LETTER : Positive side of city living

Geoffrey Lean concentrated so much on doom and gloom that he overlooked his own good news. Cities occupy just 2 per cent of the world's land surface, he quotes Herbert Giradet as saying. But Los Angeles, which went unmentioned, would obviously feature badly in an overall comparison. Widespread use of the car has stretched it to cover an area the distance from Bedford to Brighton, and to a lesser extent this dispersal is also happening in the UK.

Meanwhile, when I stay with relatives in Derbyshire - where they need wheelie bins just as large as ours - my consumption of food and water is just the same as when I am in the city, and so is my use of the loo. Surely an article entitled "Cities can and should be eco-friendly" would have served a more useful purpose than "The greedy cities".

Kenneth R Shaw

Woodford Green, Essex