Ecocities
The idea of Ecocities is a new approach toward
sustainable living. Environmentalists used to
believe that city living was pollutive and destructive
to the environment because of the amount of
sewage, trash, and unsanitary conditions created
and dumped onto the environment.
However, the alternative was to live in the
suburbs, which is also damaging to the environment
because cars are needed for transportation,
and the amount of energy used in a house by
a single family (or a person living alone) is
much more per person than the amount of energy
used in an apartment for multiple family housing.
Contents
* 1 Solutions to urban sprawl
* 2 Politics of Urban Elitism
* 3 Agriculture in Ecocities
Solutions to urban sprawl
Because people would like to reduce urban sprawl,
reduce the length of daily commute, environmentalists,
policy makers, and developers are seeking new
ways to allow people to live closer to the workplace.
Since the workplace tends to be in the city,
downtown, or urban center, they are seeking
a way to increase density without increasing
the problems usually associated with inner-city
and urban environment, such as burglary, murder,
gangs, riots, and other disruptions, as well
as unsanitary conditions, like old sewage, gum
on the ground, and cars.
One of the new ways is the Smart Growth Movement.
Other solutions include increasing public transportation.
Again, the problem is that the viability of
public transportation depends on how many people
are willing to take it. Increasing population
density as well as decreasing the appeal of
driving a car is a necessary step to encouraging
people to take public transportation.
Politics of Urban Elitism
Because the cities tend to resist new development,
such as more housing units, they contribute
to the high costs of living in the cities. As
a result, there is an increasing disparity in
income between the rich and the poor in the
city, while middle-class people tend to live
in the suburbs. As a result, many of the recent
political campaigns have focused on "urban
elitism," the idea that the city is the
domain of the rich, the bohemians, and those
who like to talk down to the middle-class.
This conveys the idea that the suburbs are
home to "real America," gun-toting,
race-car loving, conservative, average Joes,
while the cities are home to elites who are
liberal in terms of government policies and
progressivism. Moreover, city-living people
are considered to enjoy composting, recycling,
and taking public transportation — activities
portrayed as part of the fringe of mainstream
society.
The reason for the lack of housing development
is due to the neighborhoods that comprise the
city. They tend to have strong community that
are unwilling to allow developers to disperse
them by tearing down the old housing and building
new ones.
Agriculture in Ecocities
Not only are environmentalists, developers,
and policy makers looking to try to increase
population density, they are also seeking to
put production of crops closer to the cities
to reduce transportation costs, amount of pollution
involved in transportation, and also increase
freshness of the crops produced. The Columbia
University's Vertical Farm Project is one of
the most well-articulated conceptions of this
idea.
