Customer Reviews

Green Metropolis: What the City Can Teach the Country About True Sustainability

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

You have to read this book carefully, since at first glance it reads like a gigantic love letter to New York City, with the heart in "I (heart) NY" recolored green. And if you do read it that way, you're going to miss the point of what the author is saying.

The problem with green thinking is that there's a whole heck of a lot of self-delusion going on, and when it comes to urban planning, David Owen has done a lot of looking into it, pointing out that at the end of the day, a lot of "green" purchases and behaviors are attempts to rationalize consumption without actually reducing it. Along the way, he steps on the toes of the great pastoral myth of environmentalism by showing how anti-city bias in conservation thinking has often served to promote the very urban sprawl it's supposed to be fighting. And Owen is hardly a global warming denialist or ecology "skeptic" either -- in fact, the primary focus of the book is on managing carbon footprints and just how poorly that's done.

Owen's dirty little secret is something urban planners and ecological experts have been promoting for years with little heed from the general public -- that the density of cities like New York is key to creating a low-consumption environment, since distances between home, work, and other activities are relatively small and therefore cars are generally unnecessary. Owen looks at carbon footprint in per capita terms, showing how the average New Yorker uses something like one third of the total oil consumption of a rural Vermonter, and points out the absurdity of building a "green" corporate campus (his prime example being Sprint/Nextel's in Kansas) so far away from a city that virtually all employees have to drive to work. He even goes as far as to attack the locavore movement, noting that because of the ability to pool resources (i.e. load lots of produce onto one big truck), a container of raspberries going from California to NYC can have a smaller carbon footprint than the same container grown in upstate New York.

Now the book isn't perfect -- Owen leaves a lot of loose ends and really doesn't do a lot of theorizing about solutions beyond the broad templates he outlines about transit-heavy city life, and his dislike of urban agriculture of the sort proposed by futurists seems rather inflexible and underinformed; his points about excessive open space (particularly Central Park, which he finds oversized and underutilized) are sensible in terms of walkability, but urban agriculture as such is still in its infancy. He seems to avoid the issue of concentrated air pollution in urban settings, a curious omission when dealing with urban environmental matters. (And, most curiously, Owen doesn't seem to offer any opinions on the works of Paolo Solieri, the creator of the concept of the arcology and seemingly one of the most relevant of all architects to his point, although Frank Lloyd Wright comes in for a drubbing due to his unrelenting support of suburban expansion.) But the book shines at pointing out the absurdities of the modern environmental movement (in the process tending to prove a theory I've long held about the environment/ecology section at bookstores, that the signal to noise ratio is heavily tilted in favor of noise from both sides) and functions as a call to the environmental movement to stop seeing urban life as the enemy.

This was a pleasant surprise.
When I read the first chapter of Green Metropolis, I was worried that my fears about this book might be confirmed. After all, the blurb says that the author is going to reveal how New York City is more sustainable than Snowmass, Colorado or Burlington, Vermont. Hmm, I thought, there's not much to that. People in NYC don't drive cars, they live on top and side-by-side of each other (so they share heating costs), and they have great transit. Why should any readers find it surprising that NYC is so sustainable?

I was kind of impatient, I suppose. I remember sitting in a hotel near the campus of Sprint, on about 110th St and Metcalf in Kansas City, Missouri (a national epicenter of sprawl!) and telling my sister that its not enough to say NYC is the ideal for sustainability. You can't turn this into Greenwich Village, right? In other words, that kind of insight is lacking because it offers no value for what policy should do about the problem of sprawl.

Moreover, I thought, why is David Owen singing the praises of NYC, when he moved from there to rural Northwestern Connecticut?

Owen must have known that, because this book seems to understand that its not enough to laud NYC. What this book does it go step-by-step through many of planning's existing antidotes to sprawl and reveal their limitations. This is a book about challenging the assumptions that govern current sustainability policy.

The problem, he says, is that New York was built not by policy makers with the right vision, but by lucky timing. It was good timing because most of the city was laid out before the car. What is even more important to realize, he says, is that it was only because of the inability of planners to exert their will upon NYC's urban form that it turned out so well. The best efforts of man didn't foul things up. Although zoning laws and modern planning had begun to take root as early as the 20s, professional planners didn't realize their will on NYC. Too many land decisions were already predetermined before zoning could force segregated land uses. New York succeeded in spite of the best intentions of policy.

Moreover, NYC continues to succeed mostly due to forces that are beyond the decision-making of consumers and policy makers. People choose transit because they don't have a better option. Given the choice, many New Yorkers might drive Smart ForTwo cars if they were available. Sure, there would be more fuel efficient cars on the road - but there would then be fewer walkers.

Owens works over so many of the hot ideas in sustainability - from traffic calming, to congestion pricing, to LEED, to HOV lanes, to locavorism, to new urbanism - and shows how each produces unintended impacts that offset much if not all of their value. LEED, for example, is undermined by its focus on becoming green by adding extra features to buildings. It is a dream for a builder, but is it really sustainable to build a 4,000 square foot house even if it has bamboo cabinetry and argon windows? Wouldn't it be more sustainable, he suggests, to just live more simply?

The problem that undermines efforts to make Kansas City sustainable are in many ways the same problems, albeit on a larger scale, that make it hard to build sustainability on the household level. Current policy focuses on making a better "bad:" i.e., low sulfur coal, hybrid cars, bamboo flooring. What would be better would be to shift more to the "goods:" walking, biking, and generally consuming less.

Once a suburb has been developed and infrastructure has been invested and built to service that new "place," the die is cast. People can build a solar panel, but they are still going to be driving just as far from work to home. You can have a Prius, but you are still driving it on roads. It's the miles, not the mileage. Its the low-density development that prevents people from walking or biking.

For individuals, it is much the same: once a bad decision has been made, even trying to improve on a "bad," is limited. Owen does own that house that is 1 mile from the nearest commercial entity. He could move back to NYC, but then someone else would move into his home and consume on the same scale. If anything, he reasons, its better for a work-at-home person to inhabit this space.

I think he recognizes the value of using market forces and incentives to change travel plans, but he seems to argue that the labor-saving capacity of oil is rarely equalized by policy. Oil is just too efficient, it seems. You have to deny its use - rationing its use only makes the auto mode more efficient - thereby reducing the chance that congestion will send a strong enough signal to travelers that they should just ride a bike.

I haven't been satisfied with Michael Pollan because he seems to ignore some of the critiques against his ideas. I.E. - if I consume "local", do I have to give up coffee, gasoline, and most anything made with foreign minerals? How about the 2 or 3 billion who will be left to go hungry when we eliminate agriculture at scale? I have appreciated the ability of Bill McKibben to critique the problems of our current lifestyle. Then again, I am not sure he has spoken adequately about their solutions.

Upon reading Owen, I am left with a feeling of the nuances and tensions within many of the questions surrounding the sustainability of people and cities. I think this book has a place for the bookshelves of a policy maker or in the syllabi of some college planning courses. Riverhead Press says this is a book about the environment. Really, it is a book about urban planning. The author makes reference to Jane Jacobs, to Christopher Alexander, to Robert Moses, and to many of the nation's great land-use planners.

Green Metropolis is an excellent thought provoking book and vividly highlights the disconnect between what the community perceives as being "green" and what truly is. I'll give this book 5 stars but would like to mention a few shortcomings.
I thought his criticisms of Central Park and Park Avenue were completely off the mark, dead wrong. One of biggest issues that, to my mind, haunts the thesis of this book is how to make dense urban living palatable and even desirable for a range of classes of people. Central Park was conceived at the very same time that New York was beginning to "experiment" with the large apartment building. Buildings such as the Dakota (1880) were designed specifically to lure well heeled city dwellers away from single family homes (townhouses) and into denser multi-story buildings with luxury space and services. (sound familiar?) Over the next 50 years many more even larger apartment buildings were built on both sides of the Park which was one of the most important ingredients in creating a DESIRABLE dense neighborhood. Far from being a built "criticism" of the dense city (as Owen may perceive it) Central Park was an enabler of density. As wonderful as Jane Jacobs' Greenwich Village of the 40's was, most "upper east side" types probably didn't want to live there then, and they certainly didn't in 1908.
Similar points can be made about Park Avenue. I assume he is referring to that portion of Park Avenue above Grand Central Terminal. This urban boulevard was conceived as cure for the urban blight of the Harlem and New York Railroad tracks (it covered the tracks) as well as an armature for dense luxury apartment building development on both sides. Yes, the ground floors of those buildings may seem a bit sterile to Owen (and others including myself)but the buildings well heeled occupants probably like it that way and can find all the urban vitality they want a block away on Madison and Lexington avenues respectively. Sure, Park Avenue is an "edge" or border between two similar neighborhoods, but that's what boulevards are supposed to do in urban planning. Park Avenue isn't a "criticism" of dense cities. The tree lined boulevard is one component in a tool box for making high density possible. They help establishes scale and define precincts in large citys. They don't negatively impact density in any meaningful way. Owen seems to miss this point. Why did Owen bother to pick on these two NYC features in the first place. Didn't he already establish Manhattan as his "gold standard" in the first chapter?
Owen is needlessly harsh and dismissive with Washington DC. He draws far too many erroneous conclusions from the hotel desk clerk who advises him to catch a cab for a 4 block trip. Yes, the central Mall area of DC is very vast and spread out and bereft of urban amenities. Distances are farther than they look and the buildings are by design over scaled to work in that setting. But that is just one district and its flaws are not caused by axial boulevards per se but by misapplied land use concepts contained in DC's "City Beautiful" era Beaux-Arts McMillan Plan of 1901 which created a vast central "monumental core" area of monumental structures set in gardens. Neighborhoods like Foggy Bottom (near GW) and Dupont Circle, just to name two that are outside the McMillan Plan area, are dense, walkable and contain townhouses and 5 to 10 story apartment buildings and have plenty of street amenities. As for the oft-sited building height restriction in Washington the vast majority of Manhattan apartment buildings within Greenwich Village, above 75th street and within the boroughs of the Bronx and Brooklyn, would fit within Washington DC's height restrictions. Sure, Washington as a whole hasn't reached Manhattan levels of density but it's not Phoenix either.
I believe that these are but three examples of how late 19th century planners sought to make density palatable at a time when cities were even grimier and more dangerous than they are today. A close look at FL Olmstead's writings and city planning projects of the late 19th century reveals a man who actively grappled during the latter half of his life with the very same issue that haunts Green Metropolis, that is, how to get Americans to want or at least accept living in dense cities. Parker and Unwin grappled with these very same issues in England at the turn of the century.
Nevertheless, I belive the fundemental thesis of this book is sound and Owen gets it out for all to see and react to with wit and conviction. While I wasn't expecting Owen to pull some sort of "blueprint" for a Manhattan-like "city of the future" out of the bag by the end of the book, I was still left wondering...OK so what do we do now? When the President is advocating both "green economy" initiatives AND $8,000 first time home buyer tax credits in "drive til you quality" suburbs in the same speech you are left wondering if anyone in the country besides Owen really sees how absurd and contradictory this. In the end, weaning Americans off the short term economic engine and emotional attachment of single family housing production and automobile oriented development may be a lot harder than weaning Afghan farmers off opium poppies.

The author challenges a lot of notions about green - but ultimately falls flat when analyzing his own situation and the situation of others likes him, which deflates the argument he's been making all along and damages the strength of the book.

The author goes through many ways that a city, most specifically Manhattan, is much greener than the lifestyle most Americans enjoy. To sum it up - living in small spaces, where one can't accumulate much stuff, and taking mass transit to work is much greener than living in a spectacular house in the suburbs with every green amenity (turbines, water reclamation, etc.) available. The best parts of the book are his one by one dismissals of LEED features as impractical or just silly bureaucracy for most buildings. A large, sprawling corporate campus, like the Gap outside of San Francisco, can be hailed as a green mecca due to its renewable energy, etc. - but if they simply built in an office tower in San Francisco, it would be far greener. The comparisons and information included is thought provoking and has made me rethink the benefits of LEED and so-called green construction.

Unfortunately, his book has two problems - the first, well, there just aren't that many areas like Manhattan or San Francisco city for people to live in, and he doesn't suggest any real ways to promote developing and growing those areas. The second, bigger problem, alluded to previously - the author lives in an 18th century house in the middle of nowhere Connecticut. He lived in New York for years, but now does exactly what he excoriates others for doing. For all the talk of how wonderful the city is, he lives in an area more rural than most. His justification for this is essentially - he'd move back to New York, but someone else would just move to his house, so what's the big deal? Excuse me? Couldn't anyone use that justification for not living in the city?

David Owen's new book is right on target in reminding us of the environmental benefits of high-density development. And I'm not just saying that because the book is a "love letter" (as another reviewer aptly puts it) to my home town: NYC.

Crowding people together makes mass transit easier, forces people to walk more and drive less, allows for scale efficiencies in energy and water use. It lowers per capita environmental impact. It also helps support certain kinds of high culture that are expensive or highly specialized.

However, crowding together in cities also cuts people off from wild nature, a real loss. Owen acknowledges this concern perfunctorily, referencing the recent book by Louv, "Last Child in the Woods," but goes on to assert:

"A sensitive person's first reaction to the mounting evidence that Americans, especially young Americans, may be losing interest in directly experiencing the natural world is likely to be one of regret and loss, or even despair. But is it necessarily a bad thing, globally speaking? It seems perverse to say so, but sitting indoors playing video games is easier on the environment than any number of (formerly) popular outdoor activities, . . . In the end, it may not be a bad thing for the earth or for the human race if increasing numbers of Americans would rather watch our shrunken wilderness on TV than fly to it in an airplane and drive across it on a motorbike."

But environmentalism, to my mind, isn't just about limiting the human footprint; it is also about knowing, appreciating and celebrating wild nature. For me and my family, that doesn't mean flying thousands of miles to a pristine wilderness area, but hiking, birdwatching, fishing and skinnydipping in natural areas close to home. We couldn't do that in NYC, and that's why we don't live there, or in another big city.

Owen is right that density makes it easier to lower per capita environmental impact, which we need to do. But it also cuts us off from nature, which many of us refuse to do. And the world, or our country, would be a poor place, if it was all as densely populated as NYC.

The answer, I think, is that we need a variety of habitats, human as well as non human. We should have dense, urbane cities like NY; livable small towns like the town I live in now; rural areas; and wild lands, set aside primarily for all the other species with which we share the planet. That makes for interesting diversity and choices for us, and also shares resources fairly with other species.

To do this, however, we'll need to set some limits to human population growth. Toward the end of the book, Owen writes:

"A huge and often unmentioned issue underlying all our ongoing environmental problems is the issue of population. There are too many people in the world, and too many more are on the way. This is an issue that, in the United States, both conservatives and liberals have often seemed eager to avoid--for conservatives, perhaps, becuase it raises questions about family size, birth control, and abortion, and for liberals because it raises questions about immigration. Every one of the world's environmental problems is made worse by increases in the number of humans, and, most of all, by increases in the number of Americans, since U.S. residents--whether manufactured locally or imported from abroad--have the largest energy and carbon footprints in the world."

True enough! However, these insights aren't integrated into the rest of the book. This tends to leave the impression that really, the key to sustainability is to keep cramming more people together. The denser we get, the more sustainable we will be.

David Owen appears to know better, but I doubt his editors at the "New Yorker" (where he is a staff writer) will be asking him for an article on US population policies any time soon.

Contrary to Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, David Owen does not think the environmental crisis (Global Warming, Peak Oil, etc...) is over-hyped. But, he thinks it is misunderstood and that we go about it the wrong way in attempting to resolve it.

Owen refers to Bryce excellent book Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence in confirming that ethanol is a boondoggle that requires a lot more energy to produce than it actually generates. It also is causing food prices to skyrocket as corn production is being allocated for transportation purposes.

We will inevitably continue importing a lot of oil. Surprisingly, hybrid cars really don't make that much difference. U.S. proven oil reserves (30 billion barrels) cover only three years of domestic consumption. If we doubled the mpg of our entire auto fleet overnight, this would give us just an extra year of oil domestic consumption. If we opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, this may also give us only an extra year of domestic oil consumption or an extra 10 billion barrels. Hydrogen fuel for cars remains a distant pipe dream. The problems associated with producing, storing, and distributing liquid hydrogen at a feasible economic cost remains elusive. The huge reserves of shale oil and tar sands in North America may not bail us out of the Peak Oil constraint. Their respective ratio of energy spent during production vs energy generated may also be rather unattractive.

The World's CO2 emission is unlikely to decline soon. The Kyoto Protocol has not made any difference. The performance of countries with a similar population density as the U.S. such as Canada who signed this treaty have experienced more rapid growth in CO2 emission than the U.S. All other members of the Kyoto Protocol have failed to meet their CO2 emission reduction targets and have instead experienced stubbornly increasing rise in such emissions. As oil becomes less available, the resulting energy supply gap will be filled mainly by coal which generates much more CO2 emission than oil. Coal already plays a dominant role in generating electricity to fuel the rapid economic growth in China and India.

Most green technology do not make much difference. Solar panel on residential homes provide only a small fraction of residential electricity needs. Contrary to what the public believes such panels do not work well in high temperature. When temperature rises above 77 degrees Celsius, those panels provide diminishing returns. Fancy triple-glazed windows don't make much difference in residential energy efficiency over regular windows.

Owen is not encouraged when he looks out to the future. He does so by looking at current urban developments in Beijing and Dubai. Although those two cities are culturally different they are both environmental disasters because they are increasingly auto dependent. Beijing used to be a city of bikers. But, with modern development Beijing is becoming a city of drivers. Dubai is according to the author by design the most auto dependent city in the World, even more so than American cities. Owen notes that many other large cities from emerging markets are adopting this auto-dependent model of urban design. This gives him much concern because it is the most unsustainable urbanization form.

So what is the solution to our environmental problems? Manhattan... no the author is not just kidding. He really means it! And, his underlying logic is straightforward. New Yorkers live in a high urban density area. They live in small spaces and they typically do not own cars, and walk and take public transit everywhere. Their consumption of electricity, gas, gasoline, and water is a small fraction of the average American. It is even a smaller fraction of Americans living what seems a more natural lifestyle in the great outdoors such as rural residents in the West. Any apartment building or sky-rise in New York is far more green than the most high tech green home or the most green commercial campus anywhere. That is because the NY structures are high density vertical ones associated with space and energy consumption efficiencies. They are also proximate with no need for driving. Meanwhile, the "green" homes and commercial campuses are horizontal ones that are highly inefficient from a space and energy standpoint. Their users need to drive substantial distances to do anything.

Owen states we should implement zoning and urban policies that encourage other places to emulate the urban density of Manhattan. Instead, he feels we do just the opposite as environmentalists consider Manhattan an environmental Armageddon. Meanwhile, they ignore that Manhattan residents' lifestyle is far more environmentally sustainable than the ones who have returned to nature in Wyoming and else where and have to drive huge distances to go to work, buy groceries, and socialize with each other.

Owen mentions several luminaries who had the same understanding of environmental efficiencies decades ago. One is the mathematician George Danzig, inventor of linear programming, who expanded on the same concepts as Owen in Compact City. Owen could also have mentioned the visionair architect Paolo Soleri who presented the same themes in Arcology: The City in the Image of Man.

Surprise! New York City is a model of efficiency and low environmental impact. Because of its density and congestion, people walk and take mass transit rather than owning autos. Most can't afford large apartments, so owners and renters occupy relatively small living spaces in terms of square feet per person. Waste heat is less because shared walls help heat adjacent homes. The list of advantages of dense living goes on and on. In contrast, Dubai, the Las Vegas of the Middle East, is super-wasteful and environmentally unsustainable. Beijing is developing à la Los Angeles and losing whatever environmental efficiencies Old World China had. In praising the model density of New York, the author has harsh but environmentally sound messages that will make the rest of us carbon-conscious environmentalists cover our ears. Among them: you're kidding yourself if you think driving your two-ton vehicle a half-hour to buy locally grown food is saving carbon. Recycling may be better than trashing the stuff, but it's no substitute for not filing up your attic and garage in the first place. Powering our vehicles on natural gas won't help much. A lot of model environmental homes and LEED certified buildings aren't really all that energy efficient. In terms of R-value, windows suck, no matter how energy efficient they claim to be. You will want to read Green Metropolis because you are already environmentally conscious. You really don't want to hear what David Owen has to say but you need to read it.

Green Metropolis presents powerful challenges for modern efforts aiming to decrease human impact on the environment. The author, David Owen, critically examines many of today's buzzwords and topics relating to concepts of sustainability. While there are plenty of books floating around criticizing environmentalist principles as unnecessary and hysteria, Owen's criticism focuses on how sustainability efforts fall short. Rather than repeat the fuzzy, feel-good ideas that are often touted as the key to a sustainable future, Owen points toward New York City as a model in the green movement.

Owen runs through many of the more notable green theories floating through popular media today and examines how they might actually be detrimental to effecting the long-term behavioral changes that are needed to ensure a healthy ecosystem. Hybrid cars, energy efficient homes in pastoral settings, LEED certification; they all become slightly less green as David Owen places them into context and shows some of the less than desirable outcomes they can produce. Owen doesn't decry these current efforts as poor choices for the environment in and of themselves. He does point out how such efforts are often used to satisfy a moral imperative while failing to fit into the type of holistic approach that will be necessary as we continue to deplete natural resources.

Green Metropolis is in many ways eye opening. In other ways it just conveys common sense. Tactics such as hybrid cars are theorized to reduce our dependence on petroleum, but as Owen points out they still require petroleum. Even worse hybrid cars can exacerbate our existing problems by making us feel less guilty about depending on cars and feeding the demand for the auto-centric lifestyle that we have come to accept as the norm. Owen calls for something more revolutionary, almost counter-intuitive. We must embrace concepts like extreme density and reexamine other concepts like open space. Instead of continually searching for ways of greening suburban sprawl, we must find orient development toward real walkability while encouraging the types of varied and mixed-use that would incentivize car-free lifestyles.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Green Metropolis due to the unique insight that Owen offered about sustainability. His points are at times hard hitting and like many environmentally oriented books, he invokes an all familiar feeling of desperation. Where do we go from here? How do we get people to feel comfortable in cities? What do we do to erase or at least mitigate the mistakes we have made with our current development patterns? Although Owen offers solutions, he doesn't offer easy solutions like those we've come to expect (i.e. just buy a hybrid car or require new buildings to be LEED certified). The main points the reader can take away from the book aren't easy fixes that can be implemented on a personal level, but the main points provide a new perspective that allow the city to be seen as a force for good rather than the embodiment of evil. I found Green Metropolis to be a must read for anyone interested in understanding the changes that we must make collectively as we move into a future with constrained resources and a population forever looking to increase the overall quality of life. Green Metropolis shows that the problem is a communal undertaking rather than a list of personal changes we must all make.

If it's not simple it's not Green. That is a simple message that I got from David Owen's book. Many businesses and groups that claim to be Green really aren't when you pry away their fancy solar panels which are connected to nothing and their open space campuses which actually use quite a bit of energy per capita.

I was prepared to write this off as just another anti sprawl, pro "Smart Growth" but I was wrong. Owen actually criticizes these folks for some of their shortcomings. The Oil dependant US economy is not spared either nor is our impact on emerging Asian economies which have gone from a sustainable bicycle based economy to one fueled by the internal combustion engine and the changes he has seen visiting Beijing before and after cars.

Owen presents New York City as the perfect green metropolis. Per capita New Yorkers use less gasoline, less electricity and have a lower carbon footprint than their upstate neighbors. Since everything is within walking distance and there is mass transit there is no need for a car. Building require less energy to heat as units above get help from heat rising from units below. People living in open space areas actually use more energy as they have to drive everywhere and they usually have larger homes than City Dwellers.

He takes to task the creators of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). He says more architects and builders design their buildings with an eye towards accreditation that to the actual environmental impact and energy savings of their projects. He calls this thinking LEED brain.

I enjoyed the book very much. Though I'd rather not live in New York City I can do my part by seeking to live a simpler life.

Green Metropolis creates a completely new perspective with the premise that New York City should be our model for green living. Contrary to conventional thinking that urban areas equal environmental blight, David Owen states that the sprawl of our suburban and rural existence and its environmental inefficiency is the root cause of our ecological problems.

The chapter "More Like Manhattan" presents compelling statistics about why we should emulate the big city. The population density of Manhattan (67,000 people per square mile, which is 800 times that of the nation as a whole) is enough to support a mass transportation system that is convenient in both reach and frequency. Mass transportation, zoning that allows businesses and residences to co-exist thus encouraging walking, and the sheer cost and inconvenience of owning a car means that the average Manhattan resident consumes gasoline at a rate not seen in the national averages since the mid-1920s.

Although it is well known that most NYC residents walk or use mass transit instead of driving, they also pollute, consume, and throw away much less than the average resident of the surrounding suburbs and rural areas. Multi-occupancy dwellings reduce the demand for heating and cooling via shared walls and building cores, and small living areas with no storage limit the amount of "stuff" that people can purchase. Less "stuff" also means less consumption of fossil fuels, which are components of nearly everything we buy today, including the product, its wrapping, and transportation.

Outside of Manhattan, lower population density translates to sprawl, with houses and shopping continuing to spread out creating large metropolitan areas where cars are a necessity. This sprawl also supports building larger houses that consume larger amounts of fossil fuels to cool and heat, and plenty of storage room for all the things we buy. If we were to create additional areas as dense as Manhattan, we would gain the same ecological efficiencies and allow more land to remain in its natural state.

Well written and accessible, Green Metropolis presents many other thought provoking ideas including the fallacies of constructing new green buildings, LEED certification, recycling, and carbon offsets. Regardless of your ecological mindset or agreement with David Owen, Green Metropolis is required reading to gain an additional perspective of the issues and challenges. Near the end of chapter one is a summary of the environmental lessons of NYC: live smaller, live closer, drive less--words that should resonate with all of us.