Joanna Pocock at Orion:
My desire to live in a city was not simply one of seeking like-minded people (other writers and artists, perhaps) and creating a smaller environmental footprint. I was also running from the lifeless suburbs of my childhood and what lay just beyond them: the dreaded sprawl.
David Cieslewicz, before becoming mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, taught university courses in urban studies. He wrote about cities as ‘the antidote to sprawl’, that they are ‘on balance, good for the environment’. And, in his book Urban Sprawl, the sociologist Gregory Squires also sees sprawl as the evil protagonist in the story of America’s increasing hunger for gas-powered vehicles. He continues Cieslewicz’s point: ‘[W]e will not solve the problems of sprawl until we resolve the contradiction and we learn to embrace city life – living in places of real, compact urban form with all of their advantages and disadvantages – as the most positive environmental choice an individual can make.’ When I left the suburbs for Toronto and then London, with brief flings with New York and Boston, was I making the ‘most positive environmental choice’ I could? I don’t think so; but I was trying to aim for some kind of harmony with the Earth and I was struggling to see how to make it a reality.
More here.
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