Can cities be sustainable?
June 21st 2023
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I've been reading an old-ish book on sustainable
city planning this morning

Newman & Jennings (2008) Cities as sustainable
ecosystems: principles and practices, Island
press.

And like I'm not criticizing the book per se I'm
just kinda stuck thinking about whether we
actually can make cities as we think of them,
which are primarily---for lack of a better word---
endothermic entities that have to take in energy
and resources to function rather than generate
them and turn them into entities that can more
efficiently provide for their own needs

Like the book talks about urban farming as
potentially a way to decrease reliance on a global
economy of factory farming that is pretty wasteful
and ecologically damaging

but, like, would filling even a verdant city like
Portland OR community gardens and small urban farms
throughout its green areas come close to providing
for the roughly million of us in the metro area?

I mean that as a serious question: I not only
don't know I don't even know how to estimate the
answer to a question like that

could we put in enough solar panels to provide for
our energy needs? we certainly don't have the
resources to make them from scratch, so could we
even maintain them efficiently over the long term
without creating more waste?

and to be clear I'm not pissing on the idea of
doing all these things to make things *better*,
it's more the question of "can we keep the way we
organize our populations and turn them into truly
self-sustaining, non-polluting, communities or is
this a holding action reducing the damage we're
causing until we hit some new hypertech or
experience mass migration and reorganization?"