Chuck notes that the distinction between "city" and "suburb" can be somewhat arbitrary - some parts of LA are former suburbs which were absorbed, so you have to ask yourself to what extent those former suburbs became more city-like when they were absorbed.
In the DC area one has to some extent the opposite phenomenon: there are areas of Maryland and Virginia close to DC that in another part of the country might have been absorbed but weren't in this case because there was a state boundary in the way. So perhaps the question is really about density and public transit, not whether one is technically in a suburb or a city. On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 6:41 PM, Chuck Grimes <[email protected]> wrote: >> 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 -- Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org [email protected] _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
