The City — a Well-Stocked Ship
Each morning, shortly after 4 a.m., while the first light of dawn invades the sleeping city, the freeways are alive — not with commuters, but with hundreds of semitrailer trucks careening into city center with the day's supply of fresh food and drink. They converge in wholesale centers, then whisk to markets, distributing their day's load well before the morning shoppers leave their doorstep.
The metabolism of a city is much like the well-planned stocking of a cruise ship. The Princess Italia, for instance, will stock away about 75,000 pounds of food for a 14-day cruise containing 420 passengers and 250 crew, a total of just under 10,000 passenger-days.
Imagine what a megalopolis of 10 million must "ship in" each day — approximately a thousand times what the Princess Italia ship loads for a 14-day cruise!
On an average day, Mr. Average Citizen wants this varied shopping list filled:
5 ounces of beef
3 ounces of pork, lamb, and veal
½ ounce of fish
2 ounces of poultry
1 egg
½ ounce cheese
16 ounces (2 cups) milk
2½ ounces butter and other fats and oils
6 ounces fresh fruit, juices, and processed fruit
7 ounces vegetables, excluding home grown vegetables
6 ounces potatoes
1 ounce melon
4 ounces refined sugar
5 ounces wheat products
2 ounces other grain products
6 ounces beer
2 ounces wine and other spirits
8 cigarettes or cigars, and
1 cup of coffee, tea, or cocoa
Even discounting the coffee, cigarettes, and beer, that's an average of 4 pounds per person per day (one full pound being milk, the other three pounds being solids). This is the average consumption per person (all ages considered) in the United States, according to the Agriculture Department's quarterly publication, National Food Situation.
Multiply this by a family of five, and you have 20 pounds flood to be transported, marketed, bought, prepared and eaten daily. Multiply to the size of New York City, and the number reaches an astronomical 16,000 tons of food daily!
Just to provide every New Yorker (or Southern Californian, for that matter) with his 5 ounces of beef and 2 ounces of poultry, requires a daily slaughtering, cleaning, dressing, freezing, and delivering of 4,000 head of cattle and 300,000 chickens!
Some estimates say New York City has a week's surplus of food at best. A transportation strike, or any similar breakdown in commerce, and the city could die. Few consider how vulnerable we urbanites actually are.
More Input: Fuels, Minerals, and Natural Resources
After polishing off a quick breakfast and reading a few pages of the Times (the all-night vigil of producing a morning newspaper is another story in itself), Mr. Average Citizen turns the ignition key in his car. The engine responds. Fuel power.
Where does that fuel come from? If Mr. A. C. drives 12 miles to work (a conservative estimate), he burns about one gallon of gasoline; on the return trip, a second gallon. His wife burns a like amount on her daily errands.
On an average day, each citizen burns 2 pounds of motor fuel, 5½ pounds of natural gas, 5½ pounds of oil, and 6 pounds of coal. Total: 19 pounds, most of it consumed by the industries of the city, not Mr. Average Citizen himself. But nevertheless, his share is 19 pounds. (Scientific American, "The Metabolism of Cities," Sept. 1965, p. 180)
But where does all this fuel come from? Nearly 100 pounds for a family of five. The motor fuel and much of the oil comes in the oil vans from local refineries. The coal comes in endless coal cars speeding across the nation's rails. (It takes a string of 240 full coal cars daily just to power the city of New York for a day) New York's total daily fuel needs — 76,000 tons of fuels.
That's not all the resources Mr. Average Citizen consumes daily. Included on this list of industrial minerals are items he probably never directly uses, but is nevertheless responsible for.
50 pounds of sand, gravel, and stone
10 pounds of clay, lime, cement, gypsum, salt, etc.
5 pounds of iron ore and ferrous-alloy ores
2 pounds of wood, paper, and natural fibers
½ pound of non-ferrous ores and metals.
The total of such minerals runs at 67½ pounds per day, a barely liftable quantity. But New York City's total share runs 270,000 tons daily, a herculean task for local commerce and industry.
The total daily input for Mr. Average Citizen, in just these four basic areas, is: 4 pounds food, 19 pounds fuel, 67 pounds minerals, and about 1250 pounds of water (direct city use only). For New York City in a day? 16,000 tons of food, 76,000 tons of fuels, 270,000 tons of minerals, and 5,000,000 tons of water! A good day's work for the many hundreds of thousands employed in New York's service industries.
Garbage In — Garbage Out
The city is a vast maw into which a country's life blood is reverently poured. And such gargantuan consumption habits have a shuddering, enormous impact on the environment, and the country as a whole.
We've seen what goes into a city each day. Now look at what is poured out. In Los Angeles, it's obvious (smog can be seen 200 miles away), but most of the city effluence is quite invisible, including most air pollution.
The 1250 pounds of water used by Mr. Average Citizen is quickly transformed into about 1000 pounds of sewage. The discarded packaging of his food and other items produces 4 pounds of solid waste daily. And his burning of fuels produces one pound of carbon monoxide, and one additional pound of the four other major air pollutants.
New York City produces slightly more than the national average of all these pollutants: 1280 pounds of sewage per person, 5 pounds of solid trash, and slightly over 2 pounds of air pollution. The daily totals for "Fume City"? Over 5 million tons of sewage, 20,000 tons of solid wastes, and 16,000 tons of smog. And the sanitation workers want to strike?
But effluents are not the only output of man's modern metropolis. Look at the literature, newspapers, magazines, and books published each day (with some pornography under each of those categories) in a huge center of learning like New York City. How about the knowledge (or boredom?) disseminated in hundreds of schools by thousands of teachers to a million students, in New York City.
The plans, concepts, hopes, dreams, governmental squabbles, attempts to rule, the endless speeches. All these are part of the "software" of cities.
Then there is the alienated majority, the dissatisfied masses, those who go through a day with nothing to do, and those who grovel, sweat, and toil to barely make ends meet. What does all their output mean — to themselves and to a nation? In many cases, misery, stress, loneliness; a job that has nothing to do with life; a life that has nothing to do with joy, love, success, peace. Today we have crime unrestrained, poverty around the corner, insecurity, slow poisons in the air, water, food, and even in literature, sickness, stress and an early death.
Are cities really civilized?
Cities represent, on a global scale, the total achievement of man in all his history. This, then, is surely what man has striven for during his entire experience on earth. Cities have produced some very wonderful inventions, works of art, buildings, and people. And vastly more destructive inventions, absurd art, slums, and criminals of every sort.
Cities.
Can they survive?
Should they?