#urbanist

[illustratus]

Léon Krier's Atlantis at Sunrise by Carl Laubin

[onlytiktoks]

[germsleftwingblog]

i think if we want a more urban society , we should use real world research to shoe the effects of changing a city into an urban area. with some towns already being adapted into urbanism , people wont have to be as skeptical. we would have real world proof of its effectiveness at building community , lowering taxes , lowering crime and reinforcing the protection of the environment.

after that you could bring these plans to a larger scale. the economy would struggle for a few years , even if we take it slow , but a temporary struggling economy is worth it for long term improvement.

of course theres be a decrease in the automotive business , but we could use the money that would go into that into education. if the fear is that lower income people (the automotive being recorded to have more low income workers) would be out of a job , then i propose this aswell: the money saved from these changes could also go into supporting the community and its people. wed offer more support to struggling people as well as easier access to education. providing more useful jobs.

either way america needs to focus on the future. we need to put our efforts into what life will be later , not how easy life can be now.

[callan-u]

Recent city photography in Seattle

Summer 2025

[verdantachillean]

I feel like if tree density in urban areas can have a significant influence on peoples mental (and likely physical) health (which there are several studies suggesting this)

Then I feel like maybe there should be some kind of regulations putting like a minimum amount of trees per X amount of area in a city

And it also is important for the pedestrians, trees create shade which is very important, especially in densely populated areas, where it is very common for many people to travel on foot or by like bike

[kristinnicolefehrman]

Two Years in Detroit

Two years have flown by!

[ceilidhtransing]

It's astonishing the number of conversations about urbanism that get derailed by one person going “but what about my very specific situation!”

Look. No one is talking about forcing you specifically to never ever use a car if the life you lead needs one. There will always be edge cases like someone who lives on the very outer limits of a city but has to commute every day to their job thirty miles away in Middle Of Nowhere Village Farm (Population Two Hundred) which is too far to cycle and it's unlikely that there will ever be fast frequent public transport on that particular route so of course it makes sense for that person to drive. Even in well planned places there are still some situations that warrant a car. And, of course (though this is not really the group this post is about), there will be a very small population of disabled people - smaller than a lot of people probably imagine, but it definitely exists - for whom, no matter how accessible a mixed-use walkable neighbourhood you build, with tactile paving and level boarding and free seating everywhere and continuous pavements and safe segregated pedestrian paths and all that fantastic stuff, it will still be necessary to use a car a lot of the time.

But the existence of edge cases does not invalidate the project as a whole, and in fact it's a pretty conservative instinct to respond to an attempt to massively improve the general conditions of society with “but what about the way it will affect me?!”

I am very sympathetic to a lot of these people's fears and apprehensions, particularly those of disabled people who are all too used to urban planning projects completely forgetting they exist and severely limiting their ability to get around the world. I really do understand the feeling of “I can only barely get around as it is and I'm afraid that all this urbanism stuff will only make it yet more impossible for me to live my life”. But I suspect that a lot of this feeling comes from a fear of extremely poorly implemented “urbanism”, where things are - especially in North America - basically the exact same as there are now except you're forced to walk or cycle everywhere so you have an 80-minute round-trip cycle just to get groceries and the Urbanism Cops will hunt you down if you so much as think about driving. And while there's always some risk that good ideas will be absolutely butchered in execution by incompetent, careless and/or malicious officials, I do want to emphasise that no one is actually advocating for that kind of situation. An “urbanism” that leaves everything basically as-is except now cars are banned or something is no urbanism at all. And an urbanism that makes it infinitely harder for people to get around, rather than easier, is also no urbanism at all. Whatever your nightmare vision is of “everyone being forced to cycle everywhere” or “my commute now being 4 hours long because I'm not allowed to drive” or “now I'm trapped inside my house because I can't walk very far and my neighbourhood isn't accessible to me” is not actually being advocated by anyone.

Urbanism is about greatly improving the quality of life for society as a whole (as well as, you know, staving off the climate catastrophe), and within that framework there will be space for all the edge cases. Because that's what they are: edge cases. Even if 15% of people will need to drive to work no matter what, that's still 85% of people who won't. Even if 10% of people will need a car to go shopping, that's still 90% of people who won't. And the expectation - especially from people whose opposition is rooted not in genuine concern for accessibility but rather in pure myopic selfishness, like the business owners who go apeshit every time a bike lane is proposed on their street - that we should hold off on massive improvements for the vast bulk of society because “what about their specific edge case situation” is how nothing ever gets improved at all. “My personal need to drive means that everything should remain car-dependent forever.” “I can't ride a bike therefore we shouldn't invest in cycle infrastructure.” “My nearest transit stop is a half-hour walk away so instead of advocating for better public transit that works for my neighbourhood I'm going to insist that everything stays the way it is now.” Prioritising edge cases - often those of loud and wealthy conservative minorities - at the direct expense of the broad solutions that will result in massive quality-of-life improvements for almost everyone is deeply unfair, and doesn't result in anything ever getting better, but rather is a big contributing factor to everything staying shit forever.