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This is more or less common wisdom in the green movement. But I can’t help wondering whether it is actually true. Every study that I have seen seems to me to miss a few things. 1/7
Typically the studies find a positive efficiency effect 4 density and assume it continues forever as cities get bigger. No diminishing returns? No diseconomies of scale? No threshold effects? Bigger is better **forever**? We shd all ideally be packed into one giant megacity? 2/7
All the studies I’ve seen are based entirely or mostly on data from the global north. What about the global south, where the really big cities actually are? 3/7
What about local histories/conditions? What happens to energy efficiency in coastal cities when sea level rises and they have to surround themselves with giant chunks of infrastructure? Can 19th century infrastructures (e.g., NYC) be replicated today? 4/7
Or, to put it another way: Is planning to shove everyone into hyper-efficient, super-dense megacities the sort of catastrophic modernist project that James C. Scott warned about in "Seeing Like a State"? 5/7
Most megacities become financial centers and then become cesspools of inequality and corruption (possible exception: Tokyo). Do we really think Nairobi and Cairo and Djakarta are models for tomorrow? 6/7
Maybe most important—**what is a city""? Where do you draw the lines? Is it (as William Cronon suggests) meaningless to consider the urban area by itself? Is a city an **artifact** or a **system**? (The enviro discourse assumes the former, the urbanist the latter.) 7/7
