Whilst my previous post touched on the necessity of equipping new residential suburbs with the essential infrastructure and facilities to support the population, there has been strong argument from academics and advocates of sustainable built-form alike to restrict urban expansion altogether and instead opt for denser living.
Many articles have advocated going up instead of out and literary papers have discussed the holistic benefits of a city where people and buildings are more close-knit. They equate higher density living with a stronger community environment which enriches social and physical health and this is much a driver as the obvious benefits of reduced car-travel and greenfield depletion.
For as long as I've read these articles and listened to these lectures, the idea of increased high-density living has bothered me. I see a decreased quality of life in which there is greater competition for employment and reduced access to green space with associated physical and mental health degradation. I see the heat island effect being increased to detrimental levels. I see increased alienation of more rural-based workers and decreased availability of suburban jobs. I see reduced quality of schools with smaller yards and a lack of campus environment which promotes physical activity and improves mental health. Or maybe I'm just the typical suburban-Sydney resident (as described in last week's lecture) who can't stomach the idea of not owning my own block of land, two cars and a dog running around in the backyard.
However, upon reading Alan Oakes' article "Revisiting Neuman's 'Compact City Fallacy'", it appears I'm not alone in my reservation. Oakes addresses an essay written by Michael Neuman in 2005, entitled 'The Compact City Fallacy'. Through his studies, Neuman reveals that the relationship between compactness and sustainability is in fact "negatively correlated, weakly related, or correlated in limited ways." The foundation of Neuman's argument is in the concern that while the world's population continues to grow and a greater and greater proportion of those people are moving to cities, our cities are actually becoming less sustainable, producing more emissions and consuming more resources.
So why is this and what should we do about it? Ultimately, it comes down to the integration of sustainable-thinking into all phases of the building process right from conception stage. An unsustainable city will always be unsustainable, no matter how compact. For Neuman, it's about modelling ourselves on nature, an integration of living systems. This means, no matter how smart the building facade or how energy efficient the HVAC (and for Neuman, 'technology' seems almost synonymous with 'compactness'), it is the processes rather than the form that should define building.
Sustainability is a broad term and we have to remember all it encompasses if we're going to get it right. It is not solely economic benefits or even benefits for the greater environment. People must be at the heart of sustainability. Sustainable building should improve the quality of human life. Higher-density living cannot achieve this on its own. We must integrate living systems within the built environment. Most importantly, people must have visual and physical access to ample green space most of the time when living in a city in order to maintain their physiological and mental health.
Source: Oakes, A. 2013, 'Revisiting Neuman's 'Compact City Fallacy'', gb&d Magazine, Sep/Oct 2013, <http://gbdmagazine.com/2013/23-notebook/>.
Image Credit: Zhang, M. 2016 'These Drone Photos Show the Density of High-Rises in Hong Kong', PetaPixel, 5 Mar 2016, <http://petapixel.com/2016/03/05/drone-photos-show-density-high-rises-hong-kong/>.
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