Ecocities
The idea of ecocities is a new approach toward sustainable living. Environmentalists used to believe that city living was pollutive and destructive to the environment because of the amount of sewage, trash, and unsanitary conditions created and dumped onto the environment.
However, the alternative was to live in the suburbs, which is also damaging to the environment because cars are needed for transportation, and the amount of energy used in a house by a single family (or a person living alone) is much more per person than the amount of energy used in an apartment for multiple family housing.
Solutions to urban sprawl
Because people would like to reduce urban sprawl, reduce the length of daily commute, environmentalists, policy makers, and developers are seeking new ways to allow people to live closer to the workplace. Since the workplace tends to be in the city, downtown, or urban center, they are seeking a way to increase density without increasing the problems usually associated with inner-city and urban environment, such as burglary, murder, gangs, riots, and other disruptions, as well as unsanitary conditions, like old sewage, gum on the ground, and cars.
One of the new ways is the Smart Growth Movement.
Other solutions include increasing public transportation. Again, the problem is that the viability of public transportation depends on how many people are willing to take it. Increasing population density as well as decreasing the appeal of driving a car is a necessary step to encouraging people to take public transportation.
Politics of Urban Elitism
Because the cities tend to resist new development, such as more housing units, they contribute to the high costs of living in the cities. As a result, there is an increasing disparity in income between the rich and the poor in the city, while middle-class people tend to live in the suburb. As a result, many of the recent political campaigns have focused on "urban elitism," the idea that the city is the domain of the rich, the bohemians, and those who like to talk down to the middle-class.
This conveys the idea that the suburbs are home to "real America," guntoting, race-car loving, conservative, average Joes, while the cities are home to rich people who like high taxes and are extremely liberal. Otherwise, city-living people are the ones who enjoy composting, recycling, and taking public transportation, and are otherwise on the fringe of mainstream society.
The reason for the lack of housing development is due to the neighborhoods that comprise the city. They tend to have strong community that are unwilling to allow developers to disperse them by tearing down the old housing and building new ones.
Agriculture in Ecocities
Not only are environmentalists, developers, and policy makers looking to try to increase population density, they are also seeking to put production of crops closer to the cities to reduce transportation costs, amount of pollution involved in transportation, and also increase freshness of the crops produced.
See Also
Urban Renewal