Urban Discoveries Baltimore

We’ve talked a little bit before about how living in an urban area (cough, Baltimore, cough) is better for the environment. The study we were talking about then, by economists Edward L. Glaeser of Harvard and Matthew Kahn of UCLA, was primarily concerned with where future home building and population growth would do the least environmental damage. The results showed that urban areas were pretty environmentally friendly, which jibed with the perception that we had, too.

But we’re not talking about that study today. No sir. Today we’re going to talk about a new study published in The Journal of Urban Planning and Development that compares greenhouse gas emissions between high density urban areas and low density suburban areas. (The original study can be found here, but if you’re short on time or technical expertise this is a good summary.) The researchers found that the average city dweller used much, much less energy than his suburban doppelganger, resulting in a two-thirds (!) decrease in the amount of CO2 produced per person. Furthermore, the biggest gap in emissions didn’t occur in building operations (heating, cooling, etc.) or building materials (which apparently reduces to almost a rounding error (!) when everything is taken into account), but rather in transportation emissions. The why of it is fairly intuitive – city dwellers use more public transit, and drive shorter distances when they do drive, creating much less CO2.

Now while the scope of this most recent study – just two neighborhoods in Toronto – is a tad small to be conclusive, we like to think of it as complementary with the Glaeser-Kahn study. Put together they seem to suggest that in order to best protect both our land and air in the future we’re going to need to refocus on the environmental benefits of living in a city, no matter how counterintuitive that may seem at first.

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