Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment" What is a green city? What does it mean to say that San Francisco or Vancouver is more ""green"" than Houston or Beijing? When does urban growth lower environmental quality, and when does it yield environmental gains? How can cities deal with the environmental challenges posed by growth? These are the questions Matthew Kahn takes on in this smart and engaging book. Written in a lively, accessible style, Green Cities takes the reader on a tour of the extensive economic literature on the environmental consequences of urban growth. Kahn starts with an exploration of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC)--the hypothesis that the relationship between environmental quality and per capita income follows a bell-shaped curve. He then analyzes several critiques of the EKC and discusses the implications of growth in urban population and surface area, as well as income. The concluding chapter addresses the role of cities in promoting climate change and asks how cities in turn are likely to be affected by this trend. As Kahn points out, although economics is known as the ""dismal science,"" economists are often quite optimistic about the relationship between urban development and the environment. In contrast, many ecologists and environmentalists remain wary of the environmental consequences of free-market growth. Rather than try to settle this dispute, this book conveys the excitement of an ongoing debate. Green Cities does not provide easy answers complex dilemmas. It does something more important--it provides the tools readers need to analyze these issues on their own. " |
From inside the book
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... Metropolitan areas can comprise one or more entire counties . Focusing on metropoli- 6. Simon Kuznets won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1971. He studied the cross - national relationship between national per capita income and national ...
... metropolitan areas . For 279 metropolitan areas in the United States , I calculate the share of workers employed in manufacturing and services in each year between 1970 and 2000.13 The figure shows that manufacturing's share of ...
... cities , such as New York City and San Francisco ( metro- politan areas with historically high transit use and significant rail infra- structure in 1970 ) ; " new transit " cities , such as Dallas ( metropolitan areas that established ...
Contents
Measuring Urban Environmental Quality | 8 |
Income Growth and Greener Governance | 67 |
Population Growth and the Urban Environment | 93 |
Copyright | |
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