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Green Metropolis
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Green Metropolis (2009) (edit title/settings)

Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability

by David Owen (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

A challenging, controversial and highly readable look at our lives, our world and our future. In this remarkable challenge to conventional thinking about the environment, David Owen argues that the greenest community in the United States is not Portland, Oregon, or Snowmass, Colorado, but New... read more

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “It is our cars that stand between us and solutions to our gathering energy nightmare. And it's easy to see why. Cars have defined our culture and our lives.”
  • “We Americans have borrowed against the world's store of inexpensive energy in the same way that we borrowed against the illusory equity in our homes, and we have used that energy leverage to construct a way of life that will cease to be sustainable the moment we can no longer cover our monthly payments.”
  • “Transit, in order to be good for the environment and to reduce overall energy consumption, must be used to concentrate people in dense urban cores, rather than merely encouraging them to live farther from their jobs and other daily destinations.”
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • You create open spaces not by spreading people out but by moving them closer together.
    Highlighted by 19 Kindle customers
  • the most significant factor in determining the viability of any transit system—far more significant than fare levels or demo-graphics or willpower or anything else—is population density.
    Highlighted by 18 Kindle customers
  • Sustainability is a context, not a gadget or a technology. This is the reason that dense cities set such a critical example: they prove that it’s possible to arrange large human populations in ways that are inherently less wasteful and destructive.
    Highlighted by 17 Kindle customers
  • Because urban density, in itself, is such a powerful generator of environmental benefits, the most critical environmental issues in dense urban cores tend to be seemingly unrelated matters like law enforcement and public education, because anxieties about crime and school quality are among the strongest forces motivating flight to the suburbs.
    Highlighted by 16 Kindle customers
  • The crucial fact about sustainability is that it is not a micro phenomenon: there can be no such thing as a “sustainable” house, office building, or household appliance, for the same reason that there can be no such thing as a one-person democracy or a single-company economy.
    Highlighted by 16 Kindle customers
  • A dense urban area’s greenest features—its low per-capita energy use, its high acceptance of public transit and walking, its small carbon footprint per resident—are not inexplicable anomalies. They are the direct consequences of the very urban characteristics that are the most likely to appall a sensitive friend of the earth.
    Highlighted by 16 Kindle customers
  • Americans’ annual expenditure on plastic garbage bags exceeds the total annual expenditures, on everything, of nearly half the world’s countries.
    Highlighted by 15 Kindle customers
  • Manhattan’s density is approximately 67,000 people per square mile, or more than eight hundred times that of the nation as a whole and roughly thirty times that of Los Angeles.
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
  • New transit, if it is to succeed, has to be accompanied not only by population density sufficient to support it but also by a reduction in road capacity (to maintain a level of inconvenience that a significant number of drivers continue to find intolerable) or by a steady increase in the direct and indirect costs of using cars, or both—in effect, “induced transit,” or what Jane Jacobs called “attrition of automobiles.”
    Highlighted by 13 Kindle customers
  • In a world of nearly 7 billion people and counting, sustainability, if it can be achieved, will look a lot more like midtown Manhattan than like rural Vermont.
    Highlighted by 12 Kindle customers
Show all 13 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naive and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first hom in a utopian environmentalist community in New York state.

Table of Contents edit see section history

1. More like Manhattan
2. Liquid Civilization
3. There and Back
4. The Great Outdoors
5. Embodied Efficiency
6. The Shape of things to come

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. David Owen (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Riverhead
Country: Add the country of publication.
Publication Date: 2009
ISBN: 1594488827
Page Count: 368

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Classification edit see section history

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