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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.
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