City Living and the Environment: Part 2

Proximity to work, play, and errands is one of the biggest components of making city living "greener". However, other factors certainly make a big difference:

• Proximity to utilities: Laying water pipes, sewer pipes, and cable uses resources. Electricity attenuates over large distances. Cities on a grid system are the most efficient means of distributing utilities and dealing with wastes. Obviously, if you are "off the grid" in the country, you are a special case!
• Smaller footprint: Most urban homes are smaller by necessity. It is too expensive to build a sprawling house. Plus, most American urban core homes were constructed before the 1970's and therefore smaller (kids used to not all get their own rooms! ). Smaller homes are more efficient to heat and cool. Apartments and condos which are a staple of urban dwelling really take the prize for energy efficiency (all those units insulate each other). 
• Smaller lawns or no lawn at all: Urban core homes have very little in the way of a lawn. Sure, their impervious cover percentage is crazy high, but they aren't expending water, gas, and fertilizer on a sprawling yard. Many apartments in dense urban areas like LA have no turf grass at all and instead just have a few green courtyards with trees, shrubs, and flowers.
• Nowhere to store a second car: If you have more than one car, one of them ends up parked on the street typically (or you pay to lease a parking spot). This creates a pretty good incentive to consolidate to a single vehicle which leads to more carpooling or public transportation.
• Access to public transit: I am really getting into public transit now that I live somewhere with an entire system of bus and light rail (and soon to be high speed rail as I and many others are feverishly working on it)!

City living isn't for everyone, but the "concrete jungle" certainly lessens your environmental impact and the amount of money spent on utilities and peripherals. I think living in the City feels less connected to nature than suburban living, so it is easy to forget how good it is in the bigger picture. It is also easy to forget how awesome it can be with a little creative city planning. Humans are far better collectively, and there is no reason the combined mental and creative forces of a city can't make the urban core the best place to be.