I knew I would enjoy this book because I already believe that urban living is more sustainable and energy efficient. But, I found it REALLY annoying to be told that by someone who lives in a suburban / rural area and drives places that are a mile away. ( )

Owen makes a very compelling case for cities as the most environmentally friendly places to live and work due to the efficiencies of living closer, sharing resources, and reducing travel with New York City as the key example. I'm already sold on the idea but he piles on the evidence for his theory in a way that I hope convinces other people who have the ingrained idea of cities as dirty places. He also takes on the pastoral vision of many environmental movements and "LEED brain" where new construction is rewarded for fancy add-ons that are not good for the environment especially when compared to simple renovations of existing buildings. I'm less sold on his opposition to things like the locavore movement which is as much built on nutrition and local sustainability as environmentalism. He's also opposed to vertical agriculture because he thinks it would interfere with the connectivity of cities, but I think they'd fit in perfectly replacing underused light industrial and warehouse districts that already exist in cities like New York. I'm also not sold on his cop-out argument for continuing to live in a drafty farmhouse in suburban Connecticut where he believes if he moved to New York someone less environmentally aware would occupy his current house. Nits picked, I still think this book is a great argument for an idea whose time has come.
Favorite Passages:

"Jefferson…embodied the ethos of suburbia. Indeed, he could be considered the prototype of the modern American suburbanite, since for most of his life he lived far outside the central city in a house that was much too big, and he was deeply enamored of high-tech gadgetry and of buying on impulse and on credit, and he embraced a self-perpetuating cycle of conspicuous consumption and recreational self-improvement. The standard object of the modern American dream, the single-family home surrounded by grass, is a mini-Monticello" (p. 25)

Making automobiles more fuel-efficient isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but it won’t solve the world’s energy and environmental dilemmas. The real problem with cars is not that they don’t get enough miles to the gallon; it’s that they make it too easy for people to spread out, encouraging forms of development that are inherently wasteful and damaging. Most so-called environmental initiatives concerning automobiles are actually counterproductive, because their effect is to make driving less expensive (by reducing the need for fuel) and to make car travel more agreeable (by eliminating congestion). In terms of both energy conservation and environmental protection, we need to make driving costlier and less pleasant. This is true for cars powered by recycled cooking oil and those powered by gasoline. In terms of the automobile’s true environmental impact, fuel gauges are less important than odometers. In the long run, miles matter more than miles per gallon.

The near certainty is that, for many years to come, what the market will replace oil with is not something better (such as nuclear fusion, which, at the very least, is decades or generations away) but something considerably worse (such as low-grade coal, China’s main fuel, which makes oil’s carbon footprint and pollution profile look demure), and that ordinary market forces, rather than leading us inexorably toward a golden future, will most likely entice us to compound our growing troubles by prompting us to invest heavily in the energy equivalents of patent medicines (such as shale oil and ethanol). Sometimes, the invisible hand goes for the throat. ( )

One of the big insights that I got from this book is that most North American "environmentalism" is really a kind of pastoral fantasy, an obsession with nature somehow pure and untouched, man living in the woods in splendid isolation. This leads to absurd contradictions like supposed "environmentalists" who are opposed to wind generators because they spoil the view, or who live in large, energy-intensive, long-car-commute houses in the middle of nowhere.

The author's screed against some of the absurd aspects of LEED is also excellent.

Overall his argument is that the most energy-efficient approach is to build aspects of energy saving into people's lives, through tower buildings that expose little surface area, and dense neighbourhoods that support walking, cycling and transit.

There is a bit of a contradiction as the author writes in praise of this lifestyle while living in a big house far from a city, and his justification that "if I didn't live here, someone else would" is rather weak and self-serving.

Overall I liked the book because of its insight about how much North American "environmentalism" is about escaping to the wilderness and using fancy technology, rather than building energy savings into our lives.

SIDEBAR:
Interesting that three authors - Kunstler, Gehl, and Owen - all take on the problems of car-centric design and the resulting suburbs, but come to different conclusion on the ideal built form. Kunstler celebrates the New England small town as the ideal form, Gehl the European city centre with its six-storey buildings, and Owen Manhattan's towers. I find Gehl's and Owen's conclusions much more compelling. In fairness, Kunstler is making an argument not just about urban planning but about a post-oil civilization. I still think cities will survive better than small towns.

This is well researched and written and focused on key issues central to building a sustainable culture. The neglected issue of population density is most prominent, but the author also covers many other related issues and debunks many widely held myths about sustainability, such as the high relative priority we currently give to recycling, mass transit and various high-tech schemes for salvation. Owen maintains that Manhattan's population density is in part an accident due to a favorable geography. Some more discussion of how to retrofit existing urban centers to emulate Manhattan, by design, would have also been useful. ( )

Found this to be a quick and not particularly enlightening read. Owen's thesis, essentially, is the obvious: living in a smaller space, close to amenities and your workplace, reduces your carbon footprint. My greatest quibble with this book is that it is very, very American. There are no specific international examples used, aside from vague mentions of Europe’s superiority. Using one example, in this case NYC, to illustrate your argument is never terribly effective and I would have respected Owen much more if he had drawn on further examples. I was also disappointed by the lack of productive suggestions expressed in the conclusion. ( )