Compare in what time frame? Cities can't evolve. You can now build a new tall building full a small apartments with the best insulation etc "A class". In 10 years it will be far less efficient and there is no way to improve it. Similarly you can build single-family homes and re-made them when they change owner. The scale and amount in involved peoples permit that. As a result if you compute the "carbon footprint" (witch have normally NO ecological meaning, it's just a means to munge money BTW) of a hypothetical new city vs an equally hypothetical new riviera you can state the city is better. If you enlarge the timeframe to 50 or 100 years the result reverse.

Similarly if instead of computing a hypothetical new city you compute a REAL present city and the "needed investment" to improve it keeping the density at a similar or even more dense scale than you obtain horrific results for ALL cities, especially for the big and dense ones.

Carbon footprint concept is just a classic management game, meaningless in scientific terms, but dressed as science to be sold to a receptive public. The reality is that we know we need to evolve and we know cities can't evolve. UN New Urban Agenda was made as a way to force people in factory-cities, like nazi interment camps or soviet union gulags, to use them to produce a new society for some others.

Capitalism simply have reached a point John Maynard Keynes and Rosa Luxembourg both predict a century ago: now that the entire world is run by capitalism there is no one to steal we need to create one. That means enslaving a vast cohort of population to try replicating a classic colonialism development model. Carbon footprint as a social score is try to classify people by census, since of course if you are poor you likely live in an old building, typically an apartment, your score is then horrific. If you are wealthy you likely have resources to build a new house, with p.v. and co to improve the score computation as a result your score is good. Since your score is good you are obeisant (in the sense that you use your resources to enrich those behind the Green New Deal, and you still been able to pay more in the future) you are allowed to live in a luxury building profiting from the poor's who work in the modern smart-city.

Oh, you might state that that's an ideological position, but in that case try to design a new society from the present to a projected 2030+ future. Try to be honest in the simulation and see the results. Similarly see the Toyota Smart City demo https://youtu.be/p-9X8Z2kJt8 and read about https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/19/why-greeces-ex... try finding similarity and differences. Go ahead and imaging a new modern city made to be ecologic, compute how many things are needed to make it and once built how can or can not evolve. Do the same for a vast riviera of small buildings where general infra (like roads, water, electricity, ...) are reduced to the minimum. Try to see what McKinsey publish in their future vision, like https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... and try to imaging how such vision can work ONLY for VERY FEW on top of all others simply because of density scale.

It's quiet clear, at least to me, the future some want for humanity, and it's also clear most humans do not even have tried to imaging a realistic future based on their public agenda.