I am teaching a seminar at University of Colorado at Denver on Sustainable Urbanism to graduate students in Urban Design, Architecture, Planning. One of the big questions is ... what does sustainable urbanism even mean. What is sustainability? Why urbanism? One of the explorations I am interested in is the idea of SCALE: what approaches are optimized at what scale? Often, issues are conflated where a clear examination of optimization for a particular aspect of sustainability is not considered. This includes what is the best scale to explore a whole number of issues. A team presented last class comparing a number of dense cities and examining the pros and cons. these included NYC, Paris, Hong Kong, and Denver. While a theme of the seminar is that Density is "good", it was shown that there is not a linear relationship between Carbon Footprint per capita and density. While Hong Kong and Manhattan have higher densities, Paris (still quite dense) has the lower Carbon Footprint per capita. While that may be attributable to the amount of nuclear power in the French grid it it s also true that of the four cities it is not hard to argue that Paris is the most livable and humane. Good news for those who think that density, livability, and sustainability are not mutually exclusive! More to come on the seminar in future posts