[HN Gopher] Greener cities: A necessity or a luxury?
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Greener cities: A necessity or a luxury?
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 31 points
Date : 2024-02-19 15:53 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| darthoctopus wrote:
| Why not both? Green spaces and buildings are necessities insofar
| as they provide important amenities for mental health,
| pollution/heat island management, and placemaking, and in this
| sense they are critical infrastructure. But many cities, even big
| ones, operate at scale without investing in important
| infrastructure, such as public transport, traffic engineering,
| third places, and affordable housing; it is unsurprising that the
| operators of such cities should see green spaces as luxuries in a
| similar fashion.
| graphe wrote:
| You can't have something be a necessity and a luxury. An iPhone
| is one or the other, but not both.
| ponector wrote:
| Iphone is a luxury. The same way as a personal car is. Or
| automatic coffee machine for at home use.
| davkan wrote:
| Is coffee itself a luxury? Cause automatic coffee makers
| are just as cheap as any other method of making coffee
| these days.
| ponector wrote:
| Aluminum moka is cheaper than machine. To pour boiling
| water into the cup with ground coffee is even cheaper.
| And we are not talking about beans itself, which are all
| sorts of quality.
| davkan wrote:
| I would have guessed you could get a coffee maker for $10
| anywhere but it seems they cost $20 nowadays. Still even
| a $10 mocha pot would be a luxury by that definition when
| you can make folgers cowboy coffee and drink it out of
| the single pan that you use for everything.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Something can be neither luxury nor necessity. Coffee is
| one example.
| graphe wrote:
| Coffee is a luxury. It is a very carbon and labor
| intensive product of growing fruits in tropical areas,
| only using the seeds, throwing away the pulp of the
| fruit, transportation, roasting grinding and then the
| semi boiling of the seeds before it reaches your cup.
| White sugar might be cheap in price but it's unnatural
| and has many processes which are also very intensive in
| labor.
| ponector wrote:
| And then also think about carbon footprint of keeping
| animals in cruel tight cages and force then to eat only
| coffee fruits to gather coffee beans in their poo and
| sell for 100$ per kilo.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Iphone is a commodity. Think different.
| pc86 wrote:
| iPhones are only commodities to iPhones, which if you
| accept that definition means that everything is a
| commodity. An iPhone is not a commodity to most other
| phones.
| vdaea wrote:
| A personal car is only a luxury as long as you feel good
| about mooching off your friends whenever you need one.
| ponector wrote:
| Why would you do this? You can use a bus. Or scooter. Or
| bycicle. Or walk. Or dismiss journey, maybe it is a
| luxury itself?
| ghaff wrote:
| In the US, in Manhattan, you can probably make do. And
| there are other cities where you can probably manage with
| some combination of Uber and short-/longer-term rentals.
| And just foreclose on certain types of activities for the
| most part. But I suspect for a lot of people out of
| school, "I don't need a car" means the same thing I did
| as an undergrad, namely lean on people who had one.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| You can get by in a lot of cities, like Seattle, without
| a car if you don't have kids. You don't even need to bum
| rides. Even in LA, I wouldn't have bought a car if it
| wasn't for my wife getting pregnant.
| ghaff wrote:
| In Boston/Cambridge I could probably get by if I mostly
| didn't leave the city but I know lots of people outside
| the city and I do lots of activities that would be
| outside the city. Unlike Manhattan, the assumption is
| that you have a car as an adult if you aren't right out
| of school. There's one job I had (for about 1.5 years)
| that I could have managed without a car.
|
| I think you're generally OK if _most_ of your activities
| work via transit and Uber. As you suggest, as well, kids
| and pets probably make things more difficult.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| In several parts of Seattle you genuinely don't need a
| car, with few compromises. Virtually everything is
| walkable. Even many of the popular trailheads in the
| mountains have seasonal bus service. Just about the only
| time I use public transportation is when I take light
| rail to the airport. I know quite a few people that live
| this way.
|
| I do own a car but that is only ever used for traveling
| to another State or to get into more remote parts of the
| mountains. For anything else, using a car would be
| inconvenient.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'd probably be similar if I lived in Boston/Cambridge
| these days without a need to commute. I wouldn't use a
| car day to day. But I'd use one to go to outdoor
| activities or to visit people outside the city. Even if
| the economics didn't quite work out, I'd want one
| customized for my liking just so I didn't need to think
| about it.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, green spaces do involve tradeoffs. Someone living in
| Manhattan who is at least OK with the price of housing may
| wholeheartedly approve of Central Park (and all the smaller
| parks) while someone who might want to move there would rather
| some more apartment blocks were built in some of the space.
|
| Of course there are other ways of making space not all of which
| are totally voluntary to current residents/owners of property.
| Cities (including NYC) used to be much more cavalier with
| remaking areas in this manner.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| A city doesn't have space restrictions. It has transportation
| restrictions.
|
| If you manage to make people travel around faster, you
| increase the housing supply by a much higher amount than you
| can by converting local land into housing.
|
| So, everybody would be better by increasing the reach and
| area for train tracks, even if you convert a reasonable
| amount of nearby area into parks, if also, while you are at
| it, you provide some way for local transit to integrate with
| the long-distance one.
|
| The dichotomy on the article is just plainly wrong.
| Transportation enables you to improve on both, and without
| transportation you will have neither.
| ghaff wrote:
| Geography also matters of course. And many many companies
| are not actually located in a city.
|
| Better commuter rail/light rail is desirable. On the other
| hand, a commute is still a commute. I'm actually quite
| convenient to a commuter rail station that ties into the
| city's subway quite well. But I pretty much hate commuting
| into the city on the few days I have to do it because it
| still takes a big chunk out of my day.
| kiba wrote:
| _Better commuter rail /light rail is desirable. On the
| other hand, a commute is still a commute. I'm actually
| quite convenient to a commuter rail station that ties
| into the city's subway quite well. But I pretty much hate
| commuting into the city on the few days I have to do it
| because it still takes a big chunk out of my day._
|
| If the speed isn't actually fast, then transportation
| needs to be improved.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm about 45 miles outside of the city. Once you have 15
| stops or so I'm not sure how much you can improve things?
| kiba wrote:
| _I 'm about 45 miles outside of the city. Once you have
| 15 stops or so I'm not sure how much you can improve
| things?_
|
| Express train line, which means fewer stops or no stops
| at all between destination.
|
| There's probably various inefficiencies such as
| infrequent service and slowdown of the train due to track
| issue.
|
| For me, it's the issue of the train not being local to
| where I live, and infrequency of service, which means I
| could be waiting up to 20 minutes for the train to arrive
| in some cases. Stops are not as unbearable for me which
| felt like a minute or shorter for each stop.
| ghaff wrote:
| My train line eliminated semi-express service during the
| pandemic and it's still very clearly much below pre-
| pandemic ridership. The transit service did make
| improvements a number of years back but it's still
| clearly operating well below economic breakeven. (Which
| may be OK.)
|
| The station is fairly convenient to me to go in for
| morning rush hour. It's unusable for an evening event.
| The train is basically empty if I even take it at the
| tail-end of rush hour. And trains are understandably
| infrequenty scheduled outside of rush.
| wskinner wrote:
| What about people who don't want to live near train tracks?
| Or people who currently live on land that would be seized
| if train tracks were to be built? Not everyone wants to
| live in a city.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The polled preferences of Americans look something like
| 60-40 in favor of single family homes. The actual land
| distribution in metropolitan areas looks more like 95-5.
|
| To some degree, building more train tracks and allowing
| dense housing relieves pressure on the remaining areas.
| Tagbert wrote:
| or people don't tell the whole truth in polls?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| we have no way of figuring that out. The land is not
| legally permissive to get to a true market-oriented
| distribution of housing.
| kiba wrote:
| _What about people who don't want to live near train
| tracks? Or people who currently live on land that would
| be seized if train tracks were to be built? Not everyone
| wants to live in a city._
|
| You see those gigantic parking lots and 4 way stroads?
| Many of the parking lots are empty for much of the day,
| and stroads are dangerous and inefficient.
|
| For that matter, freeways and interstate highways are
| valuable resources we could repurpose for train tracks.
|
| We have grossly inefficient transportation corridor that
| could easily be made more efficient.
|
| Now, there will still be need to demolish homes and
| businesses for public benefit, but reducing traffic and
| making good use of land more efficiently means less homes
| will needed to be demolished.
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| There are still plenty of four- or five-storey walkups in
| Manhattan. These can be razed and replaced with residential
| high-rises. Manhattan's ability to build up (as opposed to
| out) is essentially unlimited.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes, you can of course just kick those people out from
| where they're living.
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| I'm not saying it would have to involve overnight
| evictions. It would happen over a multi-year span.
| ghaff wrote:
| Historically, "urban renewal" has involved the city
| government just taking drastic action. If you want to
| turn low/mid-rises into high-rises at scale, that
| probably won't happen organically.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I guess if Manhattan had the density of Hong Kong, it would
| be as affordable as Hong Kong?
|
| Hong Kong really does explore the limits of unlimited
| growth upward.
| kiba wrote:
| Hong Kong has the same problem as everyone else: refusal
| to build.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| That is ridiculous considering the towering apartment
| blocks you can see anywhere that isn't covered by a steep
| mountain in the region. And those get tunneled through by
| subways so all the places that can be built on are. The
| same is really true with any mainland Chinese city. And
| still people complain about the rent being too high.
| kiba wrote:
| Just because you have a lot of high skyscraper doesn't
| mean you have an adequate supply.
|
| I have seen pictures of those high rise apartment
| buildings. What's clear to me is that they're frequently
| skinny and tall. The tallness of these structures can be
| misleading, because we're not accounting for total volume
| of a building.
|
| You can have a lot of density with relatively low height
| and greater area of space occupied. These may be green
| spaces or parks. Filling in those area with more building
| volume doesn't mean green spaces are impossible, but it
| would be an engineering challenge to put green spaces on
| the roof.
|
| If you wish to see truly insane population density. You
| should see images of Kowloon walled city and compare that
| to Hong Kong. They're not really comparable. Kowloon
| Walled City is only 10 to 14 of stories high. There are
| certainly buildings higher than that in Hong Kong.
|
| In any case, housing cost is determined by demand and
| supply. If there's sufficient supply of housing, the
| price would go down. If there's insufficient housing, the
| cost would rise. It doesn't matter if your city is
| hyperdense or not.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Apartment buildings in Asia are around 30 stories tall,
| which is the limit where you can use low skill labor and
| cheaper materials (going higher requires more skill and
| cost). Each floor has around 4-5 units, they have to be
| like that due to window requirements. Even China isn't
| going to let you build a fat deep building with many non
| window units, which are called death traps. I lived in
| these buildings for 9 years, they are about as dense as
| you can get until things get very expensive or very
| dangerous.
|
| Kowloon walled city was torn down in the early 90s for
| good reasons.
| kiba wrote:
| That's simply a problem of engineering design and
| building code regulation, and the current assumption of
| how we design and construct buildings. You can double the
| volume of a flat area by adding a story height worth of
| flat area. Thrice, if you triple it.
|
| The fact is, the world we live in isn't constructed in
| 3D, but rather 2.5D.
|
| In any case, this is not an engineering problem, but a
| sociopolitical one.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| You need a lot more zoning capacity than housing demand
| because for various reasons buildings don't turn over very
| quickly.
|
| The real problem is that to be healthy, the housing market
| in New York needs a lot more capacity in recognizance of
| this fact. There is no such thing as full zoning capacity
| in the same way that zero unemployment is not realistic or
| good.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Trees also generate oxygen, which can be an issue in cities since
| (BBC Science Focus):
|
| > "A human breathes about 9.5 tonnes of air in a year, but oxygen
| only makes up about 23 per cent of that air, by mass, and we only
| extract a little over a third of the oxygen from each breath.
| That works out to a total of about 740kg of oxygen per year.
| Which is, very roughly, seven or eight trees' worth."
|
| You might think the problem would be minimal due to atmospheric
| circulation, but like with smog accumulation, some weather
| patterns can lead to problems:
|
| "(2021) Declining Oxygen Level as an Emerging Concern to Global
| Cities"
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33904720/
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| So you would need at least one adult tree per person to make an
| impact; for most cities that would amount to a forest.
| dvdkon wrote:
| That doesn't sound like that much, especially in less-dense
| cities and if you count "embedded" forests/parks. Looking at
| local newspaper articles suggests Prague has possibly more
| than that, but mostly in forests, not on streets. I don't
| know enough to say if/how much that would help with air
| quality.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| I live in a city with trees, an adult tree normally takes
| up the space of a big block, you can have maybe 20-30 on a
| space where 400 live if you cover the street.
|
| Most likely plants can be more a efficient way. Probably
| everything fast growing is more oxygen converting, and co2
| storing
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| I did some reddit research, bamboo seems highest oxygen
| convertor, so plant a few bamboo forest if the climate allows
| it. Would also look cool
| vel0city wrote:
| For my current home I've got 7 trees and several bushes for
| four people. I don't exactly live in a forest. My neighbor
| who lives alone has at least four trees on their property.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| Sir, I envy you, but you are not living in an apartment in
| a city.
| u32480932048 wrote:
| Perhaps it's the narcotic effects of nitrogen at 1 atm that
| make me not give a shit.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1130736/
| graphe wrote:
| I agree. Singapore is the greenest city but it's hardly green.
| Construction is always dirty, a few trees won't change that. The
| sands are stolen from other countries.
|
| They dress up the carbon causing steel beams and concrete with
| trees but don't forget the tree roots also destroy
| infrastructure, and at the end of the day it's (toxic) lipstick
| on a pig, and the continuous maintenance of the lipstick until
| the pig dies. Cities and human habitats are either being
| reclaimed by nature or fighting it. Until that fundamentally
| changes green cities are as realistic as carbon negative oil.
| cassepipe wrote:
| I now think of this video when I see "verical forests" :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajdd9LeKwTQ
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Whenever I hear "vertical forest" I think of
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdUUx5FdySs .
| HPsquared wrote:
| Luxury on the personal level, necessity on the societal level.
|
| Like getting married, doing the deed, having kids etc.
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| Most cities are hostile towards people. Maybe we should make them
| non hostile first, and then we can think about the green part.
|
| The biggest factor contributing to this hostility seems to be
| personal motorized vehicles. Reducing the number of motorized
| vehicles (and the space dedicated to them) whenever possible
| should have a much better impact than introducing greenery.
|
| Put another way, I think people live better in a city made of
| concrete with few cars than in a green city with lots of cars.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| > _I think people live better in a city made of concrete with
| few cars than in a green city with lots of cars._
|
| Definitely not. The former is easily an oppressive 1984-esque
| metropolis while the latter easily feels nice.
|
| Another key parameter is density. Low density with plenty of
| greenery and people will feel and be happy even if they may
| need a car.
| pc86 wrote:
| Isn't low density by definition not a city?
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| "Low density" is a relative term and there are ranges in
| everything. You can have a city mostly made of huge, packed
| tower blocks, or a city mostly made of small buildings with
| some space in between.
| kiba wrote:
| Cars will easily make a place feel like a 1984 metropolis.
| They need space intensive infrastructure to drive on, which
| is asphalt and concrete.
| vivekd wrote:
| I think suburbs and urban sprawl could be described this way.
| But urban core at least here in Toronto is very people friendly
| and it's definitely possible to live well here without a car.
| I'm fact most people in the downtown core don't own a car.
|
| I hear downtown Vancouver is also this way. Montreal's urban
| core and Quebec city also fit this bill.
|
| I do admit everywhere else in Canada is terrible for being
| people friendly. Not sure about other places
| zahma wrote:
| Part of the reason cities are hostile is due to their un-
| greenness. For every street that bisects a block, consider how
| many trees could go there. Then consider what that would afford
| the local ecosystem. Then consider the reduction in noise, the
| reduction of heat in the hottest months, the reduction in
| pollution, and the increase in beauty. Of course, less
| connective tissue also makes for less ease of driving, and so
| the battle inches forward to returning cities to its citizens.
|
| Making space for more green is good for us precisely because it
| makes cities less hostile perhaps in a more roundabout way.
| xyst wrote:
| The solution will involve a multifaceted approach with
| significant investment from all levels of government (federal,
| state, local). In general it involves working towards
| sustainability.
|
| We keep coming up with "solutions" that solve or partially solve
| one part of the equation. In the article it mentions in order to
| prevent another incident of Hurricane Sandy, the city decided to
| build a massive flood mitigation project.
|
| But has anybody stopped to think that maybe our best protections
| against nature is nature itself? Trees are a good start and
| definitely help brighten up a concrete jungle, absorb and store
| CO2. But this is only one aspect.
|
| For decades, cities around the country have been destroying
| natural ecosystems in favor of single family developments (ie,
| suburbs) and highways. These concrete structures and monoculture
| ecosystems that replaced once diverse green spaces are terrible
| at absorbing and mitigating the effects of nature.
|
| Man made drains get clogged or overwhelmed. Mitigation techniques
| fail quickly over time if one or more designs were built poorly.
| The build up of water slowly erodes the soil beneath the concrete
| and thus leads to formation of sinkholes. I think it's expected
| that man made infrastructure will only last 25-30 years before
| needing a full replacement.
|
| On the other hand, those once diverse ecosystems were
| great/amazing at absorbing the effects of Mother Nature. Trees,
| woodlands great and thrive here without any intervention from
| human beings. They also used to support living organisms --
| insects such as bees, and animals.
|
| Some intervention needed in case of fire prevention (ie,
| "controlled burns"). But it's otherwise self sustaining.
|
| I think federal protection is needed on all green spaces. Not
| just national parks. Freeze and stop future development of the
| suburbs. Divest from car centric transportation and
| infrastructure (highways, roads, parking lots, parking garages,
| street parking). Destruction of highways.
|
| Return the land to the people to build places where we can live,
| play, eat, and work. Scale up. Do not scale horizontally. End
| implied and direct subsidies given to SFH developments. End all
| subsidies on O&G (a multi trillion dollar industry by the way).
| Regulate O&G and use fines to pay for a greener future.
|
| This needs to be tackled at all fronts.
| rfwhyte wrote:
| Greener cities are absolutely a necessity for humanity, but sadly
| will be reserved for the wealthiest who can afford the "Luxury"
| of such things as clean air, clean water and greenspace.
|
| Until the extreme inequality at the core of capitalist society is
| addressed in a meaningful way (so never really), any so called
| "Green cities" will just be gated enclaves of the wealthy, and
| the poor will be forced to live surrounded by the pollution the
| rich are ultimately responsible for, yet are able to afford to
| isolate themselves from.
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