Views: Pros and Cons Topic Map Slideshow

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Category: Environment, Society & Politics
Tags: cities, sustainable, population
Points:
Cities hold the key to sustainable living for the world's rising population  
  • but: cities are concentrated areas of resource consumption, and so cannot be self-sustaining  

    • but: a city has to be seen as part of its environment, and that whole environment can be sustainable  

    • because: cities consume water from the surrounding water catchment, not just from within themselves  

  • but: the growth of cities has created huge environmental and social problems  

    • Solution: reduce the use of cars to a minimum  

      • Effect: increase the use of public transport  

      • but: planners have designed cities around cars rather than people  

        • because: they idealised mobility and freedom  

        • because: e.g. cities in the U.S. were based on Frank Lloyd Wright's vision of suburban homesteads connected by highways  

    • Solution: reduce, re-use, recycle and re-think as much as possible  

    • because: many cities are made up of socially deprived neighbourhoods  

      • Solution: cities with multiple centres allow people to live close to their work in high-rise blocks that are also near public transport hubs  

        • Effect: the density of high-rises can create an heat-island effect  

          • Solution: green roofs, supporting plants, can help control temperatures (Wikipedia contributors (2009) ) 

          • Solution: planting trees along the streets can help reduce air temperatures  

          • Solution: buildings can be designed to reduce direct sunlight through windows, increase ventilation, and cut energy absorption by painting external walls white  

          • because: dense cities heat the air around them  

      • because: they are organized into residential, commercial, and industrial zones  

    • because: cities expel clouds of greenhouse gases, tonnes of solid waste, and rivers of toxic effluent  

      • because: the high volume of pollutants over-loads the systems that dispose of them  

  • because: many cities already have eco-projects  

    • because: e.g. the eco-city of Dongtan, near Shanghai, is the first ever built from scratch (The Economist (2006) ) 

    • because: e.g. wind turbines and solar cells generate up to 85% of the electricity used in the building that housed the Melbourne city council  

    • because: e.g. garbage trucks in San Diego run on methane extracted from the landfills they deliver to  

    • because: e.g. Germany's new parliament building in Berlin uses carbon-neutral vegetable oil to cut its CO2 emissions by 94%  

  • because: it's possible for cities to partly feed themselves  

    • because: cities can have vertical farms (Wikipedia contributors (2008) ) 

      • but: vertical farms are only in the design stage, no real ones have been built, so there is no evidence that they are practical (Feldman (2007) Section: Final interview question) 

  • because: the size of a city creates economies of scale for energy generation, recycling, and public transport (Pearce (2006) ) 


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