If—in America—dense, transit-served cities are better, then New York is the best. This is the clear and convincing message of David Owen’s Green Metropolis, certainly the most important environmental text of the past decade. This book deserves a bit more of our attention, so profound is the revolution in thinking that it represents. As Owen himself notes, the environmental movement in the United States has historically been anti-city, as has so much American thought. This strain traces its roots back to Thomas Jefferson, who described large cities as “pestilential to the morals, the health,
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