Urban Density - Decoupling Costs and Benefits - Clinton Andrews

Decoupling Urban Density's Benefits and Costs
Jan 11, 2018
12:00 – 1:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

People love some aspects of cities, such as greater access to jobs, while hating other aspects, like congestion and air pollution. As the global proportion of the population dwelling in urban areas rises, it will become increasingly important to seize the benefits of urbanization while avoiding the costs. A key indicator of urbanization, population density, is the focus of intense and ideological debate among those who research settlement patterns, and this webinar presents recent evidence on urban density relationships. Research suggests that decoupling the good and bad effects of urban density is feasible if we target specific problems, make multi-level improvements in the design of human-scale features, and encourage the individual agency of urban dwellers.

Clinton Andrews is a professor of urban planning, director of the Rutgers Center for Green Building, and associate dean for faculty at Rutgers University’s Bloustein School. He is an avid experimenter with new methods for collecting field data in urban settings, and he teaches courses on environmental planning. He publishes both popular and scholarly articles, and has written several books, including: Humble Analysis: The Practice of Joint fact-Finding; Regulating Regional Power Systems; and Industrial Ecology and Global Change. He is also co-editor of the Journal of Planning Education and Research; a Fellow of AAAS (The American Association for the Advancement of Science); and past president of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology.