David Owen explains how NYC is the Greenest City in America:
Because densely populated urban centers concentrate human activity, we think of them as pollution crisis zones. Calculated by the square foot, New York City generates more greenhouse gases, uses more energy, and produces more solid waste than most other American regions of comparable size. On a map depicting negative environmental impacts in relation to surface area, therefore, Manhattan would look like an intense hot spot, surrounded, at varying distances, by belts of deepening green.If you plotted the same negative impacts by resident or by household, however, the color scheme would be reversed.
How Manhattan got so remarkably dense:
New York’s example, admittedly, is difficult for others to imitate, because the city’s remarkable population density is the result not of conscientious planning but of a succession of serendipitous historical accidents. The most important of those accidents was geographic: New York arose on a smallish island rather than on the mainland edge of a river or a bay, and the surrounding water served as a physical constraint to outward expansion. Manhattan is like a typical seaport turned inside out — a city with a harbor around it, rather than a harbor with a city along its edge. Insularity gave Manhattan more shoreline per square mile than other ports, a major advantage in the days when one of the world’s main commercial activities was moving cargoes between ships. It also drove early development inward and upward.A second lucky accident was that Manhattan’s street plan was created by merchants who were more interested in economic efficiency than in boulevards, parks, or empty spaces between buildings. The resulting crush of architecture is actually humanizing, because it brings the city’s commercial, cultural, and other offerings closer together, thereby increasing their accessibility — a point made forty-three years ago by the brilliantly iconoclastic urban thinker Jane Jacobs, in her landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
A third accident was the fact that by the early nineteen-hundreds most of Manhattan’s lines had been filled in to the point where not even Robert Moses could easily redraw them to accommodate the great destroyer of American urban life, the automobile. Henry Ford thought of cars as tools for liberating humanity from the wretchedness of cities, which he viewed with as much distaste as Jefferson did. In 1932, John Nolen, a prominent Harvard-educated urban planner and landscape architect, said, “The future city will be spread out, it will be regional, it will be the natural product of the automobile, the good road, electricity, the telephone, and the radio, combined with the growing desire to live a more natural, biological life under pleasanter and more natural conditions.” This is the idea behind suburbs, and it’s still seductive. But it’s also a prescription for sprawl and expressways and tremendous waste.