Does sustainability mean moving to the city?

View of an amazing city!

I’m headed to NYC to visit fam in the next few weeks and am so excited!! I love visiting Manhattan, there’s so much to see, eat, do and watch that by the time I leave I am utterly spent, have grit in my eyes, and am wired on sensory overload. It’s a great place but I often wonder about an common line of thinking that suggest we all need to move to cities, live more densely and therefore use less. But I don’t know that having everyone live in one of these big cities is the answer to our fuel, consumption and sustainability issues. After visiting New York city a couple of times, I wonder if they have the resources to upgrade their infrastructure to accommodate a whole slew of new people. Does their infrastructure serve their current residents?

Sometimes, it seems like we are looking for a silver bullet to our

I'd eat my own head

environmental issues. If we just all move to the city and turn our roof tops into gardens, we’ll curb CO2. If we can just launch some sort of weird hook into the atmosphere we can begin collecting CO2.

Instead of trying to solve the whole nasty hair ball, why can’t we consider addressing specific issues at a time, like where people live? Why can’t the amazing technologies available to us today be used to enable people to work remotely, from wherever they want, whenever they need to. The potential of technologies like skype, twitter, jive, etc. etc has to be beyond simply marketing more stuff, right? It seems like cities might save money from not having to care for as many traffic accidents, manage the run-off from vehicles, not to mention the amazing loss of productivity and time sitting in traffic all day.

So, I love New York but not sure how much more high-density it could really be.