This article ought to provoke some debate. I’ve often wondered whether less-dense parts of the city might not be just as sustainable as hyper-dense tower forms, as long as people could reduce car use.
But I’m wondering what missing elements there might be from this research.
19 responses so far ↓
1 Stephen Rees // Jul 24, 2012 at 8:40 am
The problem is not that density does not change car use, it is that that the areas studied and the length of time they modelled did not produce a great deal of change. That is no surprise, as the rates of change in established English metropolitan areas overall are less than in North America. It also depends on assumptions about other influences on car use. These places already have very good public transport systems and much higher transit mode share than we do.
Worth looking at the original study rather than the Atlantic’s take on it
2 Michael Kluckner // Jul 24, 2012 at 9:18 am
This appears to confirm evidence from Australian studies that Gord Price flagged on his blog several months ago: http://theconversation.edu.au/the-carbon-devil-in-the-detail-on-urban-density-4226
3 Robert Edwards // Jul 24, 2012 at 9:26 am
That automobile use did not increase or decrease significantly under the models used in the study hardly supports the author’s suggestion that interference with market forces in land use planning is unwise. Based on the scope of the article, at least, it’s little more than question-begging.
4 Agustin // Jul 24, 2012 at 9:59 am
All I get from this article (and the one referenced by Michael above) is that it is possible to do density poorly.
If I’m reading this right, they compared three English cities and modeled each one of them into the future, making assumptions about how they’d be developed (low, medium, and high density).
They then found that their models showed little difference on car modal share and therefore concluded that density does little to influence energy use in cities.
That seems like a heck of a leap to me.
They’ve also made another leap by assuming a 1:1 relationship between energy use and sustainability.
It’s worth noting that they used computer models rather than actual data, when actual data is widely available. Using a model introduces a layer of uncertainty into the study, and I don’t know why they’ve done it.
5 jolson // Jul 24, 2012 at 10:24 am
Sustainability means recognizing that you are part and parcel of a biosphere of living things. Lifestyles and supporting technologies have varying impacts on our biological foundation. Humans will not abandon technology very easily, which is why we need to re-invent simplicity because neither the dense city nor the sprawl city is sustainable.
6 Rick // Jul 24, 2012 at 10:53 am
Unless you get per capita energy use down, most of which is a culture shift rather than a technological panacea, city form is a bit of a red herring because gains will always be offset by growth.
7 Agustin // Jul 24, 2012 at 11:32 am
Rick,
… unless city form impacts population growth somehow. (Which I don’t think is an unreasonable hypothesis.)
8 Lisa C // Jul 24, 2012 at 4:01 pm
Did any of the cities they looked at have car sharing organizations, decent rapid transit or bike share systems? I think these three things would impact car use more than density, though they all work better in more dense areas.
What I understood from the article was that the study found 95% of people living in the denser urban cores still drove a lot. I doubt this would be the case in Vancouver’s downtown, though I don’t know any stats to back up my hunch…
9 Higgins // Jul 24, 2012 at 4:32 pm
What?
No Lisa C @6 , they were ‘tupid , they didn’t have those real advances in science like… bikes and car sharing schemes that you seem to be so concerned about, LOL! The cities were from third world countries like Australia and UK.
Stay close to Gregor and his Vision apparatchik, as if you step out of their shadow you might get burnt by the sun.
The conclusion is simple… everybody plays the Expert, in reality nobody knows anything!
10 Bill Lee // Jul 24, 2012 at 5:00 pm
The study areas were Tyne and Wear [rivers] City Region, basically Newcastle and suburbs; Cambridge Sub Region; and a greater South East region (from the Wash, west then down south to Portsmouth, Isle of Wight, a region than encloses the Cambridge SR above, but centres on London).
“Britain has policies for controlling the spread of cities, beginning in earnest with the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, which has been remarkably successful in preventing suburbanization of open land through the introduction of green belts (urban growth boundaries) around many cities (Hall, Gracey, Drewett, & Thomas, 1973). But what have been the effects? On the one hand, the distinction between countryside and city has been preserved and rural landscapes protected. On the other, restrictions on the supply of development land have led to property price increases, penalizing city dwellers by leading to less dwelling space than in other European countries (Barker, 2004; Meen, 2005; Sak & Raponi, 2002). Higher property prices have affected the affordability of houses and reduced economic competitiveness for some industries. Furthermore, the green belt policy has led some urbanites to jump the protected rings of countryside to reach villages and towns offering the lifestyle they desire (Evans, 1998), leading to longer commuting journeys.
The policy has been reinforced in the last decade so that 72% of new dwellings in 2006 were built on brownfield land, up from 54% a decade earlier. Over the same period, the average net density of new-build housing has risen 64%, from 10 to 17 dwellings per acre in England, and dramatically increased in the London region from 23 to 43 dwellings per acre, an 89% increase (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2008). One downside of this policy is a substantial reduction in choice of dwelling types, with new dwellings being mainly apartments.”
“Compaction has been promoted in the United Kingdom by Richard Rogers’s Urban Task Force (Rogers, 1999), which led to a White Paper on Urban Renaissance and policy advice (e.g., Department for Communities and Local Government, 2005). The main recommendations were to focus development at much higher densities within cities, mainly on brownfield land, and to invest in public transport. The policy assumes development is focused around a strong urban center where most commercial activity takes place. Compaction is often promoted as the urban form best able to lower CO2 emissions.
A basic premise behind the prescription for higher density was an assumed relationship between density and fuel consumption proposed by Newman and Kenworthy (1989), who concluded that high-density cities consume less energy. This relationship has been discredited as the causality cannot be attributed solely to density determining fuel consumption; it has been demonstrated that density plays a small part in energy consumption if the price of fuel and other automobile travel costs, relative to income, is included in the analysis (I. Gordon, 1997). A more plausible causal explanation is that in those cities that have cheap travel, people tend to travel further in order to have more living space, as prices are lower outside central areas. Thus, transport cost is the cause of density rather than density being the cause of lower fuel consumption.”
[ I'm still reading the paper, Journal of the American Planning Association Volume 78, Issue 2, 2012 Growing Cities Sustainably
DOI: 10.1080/01944363.2012.666731
by Marcial H. Echeniquea, Anthony J. Hargreavesb, Gordon Mitchellc & Anil Namdeod
pages 121-137
Version of record first published: 03 May 2012 ]
11 Bill Lee // Jul 24, 2012 at 5:11 pm
Oops, cut and paste left in the suffix references a,b,c to the surnames.
Journal of the American Planning Association Volume 78, Issue 2, 2012 Growing Cities Sustainably
DOI: 10.1080/01944363.2012.666731
by Marcial H. Echenique, Anthony J. Hargreaves, Gordon Mitchell & Anil Namdeo
pages 121-137 ]
12 Lionsgate // Jul 24, 2012 at 6:01 pm
“…numbers indicate that we might be better off focusing our effort on improving technology and energy efficiency.”
Planners in Vancouver, and elsewhere, need to have a better comprehension of the opportunities for energy efficiency and sustainability that lie at the intersection of technology and well designed urban form. In a recent Vancouver ULI event, on “the City in 2050: creating blueprints for change,” a panel of 3 former CoV planning directors hardly mentioned the opportunities that new technologies present to their individual visions. Mr. Spaxman stated something that sounded like most young people are wasting their time online and Mr. Toderian referenced luggage with wheels as the sort of technology he thinks is worth promoting.
Density, even if it is designed well today, will not result in the desired degree of efficiency and sustainability because buildings (the largest emitters of CO2), like cars, break down over time and require new parts and upgrades. The glass towers we built over the past two decades will equate to 50′s cadillac’s in terms of efficiency if they are not fitted with new hardware and software that allow them to keep up with the pace of change. Cars will increasingly go electric and be networked to the urban form. The new BMW i series promotes this intersection well, along with a variety of other car manufacturers like Tesla/GM/etc.. The point here is that technology should be a foundational consideration in how our City is planned.
Francis, your recent article in Vancouver magazine (Building a Virtual Vancouver) touches on some of the sustainable opportunities created by the digital revolution, but the real jump will be made by the physical urban form being connected to the vast network we are in the process of creating.
Universities in BC, UBC in particular, are doing a very good job of researching & testing some of these new technologies and taking the degree of failure down to a level that allows for real-world demonstration & deployment.
The reality is that planners will increasingly need to have a more diverse range of skills and that their decision making will require more collaborative consultation, rather than siloed thinking and put-downs of new concepts.
13 Richard // Jul 24, 2012 at 6:33 pm
The conclusions of the research are way to broad. Pretty typical of all this type of research on all sides of the issue. Trying to draw any conclusions from it for Vancouver simply is not a good idea. Running the models on development scenarios for here would be interesting. They do refer to other research that indicates that being near to downtown reduces driving by 20%.
In general average densities over regions are very poor at predicting levels of automobile use. I believe LA has a higher average density than New York City yet levels of driving are much higher in LA. What seems to be important is not the average density but having very high densities near where people work and shop and near rapid transit.
Simply having high density housing near nothing else is just a bad idea as it will be pretty much car dependent. In Vancouver the East Fraser lands are in example of this. This will be somewhat improved with the new development down there that will eventually include retail.
14 Richard // Jul 24, 2012 at 6:42 pm
@Lionsgate
Really hard to project where new technologies will take cities and transportation. One possibility is a much broader use of car sharing. Transportation will become a service not a consumer product. Instead of large upfront fixed costs and low per costs people will be charged per kilometer for car use. This change will favor compact mixed-use development where people travel shorter distances to destinations and thus will have lower transportation costs.
15 Brian // Jul 24, 2012 at 8:47 pm
The article doesn’t really give much insight into what the actual model is. Specifically, it leaves unexplained how the model purports to predict aggregate human behaviour over a long period of time. The idea that we can model that effectively is farfetched IMO.
I would also predict that density only gets so low in England. I’ve driven from London to Manchester to Leeds, waiting to for the intercity wilderness we are used to in Canada, but it never arrived. There is always another town over the next hill. Also, living quarters tend to be much smaller, resulting in higher densities. It may be that they didn’t find a wide range of energy consumption because the densities weren’t really that different.
Finally, as others have stated above, there is no distinction made between pure density and good density. My own experience in England suggests that there tends to be a high quality of density in England for two reasons: much if the country was laid out before the rise of the car, and in many places existing social structures favour small amenities nearby (see: the butcher, the baker, and the all-important local pub).
16 Lewis N. Villegas // Jul 24, 2012 at 10:32 pm
I’m happy to follow Stephen Rees on this, since he’s got the UK experience.
Look, comparing the UK to Vancouver is a bit like comparing chimps to bananas.
Although the UK has been making strides to catch up to North American levels of car dependency, they are still very much in their infancy (bless them. Oh—and mind the talk about the ‘driving on the wrong side of the road’ which is really unnecessary).
For the skeptics, we have but to point to our Canada Line and *belch*…. I mean, there are so many things that went wrong with it (read Stephen’s blog for a devastating chronology).
Yet, in the final analysis, it is an unqualified success. It is the kind of ‘let’s paint the town red’ success that only our governments are too meek to try to replicate, over and over again.
The Brits also do not have—bless them—the challenge that we face with arterials that are killing fronting residential uses.
OK, they have history on their side. Count up all the times I’ve been ‘Moron-y-fied’ on this blog for being too ‘European’ and redeem them for a free Latte at Starbucks…
The British Isles are also a compact parody of the vast expanses of their colonial Canadian landscape. So, our problems here are that much more different that their solutions there, due to both geography and history and the like.
Go on—let’s dig up another study that says that the bloody obvious in not really going to work here. Let’s start reinventing the wheel along with the long-standing traditions of ‘good’ urbanism all over again in the name of what?
Canadian know-how? Vancouver as a world leading capital? The west as the new Arabia?
[...actually, I take back that last one—it might just stick...]
We did the suburbs in the 1950s. Surely enough time & water has passed under the Port Mann that we can come up with something equally dis-functional.
I mean, we have the resources just wasting away all around us like diamonds on the beach.
Or do we? Dare we go it alone ‘cowboy style’, or is it time to consider things more carefully, and forget the ‘new’ math?
17 Aldyen Donnelly // Jul 26, 2012 at 10:48 pm
The study appears to rely heavily on a modelling exercise that incorporates assumptions that are in some cases highly inconsistent with real life.
I agree that density can be “done poorly”. So while I am solidly on the “pro-density” team, I am also careful to point out that the devil is in the details.
One of my great concerns is that too many of our expert promoters of general concepts–”put a price on carbon”, “go density”, or the like–don’t seem to feel any obligation to look into the details to learn why certain policies are effective in some applications and not others.
When I speak as an advocate for certain policies, I try very hard to get us all to get past the generalizations and into the details.
Where there is a good correlation between density and low per capita energy use, what are the attributes of the shape of the community that have resulted in the higher rate of energy efficiency?
I think those attributes come with density. But if we focus our policies on achieving the attributes, it does not mattter if I am wrong about density. If our policies and regulations target the key attributes, who knows? Maybe the market will deliver compliance with those goals in ways that won’t result in density increases.
Like I said, I am currently on the pro-density team. Good policies will let density happen if it is the most efficient way for the market to deliver compliance with our goals and objectives…but they won’t prescribe density, they will prescribe the performance attributes we are going for.
An example? Let’s regulate a “no net new” energy demand bylaw for the city of Vancouver. You want a development permit? You have to show us how you are going to invest in energy efficiency in the city to offset 100% of the increase in community energy demand your development represents. We’ll leave it to you to decide whether you want to comply by financing energy retrofits for four houses, or finance the replacement of one or two of those made-in-1957 engines that pull trains across the city. Our zoning has to allow for, but not dictate density increases in this context.
If it is cheaper for you to replace train engines and diesel buses with LNG and electric models to offset 100% of the new energy demand associated with your new development, we won’t get density. If it is cheaper for you to comply with the “no net new” energy demands standard without more densification, we won’t get much of a density increase.
I currently thing we will get density. But if we get the policies and bylaws right, it won’t matter if I am wrong about that. If we getnthenpolicies and bylaws right, we will get no net new energy demand at least cost, however that might be accomplished.
18 Aldyen Donnelly // Jul 26, 2012 at 10:52 pm
Sorry. In my last post I said “we won’t get much of a density increase” at the end of the 2nd last paragraph when I meant that we might get a density increase.
19 Elizabeth Murphy // Jul 26, 2012 at 11:27 pm
It all depends on what kinds of density we build. Towers are the least energy efficient form of development because it is all glass and concrete with elevators. Towers have an energy rating of R2-R4, which is equivalent to a castle in the middle ages.
Towers also form a heat island affect when there are concentrations of them. And building more luxury supply than is being occupied with 22,000 empty units is a serious waste when the poor are homeless on the street. Building more of the wrong product does not reduce our ecological footprint.
Making better use of the existing buildings we have should be a first priority through adaptive reuse of existing buildings such as multifamily conversion dwellings (MCD). Housing more people within the same envelop and improving energy efficiency would greatly reduce our ecological footprint, protect heritage and character, and be more affordable by not driving up land values through excessive upzoning and speculation.
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