More from Less? Environmental Rebound Effects of City Size

Abstract

Global sustainability relies on our capacity of understanding and guiding urban systems and their metabolism adequately. It has been proposed that bigger and denser cities are more resource-efficient than smaller ones because they tend to demand less infrastructure, consume less fuel for transportation and less energy for cooling/heating in per capita terms. This hypothesis is also called Brand’s Law. However, as cities get bigger, denser and more resource-efficient, they also get richer, and richer inhabitants consume more, potentially increasing resource demand and associated environmental impacts. In this paper, we propose a method based on scaling theory to assess Brand’s Law taking into account greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from both direct (energy and fuels locally consumed) and indirect (embedded in goods and services) sources, measured as carbon footprint (CF). We aim at understanding whether Brand’s Law can be confirmed once we adopt a consumption-based approach to urban emissions. By analyzing the balance between direct and indirect emissions in a theoretical urban system, we develop a scaling theory relating carbon footprint and city size. Facing the lack of empirical data on consumption-based emissions for cities, we developed a model to derive emission estimations using well-established urban metrics (city size, density, infrastructure, wealth). Our results show that, once consumption-based CF is considered, Brand’s Law falls apart, as bigger cities have greater purchase power, leading to greater consumption of goods and higher associated GHG. Findings also suggest that a shift in consumption patterns is of utmost importance, given that, according to the model, each new monetary unit added to the gross domestic product (GDP) or to other income variables results in a more than proportional increase in GHG emissions. This work contributes to a broader assessment of the causes of emissions and the paradigm shift regarding the assumption of efficiency in the relationship of city size and emissions, adding consumption behavior as a critical variable, beyond Brand’s Law.

Birth, Annexation, and Squeezing of Cities in a Prefecture: Can the Ranking of Competitive Areas of Municipalities Obey the Authentic Power Law?

“…Since the opening of Japan to the West, this country has experienced three major municipal consolidations [46] (16) in 1965, 97 (24) in 2000, and 60 (28) in 2010. Here the number in the parentheses represents the content of cities.…”

“…Besides the conventional approach to cities, in recent years, arguments from a new perspective have been assembled. The most typical examples can be seen in quantitative studies on the basis of social interaction, information entropy, environmental change, and sustainability [21][22][23][24]. It should be noted here that in most literature the key term "size" has been employed implicitly as the meaning of population.…”

Perturbation analysis of the rank-size rule for municipalities squeezed in a prefecture: Effects of the archipelagoes, rapidly increasing rural depopulation, ethnic minority issues, and future sea-level rise due to global warming

“…This perspective allows one to explore motivations for integrating physical and social sciences and eventually for establishing an interdisciplinary area on the methodological basis of conventional statistics, probability theory, and theory of complex networks. To this end, one should pay attention to the success in establishing the physics of cities [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10], which exhibit analogy in many viewpoints with the condensed matter system. As the next step we are now in the best position to extend the new discipline to human communities consisting of not only cities but also towns and villages as an organic whole.…”