Yahoo Finance Big cities can show us the way to a more climate-friendly Britain
London can view the Cop26 summit in Glasgow next week with a touch of smugness. Big cities, believe it or not, are “green”. Londoners are more likely to walk, cycle or use public transport to go about their daily business. They drive less, live more densely and use energy more efficiently than dwellers in the country or small towns. They share walls, roofs and heating systems with others. The worst thing they do is breathe foul air, but London’s Mayor is at least trying to do something about that.
People often think the most planet-friendly place to live must be wild open spaces. They are wrong. Only a hermit lives efficiently in the country. The American urbanist, Edward Glaeser, famously shocked his countrymen when he said that to find the most carbon efficient places in America they should “go downtown”. The true extinction rebel should move to Manhattan.
There few people drive cars. It is America’s “most walkable” city — and its least obese. People are stacked on top of each other and there is little waste of private open space. “Living in the country,” said Glaeser, “is not the right way to care for the Earth.”
London is half way to Glaeser’s paradigm. As world cities go it is low in living density. The geographer Danny Dorling gives it the fewest people per square kilometre of a big city anywhere, far behind Tokyo, Moscow or New York and just a quarter the density of central Paris. Look down a Paris side street and you see buildings closely packed with multi-storey apartments. London’s side streets are often just three storey terraces, interspersed with modest courtyards and mews. This is an extravagant, almost reckless, use of urban space.
London houses are in strikingly low occupancy — witness the number of dark rooms you see of a winter evening. The 2011 census showed the metropolis with more bedrooms than people to sleep in them, a phenomenon unknown in most cities. The reason appears to be — at least until recently — a sluggish housing market.
Londoners still buy rather than rent, which makes them less inclined to move according to changing needs. This in turn must be partly due in part to London’s failure to properly tax living space. A New York apartment can bear 10 times the tax of its London equivalent. London is also bad at moving singles and couples out of social housing when families get smaller. The estate agent Savills estimated in 2015 that a million London homes lay “hidden” inside under-occupied properties.
The best way to house more people efficiently in London is not by high-carbon new building but by taxing and regulating the housing it already has. That is the “green” thing to do. On the other hand London is in a literal sense remarkably green. Forty per cent of Londoners live within five minutes’ walk of a park of some sort. According to the Essential Living test of urban greenery, the central metropolis has the highest tally of parks, gardens, squares and lakes of any British city. The Wildlife Trust says two million out of London’s 3.8 million households have some sort of garden. Indeed so many streets are blessed with trees that a distant view in summer across the suburbs is of a city apparently lost in a forest.
London’s contribution to a more climate-friendly Britain is therefore clearly to pack in more people. I have always believed it could develop more off-street sites with “high-density, low-rise” buildings, and could sacrifice more suburban brownfield land and even gardens for housing. It does not need Hong Kong towers crammed ever closer. The most congenial London housing form has always been the mansion block.
There has been a toxic downside to urban living. While central London is tight-packed, the city’s suburbs have a Los Angeles sprawl, their roads congested and air polluted. One of Mayor Sadiq Khan’s few initiatives has been to cleanse vehicle emissions (such as his Ulez charge, extended on Monday), but that will only come in time with more electric vehicles.
In sum London’s contribution to Cop26 is to increase its population. Londoners should use bikes, buses and Tubes, waste less, reuse old buildings. There is no need to erect carbon-guzzling, vehicle-reliant homes in the countryside. There is space aplenty in London. Other cities should do likewise. They should work to improve the beauty and appeal of their centres, to encourage congregation not dispersal. In other words cities everywhere should become more like London.
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