Link Banana

Wired Science has an approachable look at this report which measured the per-capita emissions of the 100 largest US metro areas. There’s not much terribly surprising — density is good, public transportation is good, coal is bad, mild weather is good — but the map’s still interesting to see.

The Economist compares the cost of living in cities around the world. I was rather surprised that neither London nor New York came out on top. As proof of my ignorance they say Norway’s Oslo has topped the list since 2005.

Also, this map of American cities and their singles sex ratio has been floating around. It appears to have originated on The Daily Dish. It appears to be related to Richard Florida’s recent Who’s Your City?

I’ll leave the analysis of this interesting data to Mr. Yglesias:

You’ll see that Los Angeles, despite its reputation, is surprisingly dense. Conversely, transit-friendly Portland isn’t especially dense (less so than Houston or Dallas or Las Vegas) which goes to show how much smart policy matters — if all 23 denser-than-Portland cities on the list were as savvy as Portland about bikes, pedestrians, and transit we’d have a much better environmental situation in the country without constructing any new, denser urban areas.

There’s a fascinating and — to me — counter-intuitive article in March’s The Atlantic. Christopher Leinberger makes this interesting contention:

For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.