> But suppose you managed to live in a suburb without ever using a car, > and without anyone in your household ever using a car. > -- > Robert Naiman ----------
I think to see a suburb, you have to fly over it and look down on the approach. First you come to miles and miles housing and wide streets all within a couple of stories, then the cityscape changes into other features by everything gets taller, maybe in the distance and you land and have to take something to get you into the city. LAX is a little different because you land in a former suburb that is actually now part of the city because LA is almost all suburb, just older and old. SF is pretty much the same, except drastically smaller. At SFO you land on landfill after crossing suburbs that reach down to Los Gatos south of San Jose. What are you looking at, from an eco point of view. You are looking at concrete and asphalt, man-made surfaces that reflect and absorb radiation as well as distribute gases and so forth, a kind of massive organic/inorganic colony with its own ecology and environment. Sure you can bike to work and pick up groceries, etc, but that is pretty much irrelevant compared to the coverage of land by man made environments. This raises (in my mind) an interesting question. Which is less abusive of global scale ecology a set of condensed populations in cities, or the sprawl that surrounds them? Is the LA model easier on the enviornment than the Manhatten model, I mean in totality? A long time ago, maybe late 1970s out here, this kind of geographical question was taken up over development of Yosemite Valley. Should the park service close down the sprawling camp grounds and condense visitor activity to small areas of greater impact or allow it spread with thinner impact but greater area. At the time I was learning to climb with a visiting prof in the Geography Dept. and we used to argue this. I don't know the answer. The Valley experiment never really came to conclusions because of endless budget cuts. Instead of doing a Euro style Alpine sort of development, they just closed camp grounds because it was cheaper than maintaining them and of course the existing camping got a lot more expensive, enough to get rid of the working class families who used to use the camp grounds as a vacation on the cheap. So somebody has to read up on this and figure it out. Patrick's link just went to an intro page, but over on the right panel, there was another Harvey lecture on Urban Revolution which is a cool lecture as always with Harvey, but it doesn't address the real topic of this thread. At a guess, suburbs are very hard on the environment because of their sprawl, their thinner population density. It maybe that condensation of populations might be better---but that has to be figured out. CG CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
