Cities: A Smart Alternative to Cars

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There's no need to delay building bright green cities. Better design solutions for buildings, communities and, in many cases, infrastructure either already exist or are mid-development. And new innovation is exploding. Car-sharing is the best-known and perhaps most illustrative example but it's far from the only one. Barcelona runs the phenomenally successful "Bicing" program, renting bikes to anyone with a swipe card. Wired urban living might very well soon evolve into a series of systems for letting us live affluent, convenient lives without actually owning a lot of things.

When you build closer together, you also create the conditions for dramatic energy and cost savings. Researchers at Brookings note: "Transportation costs are a significant part of the average household budget. The average transportation expenditures for the median income household in the U.S. in 2003 was 19.1%, the highest expenditure after housing."

Dense Can Mean Efficient

But that 19.1% figure is the median. How much individual households spend varies enormously, and how much we pay for transportation is determined largely by the location of our homes. People who are living in extremely dense areas, getting around mostly on foot, by bike, and by transit, with the occasional use of a car-share vehicle, can find themselves paying a small fraction of that 19.1%.

What's more, the public burdens created by car-free or car-light lifestyles are so minimal that some municipalities (like Seattle) are actually finding that it makes good fiscal sense to encourage people to give up their cars by subsidizing transit passes and car-sharing memberships.

People in compact urban areas also pay substantially less in other energy costs. Dense neighborhoods are far more energy-efficient than even "green" sprawl, and innovation trends in green building seem to me to benefit compact development. Carbon taxes can incentivize even more energy-efficient developments—as they may soon in Portland.

Compact Communities Can Enhance Quality of Life

Pollution from a car isn't limited to its emissions and leakages. That new car smell? Toxic. We currently have no replacements for most of the bad components, and we don't appear to be much closer to a truly recyclable car. The best try of which I'm aware is the Model U, William McDonough's collaboration with Ford (F), which is an interesting start but a long, long way from a closed-loop car. Yes, there are a bunch of smart folks hard at work on these issues and on some pretty exciting designs—the 100-mpg Aptera, for instance, or the proposed VDS Vision 200, a "hyperefficient four-to-six-passenger vehicle earmarked for India that will demonstrate a 95% reduction in embodied energy, materials, and toxicity," according to the Vehicle Design Summit.

But whether green cars arrive, building bright green cities is a winning strategy. Most arguments against land-use change presume that building compact communities is a trade-off; that by investing in walkable, denser neighborhoods we lose some or a lot of our affluence or quality of life. But what if the gains actually far outweigh the costs not only in ecological and fiscal terms but in lifestyle and prosperity terms as well?

Green, compact communities, smaller, well-built homes, walkable streets, and smart infrastructure can actually offer a far better quality of life than living in McMansion hintersprawl in purely material terms: more comfort, more security, more true prosperity. But even more to the point, they offer all sorts of nonmaterialistic but extremely real benefits that suburbs cannot. Opponents of smart growth talk about sacrificing our way of life, but it's not a sacrifice if what you get in exchange is superior.

Just as a home is more than the building in which it resides, a life is more than the stuff we pile up around it. We all know this to be true. In building bright green cities we do more than help avert a monstrous disaster for which we are largely responsible. We might just awaken on the other side of this fight to find ourselves prosperously at home in the sort of communities we thought lost forever, leading more creative, connected, and carefree lives.

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on Worldchanging.com.

Alex Steffen has been the Executive Editor of Worldchanging since he co-founded the organization in 2003. He was the editor of Worldchanging's first book, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Abrams, 2006).