Common Ground in a Liquid City. Matt Hern

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      The simple (and highly qualified) answer is pretty much “yes.” The basic formulation suggests that if you can densify, all good things will flow from there: There will be enough population to support public transport, more people will walk and fewer will drive, you’ll get concentrations of services, and urbanity will flourish. If you give people reason to spend time on the street they will. Like Witold Rybczynski, who is an architect, urbanist, and now University of Pennsylvania professor, once said to me, “it has to do with density, above all. This puts a lot of people together in one place, keeps walking distance relatively small, and makes walking interesting.”

      It’s not just simple consumer-choice logic; there are all kinds of advantages to densification that may appear ancillary but are really part of the package. More than anything, living compactly necessarily reduces everyone’s footprint. Density means fewer resources required across the board: sharing is caring. In a great essay published in 2004 in the New Yorker, David Owen described living in a “utopian environmentalist community” where he and his wife lived austerely, without a lawn, shopped on foot, and bought few consumer items, in part because they had nowhere to store stuff. The community was Manhattan.

      Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it’s a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two percent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That’s ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank 51st in per-capita energy use….

      The key to New York’s relative environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan’s population density is more than eight hundred times that of the nation as a whole. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful, and forces the majority to live in some of the most inherently energy efficient residential structures in the world: apartment buildings.³¹

      There’s not really any way to think about our urban future, either in global or Vancouver-specific terms, without recognizing the need for density. If all of twentieth century, Western urban planning can be thought of as attempt to disperse and decongest Dickensian, Victorian cities, then twenty-first century city building has to be about the reverse: getting people to live more compactly, inducing them to stop sprawling and to stop gobbling up land with highways, 4,500 square foot houses, cul-de-sacs, and their freaking lawns.

      The ecological imperative is the stick, but the carrot is cities that are potentially alive, vibrant, complex, and cosmopolitan. That carrot is not a given, however: Blind densification can also mean brutal squadrons of apartment blocks, faceless crowding, or sterile rows of glassy towers. Make no mistake; densification is going to mean lots of people giving a certain amount up—space, lawns that look like putting greens, cars, purchasing power, and lots else—but boo-fucking-hoo. Frankly, density is necessarily the future of this city, and every other one too.

      I know that’s a little rough, and probably should be tempered a little. I’m not talking about turning the whole city into Manhattan (as if that were even imaginable within the next century or two). It’s tempting to brand everyone who resists density as NIMBY

      BANANAs,³² quasi-pastoralist relics, or just plain selfish,³³ but that’s no good. It is important to understand that density has to be nuanced, that there has to be a wide range of different kinds of spaces in the city, some more dense than others, and that not everyone wants urban vitality and bustle and liveliness. As Frances cautioned me:

      Certain people, from both sides of town and all kinds of political persuasions, really oppose density: they want a quieter, less-busy place. This has always been a growing city and will continue to be, so you’d think that people would recognize that and ask, “how should we deal with it, how do we want to shape that?” rather than opposing growth and density itself. Lots of people really love that liveliness, but others really don’t. They find the crowded urban life depressing and scary. We need to find a way to accommodate those people too.

      And СКАЧАТЬ