I’m curious how this is affected by population projections. Given that the number of people on earth is going to increase, the main question is where these additional people will live:
If density won’t rise, that means they’ll live in new settlements or expansions of old ones
And that means some area is taken, whether it’s natural, agricultural, industrial etc.
You talked about externalities created by living in a denser city, but not about ones created by living in a rural area, which I think are negative and pretty big, e.g.
Transportation costs for goods
Land conversion, as I mentioned before
Transportation to get services (schooling, medicine, etc.)
Additional infrastracture
Some other thoughts:
Since population growth and density vary by location, the effectiveness of doing something about them should vary too.
There could be negative side effects of trying to increase density without putting enough thought into it, like:
Conversion of natural areas inside cities (very relevant to my own city of Haifa, which for some reason insists on keeping building new neighborhoods on natural areas)
Badly designed neighborhoods that nobody wants to live in
Some environmental orgs encourage higher density (at least some activists I encountered here in Israel say “A nature lover lives in the city”). On the other hand, it seems that some others do the opposite, maybe inadvertedly.
I’m curious how this is affected by population projections. Given that the number of people on earth is going to increase, the main question is where these additional people will live:
If density won’t rise, that means they’ll live in new settlements or expansions of old ones
And that means some area is taken, whether it’s natural, agricultural, industrial etc.
You talked about externalities created by living in a denser city, but not about ones created by living in a rural area, which I think are negative and pretty big, e.g.
Transportation costs for goods
Land conversion, as I mentioned before
Transportation to get services (schooling, medicine, etc.)
Additional infrastracture
Some other thoughts:
Since population growth and density vary by location, the effectiveness of doing something about them should vary too.
There could be negative side effects of trying to increase density without putting enough thought into it, like:
Conversion of natural areas inside cities (very relevant to my own city of Haifa, which for some reason insists on keeping building new neighborhoods on natural areas)
Badly designed neighborhoods that nobody wants to live in
Some environmental orgs encourage higher density (at least some activists I encountered here in Israel say “A nature lover lives in the city”). On the other hand, it seems that some others do the opposite, maybe inadvertedly.