World Watch, Sustainability and the Irrelevance of Sprawl
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World Watch, Sustainability and the Irrelevance of Sprawl
The new World Watch Living Planet Report provides strong evidence that
the space required by urban areas is only a small part of what is
required to support human habitation --- that the land required for
agriculture, energy production and other factors is far greater --- 90
times greater. The World Watch data thus provides evidence that the
urban form --- whether dense or sparse ("compact" or "sprawl") --- is
irrelevant with respect to sustainability. If the World Watch
prescription is reliable, then strategies to combat "urban sprawl"
would yield virtually no progress toward improving sustainability (even
at the theoretical level).
The World Watch Report
(24 October 2006) One of the great pleasures of traveling in and
through London is the number and variety of daily newspapers. I bought
all four of the "qualities" today at Heathrow and found an article in
The Times particularly interesting. World Watch is out with another
"sky is falling" report, bringing hope to the "half empty" elites who
depend upon apocalyptic tales. The Times gave the report a two page
spread. Doubtless the panicked hand-wringing is to be found in a number
of today's newspapers around the world. Granted, I have not had been
able to read the report yet, given that wireless internet is not yet
available on Trans-Atlantic flights. But World Watch, in my view, has
sometimes portrayed the future in a light that makes Malthus look like
an optimist.
World Watch puts forward a figure for the amount of land required to
support the residents of the world and particular countries. This
includes land for living, commercial development, agriculture, energy
production and other land required to support human habitation. World
Watch claims that the average American is supported by approximately
23.5 acres.
Comprehending the World Watch Numbers
All of this will doubtless lead innumerates analysts to use the World
Watch report as another tool in their battle against how people want to
live --- with adequate space, a house and a car, giving further impetus
to "anti-sprawl" efforts. However, the World Watch report would be
wrongly interpreted as swipe at the demon "urban sprawl." Indeed, its
evidence provides a compelling case that, if there is a sustainability
problem as World Watch suggests, limiting suburbanization would
accomplish virtually nothing to solve the problem. Most of the land
area World Watch considers necessary to support the average person is
not the land that they live on.
Making America Hong Kong: the 1 Percent Solution
Accepting, for the moment, the World Watch data (admittedly, an act of
great faith), it is useful to compare how much land would be required
to support the average American with a United States urban form,
compared to the most compact form in the world, that of Hong Kong. At
average US urban densities, development occupies 0.27 acres per person,
including all land for residences, commercial, industrial and
government buildings, roads, railroads and airports and urban parks.
If Americans lived at the density of Hong Kong, the space required for
their support under the World Watch formula would drop 0.25 acres. This
would reduce the amount of land required to support each American by
only 1.1 percent, or 9/90th. Thus, making cities more compact --- the
anti-sprawl strategy --- is demonstrated by the World Watch report to
be a marginal strategy, again assuming World Watch is right.
How Anti-Sprawl Policy Makes Economics Unsustainable
Of course, the bigger issue is that the affluent lifestyle Americans,
Australians, Western Europeans, Canadians and Japanese have become
accustomed to cannot be sustained where compact city policies are
implement. This is for the simple reason that anti-sprawl policies
ration land inordinately increase the price of housing, destroying
wealth creation, while intensifying traffic congestion and air
pollution.
Posted by Wendell Cox on October 25, 2006 06:53 AM | Permalink