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The Environmental Advantages of Cities - Countering Commonsense Antiurbanism (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,269
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The Environmental Advantages of Cities - Countering Commonsense Antiurbanism (Paperback)
Series: Urban and Industrial Environments
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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An analysis that offers evidence to challenge the widely held
assumption that urbanization and environmental quality are
necessarily at odds. Conventional wisdom about the environmental
impact of cities holds that urbanization and environmental quality
are necessarily at odds. Cities are seen to be sites of ecological
disruption, consuming a disproportionate share of natural
resources, producing high levels of pollution, and concentrating
harmful emissions precisely where the population is most
concentrated. Cities appear to be particularly vulnerable to
natural disasters, to be inherently at risk from outbreaks of
infectious diseases, and even to offer dysfunctional and unnatural
settings for human life. In this book, William Meyer tests these
widely held beliefs against the evidence. Borrowing some useful
terminology from the public health literature, Meyer weighs
instances of "urban penalty" against those of "urban advantage." He
finds that many supposed urban environmental penalties are
illusory, based on commonsense preconceptions and not on solid
evidence. In fact, greater degrees of "urbanness" often offer
advantages rather than penalties. The characteristic compactness of
cities, for example, lessens the pressure on ecological systems and
enables resource consumption to be more efficient. On the whole,
Meyer reports, cities offer greater safety from environmental
hazards (geophysical, technological, and biological) than more
dispersed settlement does. In fact, the city-defining
characteristics widely supposed to result in environmental
penalties do much to account for cities' environmental advantages.
As of 2008 (according to U.N. statistics), more people live in
cities than in rural areas. Meyer's analysis clarifies the effects
of such a profound shift, covering a full range of environmental
issues in urban settings.
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