I liked the space presentation because it was interesting to learn about how suburbs are not as good as I thought they were. They actually cause a bad carbon footprint on the the atmosphere because the people that live in them have to drive everywhere. They cannot just walk to the grocery store or the gas station to buy milk, they have to drive there. Since they are not in walking distance to anything and they do not have a lot of public transportation they just drive a lot. Just having a green lawn does not mean that you are living a "green" lifestyle. Yet it seems that living in a suburb and owning your own house and lawn is the American dream. Living in a big city would be a better dream if one wants to live sustainably. In the city there is public transportation, and one can walk to many of the places one needs to go.
Planning the way things are built in the city are important as well. For instance, the way roads are placed can have a huge impact on how people decide what transportation to use. Before cars were made it was common the have very close roads used for walking, after cars became more popular, the roads became more spread out and harder to use for walking to places. By planning a city in a manner that promotes walking to places, they can be more sustainable.
Greenways are also important for cities to have. They are even better when they are connected by green strips. This allows for an increased species diversity because the populations in the two parks can come together rather than being separated by a a few blocks of buildings. This improves the health of the organisms in the park.
Finally they talked about urbicide. This term means "violence against the city". Urbicide occurs when people destroy a city. This destruction is really bad because it can kill people. Even when people survive, they have part of their life killed because everything thing they own is gone and they must start over. This is a really horrible thing to happen to a city.
I really hope that more people look into urban planning to make cities and new suburbs more compact. This would have huge implications on the carbon footprints of many cities in the future. However, for some reason I feel that many people, americans at least, have this idea of conquering things. We are told from the beginning of our lives that competition is a good thing. We live in a capitalistic society. I feel that this relates to how spaced out many of our suburbs have become. People want to own as much land as they can and they buy in to the idea of capitalism. We want to buy the nicest house we can, the nicest car, the nicest everything that we can afford. If there was less competition within our culture I believe we could make suburbs and cities more compact because there wouldn't be a need in anyone's mind to own more land or to own the nicest things. Yet this is a extremely difficult task to tackle and one that will not take place overnight.
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