Urban Density Is Green

 This is the biggest apartment building in the world.

The colossal Regent International apartment building in Hangzhou, China, is is the largest residential building globally and hosts over 20,000 residents! Initially designed as a hotel, this 36-story architectural marvel was transformed into a self-sufficient community, boasting high-end residential apartments, a vast food court, swimming pools, salons, supermarkets, and more. 

Designed by Alicia Loo, the chief architect behind the world's second seven-star hotel, the Singapore Sands Hotel, this S-shaped giant stands 206 meters tall. He has dominated Hangzhou's central business district since its inauguration in 2013. 

Home to a diverse community, from young professionals to influencers and small businesses, the Regent International building spans over 260,000 square meters, reshaping the skyline and redefining urban living in China.

Rent ranges from about $200 a month for an interior windowless apartment to $550 a month for apartments with a balcony. 

I posted this meme on Facebook and a friend of mine left the comment: "To me it is a symbol of the overpopulation that is killing the planet."

I responded (with minor editing for a blog format):

It shouldn't be. 

First of all, global population is nearing a peak and leveling off - the places that are still seeing surging population, especially sub-Saharan African and Afghanistan, have profoundly lower population density. 

China, in particular, has plummeting fertility rates and is far below the replacement level. It is at 1.4 billion people now, but actually lost population in the last year or two and will continue to. China has a fertility rate about half of the replacement rate, so its population will probably fall by close to 400 million people in thirty years and that's at current rates which are still plummeting. 

High density urban environments have the lowest total fertility rate. 

Second, the environmental impact of people in extremely high density environments is much lower per person than if they are spread out - they use less heating/cooling energy (especially in multifamily housing like this since there is less surface area to lose/gain heat per capita due to shared walls, and shared ceiling-floors), produce far less global warming air pollution, use much less transportation energy, build fewer cars per capita, use less water, destroy less land/sensitive animal habits than lower density development, etc. 

I'm sure it has lots of elevators, which are one of the single most energy efficient means of transportation other than bicycles, almost all power used to go up is recovered going down. And, people in densely populated areas can also use more efficient intercity transportation - this part of China has high speed electric rail that is faster and has less environmental impact than intercity transportation by cars or airplanes for short to medium distance intercity trips (admittedly China's electrical grid has way too much dirty coal, but that isn't an urban density related issue). 

Manhattan, for example, has better energy efficiency and overall less waste production and pollution per capita than any other place in the U.S. 

There is also an iron rule in economics that the bigger and more dense a city is the greater its per capita GDP in a very systemic, cross-cultural, cross-time period way. It is a power law relationship, so more dense urban areas are exponentially more productive per capita with no upper limit observed to date. So dense cities also greatly reduce environmental impact per $1 of GDP by both being more productive and less polluting per capita. 

More density means a smaller human footprint on the Earth. Put 20,000 people in suburban tract homes and you'd eat up 3+ square miles of land instead of one city block of maybe 1% of a square mile (6.4 acres), so that's a 99% reduction in habit destruction that can be left for open space, parks, and farming. 

Sure, the 6.4 acres for this high rise produces way more waste, energy consumption, and water consumption than my urban residential neighborhood would with 180 or so people in the same area of land, rather than 20,000 people, and far more than a suburban neighborhood with maybe 20 people in that land area, or an exurban neighborhood with 4 people in a mini-mansion on a single 6.4 acre lot. But per capita, it is much, much better for the planet.