[othello]

To enjoy modern standards of living, medium to high density urban arrangements are much less resource intensive than suburban sprawl, which the relevant comparison point.

The figure you quote, aggregated at the global level, entirely results from a comparison of city lifestyle with pre-industrial countryside lifestyles in developing countries. By contrast, living in the countryside or in suburbia in rich nations is much more environmentally damaging than in dense urban areas, which is what gp was referring to.

[akiselev]

> The figure you quote, aggregated at the global level, entirely results from a comparison of city lifestyle with pre-industrial countryside lifestyles in developing countries.

Literally pre-industrial [1]. Last numbers I saw from the UN estimated 2 billion subsistence farmers as of 2015, all living without the benefit of modern agriculture except the occasional bag of fertilizer or engineered seeds. The future is very unevenly distributed.

[1] http://www.fao.org/3/i5251e/i5251e.pdf

[Ericson2314]

Also keep in mind that turning nature into agriculture also has huge environmental costs not captured in energy usage.

If "developed cultured" is fixed by pricing the externalities, it would be absolutely better to pack people in cities, replace subsistence farming with sustainable industrial agriculture (no tilling, no aquifer depletion, etc.) and decrease the portion of land devoted to agriculture.