Living in a city takes inherently less resources than living in the countryside. You don't need to commute far, your water, electricity, gas, savage, road, telecommunication etc infrastructure is shared by many more people per 1 mile. You get effects of scale for basically everything (from school and healthcare, through policing, administration, transportation, mail, deliveries, junk disposal).
If you live in apartment instead of detached house - even your AC/heating gets smaller because you get less external surface area per person.
Getting this wrong and thinking living in a city uses more resources per Capita shows some serious biases.
> Living in a city takes inherently less resources than living in the countryside.
Nope. Cities are incredibly wasteful. For example, if we look at New York City, then a whole 1% of its population works directly as transit workers. And around 3% of the city in total are people just working on running the city.
This does not count the expense of capital projects. One mile of Manhattan subway now costs more than 1500 miles of a modern 6-lane freeway.
> You get effects of scale for basically everything (from school and healthcare, through policing, administration, transportation, mail, deliveries, junk disposal).
Even if you look at the most direct expenses, cities are not that advantaged. And the bigger the city, the more disadvantaged it becomes. The main reason is the complexity, capital projects for things like sewer replacements in cities cost literally hundreds if not thousands _times_ more than in rural areas.
It's actually much cheaper to dig extra ten miles of trenches than to pay to dozens of architects, inspectors, and planners to come up with a plan to open up a street in a city to replace a hundred meters of pipes.
It takes basically the same amount of resources and energy to build a house in the city centre and in the suburbs. The reason it's more expansive in the city centre is that more people want to put different stuff there.
Because almost anything you might build is more useful there than in the suburbs.
If you live in apartment instead of detached house - even your AC/heating gets smaller because you get less external surface area per person.
Getting this wrong and thinking living in a city uses more resources per Capita shows some serious biases.