Green Manhattan

New York City is the greenest city in the United States, according to this article published a few years ago in The New Yorker. I love this article, because it clearly, and in great detail, articulates the view that good urban planning has a far greater impact on the future of our environment than "site level" green design features such as green roofs and energy efficient heating systems.

In other words, a building designed with every fashionable green feature but built in the wrong place, i.e. following sprawling development patterns, increasing vehicle miles traveled and congestion, and missing urban infill opportunities, is not an environmentally sound impact when looking at the big picture. Here's an excerpt:

When most Americans think about environmentalism, they picture wild,
unspoiled landscapes - the earth before it was transmogrified by human
habitation. New York City is one of the most thoroughly altered landscapes
imaginable, an almost wholly artificial environment, in which the terrain¹s
primeval contours have long since been obliterated and most of the parts
that resemble nature (the trees on side streets, the rocks in Central Park)
are essentially decorations. Ecology-minded discussions of New York City
often have a hopeless tone, and focus on ways in which the city might be
made to seem somewhat less oppressively man-made: by increasing the area
devoted to parks and greenery, by incorporating vegetation into buildings
themselves, by reducing traffic congestion, by easing the intensity of
development, by creating open space around structures. But most such
changes would actually undermine the city¹s extraordinary energy efficiency, which arises from the characteristics that make it surreally synthetic.

Because densely populated urban centers concentrate human activity, we
think of them as pollution crisis zones. Calculated by the square foot, New York City generates more greenhouse gases, uses more energy, and produces more
solid waste than most other American regions of comparable size. On a map
depicting negative environmental impacts in relation to surface area,
therefore, Manhattan would look like an intense hot spot, surrounded, at
varying distances, by belts of deepening green.

If you plotted the same negative impacts by resident or by household,
however, the color scheme would be reversed. My little town has about four
thousand residents, spread over 38.7 thickly wooded square miles, and there
are many places within our town limits from which no sign of settlement is
visible in any direction. But if you moved eight million people like us,
along with our dwellings and possessions and current rates of energy use,
into a space the size of New York City, our profligacy would be impossible
to miss, because you¹d have to stack our houses and cars and garages and
lawn tractors and swimming pools and septic tanks higher than skyscrapers.
(Conversely, if you made all eight million New Yorkers live at the density
of my town, they would require a space equivalent to the land area of the
six New England states plus Delaware and New Jersey.) Spreading people out
increases the damage they do to the environment, while making the problems
harder to see and to address.