Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier

Department of Energy data confirms that New York State’s per capita energy consumption is next to last in the country, which largely reflects public transit use in New York City.

We must recognize that if we try to make one neighborhood greener by stopping new building, we can easily make the world browner, by pushing new development to someplace far less environmentally friendly.

Yet as people have become richer, they have increasingly chosen cities based on lifestyle—and the consumer city was born.

American cities became much healthier in the early twentieth century because they were spending as much on water as the federal government spent on everything except the military and the postal service.

Urban poverty should be judged not relative to urban wealth but relative to rural poverty.

The average commute by public transportation in the United States is forty-eight minutes; the average commute by car is twenty-four minutes.

London and Shanghai, not suburbia, are the real friends of the environment. Nature lovers who live surrounded by trees and grass consume much more energy than their urban counterparts, as I painfully discovered when, after thirty-seven years of almost entirely urban living, I recklessly experimented with suburban life. If the environmental footprin... See more

Now we know that the suburban environmentalists had it backward. Manhattan and downtown

you need to walk a city’s streets to see its soul.