The Sustainable City

http://urbanreplanner.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/bicycle-commuting-europe-miles-ahead/

When I think of cities I think of places like New York or Los Angeles.  But when I think about sustainable cities, these are not the places that come to mind.  To me a sustainable city is a place where it is easy to get around without a car, a place with recycling programs, or a place where people are encouraged to make green choices such as biking to work.  There are a number of different plans that can be implemented to form a sustainable city and these plans can be formed from both large and small ideas.



http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/Edmonton,_Alberta/



Before I moved to Victoria I had lived for 20 years in Edmonton, which tends to have a bad reputation when being addressed as a sustainable city.  When comparing Edmonton to cities that are built with a higher population density in mind, it does not seem to be very sustainable.  This is because Edmonton was built as a fairly spread out city, where most of the population owns a car.  But in order to fully consider whether or not a city is sustainable, every societal aspect must be addressed. Edmonton has a world renowned recycling and waste program, and this makes them sustainable when it comes to issues of waste management.  But considering the amount of driving that the population must do in order to get from point A to point B, Edmonton seems to fail  on the sustainability scale.  While working towards my Chemical Technology Diploma I attended the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology which was approximately 15km from my house.  There were two methods of transportation in which I could use to get to school; my car or the bus.  I took the bus for the first semester of my first year and it was so inefficient in terms of time (2-3 hours each way) that I had to drive for my next 3 semesters.  If Edmonton were to develop a better public transit system, more people would take advantage of buses instead of driving.  Sustainability experts may suggest that Edmonton needs to make the city more walkable, but this would be useless considering that the temperature in the winter can drop to -40C and no one wants to walk outside in those conditions.  I think that in order for Edmonton to become a more sustainable city they need to input a better and more efficient transit system.  In the picture to the right you can see the very small high density part of Edmonton, followed by a large area of suburban housing.       

Chris Ling, Lecture Notes, 2011

There are several cities in Europe that are very sustainable cities, which is mainly due to the high density building codes that were used.  Cities such as Barcelona were built in the past when there were no motor vehicles present in society.  This resulted in the cities being built so that it was easy to get around by walking or biking.  In these cities, the population is usually physically healthier because they tend to get more exercise due to everything being in walking distance (Ling, Lecture Notes, 2011).  By having cities that are spread out, such as Edmonton, there are many negative health issues that can result.  More people tend to drive everywhere (especially in the winter), which means they are not getting enough physical activity.  This leads to high obesity rates in large spread out cities such as Houston, Texas.  Places like Hong Kong or Copenhagen are much more densely populated and the people their tend to get around by walking, biking, or public transit.  This can be seen on the graph to the left.     

There are several sustainable cities that can be found around the world.  These cities are more often than not built with high density populations and ease of pedestrian transport in mind.  Several negative impacts can result due to sprawling suburban areas and these include such things as obesity and loss of social contact.  I think that if spread out cities were to look towards European cities and their concepts of New Urbanism then the cities across the world would become much more sustainable than they presently are.    My favorite Canadian artist, Danny Michel, wrote the song "Feather, Fur, and Fin" and although it does not directly deal with sustainable cities I find it relates to the blog topic.  This song is giving the message of how all of the building developments are taking over the habitats of animals and fish.  By building densely populated cities this destruction will still occur, but not to the same extent as it would if we were to continue to develop suburbs and take up more land than necessary.  I hope you like the song!