these comments are

these comments are weird.

seriously, people, urbanity is not a conspiracy. cities aren't some recent invention dreamed up by the illuminati, they're as old as - and a hallmark of - civilization itself.

the migration of rural labour into the city is one thing, but if you have moved out of the city into the country, onto formerly productive land, to lead an unproductive life, it is the wealth of the cities that permits you to do it. you may find it distasteful that the city exists, but it will sustain you in your comfortable retirement by generating the wealth that keeps food on your table and drugs in your veins.

for those that actually live in the city, that wish to stay there, that recognize that urban living is far more energy- and materials- efficient than rural living, making it better doesn't mean abandoning it to rot. it means taking measures to see that positive change occurs.

Many Hurdles...

Education being near the top of the list. Read oeanda's comments and try and decode what the meaning of this statment is.

My radar goes on whenever I here wealth generation or cretion without seemingly any understanding of what wealth is. Does this person mean hard currency? Wealth on paper like those profitting from inflated housing prices? I hope the commentor will take the time to explain these words. Frankly it's probably just a reflection of mainstream thinking that says property values will just continue to rise and therefore the region is constantly creating wealth. Bubble heads... If it's not sustainable, it's not going to be liveable. It's only the timeline to be determined. No matter what the intention of the authors of this book, it's attempt at planning anything is completely eroded when they admit we are not now living sustainably. Sustainability, like wealth is just another word mis-understood by the public and used in most of the useless buzz phrase rhetoric repeated day after day until swallowed by those who can't or won't think for themselves.

Where did you get the idea

Where did you get the idea that urban life is more energy/materials efficient ?

Look up the estimated water use (not consumption) of an urban person. Also the costs of commuting not only to the people, but mainly the ecology.

There's nothing wrong with cities, but when there are 10 or 18 million people jammed into small areas, it is a crime against humanity and the ecology, as the pollution they produce is, alone, a major disaster.

NAFTA has jammed 17.5 million into Mexico City. Who benefits ?

Ed Deak.

oeanda

I would like to see some actual evidence that this statement is, in any but a very studied and constrained manner in a particularly unreal and manufactured environment, actually true. In the day to day linearity of the vast majority of city dwellers lives it certainly is not.

In fact, I suspect, given the modern city and looking only at items such as food, transportation, storage, refrigeration and air travel that it is demonstrably untrue.

Furthermore, without the rural and truly productive realm the city would simply revert to cannibalism or starve. In any case, after a few months it would be empty, hollow and deserted - a few stray dogs scratching amid the long grasses growing up around, over and through the cracks in the deserted asphalt.

to be urban or not to be urban

all due respect ed, but while you may detest the big city, I think that your comments are unfair (as are oeanda's). I live in the middle of vancouver ofr 15 years, I now live in a rural remote community. I did so not because I think that one is better than the other. I did so because at this stage in my life, the benefits of rural living appeal outweigh the benefits of city living. It's a lifestyle choice; it's about tradeoffs. I may drive more now in the country, but I spend less time (a lot less) sitting in traffic jams and I have more time to spend with my family. That's just one example.

And I don't think that there's any point arguing who's more energy efficient. I've seen people in the country who blow my mind with how wasteful they are - as I have seen in the city. At the same time, I've seem people in the city living incredibly sustainable lives (community garden plot, no car, etc.), whereas, where I live, I know of folk who use the faintest amount of resources to live (live off the grind, grow their own food, etc.)

I think that it's more productive from our so called progressive side that we find common ground and cut the urban vs. rural living crap out of the equation.

clubofrome, i made no

clubofrome, i made no comment on whether or not the current system or means of generating wealth were ideal, only that cities are crucial to the system as it exists. if you live in the country, your standard of life, the technology you use, the food you eat (farmers didn't invent roundup-ready canola), the medicine you take... all this depends on urbanization and the division of labour.

by all means, work to change the system, but doing it from your cabin in the woods, on the internet, on a website based in and drawing most of its readership from the city, is surely an exercise in irony.

i'd like to see some evidence to your counter point.

question: is a bus more efficient, per passenger, than a car? yes. question: is central heating in a high-rise more efficient than heating a single detatched house? yes. say you have a grocery store that serves 10,000 people. in the city, those people live within as little as a 1km radius. in the country? even if every single customer of that grocery drives in both instances, the city, owing to its density requires the use of less fuel. it's an unrealistic comparison, of course, because many of the people in the city don't need to drive to the store. if fact, it's often faster to walk.

so you're in the country, close to a farm. does it supply everything you need, year round? i've been to a rural grocery store, too. most of the winter produce comes from california or south america. the fraction of any canadian's diet - rural or urban - that comes from local produce is small. it's all shipped from somewhere else.

where would you have them go? seriously? los angeles is a city of 18 million people, situated in a desert. it's already the biggest metro in the world. would you have them scattered across the mojave, have water piped hundreds of miles to each home, have them drive hundreds of miles (more) to buy food? what would they do for a living? i mean really, what do you propose?

if the sight and smell of humanity's concentrated filth offends you, too bad. just because yours is in low enough concentrations that you can ignore it doesn't mean you're not contributing to the gradual death of the planet. i live in a city and i drive my car about once or twice a week. everyone i know who lives in the sticks drives at least 50km a day. there just isn't any room for argument there. suburban life is wasteful.

http://tinyurl.com/3bs22g Qu

http://tinyurl.com/3bs22g

I think the key is defining your terms

Rural and agricultural sustainable living is sustainable - city living (despite a few garden plots) isn't.

Without the country the city would starve - most urban North Americans live lives that have no productive aspect to them whatsoever. Shut off the power to the city and the whole thing grinds to a halt.

Ref: Montreal and much of urban Quebec during the ice storm...

The biggest problem is the

The biggest problem is the deliberate attempt by governments to depopulate the countryside and hand it over to big business, in the mining, agriculture and forestry industries. We can see this all around us. Years ago we had dozens of small mills all around us, now 2-3. All the forest contractors are all gone, the mills operate with a fraction of the labour force of 30 years ago, while their energy and timber demands went up by thousands of percents.

This is called "economic efficiency".

The long term plan is to have imported slave labour do the work, as according to the "market economy" form of thinking: "Canadian labour priced itself out of the market".

Hundreds of ranchers will go broke this year on account of lousy beef prices and poor haycrop.

The low prices are not on account of glut on the market, but the deliberate conspiracy of the feedlot corporations to create shortages by forcing ranchers out of business, while jacking up prices in the stores.

Then the lands are picked up by the carpetbaggers and held for subdivision after the abolition of the ALR, or for major food shortages, so they can sock it to people in the cities.

We had some old friends visiting over the weekend, who brought some "prime cut" store bought sirloin steaks, as if we didn't have any. We ate them as a form of courtesy, but
normally wouldn't feed them to dogs. Full of grease, called "marble", and God only knows how many doses of chemicals. Tasted like ....

BC could feed tens of millions with organic, prime beef, but there's "no market" for it, because the markets are controlled by the carpetbagger mafia, who prevent people both from living on the land and to eat decent food.

Of course the biggest enemy of economists is any degree of self sufficiency, which can only be achieved in rural areas. We can live on our OAPs like kings, while in the city we would have to eat dogfood to survive. But this doesn't jack up the phoney GDP, so it must be eliminated and people forced to buy everything.

Ed Deak.

Hooray for Density!

Grumpy,

Deification? You mean in the economist city rankings? :)

Are denser cities necessarily less affordable? I'm not so sure. And anyway, as I pointed out in this thread, http://thetyee.ca/News/2007/07/31/Coleman/,
the GVRD is not very dense at all.

And traffic congestion is the result of low-density, automobile centred development. This happens in cities with which have even lower population densities than Vancouver. So I don't think you can say that the few, small islands of density, swimming in the great sea of sprawl that is the GVRD, could be blamed for this traffic.

I agree with Cameron's statement that "Single-family zoning should be banned."

oeanda, no offence taken...

Just pointing out that what ever you were trying to say didn't work. You didn't explain your wealth creation statementent period. Then you say urbanization is critical to the system. The systemic herding of humans into urban consumption pens? The equivalent of human feed lots. The system of diversity and cultural centres and markets may have worked once but not in this day of greed and exploitation. It's no wonder we repaeat our mistakes over and over with the flock bleating out the mantra of the overlords. Wealth creation! Wealth creation! Sorry pal, but I gotta call bullshit on you... don't think of it as a bad thing.

Good on ya, Mike

Mike Harcourt ain't no size-challenged person so, with his SmartCar, nice to see he's putting his money where his mouth is - in what he chooses to drive, that is.

Off topic? I don't think so since how we get around has much to do with a region's livability.

If, and when, the SkyTrain grid serves the whole Lower Mainland, there will be no lack of ridership and I think it will be the envy of many cities throughout the world.

I believe we might have been much closer to that goal if the system had not, in my opinion, first served politicians and contractors and, in spite of being in an earthquake zone, been much overbuilt.

Going underground along Cambie has been a costly error that, perhaps, we're too fast to attribute to NIMBY-ism.

on the other hand...

Was Paris made the most beautiful city in the world by consensus?

Limitations of low- vs high-density GHG study

oeanda, I took a look at the study you cited. I would be cautions about it as it has a number of limitations. However, I actually suspect these limitations result in the study under representing the difference in GHG emissions between low and high density development.

The study only looked at three factors: construction materials for the dwellings, energy use, and transportation. Other factors (e.g. traffic congestion, infrastructure, maintenance, contents such as appliances & furniture, food) were not considered. Obviously larger houses in the suburbs have more stuff in them and incur greater infrastructure costs.

The study assumes 3.0 people per house in the suburbs, but only 1.8 per unit in the high-density development. One would expect people living together would be more efficient. If high density units for families were more common, the efficiency figures for high density development would improve further.

The study suffered from several limitations. It only considers one high-density building and one subdivision. It assumes a building lifespan of 50 years. It uses Canada-wide averages of energy use for single-detached and 5+ story apartments (presumably to the detriment of the building in the study, which has 15 stories).