Since I didn’t end up volunteering this weekend I thought I would explore some ideas from last week’s readings from class. I was very intrigued by the article titled, “Urban Myths,” especially when I started to read the subtitle, hinting that our idea of an “environmentally friendly” place is completely backwards.
This caught me off guard for a second; a large metropolis is not the epitome of an ecological disaster? I thought of smog filled skies, millions of people and their tons of trash and sewage, paved everything. Surely a modern city can’t be an example of an environmentally friendly place. But, as I read on, I began to understand the reasoning behind this idea, that cities actually are more eco-friendly than other smaller or more sprawling human settlements because they seem to emulate living organisms.
Cities, as the article states, are like elephants; they become more economical with size. Just as with animals, it seems, cities require less energy the bigger they get. The explanation behind it being that people who live amongst many other people consume less and take up less space than people who live in more rural areas with wide open spaces. However, there are limits to the amount of efficiency a city can achieve; eventually it will run out of resources. The real challenge seems to be achieving a level of environmental resource sustainability that is balanced by the efficiency of a large metropolis.
I couldn’t help but think of the city of Richmond in relation to the ideas presented in this article. Clearly, Richmond is not a very large city population-wise, so it hasn’t reached the level of resource efficiency that is ideal for an environmentally friendly metropolis. But for Richmond, attaining a level of eco-friendliness won’t be done through simple population growth. It is an old city, and likely is plagued by an aging infrastructure that surely is a hindrance to its level of environmental resource efficiency. Richmond is obviously far off from being an environmentally friendly metropolis.
Reading this article really got me thinking about the ways in which people view cities from an environmental standpoint, and how those views are, at least based on this article, often incorrect. Perhaps a greater number of large metropolises is the key to a more environmentally friendly society.