When I moved from small-town Oregon to Paris’s 11th arrondissement last summer, the city seemed like a poem in gray: cobblestones, seven-story buildings, the steely waters of the Seine. But soon I started noticing the green woven in with the gray. Some of it was almost hidden, tucked inside the city’s large blocks, behind the apartment buildings lining the streets. I even discovered a sizable public park right across the street from my building, with big trees, Ping-Pong tables, citizen-tended gardens, and “wild” areas of vegetation dedicated to urban biodiversity. To enter it, you have to go through the gate of a private apartment building. Very Parisian.

Dense cities like Paris are busy and buzzy, a mille-feuille of human experience. They’re also good for the climate. Shorter travel distances and public transit reduce car usage, while dense multifamily residential architecture takes less energy to heat and cool. But when it comes to adapting to climate change, suddenly everyone wants green space and shade trees, which can cool and clean the air—the classic urban trade-off between density and green space.

Or, you know, maybe there’s no big trade-off at all. A new analysis of cities around the world published today in the journal People and Nature found only a weak relationship between population density and urban greenery. The team of scientists, led by Rob McDonald, an urban ecologist at the Nature Conservancy, compared satellite images with population-density data in 629 cities across the world. Globally, denser cities had less open space overall than if everyone had private yards, but the amount of public open space was basically unrelated to density and had more to do with history, policy, and culture. One calculation, using data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for cities outside the U.S., found that a 10 percent increase in density was associated with a 2.9 percent decline in tree cover. Overall, there was a lot of variability, and there were a lot of outliers: Some cities and neighborhoods have both high density and lots of trees or open space. “Density is not destiny,” McDonald told me.

[Read: A plan to cool off the hottest neighborhoods]

Broadly speaking, the researchers found two ways to avoid the trade-off between density and green space. Take Singapore, one of the densest countries in the world. There, plants are installed on roofs and facades, turning the familiar gray landscape of skyscrapers and overpasses into a living matrix. By law, developers must replace any natural area that they develop with green space somewhere on the building. Meanwhile, in Curitiba, the largest city in southern Brazil, which has tripled in population since 1970, dense housing is built around dedicated bus lanes and interwoven with large public parks and conservation areas. Curitiba also uses planted areas to help direct and soak up stormwater, buffering residential areas from floods. In Singapore, nature shares space with the built environment, while Curitiba packs people in tightly and then spares land for other species inside the boundaries of the city.

With approaches like these, it seems likely that cities could become significantly greener even as they grow denser over time. We can have our energy-efficient metropolises and our cool, clean air smelling of flowers, too. And we’ll really need them both: Cities already tend to run warmer than other places, a phenomenon that will magnify the effects of climate change unless we find ways to lower the temperature. That doesn’t mean that building dense, green cities will necessarily be cheap or easy. Much of the next century’s increased density is likely to come in Africa and Asia, where city budgets tend to be smaller and where some cities are burdened by the legacies of decades of unplanned growth. In the global North, the rise of remote work is flinging many workers toward the suburbs and exurbs, which is a less climate-friendly way of living for as long as we drive around them in gas-powered cars. But even in Europe and North America, the right policies and incentives could counteract that trend—one amenity that tends to lure people to dense urban cores is green space.

The researchers produced a list of “green interventions” that they recommend, including adding green space along rivers, streams, roads, and rail lines; using planted areas as part of stormwater management; greening vacant lots (even if they will be vacant for only a few years); creating green roofs; and planting more trees along streets. Many cities are already pursuing these sorts of tweaks. In New York City, one of the densest areas of the United States, a coalition of advocacy groups called Forest for All NYC is pushing for the city to increase its tree cover from 22 percent to 30 percent by 2035—especially in areas with low-income households and high proportions of people of color. Emily Nobel Maxwell, the director of the Nature Conservancy’s Cities Program in New York, told me that the potential of green roofs in the city has barely been tapped. At the moment, there are about 730 green roofs in the city, but that’s less than 0.1 percent of the available rooftop real estate. “This is three-dimensional, and all of our surfaces matter,” Maxwell said.

[Read: America is going to have a ‘heat belt’]

Still, not everyone is so sure that the density/green space trade-off is mostly a myth. Shlomo Angel, an expert on urban density at New York University who wasn’t involved in the study, told me that his own research using different methods shows a stronger trade-off than this new study does. But he agrees that there are ways around the trade-off, including one that he says was not emphasized enough in the study: building high. By stacking urban residents one atop the other, land is spared for parks, trees, and gardens. That, he says, is Singapore’s real secret, not its green roofs. “In order to have more open space, you have to make it possible to build higher,” Angel said. “That’s the main way of removing that conflict.”

Paris is aesthetically committed to a lower profile, but strict height limits were relaxed in the outer arrondissements in 2010. The more I explore Paris, the more green spaces I find. The Haussmann-style apartment buildings that the city is known for come with delicate wrought-iron balconies, which many residents cram with a huge array of plants, whether geraniums or banana trees. Green roofs and facades are common. As of this year, new buildings in France larger than 500 square meters will have to dedicate 30 percent of their roof space to solar panels or plants. Public parks, including two large forested areas on either end of the city, provide a shared refuge from the gray. And street trees line many of the larger streets.

Just up the block from my apartment building, there’s a London Plane tree that was planted in 1880 that’s 75 feet tall. Its trunk is more than 13 feet in circumference. I know these stats because they are proudly listed (in metric equivalents, naturally) on a sign affixed to the tree. But Paris wasn’t always able to brag about its urban forest. “In Paris in the 1600s, there were no street trees and no publicly accessible parks,” McDonald said. They emerged after the French Revolution as private gardens were made public. Trees were planted along Paris’s boulevards starting in the 1800s. “We reinvented cities once,” he said. “We can do that again.”

A Swedish mining company has discovered the largest deposit of rare earth elements, crucial to building electric vehicles. Swedish state-owned LKAB says the deposit can supply a "substantial part of Europe's needs", reducing its dependence on China.

EU wants other sources than China for these crucial minerals, but it will be 10-15 years before Sweden's are available.

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The winter of 2023 could be worse than 2022

Work is not going well lately. Exhaustion and burnout are rampant; many young people are reconsidering whether they owe all their energy to their jobs, as seen in the widespread popularity of “quiet quitting.” An ongoing wave of unionization—including at Amazon and Starbucks—has led to victories, but has also been met with ferocious resistance from management. In this context, or perhaps in any context, it might feel absurd to imagine a society in which workers can’t get enough of work. It certainly would have seemed ludicrous to readers of the French firebrand Paul Lafargue’s satirical 1883 pamphlet, The Right to Be Lazy, in which he invents a Bizarro World where workers cause all kinds of “individual and social miseries” by refusing to quit at the end of the day.

Lafargue, a onetime doctor who became a critic, a socialist, and an activist, was a politically serious man, but in this recently reissued text, he uses humor to cut through the noise of political debate. His made-up work addicts are meant to help readers see the very real dangers of a system in which many have no choice but to work until they reach their breaking point. Lafargue’s mordant approach is still effective 140 years later. Mixed with the longevity of his ideas, it gives The Right to Be Lazy the angry, hilarious wisdom of a Shakespearean fool.

[Read: The parasitic workplace]

Labor has transformed since the 1880s, yet culturally, many Americans still adhere to what Lafargue called the “dogma of work,” a belief that work can solve all ills, whether spiritual, material, or physical. This ethos is visible today in the persistent bootstrap mentality, or the mindset exemplified by Sheryl Sandberg’s “lean in” philosophy. Across the globe, we also still see widespread evidence of what he called the “Fake Age,” dominated by consumerist waste; consider all the bath bombs and adult coloring books sold in the name of self-care, or the prevalence of “fast furniture” designed to last roughly five years. In China, the rise of the “lying flat” movement, which sees employees deprioritizing their jobs, seems to echo Lafargue’s argument that the best way to resist both cheap commercialism and the dogma of work is by opting out as much as possible.

The Right to Be Lazy does not immediately seem like a book designed to help anybody work less. It reads, at first, more like an ornate manifesto from an alternate universe. Lafargue begins by condemning a “strange madness” for labor, which, he declares, was not an issue in earlier stages of civilization—or during Creation. To him, God is the “supreme example of ideal laziness,” having done “six days of work, [then resting] for eternity.” Shortly after, he jumps to the French Third Republic, a supposedly egalitarian society in which the “Rights of Man cooked up by the philosophizing lawyers of the bourgeois revolution” had done little to help peasants, the urban poor, or the inhabitants of France’s many colonies. (It is worth noting that Lafargue was born in Cuba and was of mixed Black, Indigenous, French, and Jewish heritage; although he moved to France at age 9 and did not live outside Europe again, he had a distinctly global view of oppression.) At no point does he drop the pretense that his goal is to “curb the workers’ extravagant passion for work,” yet the portrait he draws is clearly of a society in which capitalist exploitation harms workers horribly.

That underlying message isn’t surprising. Lafargue was Karl Marx’s son-in-law and disciple, and may be the person who coined the term Marxism. Alex Andriesse’s new translation of The Right to Be Lazy includes a sweet essay that Lafargue wrote about the Marx he knew, who apparently staged naval battles in the bathtub with his little daughters and loved Friedrich Engels so much that he “never stopped worrying that he would be the victim of an accident.” In a preface, the critic Lucy Sante notes that The Right to Be Lazy, though profoundly influential in the late 19th century, is little known today precisely because of its entertaining and approachable nature: It is “seldom mentioned in Marxist theoretical literature,” she writes, “because as a populist tract it is refreshingly free of theory.”

Reading Sante, I thought of the first time I cracked open Marx’s opus, Capital, in college, and how little of it I understood. I thought, too, of the World’s Oldest Living Bolshevik in Angels in America, lamenting, “And Theory? How are we to proceed without Theory?” The Right to Be Lazy shows not just how, but why. Some problems are so brutal and colossal that tackling them does not take analysis so much as courage. Lafargue plainly sees the capitalist, colonialist French society of his day as a hotbed of such problems. His blunt satire is both a model for calling out injustice—indeed, Lafargue revised it while in jail for doing exactly that—and motivation for his readers to do the same.

Marx’s vision for the future of work, as he wrote in The German Ideology, was one in which anyone could pursue the labor that appealed in a given moment: A person could “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner.” We got the gig economy instead. Side hustles and contract work may offer the illusion of the freedom Marx describes, but such patchy forms of labor can be just as constraining as, and more time-consuming than, their more traditional counterparts.

In The Right to Be Lazy, Lafargue sees this coming. He describes an “inexorable” push toward production that nudges all but the rich to seek more and more work as pay and stability decline, until “people, who hardly have the strength to stand, sell twelve or fourteen hours of labor for half as much” as it was once worth. Lafargue understands that nobody in this position can escape it by simply deciding to work less—that the problems he is describing require structural solutions, including limits to the workday.

Yet Lafargue is also interested in the more amorphous and philosophical question of workers’ time. The Right to Be Lazy is, perhaps unsurprisingly given its title, concerned with not only how much workers earn per hour but how their hours are spent. In part, it does this by focusing on the difference between a human hour and a machine hour. Lafargue wrote not long after the Industrial Revolution, which he saw as a massive missed opportunity. Many worry today that machines will replace human workers; Lafargue, instead, worried that factory work pitted humans and machines against each other in an “absurd and murderous competition.” He thought the presence of machines should transform the idea of a workday: If a knitting machine can make nearly 30,000 more stitches a minute than a human knitter, he writes, then why shouldn’t “every minute of machine work [give] the worker ten days of rest?” Of course, the answer to this question is that more work equals more goods to sell.

In today’s garment industry, to remain close to the knitting example, machine work has yet to replace human workers, but the accelerated pace that many companies demand in factories has exacerbated the sorts of labor conditions that Lafargue wrote about. Meanwhile, the smartphone has eroded the limits of the workday in almost every pocket of the economy. Effective altruists, the techy philosophy cadre lately made famous by the disgraced entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, say the threat of artificial intelligence is that it may someday become conscious, like Skynet in Terminator, and decide to oppress us. The Right to Be Lazy suggests that machines have already been used to that end for nearly 250 years.

At a moment when hobbies too often turn into side hustles, and relaxation into conspicuous consumption, Lafargue’s concerns prompt broader reflection. Close to the end of The Right to Be Lazy, he describes a utopia in which workers spend nearly all their time lounging around. This exaggerated image illuminates another difference between human time and machine time: A machine cannot enjoy its time off. We can, although productivity culture tells us otherwise. All too often, life seems to contain little but working and recuperating from work. Lafargue reminds contemporary readers that our time need not be so binary. Our leisure activities don’t need to burn through our paychecks or turn into second careers. They can be frivolous, exploratory, solitary, useless. In machine time, not working means turning off. In human time, not working can mean anything at all.

The Right to Be Lazy is also a reminder that working less has significant spiritual and creative benefits. It ends with a prayer: “Oh, Laziness, take pity on our long destitution! Oh, Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm to heal human sufferings!” The idea that laziness breeds art may now seem outdated or improbable to some, but nobody knows better than an exhausted artist how vital laziness is to creativity. Ideas tend to unfurl when not attended to, but only if your brain isn’t too jammed with tasks to give them room.

One of art’s major roles, in fact, is to facilitate this experience of slow, unstructured rumination for its beholders as well as its creators. (Contrast this with NFTs, the emblematic art of our Fake Age, whose value is predicated on the idea that what makes something art is its capacity to be owned.) In How to Do Nothing, a philosophical exploration turned manifesto that serves as a modern-day companion to The Right to Be Lazy, Jenny Odell describes coming across Ellsworth Kelly’s 1996 work Blue Green Black Red while killing time at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. As Odell lingered in front of the painting, it “seemed to push and pull my vision in different directions.” She continues, “Strange as it sounds to call a flat, monochromatic painting a ‘time-based medium,’ there was actually something to find out in each one—or rather, between me and each one—and the longer time I spent, the more I found out.”

Killing time, in Odell’s telling, facilitates discovery. Lafargue would say it does far more. “In the regime of laziness,” he writes, “in order to kill the time that kills us all, second by second, there will be plays and shows forever and always.” He immediately spins this observation into a long joke about turning lawmakers into traveling theater troupes, but its icy truth remains. The fundamental thing we all have to recognize is that we will die. Time is our enemy—and yet Lafargue asks us to face it squarely, to linger in front of it like Odell lingering in front of Blue Green Black Red. If we cannot do so, we cannot confront our mortality; we can’t face death with dignity. Surely we all have a right to do that.

Catch up with the most important stories from around Europe and beyond - latest news, breaking news, World, Business, Entertainment, Politics, Culture, Travel.

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