Urbanism: Insidious Globalist Conspiracy or Self-Evident Common Sense?

okay you know I like to get into all kinds of wonky data and Engineering stuff but today I'm going to keep it at a very high level to the point where I'm not even gonna do my usual 10 second Channel introduction I'm just gonna assume you know what this channel is and what I talk about and I do joke about it being like a morphine drip of urbanism outrage but I do also intend this channel to be therapeutic to an extent and occasionally to have like information and advice that might help you make a difference this is designed to be a place where you can come find a weirdo on the internet who spends a lot of time thinking about the same kinds of things you think about but hopefully it does it in like a mildly rational way so you don't feel like a deranged person who's fallen down like a lunatic YouTube rabbit hole and today I'm going to talk about urbanism because I don't think we all have a shared definition of what that word means I think it is a word that is vulnerable to taking on bad connotations and well you don't have to share my definition but if you're going to watch my channel you might as well know what I think it means I was going to call this video what I believe about cities but and this probably makes me a bit of a Social Deviant but I just don't like that word whether you believe in something or not has no impact whatsoever on whether that thing is actually true and today I really want to talk about things that are just true so there won't be much in the way of Graphics in this video or really much data or research at all but a lot of what I'm going to talk about I have talked about in other videos and I will continue to talk about on this channel but I kind of wanted just one video to bring everything together so here's the basic thesis proper Urban living is good which I'll talk about more in a minute lots of people want it as evidenced by housing prices and our most desirable cities and we should simply be building more of this thing that is obviously good and highly sought after so first let's talk about the core of what urbanism is which is the arguments for why cities are good and my personal list of those is pretty long when cities are efficient when people live closer together you're making it way easier to provide all kinds of utilities and services at lower cost water sewer energy fiber optic yeah but also schools libraries trash collection but efficient doesn't mean boring cities are fun and no one needs to apologize for thinking that related cities are social places and by that I kind of mean they're anti-anti-social they Foster connections between humans which is important in more ways than I can count even for me a self-identified misanthropic loner I still really like being around other people even if I normally avoid having conversations with them cities are places where people congregate to feel a sense of identity the men Minnesota Vikings don't play in some random place in the state of Minnesota they play in Downtown Minneapolis the Carolina Panthers play in downtown Charlotte cities and especially their cores are where people have the strongest identification with the place they're from cities are where you'll find culture think about any book or music or movie you love the talent the skill and the Artistry it took to create it or maybe not necessarily born in this city but they were almost certainly forged there cities are where opportunity is creative opportunities career opportunities and the networks you find in cities are indispensable to finding a good vocation or maybe you're calling in life whatever that means cities are diverse if diversity is not your thing then cities just might not be for you but I think diversity broadly speaking is as important for having a healthy resilient city as biodiversity is for having a healthy resilient rain forest also and this is more important than ever cities are where queer people and people of color can more naturally find allies or just people they can relate to no city is perfect on this count and just because someone lives in a city doesn't mean they're going to be like tolerant and liberal-minded but a proper city is generally going to be better than the opposite on this count cities are healthy or at least they should be and I'm talking about physical health and mental health they should be places where you can walk and bike to meet daily needs where you can exercise your body and your brain and have access to a diversity of nutrition choices not that we always make the best choices and cities are where you have good Access to Health Services it's literally where the medical centers are and cities are also places where you can actually get reproductive health care if the state you're in hasn't outlawed it and finally cities of quality of life now that's a very objective thing but notice when you see one of the gazillion lists of livable places that seem to come out every year it's always the world's most livable cities nobody's making a list of the world's most livable rural counties or the most livable excerbs and I don't think it's much of a mystery why okay we covered the argument for cities so let's spend a little time talking about things cities aren't doing very well and the urbanists I think would like to see improved if it isn't just too much inconvenience for everyone first there are just way way way too many cars and cities I'm not going to go through all the externalities but CO2 emissions particulate emissions noise all the impervious surface cars require with all the related runoff issues and urban heat island effects and there's traffic violence I mean find me one other area of Modern Life where we have like 50 000 deaths a year and we don't just pour massive amounts funding and political support into fixing it and electric vehicles will not be a silver bullet they can be better on noise and certain types of emissions but most of the externalities don't get any better related freeways are bad and they just don't belong in cities they're usually monuments to racism State dots drove them through the neighborhoods that would offer the least political resistance and guess which neighborhoods those were the honorable thing at this point is just to get rid of them people can find other ways to get around and if you think your city is going to Wither on the vine because Freight Vehicles can't have unfettered freeway access to your downtown go visit Vancouver BC where they basically have no Urban freeways and Incredibly high quality of life and ask yourself some hard questions parking the way we handle it in cities is mostly ridiculous devoting millions of Acres of prime Urban Land to the free storage of private automobiles just not not very clever cars in as much as they belong in cities at all should be well-behaved guests that defer to humans not the other way around because right now what we have on the streets of pretty much every U.S city amounts to asymmetrical Warfare and I don't want to take that metaphor too far but when a car collides with a human the car wins period the car comes out unscathed and the human ends up in the hospital or Worse we should be treating Motor Vehicles as the health hazard they are instead of giving drivers unfettered access to our streets and letting them operate their vehicles however idiotically they feel like they can get away with humans should be able to cross streets the very idea of jaywalking is honestly asinine in the first place and asking people to wear day glow colors just to walk around their city is something we shouldn't be doing you shouldn't have to hold out orange Flags to cross the street and you shouldn't have to push a button to request permission to cross the street in the downtown of any City or probably even if it isn't downtown and you definitely shouldn't have to wait through a three-minute signal cycle to get a walk indication okay I do want to talk a bit about what I think are some misperceptions of urbanism and why our cities don't always function the way we want them to but first brief reminder to click on all the things and hit the Bell if you don't want to miss stuff consider the patreon if you haven't already it's a great way to engage I really enjoyed the conversations there and you'll really be helping support the channel okay I've talked about all the reasons why cities are great but here's what I think is the reason why urbanism is such a big thing in the Zeitgeist right now it's because there just isn't enough of it there's an under Supply and you don't have to look any further than warehousing prices are at in the most walkable Transit rich places so if you're an urbanist I think that means what you want to see is more housing in the places that already have a high level of urban amenity or or improving the level of urban amenity in places where you already have lots of housing or just doing more of both you know there's this idea out there that making cities more walkable more dense more Transit friendly places is really just a global conspiracy to make you give up your car but the current condition of things in our urban areas is very much the opposite you could say that for decades and decades there's been a global conspiracy to require you to have a car for the very simplest most mundane everyday tasks my view as someone who's lived in a variety of urban contexts around the U.S is there aren't nearly enough places you can realistically live without a car and the result is it's left all of us very vulnerable to a handful of car manufacturers and kind of unsavory Petra states that I'm not convinced to have society's best interests at heart urbanism to me is also not just about cities but how we knit them together why we don't have high speed rail connecting all our major Metro areas that are 100 to 500 miles apart like basically every other economically Advanced country has is just very curious so here's a question that sometimes gets asked is this socialism is it Marxism to have neighbors live closer to you than like 100 feet I mean the US has always had kind of a soft socialism Social Security Medicare bailouts for publicly held corporations that we've collectively decided or too big to fail you know when I visited Miami I did a running joke about how there was urbanism for the rich and car dependency for everyone else well in the U.S sometimes it feels like socialism for the rich and dog eat dog capitalism for everyone else all this to say I think it's clear that benevolent billionaires won't be the ones to fix our cities and we just have to do the work ourselves I'm not saying this is easy being an urbanist in the U.S us means being an underdog and a pretty sizable Underdog at that but having a chip on your shoulder can be a very powerful thing so I say embrace the fact that the odds are completely stacked against you I mean what other country actually passed a national interstate and defense highways act in the 50s early in the Cold War when putting the word defense in the name of just about any legislation was probably a winner and then just spent the rest of the century plowing freeways through our cities most of us history with regard to cities and transportation after the federal aid Highway Act is honestly just inertia incremental change is easy and if you're a bureaucrat or a consultant the easiest thing to do is always just to copy and paste the last thing you did with minimal modifications I was a planner and a consultant for a long time and I think that most planners and Consultants know better we just aren't doing better inertia and sunk cost are really powerful psychological obstacles that are hard to overcome especially when Americans largely seem trapped in a sort of Stockholm syndrome of car dependency so this channel is I guess my attempt to build some sort of constituency of people who think differently about all this and are ready to start showing up call them urbanists for lack of a better word and look I'm not asking for 100 of the land area of the United States to be covered in protected bike infrastructure and high frequency rail transit in fact I'm probably only looking for about one percent which is roughly one percentage Point more than what we have right now and for those of you who still want to drive everywhere you'll still have 99 and that is all I've got although I'm more than happy to make a New York Times bestseller out of this 15 minute video for the right price free Cheesecake Factory meals for Life possibly anyway thanks for joining today and thanks to the patrons for your direct support it does help me just keep experimenting with ways to reach a wider audience although next Wednesday I will be returning you to your regularly scheduled procession of top 10 lists glass half full City visits High-Speed Rail foaming and explorations of traffic engineering Madness keep the great topic suggestions coming I'll be back with a new installment next week probably a Portland Oregon City visit now that I think of it but I'll see you then

Channel: CityNerd

Views: 102,034

Keywords: urbanism, urbanist, urban, urban talk, urbanism sociology, urban exploration, urbanism as a way of life, urbanism architecture, urbanist exploring cities, urbanist session, urban planning problems, urban planning, city planning, urban design, public transit cities skylines, american cities, strong towns, conspiracy theories

Id: NzBMAwZlVd8

Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2023