No Light Rail in Vancouver!

Sustainability, Climate Change, and Urban Planning

Nov 22

2007

In addition to talking about sprawl and urban-growth boundaries, Owen McShane raised a few other issues at the Preserving the American Dream conference: namely, the role sustainability and climate change play in the anti-sprawl movement.

The most sustainable city?

Many planning advocates take it for granted that sprawl and auto driving are inherently unsustainable. McShane shows just how this attitude can go when he describes Halle Neustadt, which some Swedish urban planners once described as “the most sustainable city in the world.”

The most-sustainable city today.

McShane here refers to some field work done by the Antiplanner. To make a long story short, what made Halle Neustadt “sustainable” was poverty, and as soon its residents gained some wealth, many of them moved out and most of the rest bought automobiles, turning the cities many greenspaces into parking lots.

Owen then turns to climate change, which he describes as the last gasp of smart growth. Smart growth, he notes, “has always been a policy in search of a justification, a solution in search of a problem.” Now, in climate change, smart-growth advocates hope they have found such a problem.

One difficulty, McShane notes, is that there is no guarantee that smart growth is really more greenhouse-friendly than ordinary sprawl. Depending on load factors, Diesel trains can emit more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than autos, and concrete-and-steel high-rise condos can emit more CO2 than wood homes.

McShane refers in particular to an Australian study that found that “place doesn’t matter,” that is, low densities were not particularly greenhouse unfriendly. Instead, income was much more important, meaning that the high-rollers living in million-dollar downtown condos were generating far more greenhouse gases than moderate-income suburbanites.

A second problem is that new technologies can render calculations about greenhouse gases completely invalid. “If New Zealand adopted nuclear energy next year, calculations of future carbon footprints would change dramatically,” McShane points out. “The error terms are so huge as to make the exercise (of measuring carbon footprints) meaningless.”

No one can predict technological change, but planning advocates often interpret this to mean there will be no change. James Howard Kunstler, for example, believes that “No combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it.”

Neither McShane nor the Antiplanner agree. I can’t predict what fuel we will use in the future, but I am fairly certain that we will still be driving personal vehicles with four wheels.

3

Trackback  •  Posted in Regional planning  

Reprinted from The Antiplanner