Originally Posted by
cooker
The state of New York has a lot of rural areas, consisting of areas like farmland, pastureland, privately held forest land, state and national parks, and so on. And based on your numbers, that includes 1577 square miles of rural land that didn’t have to be carved up into endless subdvisions, because the 1,600,000 people of Manhattan collectively decided they only need to occupy 1.4% of that amount of space.
Ah yes but the rural areas outside of the urban area (New York) don't really matter to this. One in your scenario people wouldn't have cars so they would have no way to get to it. If cars were available, they would still need roads and other infrastructure to get there. Further they would have no way to guarantee that the rural land wouldn't be subdivided and made in to sub urbs since it is outside their regulatory area...
As to your second point, yes, the people of Manahattan have only 1.4% (assuming your math was correct), so they have to export their garbage and pollute other people's property. If such density was the norm, there wouldn't be any place to export the garbage to... They are in a position that they can never be self sustaining (and hence more environmentally friendly). However, a design like Providence's is able to landfill their own garbage, particularly if they learn to have each family compost their organic waste (something that isn't an option for Manhattan) They also share their habitat with a far larger variety of flora and fauna then those in Manhattan (cock roaches, ants, and rats)...
Originally Posted by
Roody
I know it's kind of hard to understand, so lets use a simple analogy. Imagine you have a big square parcel of land that measures 6 slogs long by 6 slogs wide. (a slog is a pretend unit of length about as long as a big suburban lot.)
Okay, imagine now that you're going to build eco-friendly housing for 36 families on your 6X6 slog parcel. Here are two ways to do this:
Master Plan A: Obviously, one way to do this is to subdivide the parcel into 36 1X1 slog lots and build a single family home on each one. Each house takes up 1/4 of the lot, leaving 3/4 of the lot as open space. The new inhabitants happily put in lawns, gardens and xeriscaping on their nice big yards. They don't like to walk 6 slogs to visit their friends across the subdivision, so they pave over some of their open space to make roads for their SUVS. Then they each need a garage and a driveway, so they give up some more open space for this. They also put in for each house street lighting, signs, natural gas line, electric service, water mains, sewer lines, and so forth. So they give up still more open space. They are left with less than 3/4 of the total 6X6 slog parcel as open space. And much more than 1/4 of the space is occupied by buildings and infrastructure. IOW, there are more than 9 lots of developed space and fewer than 27 lots of open space.
Now imagine a different way of subdividing the parcel:
Master Plan B: On one of the 36 lots, build a nine story condo building that covers the entirety of just one of the 1X1 slog lots. Each floor will contain four units for a total of 36 homes. Each unit, covering 1/4 of the lot, will have the same square footage as one of the private houses in Master Plan A. Since nobody lives far from their neighbors, they won't need SUVS. They will need public transit (elevators). This will be expensive, but not as costly as the roads, driveways and garages needed in Master Plan A. A lot more money will be saved because they don't have to extend utilities all over the parcel. Inhabitants will have 35 parcels of open space, on which they can plant gardens, lawns, xeriscaping, or just leave as wild land for the trees and birds.
Summary:
Low density Plan A yields 75 percent open space, minus much additional space needed for infrastructure.
High density Plan B yields 97.2 percent open space, with no space needed for infrastructure.
Magnify this times 1000 or times 100,000 and you can see the analogy to a high density or low density city.
Yes clearly it is hard to understand since your analogy doesn't actually produce a greater
density both 'master plans' yield a density of 1 family per 'slog'... S Then we have historical precedent; which indicates that plan A would sell to 36 families, while plan b would remain mostly empty since the residents would have fled to the sub urbs... A high density city would be closer to plan c, with 36 of those 9 story condo buildings for 324 families in a space that only 36 would have existed. There would be 0 open space. They would be producing 9 times the waste and pollution of plan "A" in that footprint and have no place to allow nature to treat it. Further, the land outside such a 'master plan' would be available for developers to build 1 family per slog suburbs, and the folks stuck in that urban nightmare who could afford to would flee in vast numbers...
And lets look at the claim they wouldn't need SUV's... Well that interesting since virtually none of those who currently own them actually need them. They are a choice. Even folks who don't use such vehicles for commuting in places with solid transit systems like New York will keep the vehicles at home and use them for recreation and status symbols.