Transit vs Food Production

A common component of advocates for sustainability is the use efficient public transit, rather than automobiles, to transport people through urban environments. It could be said that a "green city" is one that does have diverse and efficient transit options. For public transit to be efficient though, the urban environment needs to be sufficiently dense. The density provides enough people to ride the transit, and pay for its construction and operating costs over the long-term. Research suggests that sufficient density for street cars would be at least 4-5 story mixed-use and multi-unit urban structures. For light rail, it roughly doubles that of street cars.

Opposite transit in the equation of sustainability is that of food production. It has become quite popular to buy "locally grown, fresh" products. Research (and common sense) shows this is substantially more sustainabile than the industrial farming process for several reasons. First, the transportation costs (both environmental and economic) are reduced because food does not have to be shipped from South America or China to reach the consumer in America. Second, locally grown food is often (though not always) produced on a smaller scale, with less harmful inputs, and less land-intensive production processes. Inudstrial farming processes put harmful pollutants into the water system, and deplete the soil of its natural ability to produce. Third, locally grown food provides a much greater ability for the seller to keep track of where the food came from. This is particularly important with the food problems we have had recently, and will continue to have in the future.

Now, why are these two elements opposite each other in the equation?

Well, lets take New York City, for example. The Big Apple has monstrous skyscrapers, and is one of the most dense places on earth. It consistently has 10-story or taller buildings throughout much of the city. It has a great subway system, though no street cars. Taxis and buses are often used as well. However, New York City because of its extreme density, and lack of urban spaces to produce food, necessitates food imports from extreme distances, and necessitates industrial agriculture to provide those food imports. It is, in effect, a completely unsustainable city with regards to food production.

Then, you have on the opposite end of the spectrum a low-density, proto-typical American city, like Louisville, Kentucky. Louisville has a metropolitan population of just over 1 million. It has no street car or rail transit, and the bus system is like many others in the U.S., barely getting by. It is very suburban, and thus low-density, with strip malls, shopping malls, business parks, industrial parks, and other features that fail to create a more sustainable urban form. This city, like most others across the country (except for rust-belt cities like Detroit, Akron, etc that are losing population) takes every available piece of land on the suburban fringe and fills it in with automobile-oriented urban form. It too fails to provide urban spaces for a food production.

If both of these are wrong, what is right?

Well, during the later 19th/early 20th century, a fellow named Ebenezar Howard developed a concept called the "Garden City." His idea was create a central city hub, and then create sub-cities or towns placed radially out from the central city. In between the central city and the towns were to be farming, parks, and other green spaces that helped sustain the all the city and towns. These agricultural and green spaces would be kept as such for eternity, so as to keep the system in balance.

Howard's design and planning ideas were partially attempted in many places across the globe. Some towns were built to mimick the Garden City, but were never fully implemented as such due to a variety of reasons, including politics, technology, and even the general thought that it was not a good idea. Because many of these attempts were never implemented effectively, they failed to actually do what Howard had intended: be self-sustaining.

Current society faces far different land planning issues than Howard faced 100 years ago. But his general concepts are still relevant. We must realize that while it is important to have a dense urban core for both transit efficiency and mixed uses, and consistent density throughout our towns, villages, and cities, it is equally important to keep the density from crossing a point of unsustainable impacts on agricultural production. Furthermore, to counter-balance such density issues, we also need to create more permanent land trusts for food production within cities. Rather than continue to expand outwards without thinking, lands need to be planned, and growth patterns need to be planned. Just because America is a democratic society does not mean that we should abandon better land use practices for the rights of an individual to do with his land whatever he chooses. This is worse for all of us.