We're told, aren't we, that building more densely in our cities will be great for the environment. Cramming everybody into a smaller space means more bikes, more walking, more public transport and fewer of those terrible, evil cars. With the result that, hey presto, all our carbon footprints are ever so much smaller.
Hang on a minute though...
Hmmm. This graph comes from a study by the Australian Conservation Foundation and, echoing similar studies from Chicago and elsewhere, it shows that transport - all those cars - isn't the bad boy you think it is when it comes to our carbon footprint. High-rise, apartment living itself generates a per capita carbon footprint 50% higher than is the case for suburban living. Even with a higher impact from using the car, suburbs are less environmentally damaging than dense urban environments. And this is without us even trying to reduce its footprint.
All this reminds us that, far from eating beef and driving cars being the biggest culprits in terms of energy use, heating or cooling our homes is the baddie. And not only is our individual footprint bigger (largely as a result of unshared accommodation and the lack of families in dense urban environments) there's also that huge additional cost dubbed "operational" - everything from street lighting and traffic management through to lifts and managing communal areas in apartment blocks. The idea that cramming us all together is good for the planet doesn't stack up.
Despite this (and despite denisification being bad for health, congestion and housing affordability) we are still wedded to the idea of ever more dense cities and to the denigration of suburbs as ugly, planet-killing, car-choked hell holes. Time to change.
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