Green metropolis

What Hacker News says

1. shawnee_Dec 2013
   Living small(er) in order to minimize carbon footprint makes sense. Green Metropolis by David Owen is a fantastic book that makes the case for Manhattan being a great blueprint for the ideal city of the future -- people living more densely = less energy use individually & less "space" to accumulate stuff and waste. Trash disposal in the city is such a complex problem that residents are literally forced to be economical about their consumption habits. Traditional concepts of homesteading on the plains, whether with large ranch houses or an "eco" house made of straw and mud are not necessarily ecologically friendly when there's imperative need to drive to get to the nearest urban area for work, school, shopping, etc -- these, he argues, are the antithesis of efficiency.

   Small eco-homes are not just a trend; they are the new era in real estate development. But they need to be built such that they can collectively share infrastructures the same way city residents do. The project I'm working on, applied to YC with (and was rejected from) last batch is built on this idea of more ecological homesteading in order to create better urban planning. Masdar City http://www.masdarcity.ae/en/ is an interesting prototype for the future of cities. We've schooled our youngins enough for them to know that ecological awareness needs to be a lifestyle. They're surprisingly aware that the world they are inheriting has exponential population growth, limited resources, and that the "industrial revolution" model of economic viability just isn't going to work forever they way it has been working.

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2. bretthopperJun 2011
   It sounds like you're treating an Apple building downtown differently than any other skyscraper. It's still just a big tower filled with people. Are you saying that SF is literally bursting at the seams and that it can't support another big office tower? What about the giant Transbay development plan? If you're going to stuff 12,000+ people anywhere, it's better to do it in an already dense area to take advantage of efficiencies.

   Green Metropolis is an interesting read about big cities and sustainability: http://www.amazon.com/Green-Metropolis-Smaller-Driving-Susta...

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3. JDDunn9Nov 2016
   This topic is discussed at length in the book, "Green Metropolis". It's part of a bigger issue of always putting cars first. You can't build a large building without first doing a traffic study. If you bring too much traffic, you can't build it. Never mind that traffic is about the only cost in America that you can increase to make public transportation more appealing.

   Generally U.S. building codes include a maximum building height, and require minimum parking spaces. Many European cities have maximum parking spaces, and minimum building height. The latter produces higher population densities which make public transportation possible.

   We need to push back against suburban sprawl and the car-first design. No required parking, no free curbside parking, and a carbon tax on gasoline. Once cities get a population density >7 people per acre, public transportation becomes viable. Population density follows a logarithmic curve with miles traveled per person, so you get as much of a reduction from moving from 2 to 20 people per square acre, as from 20 to 200.

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