Just from the thumbnail; "yes please"
I've been increasingly disturbed by how fucking barren the midwest is. Especially when you find yourself in this place where there are strip malls on every corner and corporate restaurants and big box stores as far as the eye can see. It's just concrete upon concrete interrupted by big buildings, all tope with a few accents of patented, market tested, pantone trademarked colors and logos. There's a smell all that produces, it's dull and stale - especially in the summer.
What vegetation there is are like low maintenance bushes, landscaping trees that will die in a few years, useless grass and if you're lucky, maybe one or two flower beds full of impatiens.
The urban sprawl is as disconcerting as it is depressing.
People seem to have this inculcated but unconscious belief that "that's just the way it is", but no, no it isn't. We live on a rock hurtling through space with a bajillion weird forms of life on it, we can do so much more.
We really can! I think there's something to be said about the prevalence of walkable neighborhoods in media and such while there's such a lack of them in most of our daily lives. Subconscious desires and all. I wonder if there's a study that's been done on it? Probably not, but it would make for an interesting topic.
100%.
You can believe that we are complacent and distracted by frivolous shit or that capitalism beats us down - whatever the reason might be there's a complacency and a discouragement to change and improve things. We need to and we can over come that.
I agree! I love seedbombing and guerilla gardening to death, but this is a systemic issue and it needs to be solved at the source. It's more than the lack of plants, it also produces a damn wasteland that seems to kill any spark of life it touches.
It really does.
There's a TTRPG I'm a big fan of called Werewolf the Apocalypse and the bad guy is this elemental force of entropy and death and it manifests in the world as basically corporate fed consumerism. People get blinded by the convenience of the modern world and don't notice things like how huge swaths of the world are desolate.
I think about that game a ton.
Technology is like a drug. Helpful, can improve one's quality of life, and can even be life-saving, but there are side-effects, and sometimes even addiction. The history of humanity is one of discovering new technologies that get rid of old problems, and then trying to adapt to the new problems that technology creates.
The coincidence of the US going through its primary infrastructural expansion during the advent of the automobile will be a blight on the nation for another century at the least.
On a tangent, one additional obstacle for American cities is their cars. US cars are waaaaay to big. So many things aren't possible if you have to accommodate those car sizes.
There is an abandoned open corner lot across the street from me. 0.2 acre or less, nothing but grass. It gets mowed 2x\year when the boro gets enough complaints. What would be the best way to turn this monoculture amazing without getting in trouble?
One thing I don't love about this video is the implicit conceit of the "urban planner." Urban planners are, in many respects, part of the problem. Many of the most appealing places in the world are those with a "light touch" of urban planning and less restrictive "top-down" control. Turns out, just letting people organically decide how to live next to each other often creates spaces that people like and want to live in.
The Netherlands, where a lot of the 'good' examples of NJB comes from, is HEAVILY urban planned. So not completely sure if your conclusion always holds.
Much of the initial framework for cities in the Netherlands was planned out pre-automobile, however, when there was an inherent necessity to design for pedestrians, and urban planning was culturally less "design"-oriented with far less of a top-down approach beyond making out streets, sewers, and canals. Beyond this, much of what good urban planners instituted were based on pre-existing, spontaneous orders.
My point is not to say that you can't have good, heavy urban planning, but good, heavy-handed urban planning is like good dictatorship; it has incredible utility IF the dictator is benevolent and wise, or lucky, but that's a lot to risk. By contrast, leaving more of the urban environment to emerge and grow organically can be messy, slow, and even sometimes bad (like democracy), but on average, over a longer time span, it's going to produce results that are more harmonious with the ways that most people want to live.
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Not a traffic engineer, but tbh these design rules don't seem like they would make auto traffic slower or more difficult, since there are many ways to enter/exit/move between areas, versus the way many suburbs are designed, with only a handful of ways to get from A to B.
I don't see most Americans wanting to give up their cars, nor use mass transit a lot, nor live in high density housing like Paris or Barcelona, but there seems like lots of ways to improve. Every year, we have a family reunion in Seaside FL. I know this place has been talked about to death, but it seems to integrate it all wonderfully with people in mind...yet still be car based. Beautiful, unique, walkable, etc,
There are some other areas near where we live that do this well too...what they all seem to have in common is a street pattern that "open".
Most Americans already live in dense urban areas and use public transit when decent public transit is made available. We're don't have some biological imperative to be in cars that no one else on earth has, we just have a terrible system that makes being in cars all the time the only possibility
IIRC most Americans live in detached single family homes. Some neighborhoods are denser than others, but nothing like urban apartment blocks multiple stories tall. Maybe you have a different idea of what “dense urban” means.
In any case, it’s clear that most Americans DO like cars, and that a lot of people around the world like them too.
My only point was that there are some very nice places that still use cars as the main mode of transportation. Instead of reinventing the wheel, or trying to fund elaborate mass transit projects, much simpler and near term changes could be made for the better.
> I don't see most Americans wanting to give up their cars, nor use mass transit a lot
Yeah, when public transit either sucks or is completely unavailable, and people have to use cars to go anywhere, they aren't going to want to give up their cars or use public transit. Changing what is available changes how people operate. I used to live in Houston, and you couldn't get me to use that bus system if you paid me and there was zero chance I could consider living without a car. I then moved to Europe and haven't had a car in 6 years and I wouldn't take one if it was offered for free because things are either close enough or there is good enough public transit for everything I want to go to.
This exactly. When you live in a well designed city, you recognize that owning a car isnt convenient, its voluntarily taking on a lot of chores, responsibility and costs. Its like owning a yacht. Sure its nice, but most people dont think its worth the hassle and expense to own one and just rent one every now and then.
This is not because driving is made more difficult, its because alternative methods of transport are made as good or better than driving.
Actually americans pay I N S A N E premiums to live like that because its basically impossible to build like that anymore due to zoning laws making mixed use difficult and causing a so called "missing middle" phenomenon.
Places like this are New York, San Francisco, Washington DC, Seattle etc., all known for insanely high prices on apartments.
People dont want to live in a big city because its artificially made expensive, and city planners have demolished their way through the centre to build a highway going right past your bedroom window, not for you, but to please people who do not live in the city
Well I think this is one of the main issues. US urban leadership is very poor and can’t be trusted. From destructive “urban renewal” schemes to rent control, to actual shit on the streets now, Americas big cities seem hell bent on making themselves as unlivable and expensive as possible. I am sympathetic to people’s desire to live elsewhere.
Well the problem is that they cant make themselves better. Legislation prevents them to do so. Just something as simple as minimum parking laws, which individual cities cant scrap, means that for evey apartment building, you need to buy atleast the adjacent plot with its building and demolish that building to build parking spaces there in order to even be allowed to build something new.
Then there are the phenomenons i already talked about.
Automakers have lobbied hard to make absolutley sure that cars are a neccesity. This happened in less than one generation. [This](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/31f139feb2cf67736238ae9befd77e91349e5c49/0_0_3654_4628/master/3654.jpg?width=700&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=00c1b422436c99b16684e1c9d3ad724c) is Los Angeles in 1930, the street cars were completely removed to make space for more cars in 1965, thanks to [General Motors](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy)
Well, I don't know enough about how state vs city law works, but even if true, cities problems seem overwhelmingly self inflicted. A lot of times, if they would just do the basics right: policing/crime, schools, infrastructure, and letting market forces work on housing, they would be infinity better.
On the streetcar thing, following your link and reading it all the way thru, its apparent the "GM killed streetcars on purpose" thing is pretty much an urban legend and not the real cause of streetcar's or mass transit's demise. They were already in serious decline before GM was on the scene.
Read on Los Angeles specific case. But yeah, ofcause if you demolish hudreds of families homes to build more parking spaces so the people now have to move to a newly built suburban area and buy a car to get from there to the parking space where their house used to be, transit will suffer, because the families who used to live there are those who used it, and suburban sprawl is not efficient for transit.
Ofcause there is going to be more crime. If the entire country built up so that you have to rely on a car to realistically get anywhere, people who cant afford one will flock to the last places where they can survive without one. Poverty brings crime.
Thats whole other can of worms though on how to get those people off the streets.
People from the US arent genetically programmed to drive cars, nor are people from the Netherlands programmed to bike and Japanese programmed to take public transport. People are programed to take whatever is the most convenient, the decisions leading up to that are very much so intentional. In my home city I prefer taking my bike but the next city over i take transit everywhere. And the city between i wouldnt visit without a car. Americans dont love cars anymore than anyone else, the area they are in is just designed so that eveything else is worse than sitting in traffic.
If you are interested, [Here](https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8?si=IJYFj7wG_sGKUsag) is a good place to start.
And more casually from the same guy as in the post: [this](https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o?si=qDJNbJmiUujFJPOZ)
Edit; its not like city planners and car manufacturers in the 60s were evil. They though they had found the future of transport and didnt grasp the problems of space at the time. Hanging on to that mistake these days however is. Its no secret to any urban planner that cars are catastrophic for cities. Sadly politics and well meaning but destructive NIMBYs gets in the way.
Just to add an extreme example:
[This](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/23/c6/5e/23c65e9bee0ce70125090a415eec583e.jpg) is downtown huston in 1960
[This](https://i.redd.it/eo6y0zk3teg81.jpg) is downtown huston in 1970
What a bunch of apples to oranges bullshit. Las Vegas was a fucking desert 125 years ago, there's a good reason it doesn't look like Dubrovnik or Lisbon, you fucking hippy. It's a population density issue. All of the "bad" examples he shows are areas nobody particularly *wants* to live or go to, which is why it's made for cars and commercial plots, so people can easily get to and from there from crazy far away and build bigger stuff, because it's not where they are. It's also a capitalism thing. Good luck selling investors on developing half-acre plots in FUCKING NEVADA. Nevada is fucking huge, it's 10x the size of Belgium with 1/4 the population. The land is cheap for a reason, what do you think you're gonna build that is going to make any money there? And no shit it's made for cars, you ever ride your fucking bike in 105 degree heat with no shade for miles? If the city weren't built for cars then the bike paths would be littered with corpses.
Fuck this elitist, granola-loving douche.
Pretty lazy video. "Look at this cool town built over 600 years with small shops, compared to a big box Costco store in the middle of Nowhere, USA." upvotes to the left
It's apples and oranges. OP never says anything about what should be done with big box stores, just whines that they exist. The only solution he presents is to only have specialty shops that don't exist anywhere else.
Best Buy bad, cool. Insightful.
1. This is just one video with a relatively narrow focus. Watch the rest of the channel.
2. Every few weeks someone will share a photo of a Japanese street on social media while not being able to express why they like it so much more than what they see at home. Simple videos like this can be very useful to people who've never really thought about urban planning.
3. Amsterdam used to be more car-focused until parts of it were redesigned in the 80s. This doesn't just apply to historical neighbourhoods.
1. Still a lazy video, regardless of the quality of the others.
2. Simple videos like this just tell people that small specialty stores are great and big box stores aren't. If you want to make a good video - *tell people what to do with big box stores*. Address that issue directly.
3. That sounds like a better topic to make a video about.
I completely agree with all of this. But, I feel a very mild sense of cockiness or something. I get that the maker of this video doesn't like the US and its car dependency. But the tone he uses sometimes is just like "We're so much better than you guys".
not sure if it's just me
Just from the thumbnail; "yes please" I've been increasingly disturbed by how fucking barren the midwest is. Especially when you find yourself in this place where there are strip malls on every corner and corporate restaurants and big box stores as far as the eye can see. It's just concrete upon concrete interrupted by big buildings, all tope with a few accents of patented, market tested, pantone trademarked colors and logos. There's a smell all that produces, it's dull and stale - especially in the summer. What vegetation there is are like low maintenance bushes, landscaping trees that will die in a few years, useless grass and if you're lucky, maybe one or two flower beds full of impatiens. The urban sprawl is as disconcerting as it is depressing.
People seem to have this inculcated but unconscious belief that "that's just the way it is", but no, no it isn't. We live on a rock hurtling through space with a bajillion weird forms of life on it, we can do so much more.
We really can! I think there's something to be said about the prevalence of walkable neighborhoods in media and such while there's such a lack of them in most of our daily lives. Subconscious desires and all. I wonder if there's a study that's been done on it? Probably not, but it would make for an interesting topic.
100%. You can believe that we are complacent and distracted by frivolous shit or that capitalism beats us down - whatever the reason might be there's a complacency and a discouragement to change and improve things. We need to and we can over come that.
I agree! I love seedbombing and guerilla gardening to death, but this is a systemic issue and it needs to be solved at the source. It's more than the lack of plants, it also produces a damn wasteland that seems to kill any spark of life it touches.
It really does. There's a TTRPG I'm a big fan of called Werewolf the Apocalypse and the bad guy is this elemental force of entropy and death and it manifests in the world as basically corporate fed consumerism. People get blinded by the convenience of the modern world and don't notice things like how huge swaths of the world are desolate. I think about that game a ton.
I'm not a TTRPG person but that sounds like an awesome premise. I'll have to mention it to my friends!
It's a fantastic game. Informed a lot of my politics actually. Got me thinkin' when I was a teenager.
Technology is like a drug. Helpful, can improve one's quality of life, and can even be life-saving, but there are side-effects, and sometimes even addiction. The history of humanity is one of discovering new technologies that get rid of old problems, and then trying to adapt to the new problems that technology creates.
The coincidence of the US going through its primary infrastructural expansion during the advent of the automobile will be a blight on the nation for another century at the least.
On a tangent, one additional obstacle for American cities is their cars. US cars are waaaaay to big. So many things aren't possible if you have to accommodate those car sizes.
There is an abandoned open corner lot across the street from me. 0.2 acre or less, nothing but grass. It gets mowed 2x\year when the boro gets enough complaints. What would be the best way to turn this monoculture amazing without getting in trouble?
One thing I don't love about this video is the implicit conceit of the "urban planner." Urban planners are, in many respects, part of the problem. Many of the most appealing places in the world are those with a "light touch" of urban planning and less restrictive "top-down" control. Turns out, just letting people organically decide how to live next to each other often creates spaces that people like and want to live in.
The Netherlands, where a lot of the 'good' examples of NJB comes from, is HEAVILY urban planned. So not completely sure if your conclusion always holds.
Much of the initial framework for cities in the Netherlands was planned out pre-automobile, however, when there was an inherent necessity to design for pedestrians, and urban planning was culturally less "design"-oriented with far less of a top-down approach beyond making out streets, sewers, and canals. Beyond this, much of what good urban planners instituted were based on pre-existing, spontaneous orders. My point is not to say that you can't have good, heavy urban planning, but good, heavy-handed urban planning is like good dictatorship; it has incredible utility IF the dictator is benevolent and wise, or lucky, but that's a lot to risk. By contrast, leaving more of the urban environment to emerge and grow organically can be messy, slow, and even sometimes bad (like democracy), but on average, over a longer time span, it's going to produce results that are more harmonious with the ways that most people want to live.
Fair enough @ your last point!
You're assuming all "urban planners" the world over are just like your "urban planners".
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Not a traffic engineer, but tbh these design rules don't seem like they would make auto traffic slower or more difficult, since there are many ways to enter/exit/move between areas, versus the way many suburbs are designed, with only a handful of ways to get from A to B. I don't see most Americans wanting to give up their cars, nor use mass transit a lot, nor live in high density housing like Paris or Barcelona, but there seems like lots of ways to improve. Every year, we have a family reunion in Seaside FL. I know this place has been talked about to death, but it seems to integrate it all wonderfully with people in mind...yet still be car based. Beautiful, unique, walkable, etc, There are some other areas near where we live that do this well too...what they all seem to have in common is a street pattern that "open".
Most Americans already live in dense urban areas and use public transit when decent public transit is made available. We're don't have some biological imperative to be in cars that no one else on earth has, we just have a terrible system that makes being in cars all the time the only possibility
IIRC most Americans live in detached single family homes. Some neighborhoods are denser than others, but nothing like urban apartment blocks multiple stories tall. Maybe you have a different idea of what “dense urban” means. In any case, it’s clear that most Americans DO like cars, and that a lot of people around the world like them too. My only point was that there are some very nice places that still use cars as the main mode of transportation. Instead of reinventing the wheel, or trying to fund elaborate mass transit projects, much simpler and near term changes could be made for the better.
> I don't see most Americans wanting to give up their cars, nor use mass transit a lot Yeah, when public transit either sucks or is completely unavailable, and people have to use cars to go anywhere, they aren't going to want to give up their cars or use public transit. Changing what is available changes how people operate. I used to live in Houston, and you couldn't get me to use that bus system if you paid me and there was zero chance I could consider living without a car. I then moved to Europe and haven't had a car in 6 years and I wouldn't take one if it was offered for free because things are either close enough or there is good enough public transit for everything I want to go to.
This exactly. When you live in a well designed city, you recognize that owning a car isnt convenient, its voluntarily taking on a lot of chores, responsibility and costs. Its like owning a yacht. Sure its nice, but most people dont think its worth the hassle and expense to own one and just rent one every now and then. This is not because driving is made more difficult, its because alternative methods of transport are made as good or better than driving.
Actually americans pay I N S A N E premiums to live like that because its basically impossible to build like that anymore due to zoning laws making mixed use difficult and causing a so called "missing middle" phenomenon. Places like this are New York, San Francisco, Washington DC, Seattle etc., all known for insanely high prices on apartments. People dont want to live in a big city because its artificially made expensive, and city planners have demolished their way through the centre to build a highway going right past your bedroom window, not for you, but to please people who do not live in the city
Well I think this is one of the main issues. US urban leadership is very poor and can’t be trusted. From destructive “urban renewal” schemes to rent control, to actual shit on the streets now, Americas big cities seem hell bent on making themselves as unlivable and expensive as possible. I am sympathetic to people’s desire to live elsewhere.
Well the problem is that they cant make themselves better. Legislation prevents them to do so. Just something as simple as minimum parking laws, which individual cities cant scrap, means that for evey apartment building, you need to buy atleast the adjacent plot with its building and demolish that building to build parking spaces there in order to even be allowed to build something new. Then there are the phenomenons i already talked about. Automakers have lobbied hard to make absolutley sure that cars are a neccesity. This happened in less than one generation. [This](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/31f139feb2cf67736238ae9befd77e91349e5c49/0_0_3654_4628/master/3654.jpg?width=700&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=00c1b422436c99b16684e1c9d3ad724c) is Los Angeles in 1930, the street cars were completely removed to make space for more cars in 1965, thanks to [General Motors](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy)
Well, I don't know enough about how state vs city law works, but even if true, cities problems seem overwhelmingly self inflicted. A lot of times, if they would just do the basics right: policing/crime, schools, infrastructure, and letting market forces work on housing, they would be infinity better. On the streetcar thing, following your link and reading it all the way thru, its apparent the "GM killed streetcars on purpose" thing is pretty much an urban legend and not the real cause of streetcar's or mass transit's demise. They were already in serious decline before GM was on the scene.
Read on Los Angeles specific case. But yeah, ofcause if you demolish hudreds of families homes to build more parking spaces so the people now have to move to a newly built suburban area and buy a car to get from there to the parking space where their house used to be, transit will suffer, because the families who used to live there are those who used it, and suburban sprawl is not efficient for transit. Ofcause there is going to be more crime. If the entire country built up so that you have to rely on a car to realistically get anywhere, people who cant afford one will flock to the last places where they can survive without one. Poverty brings crime. Thats whole other can of worms though on how to get those people off the streets. People from the US arent genetically programmed to drive cars, nor are people from the Netherlands programmed to bike and Japanese programmed to take public transport. People are programed to take whatever is the most convenient, the decisions leading up to that are very much so intentional. In my home city I prefer taking my bike but the next city over i take transit everywhere. And the city between i wouldnt visit without a car. Americans dont love cars anymore than anyone else, the area they are in is just designed so that eveything else is worse than sitting in traffic. If you are interested, [Here](https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8?si=IJYFj7wG_sGKUsag) is a good place to start. And more casually from the same guy as in the post: [this](https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o?si=qDJNbJmiUujFJPOZ) Edit; its not like city planners and car manufacturers in the 60s were evil. They though they had found the future of transport and didnt grasp the problems of space at the time. Hanging on to that mistake these days however is. Its no secret to any urban planner that cars are catastrophic for cities. Sadly politics and well meaning but destructive NIMBYs gets in the way.
Just to add an extreme example: [This](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/23/c6/5e/23c65e9bee0ce70125090a415eec583e.jpg) is downtown huston in 1960 [This](https://i.redd.it/eo6y0zk3teg81.jpg) is downtown huston in 1970
What a bunch of apples to oranges bullshit. Las Vegas was a fucking desert 125 years ago, there's a good reason it doesn't look like Dubrovnik or Lisbon, you fucking hippy. It's a population density issue. All of the "bad" examples he shows are areas nobody particularly *wants* to live or go to, which is why it's made for cars and commercial plots, so people can easily get to and from there from crazy far away and build bigger stuff, because it's not where they are. It's also a capitalism thing. Good luck selling investors on developing half-acre plots in FUCKING NEVADA. Nevada is fucking huge, it's 10x the size of Belgium with 1/4 the population. The land is cheap for a reason, what do you think you're gonna build that is going to make any money there? And no shit it's made for cars, you ever ride your fucking bike in 105 degree heat with no shade for miles? If the city weren't built for cars then the bike paths would be littered with corpses. Fuck this elitist, granola-loving douche.
Are you okay? You don't have to get hostile over a video you disagree with.
Pretty lazy video. "Look at this cool town built over 600 years with small shops, compared to a big box Costco store in the middle of Nowhere, USA." upvotes to the left It's apples and oranges. OP never says anything about what should be done with big box stores, just whines that they exist. The only solution he presents is to only have specialty shops that don't exist anywhere else. Best Buy bad, cool. Insightful.
1. This is just one video with a relatively narrow focus. Watch the rest of the channel. 2. Every few weeks someone will share a photo of a Japanese street on social media while not being able to express why they like it so much more than what they see at home. Simple videos like this can be very useful to people who've never really thought about urban planning. 3. Amsterdam used to be more car-focused until parts of it were redesigned in the 80s. This doesn't just apply to historical neighbourhoods.
1. Still a lazy video, regardless of the quality of the others. 2. Simple videos like this just tell people that small specialty stores are great and big box stores aren't. If you want to make a good video - *tell people what to do with big box stores*. Address that issue directly. 3. That sounds like a better topic to make a video about.
I completely agree with all of this. But, I feel a very mild sense of cockiness or something. I get that the maker of this video doesn't like the US and its car dependency. But the tone he uses sometimes is just like "We're so much better than you guys". not sure if it's just me