Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability

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(as of Oct 13, 2026 20:32:50 UTC – Details)


Look out for David Owen’s next book, Where the Water Goes.
A challenging, controversial, and highly readable look at our lives, our world, and our future.
Most Americans think of crowded cities as ecological nightmares, as wastelands of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams. Yet residents of compact urban centers, Owen shows, individually consume less oil, electricity, and water than other Americans. They live in smaller spaces, discard less trash, and, most important of all, spend far less time in automobiles. Residents of Manhattan—the most densely populated place in North America—rank first in public-transit use and last in percapita greenhouse-gas production, and they consume gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. They are also among the only people in the United States for whom walking is still an important means of daily transportation.
These achievements are not accidents. Spreading people thinly across the countryside may make them feel green, but it doesn’t reduce the damage they do to the environment. In fact, it increases the damage, while also making the problems they cause harder to see and to address. Owen contends that the environmental problem we face, at the current stage of our assault on the world’s nonrenewable resources, is not how to make teeming cities more like the pristine countryside. The problem is how to make other settled places more like Manhattan, whose residents presently come closer than any other Americans to meeting environmental goals that all of us, eventually, will have to come to terms with.
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B002N83HJS
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Books
Accessibility ‏ : ‎ Learn more
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 29, 2009
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 631 KB
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 380 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1101140314
Page Flip ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Best Sellers Rank: #444,339 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store) #32 in Sustainable Development Economics #125 in Sustainable Business Development #128 in Urban Sociology
Customer Reviews: 4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars (123) var dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction; P.when(‘A’, ‘ready’).execute(function(A) { if (dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction !== true) { dpAcrHasRegisteredArcLinkClickAction = true; A.declarative( ‘acrLink-click-metrics’, ‘click’, { “allowLinkDefault”: true }, function (event) { if (window.ue) { ue.count(“acrLinkClickCount”, (ue.count(“acrLinkClickCount”) || 0) + 1); } } ); } }); P.when(‘A’, ‘cf’).execute(function(A) { A.declarative(‘acrStarsLink-click-metrics’, ‘click’, { “allowLinkDefault” : true }, function(event){ if(window.ue) { ue.count(“acrStarsLinkWithPopoverClickCount”, (ue.count(“acrStarsLinkWithPopoverClickCount”) || 0) + 1); } }); });
Customers find the book interesting and thought-provoking, with one noting it serves as an eye-opener about our lifestyle. They appreciate its informative content, with one customer highlighting its thorough research and insight. The writing style receives positive feedback, with one customer particularly appreciating the author’s approach.