Understanding Urban Environments

Metropolis sickness can be dealt with if we are able to discern cities by understanding the relationship between cities and city dwellers. The Radio Lab special, “Cities”, examines whether the people create the city, or whether the city creates the people. It explores the unique beats of each city and their reason for having these beats. Individual suburbs or sprawl cities cannot be considered unique because they cannot be identified with their own beat because there are no “foot falls” in a suburb. If a neighborhood has poor walkability, there will be fewer “foot falls”. Radio Lab urban physicists can deduce from the average number of footsteps of a city pedestrian how many libraries and how much crime the city has and how high the GDP the city is. Because suburbs and sprawl cities have no pedestrian activity, they cannot be differentiated.  Suburbs and neighborhoods within sprawl cities lack a purpose and a character, and therefore, they have no pulse. Mathematically, the scale of the city helps the urban expert decide what the city’s beat is. However, in a suburb, none of this exists. A city beat makes a city unique, so therefore, sprawl creates mundaneness because the area is missing a soul. We learn that “jamming people up in an urban space, so that people bump into each other, creates urban friction,” underscoring Jacobs’s radical urban fundamentals; higher density promotes health in an urban environment.

At the same time, we learn that a large city like New York could be considered “a monster gobbling up resources.” However, it is in fact efficient in its large size because of its compactness. Radio Lab presents the scenario that if New Yorkers would move all around the nation, they would use up a lot more resources than if New Yorkers stayed in their city. For example, if we would look at the suburban home and compare the amount of heat it uses to the amount of heat a six-floor apartment building in New York uses, we’d find out that the urban building uses less heat because more people must share the heat, and stacking up living spaces creates insulation. Urbanism saves forests and water. Urban experts compare this phenomenon to biology—an elephant cell is more efficient than a mouse cell because even though its size is larger, it doesn’t use as much energy per unit. Cities function the same way in that the larger the size, the fewer infrastructures per capita is needed. On the other hand, cities accelerate the pace of life, therefore causing city dwellers to want more and more. They desire more entertainment, more options, more ideas, all of which require more energy and more consumption. Paradoxically, cities whose inhabitants claim to allow for a greener life style promote more consumption all across America. At the same time, the synergy to collaborate and the desire for new concepts and inventions that result from “urban friction” could become the solution to the consumption problem we have.