of craftsmanship.”
Which environmentalism will be more effective—Livingstone’s big-city modernism or Prince Charles’s agrarian utopianism? In principle, traditional rural communities are pretty green. If people don’t heat their homes much, or travel much, and stick to traditional rural pursuits, then they’ll use little carbon. On the other hand, you just can’t make a city run without a certain amount of electricity for elevators and public transportation. If people really could be counted upon to act like fifteenth-century rural peasants, then rural ecotowns could be extremely green.
But people don’t want to live like medieval serfs. If they end up living in a low-density area, they’ll drive a lot, and they’ll want big houses that are comfortably cooled and heated. In cities, however, people end up sharing common public spaces, like restaurants, bars, and museums. The urban model is green when used by real people. The data shows that, and we know why: High costs of land restrict private space, and density makes car usage far less attractive. Urban living is sustainable sustainability. Rural ecotowns are not.
The Biggest Battle: Greening India and China
Higher-density construction in the United States and Europe will reduce carbon emissions, but the most important battles over urban development in the coming years will be waged in India and China. About half of America’s homes in 2000 were built between 1970 and 2000, so let’s assume that about half of America’s housing stock thirty years from now will also be new. If every prodensity effort is wildly successful in the United States, emissions from driving and powering these new houses might fall by 50 percent. That would be a great achievement, reducing America’s household carbon emissions by 25 percent and America’s total emissions by 10 percent. Yet from this momentous shift, world carbon emissions would fall by only 2 percent. That calculation is not meant to excuse inaction, but rather to make the point that America is something of a sideshow in the long-run battle against climate change. America has trillions of dollars of infrastructure built around the car, and any developed country changes slowly.
India and China are changing fast, and they have a lot more people than America does. If carbon emissions in India and China rose to American per capita levels, the world’s carbon consumption would increase by 139 percent, even if their population stayed the same. The biggest environmental benefits from supporting higher-density development in the United States may well be in helping persuade the Chinese and Indians to build up rather than out.
Today, the United States is the world’s second biggest carbon emitter; on average, Americans emit about 20 metric tons of carbon dioxide per person per year. Canadians, who also drive a lot, emit almost the same amount per person. Western Europeans are a lot greener. The English emit a little less than 10 tons of carbon dioxide per year; Italians are responsible for about 8 tons; and the French, with all their nuclear energy, produce only about 7 tons of carbon dioxide per person annually.
The Chinese are producing almost 5 tons of carbon dioxide per person per year; the Indians, 1 ton. If the Chinese per capita carbon emissions rise to American levels, this would lead to an extra 20 billion tons of carbon emitted every year, increasing world carbon emissions by 69 percent. But if energy consumption in India and China levels off at the output of France, world emissions would rise by about 30 percent—an increase that could conceivably be offset by carbon cutbacks in the United States and elsewhere. So it’s essential that we encourage these countries to keep their carbon emissions at the more modest European levels rather than emulating current American energy use and development patterns.
Today China’s carbon emissions are largely industrial. Like the
black smoke that once surrounded Pittsburgh or Manchester, they’re the by-product of a great industrial power on the rise. So far, China’s households are remarkably parsimonious energy users. Matthew Kahn, Rui Wang, Siqi Zheng, and I did a city-by-city analysis of China’s household carbon emissions, similar to the one that we did for the United States. While the typical household in the Washington, D.C., area generates 43 tons of carbon dioxide per year, the typical Beijing household emits only 3.997 tons—and Beijing is one of the brownest places in China. In more than 60 percent of the Chinese cities we examined, carbon dioxide emissions per household ran at 2 tons a year or less. Household emissions in Daqing, China’s oil capital and brownest city, are one fifth of emissions in San Diego, America’s greenest city.
Chinese household emissions are driven by home heating and electricity. As countries develop, warmth comes first, long before air conditioning. The heaviest carbon-emitting places in the United States are hot and humid, but the heaviest emitters in China today are cold places, because China heats but it doesn’t yet cool. While half of U.S. household emissions reflect personal transportation, only a tenth of Chinese emissions currently come from cars. The relative paucity of driving and air conditioning in China keeps current emission levels low, but we can hardly expect an increasingly prosperous Chinese population to forgo the luxuries that Americans take for granted. If anything, the case for air conditioning in India seems even stronger.
A generation ago, both China and India were solidly rural. They did little environmental damage because, like all poor places, they used little energy. Over a fifty-year period, however, they’re achieving the same industrial and urban transformation that took centuries in the West. The result is an inevitable explosion in energy consumption, which is today helping to drive up oil prices and in the future could produce extraordinary increases in carbon emissions.
It may be tempting to wish that China and India would just stay committed to traditional agriculture, but subjecting 2.4 billion people to the deprivations of permanent poverty is no solution for climate change. The agricultural past of China and India meant endemic infant mortality and starvation. Permanent poverty means that billions will be subject to every plague that humankind can carry without the help of high-tech medicine. Poverty is a breeding ground for dictatorship, so if India and China stay poor, the rest of us will face the military risks associated with powerful, dictatorial neighbors. There is, however, a middle way that combines prosperity and growth with fewer environmental risks. That path involves high-density urban living, not the cars of American exurbs.
Growth patterns in India and China offer both hopeful and disturbing signs. On the plus side, the great cities of both nations are enormously dense. Mumbai has more than fifty thousand people per square mile, about double the density of New York City. Kolkata and Bangalore are above twenty thousand per square mile. Shenzhen, the rapidly growing metropolis in mainland China across the water from Hong Kong, has more than fifteen thousand people per square mile. These densities fit well with buses and trains and elevators but make car usage practically impossible. The world will be safer if China’s future involves hyperdense places made more comfortable with better public transportation and high-rise residences.
But there are also warning signs. Shanghai and Beijing, with their 20 million and 17 million inhabitants respectively, are vast places about one tenth as dense as New York City and less than half as dense (about 2,600 people per square mile) as Los Angeles. Car usage in both India and China is soaring. Chinese car ownership hit 60 million vehicles in 2009, with an annual rate of increase of over 30 percent. A few more 30 percent years, and China could have 500 million cars by 2020. Meanwhile, India’s Tata Group made headlines by producing a $2,500 car, and Tata’s cars could put a billion Indians behind a wheel, if they can handle the traffic jams. A billion Indian drivers will emit a lot of carbon.
Seeking Smarter Environmentalism
There is a powerful whiff of hypocrisy associated with energy-mad Americans—and I’m part of this group—trying to convince Asians to conserve more. One distinguished economist likened it to a “nation of SUV drivers trying to tell a nation of bicyclists not to drive mopeds.” My awkward suburban life is certainly no model of green living. The only way the West can earn any moral authority on global warming is to first get its own house in order. As long as America leads the developed world in per capita carbon emissions, we’ll never be able to convince China and India and the rest of the developing world to do anything other than emulate our own energy-intensive lifestyles.
The West also needs to embrace a smarter form of environmentalism. In the first phase of environmentalism, when the objective was just to make people care about nature, the exact policy prescription was less important than raising public consciousness. Today the stakes are higher. We cannot endorse every land conservation plan no matter how misguided or counterproductive. We need instead to focus on those proposals that will have a meaningful impact on climate change.
Smart environmentalism requires thinking through the inadvertent side effects of different environmental policies and recognizing those that actually do more harm than good. The conservationists who keep the Bay Area free from new construction are preventing development in the greenest part of America. The law of conservation of construction then means that building will consequently increase in America’s browner areas. The alleged environmentalists who suffer from the Lorax fallacy and fight high-density development close to urban cores in order to preserve local green spaces are ensuring that development will move to the exurban fringe and that people will drive more.
Smart environmentalism needs to embrace incentives. Ken Livingstone’s congestion charge showed the power of using prices to get people out of their cars. This can be done in other cities. Throughout the world, we can adopt a global emissions tax that charges people for the damage done by their carbon emissions. The actual size of the tax needs to be worked out by the experts who can best gauge the true cost of carbon emissions, but the basic principle is one we should all embrace: Unless we charge people for the carbon they emit, they won’t emit less. Opponents of big government understandably worry that this type of policy will just turn into an added source of revenue for the government, but this worry can be reduced with a public commitment to rebating the tax to citizens as an energy dividend, much as the state of Alaska pays each of its citizens an annual dividend from oil revenues.
Richer countries must also offer incentives for poorer countries to use less energy. We can lecture the Chinese about being more French in their energy usage, but our lectures will fall on deaf ears unless we put some of our own resources on the table. The political hurdles facing this type of transfer—you might call it “cash for no oil”—are enormous. I can already hear the isolationists screaming. But the stakes are also large. If the developed world can subsidize more fuel-efficient technology in the developing world, or better yet, subsidize the development of new fuel-efficient technologies that would then be given away free to developing countries, those countries may be able to live better lives with a more moderate increase in energy use. Yet fuel efficiency is unlikely to be the only answer, because Jevons’s paradox reminds us that as engines and appliances get more efficient, they will also be used more.
If the future is going to be greener, then it must be more urban. Dense cities offer a means of living that involves less driving and smaller homes to heat and cool. Maybe someday we’ll be able to drive and cool our homes with almost no carbon emissions, but until then, there is nothing greener than blacktop.
For the sake of humanity and our planet, cities are—and must be—the wave of the future. There are several models of urban success that will carry us into that future. The next chapter discusses the types of cities that will thrive in this century and beyond.
CHAPTER 9
How Do Cities Succeed?
Tolstoy may have been right that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy fami
ly is unhappy in its own way,” but among cities, failures seem similar while successes feel unique. Someone wandering through Leipzig’s boarded-up neighborhoods could very well think she was in Detroit. Empty houses give off a similarly depressing feeling whether they’re in England or Ohio. But no one could ever confuse Bangalore with Boston or Tokyo with Chicago. Successful cities always have a wealth of human energy that expresses itself in different ways and defines its own idiosyncratic space.
The air-conditioned skyways that connect the shimmering towers of downtown Hong Kong are full of the kinds of chain stores that can be found on several continents, and yet few people would think they were anyplace other than Hong Kong. Tokyo and Singapore also boast tall towers and chain stores, but they bear no resemblance to either Hong Kong or each other. While Hong Kong is decidedly multicultural, Tokyo is profoundly Japanese, with special sensibilities that are so hard for outsiders to understand. Singapore is, if anything, even more open to Westerners than Hong Kong, but its streets are less crowded, and its rules are far stricter. All three cities have great food, but the cuisines are also quite different. No one would confuse raw tuna with Cantonese duck or the multiethnic mixture that makes eating in Singapore such a delight.
But all successful cities do have something in common. To thrive, cities must attract smart people and enable them to work collaboratively. There is no such thing as a successful city without human capital. Today, especially in the developed world, skilled people have usually been well educated in traditional schools—although their most important knowledge is usually acquired after graduation. At other times, and in poorer places today, human capital is more likely to come in the form of intelligent, energetic entrepreneurs who, like Henry Ford or James Watt, received little formal education. The best cities have a mix of skills and provide pathways for those who start with less to end with more.
Triumph of the City Page 27