When reading news articles or magazines on the future of urbanisation, a common picture that usually pops up is the rendered 3D CAD drawing of kids playing on large green spaces, while carbon-neutral dwellings out of sustainable materials are integrated in the landscape. Add a few vertical wind turbines, PV-covered rooftops, a bike here, a hydrogen or EV-charging station there, and the picture is complete. Already quite a change from “the Jetsons” TV-series future imagined only a few decades back, and something which seems a lot more sustainable.

According to the UN almost 70% of the world’s population is predicted to live in cities by 2050. At the same time, more and more studies show that the net CO2 emissions of urban dwellers tend to be lower than their rural counterparts. According to LiveScience, New Yorkers tend to emit 30% less than the national average, mainly due to their smaller dwellings and shorter transportation distances.

So obviously, shouldn’t more and more people live in cities and let only farmers (those having to care for our sustenance) live in the countryside?

Well, apart from killing the “charm of rural culture”, you might also find some concrete arguments against this idea. First, one only needs to spend some time in the London, Paris or any 10 million + city tube/metro to realise how long it takes to get anywhere and do anything. Assuming you don’t live bang in the middle of the city, just count the number of hours in a week you spend underground. I’m not even talking about rush hour, where you have the privilege of spending this time between sweaty armpits and luggage of tourists who clearly had no clue what they signed up for. And this is still probably the smartest way of travelling if one considers the alternative: being stuck in a bus behind the unloading delivery van, or even worse in your own car which you still have to find a parking spot for. And pay for the car. And the fuel. And the maintenance. Oh, and did I mention the insurance? Bottom line is, apart from the absurdity of using 1.5 tons of metal to transport 80kg of human, cars make no sense in cities from a cost and time perspective. And electric vehicles won’t solve that.

At this point, the sportier spirits among us will jump in and say that I forgot to add the most ecofriendly solution of all: cycling. And don’t get me wrong, my ideal world would be filled with people cycling to work, with bike lanes drawn out on every road and warm showers waiting for you at work to change yourself in your work clothes (alright, no need to get cocky you Danish and Dutch, everyone needs their own time to get there). But tell a guy from New Jersey to hop on his bike on a cold and rainy day to get to work in Manhattan: I mean, you got to have a bit of pity for him, he’s having a hard enough time getting laughed at by Ted and his friends for living on the wrong side of the Hudson! Anyway, it just seems that no matter which transportation is chosen, cities above a certain size require too much transportation time, money and therefore … energy! Well, you might answer that sparsely populated rural areas have the same problem, if not worse. Well, let me get to my second point.

I would like to focus on the supply (in food, material, goods…) of a city of such a huge scale. Let’s go back a few centuries. In the Middle Ages, towns and cities were created and thriving when the agricultural lands around them managed to generate enough surplus to not only feed the farmers but the people living in these cities. As Jancovici explains, the agricultural perimeter around each city was defined by the distance one could cover by foot in a couple of days to deliver the harvest, produce or meat before it turned bad. Obviously, this kept the size of cities in check for quite some while.

With the advent of mechanisation in the 19th century, the yield per acre increased and therefore more people could move to the cities. But as transportation also mechanised itself, the “agricultural perimeter” around each city could be vastly extended as well, allowing in turn for more people in the city to be fed. All this growth was generated thanks to fossil fuels, first coal then oil. As fossil fuels still represented 96% of the energy consumed in transportation in 2012, cities are basically fed on fossil fuels, and a share of the emissions accredited to rural populations in fact only serves to feed the urban one.

Solutions to this are either to decarbonise the transportation system or to eat more locally. The first option still has a few hurdles to overcome which we can talk about in more detail another time (lower energy content of biofuels, material consumption and weight of EV batteries, life cycle of hydrogen production), while the second one implies to reduce this agricultural perimeter. If the same amount of people live within a reduced yield area, on which organic production would require more surface per kg of food produced than “industrialised” agriculture, we quickly encounter a problem (we’ll skip the topic on permaculture for now, but for me it also fits into the redistribution of population to rural areas).

Finally, let’s consider these higher emissions in the rural sector. Indeed, driving 50km in one of those pick-up trucks to get to the closest doctor or simply find a hardware store doesn’t seem very economical. But if the density of mid-sized towns offering these services was better spread out throughout the territory through a megalopolis exodus, the distances having to be covered by country folks would in turn decrease, sparing fuel, time and money, and making the countryside in turn a more pleasant place to live, which generates a positive feedback loop.

So what I am trying to get at is that we should stop to push for further urbanisation just because it seems to reduce per capita emissions, and look at the wider consequences of it. People living in a community can help, protect and entertain each other, but above a certain size these original benefits are lost (if you see a Londoner smiling at you in the tube, just check your fly isn’t open before taking it for a sign of friendliness). I think we should start to think more about integrating the countryside in our sustainability plans and encourage the creation of smaller local communities, which is something which paradoxically has to be encouraged on a national scale. And it might not only have environmental benefits, but also help to overcome political cleavages which seem to have widened uncontrollably over the past few years…