Morning in the city. The car alarm that was beeping ten minutes ago is back on.

Around 4 AM last night, in the street below my bedroom windows, some woman started yelling and cursing at someone else down there. I heard some people in my building yelling at her to STFU, and then her yelling back. Eventually I dozed off again. I live in Federal Hill, among numerous bars, restaurants and a parking garage. I prefer natural ventilation and have adapted to sleeping through a background noise of patrons arguing or reveling as they make their way to their cars or townhouses. My wife hasn't.

After three years of walking five quick blocks to the office, I'm moving nine miles away so I can swim in the mornings. I'll be biking and riding the light rail to work. I've been throwing things out as we prepare to move, but I remembered this morning that no one had set the trash bins out for collection last Wednesday, so they are already overflowing. We supposedly have a trash schedule, but the building's owners moved out two years ago, essentially leaving no one in charge. No one bothers to lock the bins, so passers-by stuff beer cans, pizza boxes, dog waste, whatever, in our bins. The city won't collect loose trash, so the bins just fill up with more and more loose, foul-smelling trash. Yes, I see rats at night.

Despite the problems, I've enjoyed living in such a walkable part of the city (WalkScore = 92). I like waking up later, not having a stressful commute and walking home for lunch. I like walking to everything, not having a car, not worrying about moving between parking spaces. My wife, OTOH, doesn't feel safe here, would rather drive than walk and feels trapped in the apartment. When I read New Urbanists arguing for denser cities, I am sympathetic, but I am aware of the practical complaints suburban-raised Americans will have with city life.

In his latest book, The Architecture of Community, Léon Krier argues for traditional walkable cities. He sees modern architecture as destructive of urban fabric. I've heard a local architect express the theory that a few buildings should be, "heroes" while most others should be, "good soldiers." Can modernist buildings be good soldiers?

Modern Problems

(Krier) begins with a rather provocative thought experiment:

"If, one day, for some mysterious reason, all the buildings, settlements, suburbs, and structures built after 1945--especially those commonly called 'modern'--vanished from the face of the earth, would we mourn their loss?"

"What if, instead, all of the pre-modern buildings--the ones we consider historic--disappeared? Would we weep more for them?"

... Krier contends that modernism, whatever its virtues in small scale, has been nothing but a disaster in larger scales--a force that has managed to sterilize cities aesthetically, ruin years of expertise in building trades, and lead planners and developers to compose cities in unsustainable ways.

...

Modern architecture and contemporary urban planning have grown up at a time of copious energy supplies, particularly in fossil energy. That energy supply is anomalous in history and quite possibly running out soon. So shouldn't we make cities that are more traditional in shape and size, which have survived centuries?

...

Whatever Krier's taste in building styles, his point about the structure and sustainability of cities is unassailable. Too many cities grow like cancers, spreading without planning, with various functional zones--residential, commercial, recreational--isolated from one another. Communities should be mixed from the start, growing by duplication, with the 10-minute walk being the measure of proper scale. (Forward-thinking cities like Portland have tried to plan around the 20-minute walk or bike ride.)

For now, Krier laments, we are wrapped up in celebrating green efforts only in high-profile individual buildings. "Sustainable development or city is a powerful myth with little reality," he writes, adding that the notion of sustainable planning exists only as hypothesis. "For the time being, the abuse of the term 'sustainable' erodes its social and political persuasiveness and postpones the advent of eventual solutions."

Witold Rybczynski also believes the sustainability movement has gone awry. He expresses what I noticed about the 2007 Solar Decathlon. All the examples were essentially rural or suburban houses.

The Green Case for Cities

Putting solar panels on the roofs doesn't change the essential fact that by any sensible measure, spread-out, low-rise buildings, with more foundations, walls, and roofs, have a larger carbon footprint than a high-rise office tower--even when the high-rise has no green features at all.

The problem in the sustainability campaign is that a basic truth has been lost, or at least concealed. Rather than trying to change behavior to actually reduce carbon emissions, politicians and entrepreneurs have sold greening to the public as a kind of accessorizing. Keep doing what you're doing, goes the message. Just add a solar panel, a wind turbine, a hybrid engine, whatever. But a solar-heated house in the burbs is still a house in the burbs, and if you have to drive to it, even in a Prius, it's hardly green.

Architectural journals and the Sunday supplements tout newfangled houses tricked out with rainwater-collection systems, solar arrays, and bamboo flooring. Yet any detached single-family house has more external walls and roof--and hence more heating loads in winter and cooling loads in summer--than a comparable attached townhouse, and each consumes more energy than an apartment in a multifamily building. Again, it doesn't really matter how many green features are present. A reasonably well-built and well-insulated multifamily building is inherently more sustainable than a detached house. Similarly, an old building on an urban site, adapted and reused, is greener than any new building on a newly developed site.

A Thoreau-like existence in the great outdoors isn't green. Density is green. Does this mean that we all have to live in Manhattan? Not necessarily. Cities such as Stockholm and Copenhagen are dense without being vertical. And closer to home is Montreal, where the predominant housing form is a three- or four-story walk-up. Walk-ups, which don't require elevators, can create a sufficient density--about 50 people per acre--to support public transit, walkability, and other urban amenities. Increasing an area's density requires changing zoning to allow smaller lots and compact buildings such as walk-ups and townhouses.

But one man's ceiling is another man's floor. There goes another car alarm.