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Compact City: is It Sustainable?

World's population is growing rapidly with more and more people concentrated in cities. We know this trend as urbanization. More people live in urban regions than rural areas. In 1950, it was only 30 percent of the world's population who lived in cities. In 2014, the percentage has increased where we have 54 percent of the world's population are the urban dwellers. By 2050, it has been projected that 66 percent of the world's population will be urbanized (United Nations 2014).


Urban and Rural Population of the World (United Nations 2014)


Large concentration of people within cities has caused wicked problems related to social, economic, and environmental aspects of the city dwellers. There has been a long debate on what makes the most sustainable city model. Compact city has been arguably referred as the most sustainable model of city development. However, the idea of compact city as a sustainable model of city development has never been apart from contradictions. Is it really sustainable? What is the relationship between density and sustainability?


To understand the compact city and what it's all about, I would like to address a glimpse of its origin before coming to the discussions of compact city and its sustainability facets. Compact City (or 'smart growth') concept was firstly introduced in 1973 by Dantzig and Saaty in their work, 'Compact City: Plan for a Livable Urban Environment'. The writers were two mathematicians with vision of achieving the most efficient use of resources. Since then, this concept has influenced urban planning. One of the most famous work related to compact city concept is 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' by Jane Jacobs. Jacobs (1961) criticized conventional model of urban planning and transport planning at that time in America which was promoting urban sprawl and reducing density of housings in urban area.


Claustrophobic Hong Kong's Vertical Residential (Wolf 2014)

In 2005, Michael Neuman challenged the relatively-established urban design principle by stating that compactness is negatively correlated with sustainability (Neuman 2005). He argues that the concept of compact city as sustainable city form is not fully correct. Neuman suggests that the debate is not necessarily how sustainable compact city is. It is because sustainability and compact city are two different things. There are indeed several sustainability qualities that can be achieved by having a compact city such as more efficient transport energy. However in an interview, Neuman argued that looking at the overall historical data, we are getting less efficient and less sustainable as we are concentrated in cities (Oakes 2013).


Looking at these conditions, I personally agree with Neuman's point. Density is not the only key to sustainability. It is the way we live, how we consume and use energy and resources, that define the actual degree of how sustainable we are. Density is just a physical built form, it's not an attitude. It will be pointless to have skyscrapers if the lifestyle of the inhabitants of these skyscrapers demand much more resources compared to the lifestyle of the people living in rural villages.


Another negative impact of over-crowded settlements is lower quality of environment for people's health (both physical and mental). A series of photos by Michael Wolf show how claustrophobic a dense urban form can be.

References:

Dantzig, G., and T. Saaty, 1973, Compact city: Plan for a Livable Urban Environment, W. H. Freeman, San Francisco.

Jacobs, J 1961, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, New York.

Neuman, M 2005, 'The Compact City Fallacy', Journal of Planning Education and Research, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 11‐26. <http://understandtheplan.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/The-Compact-City-Fallacy.pdf>

Oakes, A 2013, 'Revisiting Neuman's Compact City Fallacy', <http://gbdmagazine.com/2013/23-notebook/>

United Nations 2014, World Urbanization Prospects The 2014 Revisions, United Nations, New York, <http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf>


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