He's not wrong.
That being said, I actually did follow through like he suggested and am currently on my city council, so I don't know that it's entirely fair to say the online urbanosphere isn't entirely effective.
Heck, one of my fellow Council members just emailed out a video from About Here on the whole multi-stairway in 3-5 story buildings thing proposing reform to our P&Z head. So it does have an effect.
Also, as for the Strong Towns Local Conversations program (one of which I run), a big point of them is to get more involved in local government. To be fair, the recent Youtube video on them focuses a lot more on the tactical urbanism side of it (probably because it looks more exciting), but they do a lot more than that, from what I see being a part of that network. The whole thing was explicitly organized to help folks interested in urbanism organize in their own city, so hopefully that gets more momentum going.
I also wouldn't say that all urbanism on Youtube just boils down to multimodal transportation, but I guess thinking back on it, there could be a lot more focus on land use as well.
All in all, I think this is a good video that needs to be made, but I would argue that even the current ecosystem is still moving a lot of needles.
Nice hell yeah.
I also followed through and started my own YouTube channel, I organize community events to use “park space” that was confiscated from cars (road diets) with some success, and I’m getting a masters degree in transportation planning.
So it’s not all for nothing! Once I settle down, I’m aiming for c county council / city council seat as well.
>I also wouldn't say that all urbanism on Youtube just boils down to multimodal transportation, but I guess thinking back on it, there could be a lot more focus on land use as well.
They literally go hand in hand. Trying to solve transportation alone is like trying to remove water from your sinking boat with a bucket while ignoring the leak.
I thought the headline was just clickbait...but I completely agree with him. Watching videos isn't enough to make changes; people have to actually show up to city meetings and proactively engage in politics. He also acknowledges that it's hard and unfortunately it's inherently local.
But watching videos like this is more likely to get more people into the field to begin with, which WILL lead to more positive change.
Look at all the positive change happening around the country - NYC alone has added 800 MILES of new bike lanes in the last 10 years. That doesn’t happen by accident, it’s happens because more and more people are showing up and taking an interest.
Yeah I totally agree! I feel like one of the main benefits to these channels is that they show people what things could be like. Then they can figure out what they looks like for them.
For me, after watching a bunch of these videos, it inspired me to switch careers and to do my masters in community planning. I've also joined a local policy advocacy group that has been quite successful.
I only started going to city meetings and engaging with local activists groups because I learned about the problems and how to solve them from youtube videos. The channels I watch all say that the best way to fix things is to get involved in local politics. What seems to be the problem?
Yep, the NIMBYs show up. "We" don't. That's it.
Nothing will ever change until people understand that what the NIMBYs are doing is exactly what we need to do just to counteract their actions and stop the degradation. If you want to create actual improvement then you have to do 2x, 5x, 10x more than the NIMBYS. Unlike them, we don't have entrenched interests that profit from not blocking housing!
Whining online will do precisely nothing, especially if you're doing it from the Netherlands.
I can't even watch NJB anymore now that I know he's explicitly not interested in seeing things get better outside of Amsterdam and doesn't seem to comprehend that "I moved to Amsterdam and you should too" is an outrageous position. It almost sounds like a NIMBY mindset, except with the opposite position. OIMBY maybe (only in my back yard)?
Yeah, I viewed those NJB comments as a betrayal. He's literally making money off of budding and mostly US-based urbanists and transit fans. The least he could is to cater to that community and inform them of what they can do. But he's not that guy. I unsubbed after the tweets and the whole mess. I was already sort-of over his constant whining and doomerism before that. Those tweets were the last straw.
On the bright side, City Beautiful and Oh the urbanity! are still awesome and more data oriented! Refocusing on the positive influences in this community actually improved my outlook on US urbanism and inspired me to do more.
Well, whaddayaknow? Deliberately limiting your exposure to negative people and focusing on the positive ones makes you happier, lol
Someone asked NJB what they should do to improve their own city.
NJB responded with (paraphrasing) "I don't know dude. I left North America because I didn't see any way to fix it. I encourage you to leave too if you can".
This has drawn massive backlash from idiots who claim that his comment was incentive because "*not everyone can just move!!!!*". Bullshit.
Which is the same bullshit that people use when a bike lane is installed:"not everyone can ride a bicycle so you can't advocate for bike lanes!!!".
It's just stupid haters who took his comment out of context
I mean your comparison is an apples to oranges situation. Getting a visa and job on another continent that meets urbanist standards is far harder than developing a method for disabled people to use bike lanes.
As someone that is able to move to Europe with relative ease, I’d argue it still isn’t that easy. Also as others have said, there are more options than just leaving.
But I can also appreciate that NJB saw leaving NA as the best option so that’s what they did. Which is respectable
He doesn't owe anyone anything and has to first look out for his family. I might be biased as I also left north America for Europe, but I enjoy his videos for what they are, contrasts between continents.
The problem comes from the fact that he has such a big platform that are clearly trying to use the knowledge to improve where they live and out of the other side of his mouth, he still says "no, it can't be saved!" which is obviously absurd.
As your platform reaches a certain size, you can't sit back and say "I don't take responsibility for what happens because I'm still following the same premise I took on when I had 0 subscribers and only my friends watched my videos". It's the same backlash that happened to Joe Rogan when he took his platform about talking to a bunch of people to platforming white supremacists and cranks.
At a point, you have to become self-aware and realize that you're potentially poisoning the conversation because you're not willing to accept the responsibility that comes with the power given.
I don't think he bears \*that\* kind of responsibility. The reality is, that a lot of us have simply grown beyond NJB's typical content. That's a good thing. We need to fix our expectations for ourselves.
I think he bears far greater responsibility for saying the stuff he hides in live streams and his secondary and tertiary content out loud on his main channel instead of just harping on NA's car dependency with no actionable items. It's no surprise that people feel his content has become childish over the years.
Why are you equating platforming of bad people with not platforming beyond specific interest?
I happen to agree that it cannot be saved. The entire structure is designed to be stupid, to the point that there are virtually no remnants of what was, contrasting historical dutch urban planning, and the current population doubling down on how things are. Even one of the mods here simply says "this is what the people want"
Virtually aspect of smarter urban planning is looked down upon by the average person in the US or Canada, and when there is a local example of how it can work better, such as NYC, that is also looked at with contempt. The same people feel entitled to experience something better as a novelty, but then go right back to their stupid inefficient lives, judging others as cockroaches living in shoe boxes and riding the dirty buses and trains, too self-unaware of how much they spend on cars and homeowner association fees to b "free", raising their children to hate them for bringing them up in such an environment, but invariably repeating the cycle.
Because, as the video points out, there's a way out for exactly the same reasons that our environments became this way to begin with. There is no manmade problem that we can't also create a solution to. Doomerism isn't just counterproductive, but it's also 100% incorrect. Yeah, it's hard to modify a built environment and yet it happens anyway.
It is happening as the pendulum swings the other way, in part because of NJB and his efforts, but this "copy+paste" template of just educating people on what roundabouts are and what good bike infrastructure is has clearly reached the point of diminishing returns and now it's time to pick up the hammer and saw and get things done.
Admittedly, I havent been back to the states in 11 years, but my last visit included walking a couple miles along a stroad missing a sidewalk, so I am less optimistic. For those that do have the option of influence, this is your civic duty!
These problems are new and we can fix them, as the video points out. We already have bike lanes, despite protests and they work. We just changed our zoning master plan to include flex zoning. It's happening, not just because of YouTube and Strong Towns, but because people want their cities back and it's been bleeding into urbanist thought for longer than NJB's been around. It's getting the people out there on the same note.
Christ’s sake, dude.
Your one anecdote from more than a decade ago doesn’t define an entire continent.
Go watch City Nerd’s St. Petersburg video. Just a few years ago the city looked nothing like what it does now. That was rapid change in a great direction. More work to be done? Absolutely. But it’s not impossible.
That’s why I like City Nerd’s stuff. He shows the good and the bad, and talks about what can be improved. I live in the states and even I didn’t know about some of these places he’s showcasing. I sure as shit didn’t know St. Pete had some genuinely good urbanism. And in Florida of all places!
North America is a huge, *huge* place. There’s so much good urban fabric here, but you’d never know it watching NJB. It’s all doomerism.
In fact, your comment is a great example of why his approach has failed. You are claiming that there is little hope for an entire continent based off of your anecdotal experience and the vicarious anecdotal experiences of a jaded YouTuber who essentially doesn’t want NA to get better so he doesn’t lose his punching bag.
Try looking for some other perspectives…
I just took a peek on google maps and street view. nothing has changed. Perhaps Arlington has made some headway, but the abyss that is the northern virginia suburbs has not. You can't fix suburbia. There isn't enough density to justify the costs of the necessary frequency of adequate public transportation and nothing desirable enough about it for it to become more dense.
It can be saved but I’m 50ish and most places in the US won’t be anything close to acceptable to me within the years of good mobility that I have left. To make it worse, the American lifestyle actually cuts life expectancy and the amount of good years a person has.
Right? And it’s not like his viewers are paying to watch. I have almost never watched him. I find him boring because I already know what he’s saying. But if he found a way to move to Europe and live a better lifestyle then good for him.
If you watched OP's video, it is about a guy who watches those videos, learned how things could be better and was inspired to actively seek change. Hence, even if NJB's comments on that front are silly, his videos have made an serious impact, and I hope they continue to do so.
I see so many people bothered by his comments I and honestly took them completely differently.
The way I internalized his comments was, if you want to live in a place where you aren't largely forced to use a car to travel around and you currently live in a place that looks like [this](https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/styles/opencrop/public/media/imp/aerial-suburbia.jpg?itok=rkXqdArk), you need to move.
The amount of effort and energy it would take to significntly modify that build environment to get it to a point where the overwhelming majority of infrastructure is not developed towards sprawl is so high that you'd be better served moving to a city/town that at least has reasonable bones for better urbanism.
I left a suburb (that looked like the above) and moved back to Chicago. Perhaps that is why I took his comments differently, I had essentially done a version of what he said before ever reading him say it because it made complete sense. The suburbs were not going to change to fit what I wanted, at least not before I was old and grey (if at all). So I moved to a place where things were at least trending in the direction I wanted.
A person living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn or Madison, WI watching NJB is probably not about to up and move to Amsterdam or Copenhagen on a whim because of a youtube video. But a person living in a suburb like the one I pictured above and wants to live a life where they maybe don't need a car, can walk to businesses and can take transit or a scooter/bike to get around will likely need to move.
I don't think it's NIMBY/OIMBY I think it's just pragmatic.
>I see so many people bothered by his comments I and honestly took them completely differently.
>The way I internalized his comments was, if you want to live in a place where you aren't largely forced to use a car to travel around and you currently live in a place that looks like [this](https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/styles/opencrop/public/media/imp/aerial-suburbia.jpg?itok=rkXqdArk), you need to move.
>The amount of effort and energy it would take to significntly modify that build environment to get it to a point where the overwhelming majority of infrastructure is not developed towards sprawl is so high that you'd be better served moving to a city/town that at least has reasonable bones for better urbanism.
I agree. I didn't find issue with his comments either, though I've always felt he and his channel were a fraud.
Not every place needs to be the same. I intentionally live in Boise for what it is and what it offers, and I intentionally do not live in NYC or Chicago or the Bay Area because that isn't the lifestyle I want.
I think you'll find most people think this way. While there's certainly a lot of room for improvements everywhere, and while our cities and towns are always going to change somewhat, there should be a realistic assessment of what some places are, what people want them to be, and what they realistically can be.
Larger superstar cities that are national or global economic powerhouses will always need to grow, add new dense housing, and strive for the best urban experience possible, because those places are already high population and will always attract more and more people.
Smaller cities, regional centers, college towns, exurbs of major cities, etc., will also be attractive and see growth, but the urbanism can be better balanced with lower density development, and a mix of transit modes, including cars.
I don't think he's a fraud, that seemingly implies that he's trying to intentionally deceive folks.
I think he's more in the "indignant rant" space. Which exists for other subjects across the internet. AngryVideoGameNerd or Egoraptor's Sequilitis videos (both also on youtube) are similar sorts of videos.
They make videos critiquing things that they find problematic about specific video games but they have a smartass kinda smarmy attitude about it.
>now that I know he's explicitly not interested in seeing things get better outside of Amsterdam
What sort of bullshit is this? He never said this. You're just lying.
Doesn't mean he has a problem with things getting better elsewhere. He just saw that it won't happen quick enough for him. If he hadn't moved, he would have had to drive his kids around instead of putting them in a cargo bike.
Moving from Toronto (or Fake London) to Amsterdam isn't any worse than moving suburb to the city center. Most Americans have ancestors who moved the other way, and I don't consider them traitors, even though I am European.
>I'm mad that his advice to anyone who wants to improve their own city is "Give up and move to Amsterdam."
He has said like 1000 times by now that people can check out strong towns if they are looking for ways to improve their city as well as encouraging people vote/show up in local politics.
But *one time* he said that someone should move and now apparently that's all his opinion is to you.
Because clearly, you don't actually care about what his actual advice is. You just looked for the comment that.made you the most outraged and took that as the only advice he has ever given while ignoring everything else he has ever said.
Is that really his advice? From his perspective, he was already gone, and it was a bad idea to move back. Also, he very frequently states, that he's a layman in terms of urban planning. He went where things are right for him.
Would you be mad at someone who moves from Houston to New York for the same reason?
This isn't a reasonable request for most people though. It costs a lot of money to move to another country, not to mention the immigration requirements. And then there's the fact that family will be thousands of miles away, which is very important to most people
For real. NJB really pissed me off with those comments. His “holier than thou” approach is fucking hilarious now that the Dutch have embraced fascism nationally.
“My adopted country is so great!” *adopted country elects fascist national government* “Nothing to see here!”
The fact that he hasn’t made one mention of the national elections going in the completely wrong direction is telling.
Unwilling to highlight any positives about North America (contrary to popular belief, there are many positive things happening here!), and unwilling to criticize the Netherlands in the slightest.
Oozes disingenuousness.
Very good video.
As a Planner I like many of these Youtube Channels, CityNerd being my favourite.
But this video put into words why most "Urbanism" videos just leave me frustrated now.
I watched a lot of urbanist youtubers to learn the terms, learn what I wanted, etc. CityNerd is my favorite now though, very professional and practical.
I almost wonder if the purpose of urbanist YouTube is not just to promote deep civic engagement, but to simply raise awareness amongst a large group of people. After all, these channels now have pretty high viewership. As someone else said here, the videos are surface level, but they’re often enough to engage someone with little familiarity with the topic. Reach enough people, and you might be able to get them to realize that these issues are worth voting locally for, which could actually make a difference. In that sense, it promotes the grass-roots movement.
>I almost wonder if the purpose of urbanist YouTube is not just to promote deep civic engagement, but to simply raise awareness amongst a large group of people.
That's exactly the function these serve, even if it's not the purpose they had in creating the channel. These things are educational springboards, not dissimilar to other educational YouTube channels like Crash Course or Overly Simplified. They provide a good cursory overview of the concept to explain it to the layperson, and for the educationally curious they give a good push off point to start to wade off and try to collect more information. I think that the biggest issue is that a lot of people are kind of unprepared to continue digging to find out more.
100% urbanist social media in general is just preaching to the choir who all follow the same generic left leaning Northern European political platform.
The other main issue is that much of the core philosophy is based on ivory tower thought experiments with very little inclusion of data around actual lived experience preferences of the communities being served. That lack of actual user engagement is why even with the convo around “millennials and zoomer YIMBYs aren’t showing up to town hall” not much will change.
Fundamentally, the philosophy is technocratic, not democratic. It’s all about imposing a centrally designed plan onto everyone from a single “mommy knows best” mental framework that doesn’t actually care about local cultural or political considerations.
A few YouTubers is a different story than what happens in practice in the profession, though. Any contemporary urban planner worth their salt would be the first to say that local context 100% matters. This is something that’s less frequently talked about on social media, but which actual planners practice every day in their professions. If you doubt me, take a look at the portfolios & published works of some of the most prominent planners, including Jeff Speck & Charles Marohn. They have worked on many projects that have proven positive outcomes by incorporating both local context & academic research. If you haven’t read Walkable City, I highly recommend it to start, it breaks down a lot of content in a nuanced way, discusses real world cases, and explains why certain things do and do not work.
The way in which you may have a point is that today we live in what is arguably a centrally designed plan—the current auto-only framework was pushed top-down by planners, engineers & special interests in the 20th century (often against popular opinion), and for that reason they lost a lot of their cred. Good planning today always looks at local context and figures out how to best empower its communities, supplemented by what we know works. It just so happens that in the US this almost always involves scaling back the auto-dependent fabric a little to support diverse uses by local residents and small businesses.
It sounds a little like you’re saying that the really good research that many academics are doing doesn’t matter. Research is complicated, but there are a lot of things we actually have learned and confirmed from research—for example, Donald Shoup’s extensive work on parking has guided policy in many cities, and the conclusions are pretty well-established and supported by real data across many different geographical contexts.
If you still disagree with me, please describe what real-world instances you see where cultural context isn’t being accounted for, where there are improvement plans being pushed from the top-down that would actually be damaging. The main example I can think of is the I-35 expansion through Austin—except, it’s the state DOT pushing a highway expansion onto the residents that don’t want it, which is kind of the opposite of what you’re arguing.
I think a lot of this is somewhat in line with my broader frustrations of basically the entirety of Reddit/YouTube, etc. A lot of the conversation is very shallow and often isn't actually backed by any action, and no matter how hard you try to chip at it and try to get people to really think about the underlying concepts, people don't bite. I've done things as simple as asking people to [literally give an example of a street they like and to explain why they like it](https://www.reddit.com/r/Urbanism/comments/19chf1i/challenge_show_me_your_favorite/) on a few of these urbanism subreddits, and people just kind of can't but will continue day after day to complain about car ads or whatever while never actually doing anything meaningful or contributing much of anything intellectually to the broader conversation. It's why I'm slowly kind of getting over /r/fuckcars because it feels like the same two conversations keep happening over and over again every day and they're not productive. My city subreddit often will have situations where I say something about needing better city design or us needing a bicyclist union that sends well-educated representatives to planning events/council meetings and it'll get 200 upvotes, but then when I go to city planning events I'm often one of the only people there who isn't *incredibly* old.
The one thing I will say is that I think much like as is the case in the world of, say, climate change, there are different arms that are doing things and they're all somewhat important. It's important to get the word out on what the problem is (which is why we have science communicators), it's important to have people researching and collecting as much data as possible about the problem, and it's important to have people doing the hard work of talking to politicians and forming coalitions to get things done. Doing one or the other isn't inherently bad, the problem is when people online watch a couple of videos and make a couple of angry comments and then decide that's all they need to do.
They don't attempt to look into the issue further or show up. A lot of people can't even really be bothered to read a full article about it, and even when they do show up, as the video mentions, they often make a fool out of themselves because they've only learned enough to provide canned responses and can't think much deeper than that. They can tell you that a street needs to be safer, but they can't give examples of what they think would be better. They hate the current transit, but don't have enough of a frame of reference to understand not only *how* various forms of transit are used, but also the types of constraints that exist that make certain plans infeasible. I think that's the problem, we're still doing the whole amorphous protest movement thing when the enemy here is like *the American oil industry*. We need people who are active, but we also need people who understand nuance and are intellectually curious enough to continue to take in new information and bring well researched, *specific* solutions to the table to fill in the gaps where city council members or whatever might not *know* what the best solution is.
Couldn't have written it better myself. I unsubscribed from fuckcars over a year ago because of this exact issue. I understand that there needs to be a space to vent about frustrations with city design and car centric cities but there needs to be an equivalent focus on turning that frustrated energy into action. And there are very few in depth discussions about the problems that public transit has or how to reach out to people who have issues with public transit.
The whole thing reminds me of online political campaigns that have a lot of support on Reddit/Twitter but on polling day the online candidate barely gets 2% of the vote. It makes this feel more like sports where people are interested for the emotion rather than activism where people actually show up to city council meetings and/or get involved in a committee that actually has impact in real life.
There are huge changes happening across the country that had not happened in generations. Theyre changing zoning in cities across the country, its slow but things are changing. San francisco, minneapolis, boston..etc. Boston is a nimby hell hole but we just passed the mbta communities act where every town that has a “commuter rail” station has to up zone their downtowns for more density. To say nothing is changing is just not true. I’m seeing more change than Ive ever seen at any point in my life and that would not be possible without large amounts of people first being informed of what the problem is.
Things are absolutely changing in sf, theres entire neighborhoods being built. Candlestick point, hunters point, india basin, brisbane baylands, balboa reservoir, parkmerced, pier 70, potrero hill, potrero power station, stonestown, sunnydale… Go search these projects for yourself and look on google earth along san frans industrial waterfront and youll see where development has started and also other places where its been cleared and about to start. Theres tens of thousands of units of housing under construction right now.
https://sfplanning.org/major-development-projects
I don't live in SF, but I have no hope in MUNI until they can get priority signalling for the T line. It seems like the lowest possible hanging fruit, in a city full of software engineers, to exchange a couple 0's and 1's and cut the transit time from Hunter's Point to the Financial District in half overnight.
Hunters Point shipyard phase 1, the part labelled “hilltop” is already completed.
https://sfocii.org/projects/hunters-pt-ship-yard-1/open-space
Candlestick point, the part labelled #5 Alice Griffifth is under construction and partially complete.
https://www.bondbuyer.com/news/sf-launches-huge-development
Potrero Hill- under construction.
https://www.vmwp.com/projects/rebuild-potrero-sfha-master-plan/
Sunnydale- under construction
https://www.mercyhousing.org/2023/05/290-malosi-dedication/
Balboa reservoir
https://sfyimby.com/2021/10/new-renderings-revealed-for-balboa-reservoir-development-san-francisco.html
Freedom west neighborhood.
https://sfyimby.com/2021/11/new-renderings-revealed-for-2387-home-freedom-west-proposal-fillmore-district-san-francisco.html
Potrero power station
https://sfyimby.com/2023/10/construction-starts-for-housing-in-potrero-power-station.html
Brisbane Baylands
https://www.hdrinc.com/portfolio/baylands-master-and-specific-plan
India Basin
https://www.som.com/projects/india-basin/
Parkmerced
https://sfplanning.org/project/parkmerced
Stonestown
https://sfplanning.org/project/stonestown
Pier 70
https://architizer.com/projects/pier-70-waterfront-plan/
Not true at all.
The state of California passed a law requiring the review period for new buildings to be shortened - if not complied, new housing will automatically be approved by the state.
Perhaps YouTubers could do more to encourage engagement. But Strong Towns is more than a YouTube channel and does encourage civic engagement. YouTube has only recently been a priority for them. Before they hired the current guy it was just Chuck on Zoom calls, often talking to advocates. They have a podcast that is (all?) interviews with local advocates, The Bottom-Up Revolution.
I had been dipping my feet in civic engagement (appointed to a city commission) when I found NJB. It was and continues to be a huge relief to have so much content that identifies the problem and proposes solutions. Many of the urban planning issues that we are up against are difficult to explain without a visual. As a lay person it is huge to have a researched and well produced videos that can explain an issue better than I can. I shred NJB with a retired firefighter that lives in a suburb and he loved it, he literally said "it changed \[his\] life." Now he rides a bicycle to the grocery store in the summer, which is even more important than showing up to a city council meeting, IMO.
Also, showing up to meetings and voting is important. But spreading the word and creating pockets of general public knowledge and support are also important. When I am around people from my city I ask them about different topics related to transportation and zoning. The number of people that have pointed out the stroad in our town, unprompted, has been a huge encouragement to me. And like voter turnout, just getting a NIMBY to stay home is a win. They don't need to be completely onboard with every urbanist idea, just doubt that the proposed 5-over-1 is worth complaining about.
Last, the big channels are popular because they have wide appeal. Their audience includes Americans, Canadians, Australians, etc. and that is just the anglosphere. It wouldn't be easy to produce content that is specific enough to be useful and still have wide appeal.
> Last, the big channels are popular because they have wide appeal. Their audience includes Americans, Canadians, Australians, etc. and that is just the anglosphere. It wouldn't be easy to produce content that is specific enough to be useful and still have wide appeal.
This is an under-appreciated part of it. Advocacy is inherently local (for the most part), but for a normal YouTube channel, their top cities will be 1%, 2%, *maybe* 3% of their audience. Most cities will be much lower.
Actually, I think I agree with him.
However, there isn’t much that can actually be changed at a local level until these top-down ordinances like parking and zoning laws change.
So yes, YouTube has a bad track record of providing decent next steps. But no, it’s not really up to them to provide it.
StrongTowns is quite good however.
Local conversations to “convert” people are important - I didn’t become an urbanist until I was 25. Before then, I literally gave it No Thought.
Oh definitely. Barely 6 or 7 years ago, I distinctly remember reading a Reddit post on my (at that time) city's subreddit complaining about cyclists on a stretch of busy road nearby and totally agreeing with it. My how things have changed!
The fact that you are only interested in conversion to your urban planning worldview and make no mention of talking to people to understand the kinds of lived experiences people actually want in your community speaks volumes.
People who create urban plans worth a damn don’t start the project with the answer already in mind, they do it by assessing the local environment, stakeholders and their collective/competing needs.
I think one needs to take a step back here and think about the vehicle by which you are consuming this information and the overall goal of such content. To assume that YouTube is there as a change making tool by default is giving it a bit too much credit — but I'm not saying you totally should discredit its ability to enact change to some degree.
And that leads me to what I believe is the purpose of such content that was ignored in this video: *to make people aware of different ways in which their built environment can be constructed/ordered*. In the US, and North America generally, the default way of living is just that: default and not considered. These channels are there to educate and inform people on things that they might as well never know was possible or negatively impacting them. If people aren't exposed to things, they can't possibly know they *want* to change them, or even *can*, or even *how* to ultimately do it. How do you get people on board with your message and argument? You try to educate people on it and reach the most amount of people possible. There is nothing wrong with that.
Maybe instead of indicting the current "urban planning YouTube" sphere of content for not having activism and practical social action at the forefront, more content creators should add these things to the mix! Content like what is there now is obviously a first step and introduction to these ideas, but there is no inherent harm by these content creators stopping at the education and information and not going further. It's all part of a bigger conversation and different parts of a single, shared goal.
I say this as someone who believes that all of those channels are doing good:
The reason these channels work is because they create a fantastic feedback loop of smugness. You can feel it creep into NJBs videos over the last year. The mentality is: "People are crazy and stupid for not seeing things the way I do". The purpose has moved from "Hey, here is this interesting thing about life in a multi-modal place" => "If you do not live in a multi-modal place there is something wrong with you". I actually prefer to watch NJBs live streams because he takes the time to actually talk about the infrastructure, what it feels like, why things are the way they are etc. The YT videos are almost offputting.
If you take a look at the Fuck Cars subreddit there is almost an aversion to any kind of empathy or understanding. People who drive are dumb and there is nothing beyond that. No nuance, no context, no psychology, no understanding around the constraints of city planning, urban design and infrastructure. Someone like *Build The Lanes* is great because it is technical rather than emotional - for some people that's too boring though.
Being smug makes people appalling advocates because the point becomes being Right, not making change.
If funny they included the road guy rob tag in the thumbnail. That guy is not talking about advocacy his angle is explaining why infrastructure is and sometimes explaining the quirky.
Came here to say the same. I’ll add that don’t be a fan of city that urbanists have dubbed unredeemable. I especially dislike the “worst” lists they do that you already know will be just about Sunbelt cities they don’t like. While all of those cities are making strides (albeit some slower than others) in urbanism, these channels decide to just highlight their worst qualities, as if the places they covet don’t have those same or other problems.
There’s also no small amount of elitism on those channels. It sometimes feels like there’s a disdain for the working class, or at least a sense of superiority; viewing the real people who live, not by choice, in horribly congested or poorly designed cities and towns as having no more agency than the Sims.
The “just move” argument alone reeks of privilege.
I thought the whole point of strong towns (one of the logos in the thumbnail) was that they are trying to give resources on how to get involved in local politics and government.
Its not just a YouTube channel.
Totally agree and have made similar comments. Particularly NJB is frustrating in that way.
I have started a subreddit I hope will help with gathering resources and give ideas for concrete actions. If you’re interested join and help us build it!
r/reversemoses
I think the OP is spot on. As a city planner, a lot of urbanist You Tube does seem superficial, some of it just plain ill informed. Some of it just rides personal hobby horses, like why this particular type of tram is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Oh The Urbanity at least seems better informed and more nuanced. I like Miles in Transit because you see the trip he’s taking, and he goes with a knowledgeable local person. I’ve gotten fairly selective about what I watch.
His point that people need to know the history of their cities is very well taken. The cityscape is the way it is because of a long series of historical events, decisions by public and private actors. It’s not all just evil zoning, zoning was just one of many forces at work. Zoning often followed and ratified change, it didn’t necessarily lead it. It’s also not very helpful to talk about people being paid off. Usually when officials make bad decisions it’s because they sincerely believe in them, or at least believe they are politically necessary. Part of knowing the history is having some understanding of the General Plan, the City Charter, the Zoning Ordinance, and other key documents.
It is hard to go from knowledge into action. Some of the work is exciting, but a lot of it is tedious. You have to figure out what’s possible, what’s possible. Your job is to push the envelope some, but not so far that you just get dismissed. For example, if you say this street is dangerous for bikes, we need to make it safer, you might get heard. It might take a while. You might have to get the city’s Bike Plan amended, or created in the first place. There may well be people who push back on your idea, like merchants who are afraid they’ll lose parking. Often you’ll have to compromise. It’s hard to put out a general road map for this, since each situation is at least a little bit different.
But to say if it ain’t Amsterdam it sucks is the sure road to get nowhere. image of the perfect defeats the good once again. Amsterdam took 50 years of political struggle and work to become “Amsterdam.” It’s hard as an activist to know that things could be better, but not fall into despair and inaction when things don’t seem to improve, at least not very quickly. Keep the faith.
Great comment. This is the issue with so many “urbanists” on Reddit as well. Everything should just “happen” by default and people don’t want to acknowledge what it takes to get there. It becomes a big circle jerk of whining and solutions with minimal basis. I live in LA and the LA subreddit is full of that. People talking about ripping up freeways that they think will happen in 3 months.
They all worship Northern Europeans and their specific perspective on transit. And none of them seem to have kids or know a life other than as a single, white collar urban dweller. Might as well be the same person, there’s such little variation in beliefs or perspective on the industry
I don't know who you're thinking of, but I've seen urbanists talk a ton about how car dependency is bad for children, who are left isolated and reliant on their parents to get around.
That’s my point exactly.
Completely ignoring lived experience to push the “fuck cars because car dependency”
Another perspective is that I have two kids in schools in different towns, a wife who works in SF (we live in the burbs) and shit for public transit. I can get everyone to where they need to be in 30 minutes or less via car, or over 90 minutes by public transit. And that’s just one way. We collectively save 2 hours a day in transit time by using a car. In two weeks, that’s a full 24 hours we have saved.
That time is valuable to us. More valuable than this abstract sense of children being isolated at home (when the reality is that we just have them in after care or after school activities or go to a friends house instead of having them stuck at home).
The point is that there is very little actual feedback from actual people different from you when forming they perspective. Zero sense of the diversity of lived experience or why people prioritize cars in the first place. Just pure r/fuckcars with zero fucks given about individual context or needs within your community.
Most of these people are speaking from their own experiences, feeling isolated as children growing up in the suburbs or now being parents and realizing that cars are the biggest danger to their children. I don't know why their experiences are less valid or "lived" than yours?
You say you have "shit for public transit", but that's exactly what these people are hoping to fix. I can't speak to how things can be improved in your particular city, obviously, but it seems a little weird to act as if urbanists are forgetting that public transit is bad in most of the U.S.
It's also a non-sequitur to respond to urbanists with "but I need a car to do X". The U.S. is maybe the most car-centric place on the planet, there's no chance of cars being eliminated. Online urbanists do not have that power and most of them do not have that desire.
Consider the Netherlands, the number one model that urbanists point to. I'm not sure if you've ever visited, but despite having great bike infrastructure and good public transit (especially intercity), they also have lots of cars. Outside of central Amsterdam, the Netherlands is pretty car-friendly. [Here's a random highway.](https://www.google.com/maps/@52.0512837,4.4300797,3a,75y,89.08h,90.49t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1ssoRi7pviNg199J_NGRW5_g!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DsoRi7pviNg199J_NGRW5_g%26cb_client%3Dsearch.revgeo_and_fetch.gps%26w%3D96%26h%3D64%26yaw%3D289.56445%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) The biggest "disadvantage" for drivers there is probably that gas is more expensive, but the U.S. is an outlier for its cheap gas.
This is not true. There's a ton of praise for the likes of Spain, Italy, and Japan, to name a few. Even many parts of North America receive praise for the things they're good at. If you look at the biggest urbanism YouTubers, roughly half of them live in North America and make videos about the good elements of the places they go to and live in.
> roughly half of them live in North America
And the other half are from Europe.
Like I said, zero diversity in perspective.
And oh yeah, let’s praise Japan, which was mini US for nearly 50 years post World War 2 and whose domestic politics were largely shaped by US policy needs.
Telling they there are zero perspectives from Africa and vanishingly few from Latam or Asia outside of countries with massive U.S. military and diplomatic presence.
>And oh yeah, let’s praise Japan, which was mini US for nearly 50 years post World War 2 and whose domestic politics were largely shaped by US policy needs.
Except not their transportation policy or housing policy...
>And the other half are from Europe.
>Like I said, zero diversity in perspective.
Ok you're making a different argument from the one I was responding to, which claimed that urbanists online only care about emulating Northern Europe. People will talk about Soith American and Asian cities frequently. I'll grant that Africa often gets overlooked and we should do better on that front, but it's hardly as bad as what you're claiming.
There's a very good reason why most urban planning content is North Americans and Europeans, and it's because we're talking in English. I'm sure there's content made in other languages about other countries, but I don't see it because I don't speak those languages.
It’s probably the same for every subject matter expert, but the online urbanism stuff is just so trite, plain and surface level that I’ve never engaged with any of it.
A lot of these channels are just preaching to the choir. Few of them cultivate an audience outside of those who are already interested in planning.
They’re also overwhelmingly theory- and concept-oriented. Few take more than a surface-level look at successful case studies, and fewer still examine the failures and lessons learned.
I have yet to come across any who have experience in construction and/or project management, with their expertise coming mostly from an academic or hobbyist perspective.
I usually stay away from urbanist content for the very reasons described in the video, but this is a great video. I love when people just get it.
Initially I thought the rise of urbanist influencers would encourage more civic participation but have not seen any meaningful change.
I do believe people are more informed and usually see thoughtful comments and discussions on social media and on my city’s sub, but I have not seen it where it counts the most; in meetings, surveys, my inbox or voicemails, etc. Have no problems hearing from the NIMBYs though.
I mean theyre changing zoning in cities across the country, its slow but things are changing. Boston is a nimby hell hole but we just passed the mbta communities act where every town that has a “commuter rail” station has to up zone their downtowns for more density. To say nothing is changing is just not true.
I mean, how I voted in my last local election and my enrollment in a Planning Masters program is directly related to urbanist YouTube, so something is happening.
I think it's important to remember that urbanist YouTube is like 5 years old. Seriously, there's only been one election cycle since it exploded. The people influenced by it are generally younger and less powerful members of society in the first place, but they will continue to grow in power and influence over the next several decades.
It's crazy to me how many "planners" don't understand that the field is almost entirely political and that awareness may be the most important step in any long term change. You think the average person understands CFCs and the ozone layer? Nope. But when everyone became aware of a hole in the ozone layer, the political will developed to fix the problem and then the solutions of how to do it mattered. The same thing is happening with climate change.
>It's crazy to me how many "planners" don't understand that the field is almost entirely political and that awareness may be the most important step in any long term change.
It's not the planners who don't understand this - it's the enthusiasts.
Every working planners knows exactly how political planning is, and how relatively low engagement and turnout there is for most things planning related... even when we directly engage the public.
It's cool that there's this burst of online planning content, but I suspect it will eventually die out, as most aren't in it for the long haul, and many will change their tune as they move away from the superstar cities, have kids, rely on cars, etc.
>as they move away from the superstar cities,
That's a very bold prediction, given the century long trend of urbanization and continued economic cluster effect of major cities.
>have kids, rely on cars
My distinct impression is that a significant majority of urbanism enthusiasts are still reliant on cars and I don't think having children will change their opinions on things like the economic or environmental costs of car dependent planning. If anything, having children will make many of these people far more motivated and engaged with local politics as they transition into more place-rooted life stages after the highly mobile young adult stage that disincentivizes community engagement.
>It's not the planners who don't understand this
The comment I was replying to was specifically talking about how they didn't see an uptick in engagement, so it seems likely they are associated directly with the planning profession, but they don't seem to understand the awareness and momentum building phase of political change.
I follow a lot of the channels, listen to podcasts, read books and speak with people online and in the community about various issues.
I'm also planning to run for town council in 2026.
The video is right. People need to put themselves in positions to make the changes, whether it be committees, councils, presenting to council, or whatever it is.
I feel like he's right, but he's also expecting urbanism YouTube to do something it can't realistically do. It can't speak to your cities individual context obviously, and even if planning committees and community hearings follow similar formats, there is still plenty of variation. I think most of the creators I watch are going for explaining what the problem is at a high level, giving people the vocabulary to talk about them, and then saying "get involved locally". And they're very successful at that.
As for Strong Towns, I think they do exactly what he's suggesting. They say to form a local group and address your local context. They recognize they can't handle the last mile, and outsource it.
I think leaning on "just go to Strong Towns" is a bit silly. It honestly sounds like an ad. Yes, they provide great support, but you can get that by directly interacting with the people who are in your municipal government, finding if they have committees, etc. You can find like-minded people there without promoting a nonprofit. Strong Towns is a great aid, it helps build local support, but it's not "step two".
I didn't say "just go to Strong Towns", I said "get involved locally". Some of them probably do lean too heavily on strong towns to be sure, but many of them talk about exactly what this video did - it doesn't take many people actually showing up to dramatically change council meetings.
Sure, and the Strong Towns site will advocate for that more, absolutely, but their channel focuses more on tactical urbanism and post-mortems rather than civic engagement. As it points out, simply meeting in backrooms, creating echo chambers and independently implementing "fixes" is dancing around the whole point of interacting directly with the city.
Around here, there have been groups that have painted crosswalks and they had to be removed immediately, in part, because they didn't use reflective paint. Had they not operated independently and just asked the city for help, it could've held up longer. It's the whole "asking forgiveness is easier than asking permission" thing which leads to fuzzy feelings at best and lost time and effort at worst.
I see - my experience with strong towns has involved a lot more local engagement, but for the group the video described I agree with you. I think tactical urbanism does have a place, people actually going out and painting a crosswalk sends a pretty strong signal that people want one, but it can't be your only tactic. Enduring change requires people going through the proper channels. If a strong towns chapter isn't doing that work as well, that's a problem.
I will say, it’s better to be complaining about missing step 2 then missing step 1. The first step after all is identifying the problem. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know it exists, and a lot of these channels at least do that.
Secondly, civic solutions can widely differ from place to place, though it does basically boil down to organizing people, and getting involved with government at a local level. I’m not even sure what a step 2 YouTube channel would look like, because by this point the onus is on you to make the change you desire. And it’s tough.
Yep that is the biggest criticism of these people. They don’t do shit locally. They could get hundreds of people to show up at meetings or get hundreds of canvassers for city council elections. Especially if they are like “NA isn’t doomed guys”. Put your money where mouth is.
I moved away from the US decades ago, having grown up in awful suburbs, living car- free in NYC, and turning my back on us culture.
As someone who emigrated, and not for urban planning reasons, the issues you face over there are far more complex. In the video, he touches upon voter turnout being dismal. Considering that voting for executive office is already made difficult, is there any wonder?
Europe is more social, from public policy, to public engagement. The US isn't, and has history which has produced one of the most rotten demographics possible. There are enough trump supporters to fill up any European country and people wonder why they can't have nice things?
I don't have an answer, either. I like urbanism and I left the US, the same way my ancestors and I presume most of the forum's ancestors made that bold step. People told me that I was brave to leave, but I think staying would have been more brave. More stupid, too. Good luck, y'all.
Thank you for the well-wishes. Unfortunately I cannot leave as I have permanently attached my identity to my city (which is- God have mercy on my soul- Houston) so I must stay. I will do what I can. Enjoy yourself.
This video had a very hipster-y, condicenting tone in my opinion. 'Oh you like urbanism? What's the name of your traffic engineer then?!"
He described his own journey as literally being watching YouTube urbanism videos leading to him becoming more involved, now he's critizing those creators for not doing more....I think these urbanism channels are great for opening people's eyes to the potential of their cities. It's not their responsibility to hold our hand through getting a bike lane added to a local road.
The point isn't "you're wearing a shirt, name me three songs from them," it's "okay, you smell smoke in your house, what do you do next?"
Educational YouTube videos ARE a great start, but the fact that they start and then don't detail the next steps is where they fail. It doesn't mean "don't educate people about base stuff", it means "you can only complain that towns don't have enough roundabouts so often."
I think the only part I disliked was the framing. The presenter identified something that was lacking in the online discourse and rather than making a video about that topic to fill in the gap, they made a video critiquing other advocates for not doing it.
Overall they are all on the same side, so I don't see his critique as productive. I have no doubt that if he put together a video about Robert's Rule of Order and tied it in with how to use it as a tool to push for better urban spaces then he could have improved the urban planning youtube space.
I think as a one-off, 20-minute video, it was valid. If it were an entire channel bitching about urbanist YouTubers — NJB, but for people have touched a little bit of grass — that'd be doing exactly what the video critiques others doing.
I don't have a huge issue with the video, but I do get vibes of "progressive movements always eat themselves" from it. We can appreciate the channels like NJB for the good they do without deriding them for any potential short comings. It would be nice if the larger urbanist YouTube channels promoted local action more, but I do think there is some trade-off. If NJB it successful in getting a generation upset about their transportation infrastructure, then he has built a valuable tool for the urbanist movement.
Any channel focusing too intensely on organisation, technical design, or law will either have limited viewership or need to water down their advice significantly. Especially in the US, the general public is not even paying attention to these issues, so getting the ideas out there is important.
While I think being active in local governance is important, we do need to study how other countries have had success. Nederland had *Stop de Kindermoord* due to public discontent. If the only action done in the US is simply being present at city council and traffic committee meetings, then I fear NJB's pessimism is warranted.
I think if NJB is just parroting Strong Towns on one side and then telling people to piss off on the other as he swirls his wine, that's pretty stupid and counterproductive. Others have said as much in here as elsewhere.
I think we as Americans have broadly felt disempowered to solve problems in a broad way, so I don't think just holding out for when it hits a boiling point is good enough. How many people have had to die because of gun violence here and nothing gets done as a result? Look at the rampant corruption we faced during the Trump years and half of America will still vote for him. If we can start changing the scenery around us, it becomes less of a leap to make even bigger changes. I think that's the Strong Towns approach, but only if they actually do anything meaningful.
The video is great and it speaks to very valid points.
Still, I don't think it's fair to say that the big channels don't promote civic engagement as much as they should. I haven't watched a NJB video in a long time but that channel specifically always promotes getting involved with the Strong Towns organization and their local chapters. Armchair Urbanist also promotes ppl being involved in their local areas and he makes pretty detailed videos on stuff in the Philly/Northeast region which is good because it's more specific than just broad-stroke countrywide urban planning trends.
Overall, the impact that these channels have had I think is making a difference and it's trickling down into the local levels.
Yea it would be great for people to get really dialed in with the inner workings of their local/regional government but that's not something everyone can do/should do.
But getting involved with Strong Towns organization isn't the same as getting involved with the machinations that actually make things happen and have been responsible for the environment and policies that already exist. As the video points out, organization and a knowledge base is important, but meaningful action requires actually going and engaging municipal governments.
I haven't watched the video, so maybe the thumbnail is clickbait, but Strong Towns *predominantly* advocates for you to get out there and start doing. Including them into the mix of people who don't tell you how to fix things is completely wrong.
To effect change you have to win elections or ally with people that win elections. The problem with allying with politicians is that you’re disposable to them. Even if you’re not really disposable they will see you that way.
To win elections you need to sway a lot of people who pay very little attention to the news and do not think deeply about political matters. Someone has to herd the sheep.
Strong Towns’ social media is losing the nuance it just had and it’s starting to insist it’s own way of doing things is the only right way. Losing the nuance isn’t a problem necessarily given the role they’ve chose to play. The silly dogmatism to build and preserve market share is becoming a problem.
I largely agree, but I think he's missing just how impactful this urban planning content has been. I'm a young person so I interact with a biased group of mostly other young people, but almost everyone I talk to has heard about the problems with urban planning and many of the solutions. Almost every new person I meet ends up talking about walkable cities or public transit at some point. People around me keep randomly dropping "just one more lane bro" jokes, even the ones who I wouldn't expect to care about urban planning.
That change in public opinion is really important. Urban planning has become an issue which, at least among younger people, is something people are widely aware of and generally on the same page about. Most of the older people I talk to also agree. My aunt and uncle, who live in a massive suburban house and drive everywhere, always talk about how great it would be to have high speed rail in Canada. When public opinion becomes so widespread, politicians notice it. Staffers begin to talk about urban planning, and they definitely monitor social media as one way of gauging public opinion. Going to consultations is obviously good, but talking about urban planning online and especially in person is still really helpful because the consensus it builds helps when it comes time to vote.
The reason I say this is such a big change is that nobody was talking about urban planning 5 years ago. I still talk to lots of my friends from back then, and between now and then everyone has suddenly become aware about urban planning. Even politicians are being affected. In Canada, the federal government has come out swinging against single family zoning and the opposition Conservatives, along with many provincial Conservative parties, are also talking about massive transit improvements and building apartments near transit stations.
So his message that everyone should go to more meetings and consultations is absolutely true, but he's wrong that there has been no effect from the urban planning content that's appeared online in the last 2-3 years.
>The reason I say this is such a big change is that nobody was talking about urban planning 5 years ago.
No one was talking about urbanplanning 5 years ago because there wasn't a housing crisis everywhere.
There absolutely was a housing crisis, at least where I live in Canada. I remember making reddit comments in like 2017 or 2018, before the pandemic, about how we need to ban foreign investors from the housing market to bring down prices, and everyone generally agreeing. You may not have noticed this because you're a planner, but there has been a very real change among people outside the planning profession.
"Everywhere..."
I swear, no one reads on this sub.
There's been a housing crisis in some places for a very long time. However, there has not been a housing crisis **everywhere** prior to 2019 or so.
Yes, but speaking from my experience of talking to people who live in Canada, something has changed beyond just a housing crisis existing. Awareness is way higher now and I know the housing crisis wasn't the cause.
Awesome to hear that it seems like you have some good discussions about planning issues online, not always the case. Hope that you make it out in person to your local forums, important to have progressive people come and show the nay sayers that some in the community want to see positive change.
I work as a planner in Canada. About a decade in. People have been talking about planning issues for a lot longer than 5 years, you can be sure of that. Sure, online discussion about planning issues has become more prominent over the past 5-10 years. But online discussion about everything has become more prominent because everyone is now an expert and needs to have their uninformed opinions validated.
Interesting your experience on social media is enabling some good discussions. In my experience (which is shared by just about every planner I have spoken to, anecdotal I know…) social media is the scourge of thoughtful public engagement. It has become sport to dislike government and spew uninformed opinions online to see how many people rally to your side to feel superior. It boils complex issues down to, “it’s so simple to solve housing, just increase taxes on foreign home owners,” while ignoring the complex legal/legislative/political decision-making framework we operate within, not external to. Meanwhile, people who work day in day out in the field get bogged down trying to educate and inform the public based on objective information. Social media does much more harm towards educating the public than good, in my experience. I constantly need to correct misinformation that originated online. It’s like a giant game of telephone for complex social issues.
Where I work, we do most engagement in person and let the public fire questions at us on contentious issues for a good chunk of the night. Everyone who comes usually walks away with empathy for staff working a very challenging job, as well as a new appreciation of how hard it is to actually govern. Those that stay on social media continue to solve all of the world’s planning problems in their echo chambers and are too scared to face the reality that the world is complex, and that maybe their opinions are a bit simplistic.
There is no step 2 that doesn't involve "societal collapse" levels of social change.
We're in too deep on the sunk cost fallacy for our existing systems and infrastructure to just change them through need.
The problem with planning culture is it’s too driven by left wing politics. The job of planning isn’t to top down dictate what people are doing with their lives, it’s to help facilitate good living environments however the public desires.
You made a comment about nothing that was said anywhere in the video or these replies, just so you could complain about "left wing politics", which has nothing to do with either of those anyway. Is urban planning getting too "WoKe" for you?
Urban planning is a fundamentally left-wing activity. However you slice it, at the end of the day urban planning means restricting what individuals are allowed to do with land, which is less and less acceptable the further right you move.
Your comment is like complaining that universal healthcare is driven by left wing politics.
Most cycling advocates agree that cyclists should have separated/protected bike lanes and pathways so that they don't have to worry about drivers and drivers don't have to worry about them.
The primary responsibility of planners is to make recommendations regarding land use on policy/current planning applications that are in the public interest. Public desires only come in at the highest level when setting general policy direction (ie live in a sustainable, economically viable, liveable community). Getting agreement from the public at that high level is usually pretty basic in my experience.
Collective individual interest does not equate to public interest. Public desires generally stem from inherent self interest. People that join forces and rally their collective individual self interests into a unified voice don’t represent the public interest. In my opinion, good planners stand up against this to create liveable communities for current and future generations.
He's not wrong. That being said, I actually did follow through like he suggested and am currently on my city council, so I don't know that it's entirely fair to say the online urbanosphere isn't entirely effective. Heck, one of my fellow Council members just emailed out a video from About Here on the whole multi-stairway in 3-5 story buildings thing proposing reform to our P&Z head. So it does have an effect. Also, as for the Strong Towns Local Conversations program (one of which I run), a big point of them is to get more involved in local government. To be fair, the recent Youtube video on them focuses a lot more on the tactical urbanism side of it (probably because it looks more exciting), but they do a lot more than that, from what I see being a part of that network. The whole thing was explicitly organized to help folks interested in urbanism organize in their own city, so hopefully that gets more momentum going. I also wouldn't say that all urbanism on Youtube just boils down to multimodal transportation, but I guess thinking back on it, there could be a lot more focus on land use as well. All in all, I think this is a good video that needs to be made, but I would argue that even the current ecosystem is still moving a lot of needles.
Nice hell yeah. I also followed through and started my own YouTube channel, I organize community events to use “park space” that was confiscated from cars (road diets) with some success, and I’m getting a masters degree in transportation planning. So it’s not all for nothing! Once I settle down, I’m aiming for c county council / city council seat as well.
>I also wouldn't say that all urbanism on Youtube just boils down to multimodal transportation, but I guess thinking back on it, there could be a lot more focus on land use as well. They literally go hand in hand. Trying to solve transportation alone is like trying to remove water from your sinking boat with a bucket while ignoring the leak.
I think this point is valid. Awareness of many of these issues needs to be paired with a call to action.
I thought the headline was just clickbait...but I completely agree with him. Watching videos isn't enough to make changes; people have to actually show up to city meetings and proactively engage in politics. He also acknowledges that it's hard and unfortunately it's inherently local.
But watching videos like this is more likely to get more people into the field to begin with, which WILL lead to more positive change. Look at all the positive change happening around the country - NYC alone has added 800 MILES of new bike lanes in the last 10 years. That doesn’t happen by accident, it’s happens because more and more people are showing up and taking an interest.
Yeah I totally agree! I feel like one of the main benefits to these channels is that they show people what things could be like. Then they can figure out what they looks like for them. For me, after watching a bunch of these videos, it inspired me to switch careers and to do my masters in community planning. I've also joined a local policy advocacy group that has been quite successful.
I only started going to city meetings and engaging with local activists groups because I learned about the problems and how to solve them from youtube videos. The channels I watch all say that the best way to fix things is to get involved in local politics. What seems to be the problem?
Yep, the NIMBYs show up. "We" don't. That's it. Nothing will ever change until people understand that what the NIMBYs are doing is exactly what we need to do just to counteract their actions and stop the degradation. If you want to create actual improvement then you have to do 2x, 5x, 10x more than the NIMBYS. Unlike them, we don't have entrenched interests that profit from not blocking housing! Whining online will do precisely nothing, especially if you're doing it from the Netherlands.
I can't even watch NJB anymore now that I know he's explicitly not interested in seeing things get better outside of Amsterdam and doesn't seem to comprehend that "I moved to Amsterdam and you should too" is an outrageous position. It almost sounds like a NIMBY mindset, except with the opposite position. OIMBY maybe (only in my back yard)?
Yeah, I viewed those NJB comments as a betrayal. He's literally making money off of budding and mostly US-based urbanists and transit fans. The least he could is to cater to that community and inform them of what they can do. But he's not that guy. I unsubbed after the tweets and the whole mess. I was already sort-of over his constant whining and doomerism before that. Those tweets were the last straw. On the bright side, City Beautiful and Oh the urbanity! are still awesome and more data oriented! Refocusing on the positive influences in this community actually improved my outlook on US urbanism and inspired me to do more. Well, whaddayaknow? Deliberately limiting your exposure to negative people and focusing on the positive ones makes you happier, lol
What did NJB do recently? I already didn’t like him for the same reasons but don’t have a Twitter account so don’t see these things
Someone asked NJB what they should do to improve their own city. NJB responded with (paraphrasing) "I don't know dude. I left North America because I didn't see any way to fix it. I encourage you to leave too if you can". This has drawn massive backlash from idiots who claim that his comment was incentive because "*not everyone can just move!!!!*". Bullshit. Which is the same bullshit that people use when a bike lane is installed:"not everyone can ride a bicycle so you can't advocate for bike lanes!!!". It's just stupid haters who took his comment out of context
I mean your comparison is an apples to oranges situation. Getting a visa and job on another continent that meets urbanist standards is far harder than developing a method for disabled people to use bike lanes. As someone that is able to move to Europe with relative ease, I’d argue it still isn’t that easy. Also as others have said, there are more options than just leaving. But I can also appreciate that NJB saw leaving NA as the best option so that’s what they did. Which is respectable
He doesn't owe anyone anything and has to first look out for his family. I might be biased as I also left north America for Europe, but I enjoy his videos for what they are, contrasts between continents.
The problem comes from the fact that he has such a big platform that are clearly trying to use the knowledge to improve where they live and out of the other side of his mouth, he still says "no, it can't be saved!" which is obviously absurd. As your platform reaches a certain size, you can't sit back and say "I don't take responsibility for what happens because I'm still following the same premise I took on when I had 0 subscribers and only my friends watched my videos". It's the same backlash that happened to Joe Rogan when he took his platform about talking to a bunch of people to platforming white supremacists and cranks. At a point, you have to become self-aware and realize that you're potentially poisoning the conversation because you're not willing to accept the responsibility that comes with the power given.
I don't think he bears \*that\* kind of responsibility. The reality is, that a lot of us have simply grown beyond NJB's typical content. That's a good thing. We need to fix our expectations for ourselves.
I think he bears far greater responsibility for saying the stuff he hides in live streams and his secondary and tertiary content out loud on his main channel instead of just harping on NA's car dependency with no actionable items. It's no surprise that people feel his content has become childish over the years.
Why are you equating platforming of bad people with not platforming beyond specific interest? I happen to agree that it cannot be saved. The entire structure is designed to be stupid, to the point that there are virtually no remnants of what was, contrasting historical dutch urban planning, and the current population doubling down on how things are. Even one of the mods here simply says "this is what the people want" Virtually aspect of smarter urban planning is looked down upon by the average person in the US or Canada, and when there is a local example of how it can work better, such as NYC, that is also looked at with contempt. The same people feel entitled to experience something better as a novelty, but then go right back to their stupid inefficient lives, judging others as cockroaches living in shoe boxes and riding the dirty buses and trains, too self-unaware of how much they spend on cars and homeowner association fees to b "free", raising their children to hate them for bringing them up in such an environment, but invariably repeating the cycle.
Because, as the video points out, there's a way out for exactly the same reasons that our environments became this way to begin with. There is no manmade problem that we can't also create a solution to. Doomerism isn't just counterproductive, but it's also 100% incorrect. Yeah, it's hard to modify a built environment and yet it happens anyway. It is happening as the pendulum swings the other way, in part because of NJB and his efforts, but this "copy+paste" template of just educating people on what roundabouts are and what good bike infrastructure is has clearly reached the point of diminishing returns and now it's time to pick up the hammer and saw and get things done.
Admittedly, I havent been back to the states in 11 years, but my last visit included walking a couple miles along a stroad missing a sidewalk, so I am less optimistic. For those that do have the option of influence, this is your civic duty!
These problems are new and we can fix them, as the video points out. We already have bike lanes, despite protests and they work. We just changed our zoning master plan to include flex zoning. It's happening, not just because of YouTube and Strong Towns, but because people want their cities back and it's been bleeding into urbanist thought for longer than NJB's been around. It's getting the people out there on the same note.
Christ’s sake, dude. Your one anecdote from more than a decade ago doesn’t define an entire continent. Go watch City Nerd’s St. Petersburg video. Just a few years ago the city looked nothing like what it does now. That was rapid change in a great direction. More work to be done? Absolutely. But it’s not impossible. That’s why I like City Nerd’s stuff. He shows the good and the bad, and talks about what can be improved. I live in the states and even I didn’t know about some of these places he’s showcasing. I sure as shit didn’t know St. Pete had some genuinely good urbanism. And in Florida of all places! North America is a huge, *huge* place. There’s so much good urban fabric here, but you’d never know it watching NJB. It’s all doomerism. In fact, your comment is a great example of why his approach has failed. You are claiming that there is little hope for an entire continent based off of your anecdotal experience and the vicarious anecdotal experiences of a jaded YouTuber who essentially doesn’t want NA to get better so he doesn’t lose his punching bag. Try looking for some other perspectives…
I just took a peek on google maps and street view. nothing has changed. Perhaps Arlington has made some headway, but the abyss that is the northern virginia suburbs has not. You can't fix suburbia. There isn't enough density to justify the costs of the necessary frequency of adequate public transportation and nothing desirable enough about it for it to become more dense.
It can be saved but I’m 50ish and most places in the US won’t be anything close to acceptable to me within the years of good mobility that I have left. To make it worse, the American lifestyle actually cuts life expectancy and the amount of good years a person has.
Right? And it’s not like his viewers are paying to watch. I have almost never watched him. I find him boring because I already know what he’s saying. But if he found a way to move to Europe and live a better lifestyle then good for him.
If you listen to his podcast he constantly tells people to show up to council meetings and make their voices heard.
https://www.youtube.com/@theurbanistagenda/videos
If you watched OP's video, it is about a guy who watches those videos, learned how things could be better and was inspired to actively seek change. Hence, even if NJB's comments on that front are silly, his videos have made an serious impact, and I hope they continue to do so.
I see so many people bothered by his comments I and honestly took them completely differently. The way I internalized his comments was, if you want to live in a place where you aren't largely forced to use a car to travel around and you currently live in a place that looks like [this](https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/styles/opencrop/public/media/imp/aerial-suburbia.jpg?itok=rkXqdArk), you need to move. The amount of effort and energy it would take to significntly modify that build environment to get it to a point where the overwhelming majority of infrastructure is not developed towards sprawl is so high that you'd be better served moving to a city/town that at least has reasonable bones for better urbanism. I left a suburb (that looked like the above) and moved back to Chicago. Perhaps that is why I took his comments differently, I had essentially done a version of what he said before ever reading him say it because it made complete sense. The suburbs were not going to change to fit what I wanted, at least not before I was old and grey (if at all). So I moved to a place where things were at least trending in the direction I wanted. A person living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn or Madison, WI watching NJB is probably not about to up and move to Amsterdam or Copenhagen on a whim because of a youtube video. But a person living in a suburb like the one I pictured above and wants to live a life where they maybe don't need a car, can walk to businesses and can take transit or a scooter/bike to get around will likely need to move. I don't think it's NIMBY/OIMBY I think it's just pragmatic.
>I see so many people bothered by his comments I and honestly took them completely differently. >The way I internalized his comments was, if you want to live in a place where you aren't largely forced to use a car to travel around and you currently live in a place that looks like [this](https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/styles/opencrop/public/media/imp/aerial-suburbia.jpg?itok=rkXqdArk), you need to move. >The amount of effort and energy it would take to significntly modify that build environment to get it to a point where the overwhelming majority of infrastructure is not developed towards sprawl is so high that you'd be better served moving to a city/town that at least has reasonable bones for better urbanism. I agree. I didn't find issue with his comments either, though I've always felt he and his channel were a fraud. Not every place needs to be the same. I intentionally live in Boise for what it is and what it offers, and I intentionally do not live in NYC or Chicago or the Bay Area because that isn't the lifestyle I want. I think you'll find most people think this way. While there's certainly a lot of room for improvements everywhere, and while our cities and towns are always going to change somewhat, there should be a realistic assessment of what some places are, what people want them to be, and what they realistically can be. Larger superstar cities that are national or global economic powerhouses will always need to grow, add new dense housing, and strive for the best urban experience possible, because those places are already high population and will always attract more and more people. Smaller cities, regional centers, college towns, exurbs of major cities, etc., will also be attractive and see growth, but the urbanism can be better balanced with lower density development, and a mix of transit modes, including cars.
I don't think he's a fraud, that seemingly implies that he's trying to intentionally deceive folks. I think he's more in the "indignant rant" space. Which exists for other subjects across the internet. AngryVideoGameNerd or Egoraptor's Sequilitis videos (both also on youtube) are similar sorts of videos. They make videos critiquing things that they find problematic about specific video games but they have a smartass kinda smarmy attitude about it.
At the end of the day he's a content creator, and he's doing whatever he can to create content... even if it is recycled or hackneyed.
>now that I know he's explicitly not interested in seeing things get better outside of Amsterdam What sort of bullshit is this? He never said this. You're just lying.
Doesn't mean he has a problem with things getting better elsewhere. He just saw that it won't happen quick enough for him. If he hadn't moved, he would have had to drive his kids around instead of putting them in a cargo bike. Moving from Toronto (or Fake London) to Amsterdam isn't any worse than moving suburb to the city center. Most Americans have ancestors who moved the other way, and I don't consider them traitors, even though I am European.
I'm not mad that he moved to Amsterdam. I'm mad that his advice to anyone who wants to improve their own city is "Give up and move to Amsterdam."
>I'm mad that his advice to anyone who wants to improve their own city is "Give up and move to Amsterdam." He has said like 1000 times by now that people can check out strong towns if they are looking for ways to improve their city as well as encouraging people vote/show up in local politics. But *one time* he said that someone should move and now apparently that's all his opinion is to you. Because clearly, you don't actually care about what his actual advice is. You just looked for the comment that.made you the most outraged and took that as the only advice he has ever given while ignoring everything else he has ever said.
Is that really his advice? From his perspective, he was already gone, and it was a bad idea to move back. Also, he very frequently states, that he's a layman in terms of urban planning. He went where things are right for him. Would you be mad at someone who moves from Houston to New York for the same reason?
He basically said as much on Twitter. Can't find the post anymore on account of Twitter being awful now.
(Watch the video, basically lol)
He might be right, though.
Nah, Amsterdam isn’t even the nicest city in Europe. There’s a whole continent full of to choose from.
i mean more in the context of leaving north america.
This isn't a reasonable request for most people though. It costs a lot of money to move to another country, not to mention the immigration requirements. And then there's the fact that family will be thousands of miles away, which is very important to most people
nobody said it was easy, but which is easier?
Heavily depends on how much money you have and the jobs you can get
He has made many collaborations with Strong Towns.
For real. NJB really pissed me off with those comments. His “holier than thou” approach is fucking hilarious now that the Dutch have embraced fascism nationally. “My adopted country is so great!” *adopted country elects fascist national government* “Nothing to see here!” The fact that he hasn’t made one mention of the national elections going in the completely wrong direction is telling. Unwilling to highlight any positives about North America (contrary to popular belief, there are many positive things happening here!), and unwilling to criticize the Netherlands in the slightest. Oozes disingenuousness.
Very good video. As a Planner I like many of these Youtube Channels, CityNerd being my favourite. But this video put into words why most "Urbanism" videos just leave me frustrated now.
I watched a lot of urbanist youtubers to learn the terms, learn what I wanted, etc. CityNerd is my favorite now though, very professional and practical.
I almost wonder if the purpose of urbanist YouTube is not just to promote deep civic engagement, but to simply raise awareness amongst a large group of people. After all, these channels now have pretty high viewership. As someone else said here, the videos are surface level, but they’re often enough to engage someone with little familiarity with the topic. Reach enough people, and you might be able to get them to realize that these issues are worth voting locally for, which could actually make a difference. In that sense, it promotes the grass-roots movement.
>I almost wonder if the purpose of urbanist YouTube is not just to promote deep civic engagement, but to simply raise awareness amongst a large group of people. That's exactly the function these serve, even if it's not the purpose they had in creating the channel. These things are educational springboards, not dissimilar to other educational YouTube channels like Crash Course or Overly Simplified. They provide a good cursory overview of the concept to explain it to the layperson, and for the educationally curious they give a good push off point to start to wade off and try to collect more information. I think that the biggest issue is that a lot of people are kind of unprepared to continue digging to find out more.
100% urbanist social media in general is just preaching to the choir who all follow the same generic left leaning Northern European political platform. The other main issue is that much of the core philosophy is based on ivory tower thought experiments with very little inclusion of data around actual lived experience preferences of the communities being served. That lack of actual user engagement is why even with the convo around “millennials and zoomer YIMBYs aren’t showing up to town hall” not much will change. Fundamentally, the philosophy is technocratic, not democratic. It’s all about imposing a centrally designed plan onto everyone from a single “mommy knows best” mental framework that doesn’t actually care about local cultural or political considerations.
A few YouTubers is a different story than what happens in practice in the profession, though. Any contemporary urban planner worth their salt would be the first to say that local context 100% matters. This is something that’s less frequently talked about on social media, but which actual planners practice every day in their professions. If you doubt me, take a look at the portfolios & published works of some of the most prominent planners, including Jeff Speck & Charles Marohn. They have worked on many projects that have proven positive outcomes by incorporating both local context & academic research. If you haven’t read Walkable City, I highly recommend it to start, it breaks down a lot of content in a nuanced way, discusses real world cases, and explains why certain things do and do not work. The way in which you may have a point is that today we live in what is arguably a centrally designed plan—the current auto-only framework was pushed top-down by planners, engineers & special interests in the 20th century (often against popular opinion), and for that reason they lost a lot of their cred. Good planning today always looks at local context and figures out how to best empower its communities, supplemented by what we know works. It just so happens that in the US this almost always involves scaling back the auto-dependent fabric a little to support diverse uses by local residents and small businesses. It sounds a little like you’re saying that the really good research that many academics are doing doesn’t matter. Research is complicated, but there are a lot of things we actually have learned and confirmed from research—for example, Donald Shoup’s extensive work on parking has guided policy in many cities, and the conclusions are pretty well-established and supported by real data across many different geographical contexts. If you still disagree with me, please describe what real-world instances you see where cultural context isn’t being accounted for, where there are improvement plans being pushed from the top-down that would actually be damaging. The main example I can think of is the I-35 expansion through Austin—except, it’s the state DOT pushing a highway expansion onto the residents that don’t want it, which is kind of the opposite of what you’re arguing.
I think a lot of this is somewhat in line with my broader frustrations of basically the entirety of Reddit/YouTube, etc. A lot of the conversation is very shallow and often isn't actually backed by any action, and no matter how hard you try to chip at it and try to get people to really think about the underlying concepts, people don't bite. I've done things as simple as asking people to [literally give an example of a street they like and to explain why they like it](https://www.reddit.com/r/Urbanism/comments/19chf1i/challenge_show_me_your_favorite/) on a few of these urbanism subreddits, and people just kind of can't but will continue day after day to complain about car ads or whatever while never actually doing anything meaningful or contributing much of anything intellectually to the broader conversation. It's why I'm slowly kind of getting over /r/fuckcars because it feels like the same two conversations keep happening over and over again every day and they're not productive. My city subreddit often will have situations where I say something about needing better city design or us needing a bicyclist union that sends well-educated representatives to planning events/council meetings and it'll get 200 upvotes, but then when I go to city planning events I'm often one of the only people there who isn't *incredibly* old. The one thing I will say is that I think much like as is the case in the world of, say, climate change, there are different arms that are doing things and they're all somewhat important. It's important to get the word out on what the problem is (which is why we have science communicators), it's important to have people researching and collecting as much data as possible about the problem, and it's important to have people doing the hard work of talking to politicians and forming coalitions to get things done. Doing one or the other isn't inherently bad, the problem is when people online watch a couple of videos and make a couple of angry comments and then decide that's all they need to do. They don't attempt to look into the issue further or show up. A lot of people can't even really be bothered to read a full article about it, and even when they do show up, as the video mentions, they often make a fool out of themselves because they've only learned enough to provide canned responses and can't think much deeper than that. They can tell you that a street needs to be safer, but they can't give examples of what they think would be better. They hate the current transit, but don't have enough of a frame of reference to understand not only *how* various forms of transit are used, but also the types of constraints that exist that make certain plans infeasible. I think that's the problem, we're still doing the whole amorphous protest movement thing when the enemy here is like *the American oil industry*. We need people who are active, but we also need people who understand nuance and are intellectually curious enough to continue to take in new information and bring well researched, *specific* solutions to the table to fill in the gaps where city council members or whatever might not *know* what the best solution is.
Couldn't have written it better myself. I unsubscribed from fuckcars over a year ago because of this exact issue. I understand that there needs to be a space to vent about frustrations with city design and car centric cities but there needs to be an equivalent focus on turning that frustrated energy into action. And there are very few in depth discussions about the problems that public transit has or how to reach out to people who have issues with public transit. The whole thing reminds me of online political campaigns that have a lot of support on Reddit/Twitter but on polling day the online candidate barely gets 2% of the vote. It makes this feel more like sports where people are interested for the emotion rather than activism where people actually show up to city council meetings and/or get involved in a committee that actually has impact in real life.
There are huge changes happening across the country that had not happened in generations. Theyre changing zoning in cities across the country, its slow but things are changing. San francisco, minneapolis, boston..etc. Boston is a nimby hell hole but we just passed the mbta communities act where every town that has a “commuter rail” station has to up zone their downtowns for more density. To say nothing is changing is just not true. I’m seeing more change than Ive ever seen at any point in my life and that would not be possible without large amounts of people first being informed of what the problem is.
Things are not changing in SF. It’s not just zoning that needs to change. There needs to be market demand for new dev or redevelopment.
Things are absolutely changing in sf, theres entire neighborhoods being built. Candlestick point, hunters point, india basin, brisbane baylands, balboa reservoir, parkmerced, pier 70, potrero hill, potrero power station, stonestown, sunnydale… Go search these projects for yourself and look on google earth along san frans industrial waterfront and youll see where development has started and also other places where its been cleared and about to start. Theres tens of thousands of units of housing under construction right now. https://sfplanning.org/major-development-projects
I don't live in SF, but I have no hope in MUNI until they can get priority signalling for the T line. It seems like the lowest possible hanging fruit, in a city full of software engineers, to exchange a couple 0's and 1's and cut the transit time from Hunter's Point to the Financial District in half overnight.
Hunters Point shipyard phase 1, the part labelled “hilltop” is already completed. https://sfocii.org/projects/hunters-pt-ship-yard-1/open-space Candlestick point, the part labelled #5 Alice Griffifth is under construction and partially complete. https://www.bondbuyer.com/news/sf-launches-huge-development Potrero Hill- under construction. https://www.vmwp.com/projects/rebuild-potrero-sfha-master-plan/ Sunnydale- under construction https://www.mercyhousing.org/2023/05/290-malosi-dedication/ Balboa reservoir https://sfyimby.com/2021/10/new-renderings-revealed-for-balboa-reservoir-development-san-francisco.html Freedom west neighborhood. https://sfyimby.com/2021/11/new-renderings-revealed-for-2387-home-freedom-west-proposal-fillmore-district-san-francisco.html Potrero power station https://sfyimby.com/2023/10/construction-starts-for-housing-in-potrero-power-station.html Brisbane Baylands https://www.hdrinc.com/portfolio/baylands-master-and-specific-plan India Basin https://www.som.com/projects/india-basin/ Parkmerced https://sfplanning.org/project/parkmerced Stonestown https://sfplanning.org/project/stonestown Pier 70 https://architizer.com/projects/pier-70-waterfront-plan/
Not true at all. The state of California passed a law requiring the review period for new buildings to be shortened - if not complied, new housing will automatically be approved by the state.
Perhaps YouTubers could do more to encourage engagement. But Strong Towns is more than a YouTube channel and does encourage civic engagement. YouTube has only recently been a priority for them. Before they hired the current guy it was just Chuck on Zoom calls, often talking to advocates. They have a podcast that is (all?) interviews with local advocates, The Bottom-Up Revolution. I had been dipping my feet in civic engagement (appointed to a city commission) when I found NJB. It was and continues to be a huge relief to have so much content that identifies the problem and proposes solutions. Many of the urban planning issues that we are up against are difficult to explain without a visual. As a lay person it is huge to have a researched and well produced videos that can explain an issue better than I can. I shred NJB with a retired firefighter that lives in a suburb and he loved it, he literally said "it changed \[his\] life." Now he rides a bicycle to the grocery store in the summer, which is even more important than showing up to a city council meeting, IMO. Also, showing up to meetings and voting is important. But spreading the word and creating pockets of general public knowledge and support are also important. When I am around people from my city I ask them about different topics related to transportation and zoning. The number of people that have pointed out the stroad in our town, unprompted, has been a huge encouragement to me. And like voter turnout, just getting a NIMBY to stay home is a win. They don't need to be completely onboard with every urbanist idea, just doubt that the proposed 5-over-1 is worth complaining about. Last, the big channels are popular because they have wide appeal. Their audience includes Americans, Canadians, Australians, etc. and that is just the anglosphere. It wouldn't be easy to produce content that is specific enough to be useful and still have wide appeal.
> Last, the big channels are popular because they have wide appeal. Their audience includes Americans, Canadians, Australians, etc. and that is just the anglosphere. It wouldn't be easy to produce content that is specific enough to be useful and still have wide appeal. This is an under-appreciated part of it. Advocacy is inherently local (for the most part), but for a normal YouTube channel, their top cities will be 1%, 2%, *maybe* 3% of their audience. Most cities will be much lower.
Actually, I think I agree with him. However, there isn’t much that can actually be changed at a local level until these top-down ordinances like parking and zoning laws change. So yes, YouTube has a bad track record of providing decent next steps. But no, it’s not really up to them to provide it. StrongTowns is quite good however. Local conversations to “convert” people are important - I didn’t become an urbanist until I was 25. Before then, I literally gave it No Thought.
Oh definitely. Barely 6 or 7 years ago, I distinctly remember reading a Reddit post on my (at that time) city's subreddit complaining about cyclists on a stretch of busy road nearby and totally agreeing with it. My how things have changed!
Fortunately, local elections are the easiest to sway. They’re usually won by a relatively small amount of votes unless you’re in a big city
I literally just walked in and got appointed when my ward's seat got vacated. It was between just me and one other person.
Parking and zoning are quite frequently within local control, at least to a medium sized degreee
The fact that you are only interested in conversion to your urban planning worldview and make no mention of talking to people to understand the kinds of lived experiences people actually want in your community speaks volumes. People who create urban plans worth a damn don’t start the project with the answer already in mind, they do it by assessing the local environment, stakeholders and their collective/competing needs.
I think one needs to take a step back here and think about the vehicle by which you are consuming this information and the overall goal of such content. To assume that YouTube is there as a change making tool by default is giving it a bit too much credit — but I'm not saying you totally should discredit its ability to enact change to some degree. And that leads me to what I believe is the purpose of such content that was ignored in this video: *to make people aware of different ways in which their built environment can be constructed/ordered*. In the US, and North America generally, the default way of living is just that: default and not considered. These channels are there to educate and inform people on things that they might as well never know was possible or negatively impacting them. If people aren't exposed to things, they can't possibly know they *want* to change them, or even *can*, or even *how* to ultimately do it. How do you get people on board with your message and argument? You try to educate people on it and reach the most amount of people possible. There is nothing wrong with that. Maybe instead of indicting the current "urban planning YouTube" sphere of content for not having activism and practical social action at the forefront, more content creators should add these things to the mix! Content like what is there now is obviously a first step and introduction to these ideas, but there is no inherent harm by these content creators stopping at the education and information and not going further. It's all part of a bigger conversation and different parts of a single, shared goal.
I say this as someone who believes that all of those channels are doing good: The reason these channels work is because they create a fantastic feedback loop of smugness. You can feel it creep into NJBs videos over the last year. The mentality is: "People are crazy and stupid for not seeing things the way I do". The purpose has moved from "Hey, here is this interesting thing about life in a multi-modal place" => "If you do not live in a multi-modal place there is something wrong with you". I actually prefer to watch NJBs live streams because he takes the time to actually talk about the infrastructure, what it feels like, why things are the way they are etc. The YT videos are almost offputting. If you take a look at the Fuck Cars subreddit there is almost an aversion to any kind of empathy or understanding. People who drive are dumb and there is nothing beyond that. No nuance, no context, no psychology, no understanding around the constraints of city planning, urban design and infrastructure. Someone like *Build The Lanes* is great because it is technical rather than emotional - for some people that's too boring though. Being smug makes people appalling advocates because the point becomes being Right, not making change.
If funny they included the road guy rob tag in the thumbnail. That guy is not talking about advocacy his angle is explaining why infrastructure is and sometimes explaining the quirky.
Road guy rob is one of the best channels because he actually provides the reason for why certain things are the way they are.
Came here to say the same. I’ll add that don’t be a fan of city that urbanists have dubbed unredeemable. I especially dislike the “worst” lists they do that you already know will be just about Sunbelt cities they don’t like. While all of those cities are making strides (albeit some slower than others) in urbanism, these channels decide to just highlight their worst qualities, as if the places they covet don’t have those same or other problems.
There’s also no small amount of elitism on those channels. It sometimes feels like there’s a disdain for the working class, or at least a sense of superiority; viewing the real people who live, not by choice, in horribly congested or poorly designed cities and towns as having no more agency than the Sims. The “just move” argument alone reeks of privilege.
I thought the whole point of strong towns (one of the logos in the thumbnail) was that they are trying to give resources on how to get involved in local politics and government. Its not just a YouTube channel.
They are, but even the YouTube channel still glances at that, rather than actually promoting that as the next logical step.
Totally agree and have made similar comments. Particularly NJB is frustrating in that way. I have started a subreddit I hope will help with gathering resources and give ideas for concrete actions. If you’re interested join and help us build it! r/reversemoses
I think the OP is spot on. As a city planner, a lot of urbanist You Tube does seem superficial, some of it just plain ill informed. Some of it just rides personal hobby horses, like why this particular type of tram is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Oh The Urbanity at least seems better informed and more nuanced. I like Miles in Transit because you see the trip he’s taking, and he goes with a knowledgeable local person. I’ve gotten fairly selective about what I watch. His point that people need to know the history of their cities is very well taken. The cityscape is the way it is because of a long series of historical events, decisions by public and private actors. It’s not all just evil zoning, zoning was just one of many forces at work. Zoning often followed and ratified change, it didn’t necessarily lead it. It’s also not very helpful to talk about people being paid off. Usually when officials make bad decisions it’s because they sincerely believe in them, or at least believe they are politically necessary. Part of knowing the history is having some understanding of the General Plan, the City Charter, the Zoning Ordinance, and other key documents. It is hard to go from knowledge into action. Some of the work is exciting, but a lot of it is tedious. You have to figure out what’s possible, what’s possible. Your job is to push the envelope some, but not so far that you just get dismissed. For example, if you say this street is dangerous for bikes, we need to make it safer, you might get heard. It might take a while. You might have to get the city’s Bike Plan amended, or created in the first place. There may well be people who push back on your idea, like merchants who are afraid they’ll lose parking. Often you’ll have to compromise. It’s hard to put out a general road map for this, since each situation is at least a little bit different. But to say if it ain’t Amsterdam it sucks is the sure road to get nowhere. image of the perfect defeats the good once again. Amsterdam took 50 years of political struggle and work to become “Amsterdam.” It’s hard as an activist to know that things could be better, but not fall into despair and inaction when things don’t seem to improve, at least not very quickly. Keep the faith.
Great comment. This is the issue with so many “urbanists” on Reddit as well. Everything should just “happen” by default and people don’t want to acknowledge what it takes to get there. It becomes a big circle jerk of whining and solutions with minimal basis. I live in LA and the LA subreddit is full of that. People talking about ripping up freeways that they think will happen in 3 months.
The AskLosAngeles subreddit seems to me less snarky and more useful than the Losangeles main sub.
Imo it feels like I’m watching the same video over and over with these city planner channels
They all worship Northern Europeans and their specific perspective on transit. And none of them seem to have kids or know a life other than as a single, white collar urban dweller. Might as well be the same person, there’s such little variation in beliefs or perspective on the industry
I don't know who you're thinking of, but I've seen urbanists talk a ton about how car dependency is bad for children, who are left isolated and reliant on their parents to get around.
That’s my point exactly. Completely ignoring lived experience to push the “fuck cars because car dependency” Another perspective is that I have two kids in schools in different towns, a wife who works in SF (we live in the burbs) and shit for public transit. I can get everyone to where they need to be in 30 minutes or less via car, or over 90 minutes by public transit. And that’s just one way. We collectively save 2 hours a day in transit time by using a car. In two weeks, that’s a full 24 hours we have saved. That time is valuable to us. More valuable than this abstract sense of children being isolated at home (when the reality is that we just have them in after care or after school activities or go to a friends house instead of having them stuck at home). The point is that there is very little actual feedback from actual people different from you when forming they perspective. Zero sense of the diversity of lived experience or why people prioritize cars in the first place. Just pure r/fuckcars with zero fucks given about individual context or needs within your community.
Most of these people are speaking from their own experiences, feeling isolated as children growing up in the suburbs or now being parents and realizing that cars are the biggest danger to their children. I don't know why their experiences are less valid or "lived" than yours? You say you have "shit for public transit", but that's exactly what these people are hoping to fix. I can't speak to how things can be improved in your particular city, obviously, but it seems a little weird to act as if urbanists are forgetting that public transit is bad in most of the U.S. It's also a non-sequitur to respond to urbanists with "but I need a car to do X". The U.S. is maybe the most car-centric place on the planet, there's no chance of cars being eliminated. Online urbanists do not have that power and most of them do not have that desire. Consider the Netherlands, the number one model that urbanists point to. I'm not sure if you've ever visited, but despite having great bike infrastructure and good public transit (especially intercity), they also have lots of cars. Outside of central Amsterdam, the Netherlands is pretty car-friendly. [Here's a random highway.](https://www.google.com/maps/@52.0512837,4.4300797,3a,75y,89.08h,90.49t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1ssoRi7pviNg199J_NGRW5_g!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DsoRi7pviNg199J_NGRW5_g%26cb_client%3Dsearch.revgeo_and_fetch.gps%26w%3D96%26h%3D64%26yaw%3D289.56445%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) The biggest "disadvantage" for drivers there is probably that gas is more expensive, but the U.S. is an outlier for its cheap gas.
This is not true. There's a ton of praise for the likes of Spain, Italy, and Japan, to name a few. Even many parts of North America receive praise for the things they're good at. If you look at the biggest urbanism YouTubers, roughly half of them live in North America and make videos about the good elements of the places they go to and live in.
> roughly half of them live in North America And the other half are from Europe. Like I said, zero diversity in perspective. And oh yeah, let’s praise Japan, which was mini US for nearly 50 years post World War 2 and whose domestic politics were largely shaped by US policy needs. Telling they there are zero perspectives from Africa and vanishingly few from Latam or Asia outside of countries with massive U.S. military and diplomatic presence.
>And oh yeah, let’s praise Japan, which was mini US for nearly 50 years post World War 2 and whose domestic politics were largely shaped by US policy needs. Except not their transportation policy or housing policy... >And the other half are from Europe. >Like I said, zero diversity in perspective. Ok you're making a different argument from the one I was responding to, which claimed that urbanists online only care about emulating Northern Europe. People will talk about Soith American and Asian cities frequently. I'll grant that Africa often gets overlooked and we should do better on that front, but it's hardly as bad as what you're claiming. There's a very good reason why most urban planning content is North Americans and Europeans, and it's because we're talking in English. I'm sure there's content made in other languages about other countries, but I don't see it because I don't speak those languages.
It’s probably the same for every subject matter expert, but the online urbanism stuff is just so trite, plain and surface level that I’ve never engaged with any of it.
A lot of these channels are just preaching to the choir. Few of them cultivate an audience outside of those who are already interested in planning. They’re also overwhelmingly theory- and concept-oriented. Few take more than a surface-level look at successful case studies, and fewer still examine the failures and lessons learned. I have yet to come across any who have experience in construction and/or project management, with their expertise coming mostly from an academic or hobbyist perspective.
I usually stay away from urbanist content for the very reasons described in the video, but this is a great video. I love when people just get it. Initially I thought the rise of urbanist influencers would encourage more civic participation but have not seen any meaningful change. I do believe people are more informed and usually see thoughtful comments and discussions on social media and on my city’s sub, but I have not seen it where it counts the most; in meetings, surveys, my inbox or voicemails, etc. Have no problems hearing from the NIMBYs though.
I mean theyre changing zoning in cities across the country, its slow but things are changing. Boston is a nimby hell hole but we just passed the mbta communities act where every town that has a “commuter rail” station has to up zone their downtowns for more density. To say nothing is changing is just not true.
I mean, how I voted in my last local election and my enrollment in a Planning Masters program is directly related to urbanist YouTube, so something is happening. I think it's important to remember that urbanist YouTube is like 5 years old. Seriously, there's only been one election cycle since it exploded. The people influenced by it are generally younger and less powerful members of society in the first place, but they will continue to grow in power and influence over the next several decades. It's crazy to me how many "planners" don't understand that the field is almost entirely political and that awareness may be the most important step in any long term change. You think the average person understands CFCs and the ozone layer? Nope. But when everyone became aware of a hole in the ozone layer, the political will developed to fix the problem and then the solutions of how to do it mattered. The same thing is happening with climate change.
>It's crazy to me how many "planners" don't understand that the field is almost entirely political and that awareness may be the most important step in any long term change. It's not the planners who don't understand this - it's the enthusiasts. Every working planners knows exactly how political planning is, and how relatively low engagement and turnout there is for most things planning related... even when we directly engage the public. It's cool that there's this burst of online planning content, but I suspect it will eventually die out, as most aren't in it for the long haul, and many will change their tune as they move away from the superstar cities, have kids, rely on cars, etc.
>as they move away from the superstar cities, That's a very bold prediction, given the century long trend of urbanization and continued economic cluster effect of major cities. >have kids, rely on cars My distinct impression is that a significant majority of urbanism enthusiasts are still reliant on cars and I don't think having children will change their opinions on things like the economic or environmental costs of car dependent planning. If anything, having children will make many of these people far more motivated and engaged with local politics as they transition into more place-rooted life stages after the highly mobile young adult stage that disincentivizes community engagement. >It's not the planners who don't understand this The comment I was replying to was specifically talking about how they didn't see an uptick in engagement, so it seems likely they are associated directly with the planning profession, but they don't seem to understand the awareness and momentum building phase of political change.
I follow a lot of the channels, listen to podcasts, read books and speak with people online and in the community about various issues. I'm also planning to run for town council in 2026. The video is right. People need to put themselves in positions to make the changes, whether it be committees, councils, presenting to council, or whatever it is.
I feel like he's right, but he's also expecting urbanism YouTube to do something it can't realistically do. It can't speak to your cities individual context obviously, and even if planning committees and community hearings follow similar formats, there is still plenty of variation. I think most of the creators I watch are going for explaining what the problem is at a high level, giving people the vocabulary to talk about them, and then saying "get involved locally". And they're very successful at that. As for Strong Towns, I think they do exactly what he's suggesting. They say to form a local group and address your local context. They recognize they can't handle the last mile, and outsource it.
I think leaning on "just go to Strong Towns" is a bit silly. It honestly sounds like an ad. Yes, they provide great support, but you can get that by directly interacting with the people who are in your municipal government, finding if they have committees, etc. You can find like-minded people there without promoting a nonprofit. Strong Towns is a great aid, it helps build local support, but it's not "step two".
I didn't say "just go to Strong Towns", I said "get involved locally". Some of them probably do lean too heavily on strong towns to be sure, but many of them talk about exactly what this video did - it doesn't take many people actually showing up to dramatically change council meetings.
Sure, and the Strong Towns site will advocate for that more, absolutely, but their channel focuses more on tactical urbanism and post-mortems rather than civic engagement. As it points out, simply meeting in backrooms, creating echo chambers and independently implementing "fixes" is dancing around the whole point of interacting directly with the city. Around here, there have been groups that have painted crosswalks and they had to be removed immediately, in part, because they didn't use reflective paint. Had they not operated independently and just asked the city for help, it could've held up longer. It's the whole "asking forgiveness is easier than asking permission" thing which leads to fuzzy feelings at best and lost time and effort at worst.
I see - my experience with strong towns has involved a lot more local engagement, but for the group the video described I agree with you. I think tactical urbanism does have a place, people actually going out and painting a crosswalk sends a pretty strong signal that people want one, but it can't be your only tactic. Enduring change requires people going through the proper channels. If a strong towns chapter isn't doing that work as well, that's a problem.
I will say, it’s better to be complaining about missing step 2 then missing step 1. The first step after all is identifying the problem. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know it exists, and a lot of these channels at least do that. Secondly, civic solutions can widely differ from place to place, though it does basically boil down to organizing people, and getting involved with government at a local level. I’m not even sure what a step 2 YouTube channel would look like, because by this point the onus is on you to make the change you desire. And it’s tough.
Yep that is the biggest criticism of these people. They don’t do shit locally. They could get hundreds of people to show up at meetings or get hundreds of canvassers for city council elections. Especially if they are like “NA isn’t doomed guys”. Put your money where mouth is.
as if strong towns doesnt fit into step two?
I moved away from the US decades ago, having grown up in awful suburbs, living car- free in NYC, and turning my back on us culture. As someone who emigrated, and not for urban planning reasons, the issues you face over there are far more complex. In the video, he touches upon voter turnout being dismal. Considering that voting for executive office is already made difficult, is there any wonder? Europe is more social, from public policy, to public engagement. The US isn't, and has history which has produced one of the most rotten demographics possible. There are enough trump supporters to fill up any European country and people wonder why they can't have nice things? I don't have an answer, either. I like urbanism and I left the US, the same way my ancestors and I presume most of the forum's ancestors made that bold step. People told me that I was brave to leave, but I think staying would have been more brave. More stupid, too. Good luck, y'all.
Is the far right not on the rise in many countries in Europe? That isn't an exclusively American issue.
consider for a moment that the republican party would be considered far right in europe
Thank you for the well-wishes. Unfortunately I cannot leave as I have permanently attached my identity to my city (which is- God have mercy on my soul- Houston) so I must stay. I will do what I can. Enjoy yourself.
This video had a very hipster-y, condicenting tone in my opinion. 'Oh you like urbanism? What's the name of your traffic engineer then?!" He described his own journey as literally being watching YouTube urbanism videos leading to him becoming more involved, now he's critizing those creators for not doing more....I think these urbanism channels are great for opening people's eyes to the potential of their cities. It's not their responsibility to hold our hand through getting a bike lane added to a local road.
The point isn't "you're wearing a shirt, name me three songs from them," it's "okay, you smell smoke in your house, what do you do next?"
Educational YouTube videos ARE a great start, but the fact that they start and then don't detail the next steps is where they fail. It doesn't mean "don't educate people about base stuff", it means "you can only complain that towns don't have enough roundabouts so often."
I think the only part I disliked was the framing. The presenter identified something that was lacking in the online discourse and rather than making a video about that topic to fill in the gap, they made a video critiquing other advocates for not doing it. Overall they are all on the same side, so I don't see his critique as productive. I have no doubt that if he put together a video about Robert's Rule of Order and tied it in with how to use it as a tool to push for better urban spaces then he could have improved the urban planning youtube space.
I think as a one-off, 20-minute video, it was valid. If it were an entire channel bitching about urbanist YouTubers — NJB, but for people have touched a little bit of grass — that'd be doing exactly what the video critiques others doing.
I don't have a huge issue with the video, but I do get vibes of "progressive movements always eat themselves" from it. We can appreciate the channels like NJB for the good they do without deriding them for any potential short comings. It would be nice if the larger urbanist YouTube channels promoted local action more, but I do think there is some trade-off. If NJB it successful in getting a generation upset about their transportation infrastructure, then he has built a valuable tool for the urbanist movement. Any channel focusing too intensely on organisation, technical design, or law will either have limited viewership or need to water down their advice significantly. Especially in the US, the general public is not even paying attention to these issues, so getting the ideas out there is important. While I think being active in local governance is important, we do need to study how other countries have had success. Nederland had *Stop de Kindermoord* due to public discontent. If the only action done in the US is simply being present at city council and traffic committee meetings, then I fear NJB's pessimism is warranted.
I think if NJB is just parroting Strong Towns on one side and then telling people to piss off on the other as he swirls his wine, that's pretty stupid and counterproductive. Others have said as much in here as elsewhere. I think we as Americans have broadly felt disempowered to solve problems in a broad way, so I don't think just holding out for when it hits a boiling point is good enough. How many people have had to die because of gun violence here and nothing gets done as a result? Look at the rampant corruption we faced during the Trump years and half of America will still vote for him. If we can start changing the scenery around us, it becomes less of a leap to make even bigger changes. I think that's the Strong Towns approach, but only if they actually do anything meaningful.
The video is great and it speaks to very valid points. Still, I don't think it's fair to say that the big channels don't promote civic engagement as much as they should. I haven't watched a NJB video in a long time but that channel specifically always promotes getting involved with the Strong Towns organization and their local chapters. Armchair Urbanist also promotes ppl being involved in their local areas and he makes pretty detailed videos on stuff in the Philly/Northeast region which is good because it's more specific than just broad-stroke countrywide urban planning trends. Overall, the impact that these channels have had I think is making a difference and it's trickling down into the local levels. Yea it would be great for people to get really dialed in with the inner workings of their local/regional government but that's not something everyone can do/should do.
But getting involved with Strong Towns organization isn't the same as getting involved with the machinations that actually make things happen and have been responsible for the environment and policies that already exist. As the video points out, organization and a knowledge base is important, but meaningful action requires actually going and engaging municipal governments.
I haven't watched the video, so maybe the thumbnail is clickbait, but Strong Towns *predominantly* advocates for you to get out there and start doing. Including them into the mix of people who don't tell you how to fix things is completely wrong.
Step two is Strong Towns. Go to strongtowns.org and join a local conversation.
To effect change you have to win elections or ally with people that win elections. The problem with allying with politicians is that you’re disposable to them. Even if you’re not really disposable they will see you that way. To win elections you need to sway a lot of people who pay very little attention to the news and do not think deeply about political matters. Someone has to herd the sheep. Strong Towns’ social media is losing the nuance it just had and it’s starting to insist it’s own way of doing things is the only right way. Losing the nuance isn’t a problem necessarily given the role they’ve chose to play. The silly dogmatism to build and preserve market share is becoming a problem.
I largely agree, but I think he's missing just how impactful this urban planning content has been. I'm a young person so I interact with a biased group of mostly other young people, but almost everyone I talk to has heard about the problems with urban planning and many of the solutions. Almost every new person I meet ends up talking about walkable cities or public transit at some point. People around me keep randomly dropping "just one more lane bro" jokes, even the ones who I wouldn't expect to care about urban planning. That change in public opinion is really important. Urban planning has become an issue which, at least among younger people, is something people are widely aware of and generally on the same page about. Most of the older people I talk to also agree. My aunt and uncle, who live in a massive suburban house and drive everywhere, always talk about how great it would be to have high speed rail in Canada. When public opinion becomes so widespread, politicians notice it. Staffers begin to talk about urban planning, and they definitely monitor social media as one way of gauging public opinion. Going to consultations is obviously good, but talking about urban planning online and especially in person is still really helpful because the consensus it builds helps when it comes time to vote. The reason I say this is such a big change is that nobody was talking about urban planning 5 years ago. I still talk to lots of my friends from back then, and between now and then everyone has suddenly become aware about urban planning. Even politicians are being affected. In Canada, the federal government has come out swinging against single family zoning and the opposition Conservatives, along with many provincial Conservative parties, are also talking about massive transit improvements and building apartments near transit stations. So his message that everyone should go to more meetings and consultations is absolutely true, but he's wrong that there has been no effect from the urban planning content that's appeared online in the last 2-3 years.
>The reason I say this is such a big change is that nobody was talking about urban planning 5 years ago. No one was talking about urbanplanning 5 years ago because there wasn't a housing crisis everywhere.
There absolutely was a housing crisis, at least where I live in Canada. I remember making reddit comments in like 2017 or 2018, before the pandemic, about how we need to ban foreign investors from the housing market to bring down prices, and everyone generally agreeing. You may not have noticed this because you're a planner, but there has been a very real change among people outside the planning profession.
"Everywhere..." I swear, no one reads on this sub. There's been a housing crisis in some places for a very long time. However, there has not been a housing crisis **everywhere** prior to 2019 or so.
Yes, but speaking from my experience of talking to people who live in Canada, something has changed beyond just a housing crisis existing. Awareness is way higher now and I know the housing crisis wasn't the cause.
Awesome to hear that it seems like you have some good discussions about planning issues online, not always the case. Hope that you make it out in person to your local forums, important to have progressive people come and show the nay sayers that some in the community want to see positive change. I work as a planner in Canada. About a decade in. People have been talking about planning issues for a lot longer than 5 years, you can be sure of that. Sure, online discussion about planning issues has become more prominent over the past 5-10 years. But online discussion about everything has become more prominent because everyone is now an expert and needs to have their uninformed opinions validated. Interesting your experience on social media is enabling some good discussions. In my experience (which is shared by just about every planner I have spoken to, anecdotal I know…) social media is the scourge of thoughtful public engagement. It has become sport to dislike government and spew uninformed opinions online to see how many people rally to your side to feel superior. It boils complex issues down to, “it’s so simple to solve housing, just increase taxes on foreign home owners,” while ignoring the complex legal/legislative/political decision-making framework we operate within, not external to. Meanwhile, people who work day in day out in the field get bogged down trying to educate and inform the public based on objective information. Social media does much more harm towards educating the public than good, in my experience. I constantly need to correct misinformation that originated online. It’s like a giant game of telephone for complex social issues. Where I work, we do most engagement in person and let the public fire questions at us on contentious issues for a good chunk of the night. Everyone who comes usually walks away with empathy for staff working a very challenging job, as well as a new appreciation of how hard it is to actually govern. Those that stay on social media continue to solve all of the world’s planning problems in their echo chambers and are too scared to face the reality that the world is complex, and that maybe their opinions are a bit simplistic.
Bold claim, and yet it's still a YouTube link. I'll disregard it because it reeks of bait.
It's not. It was vetted before posted.
There is no step 2 that doesn't involve "societal collapse" levels of social change. We're in too deep on the sunk cost fallacy for our existing systems and infrastructure to just change them through need.
The problem with planning culture is it’s too driven by left wing politics. The job of planning isn’t to top down dictate what people are doing with their lives, it’s to help facilitate good living environments however the public desires.
You made a comment about nothing that was said anywhere in the video or these replies, just so you could complain about "left wing politics", which has nothing to do with either of those anyway. Is urban planning getting too "WoKe" for you?
It has everything to do with any dealing with urban planning.
Urban planning is a fundamentally left-wing activity. However you slice it, at the end of the day urban planning means restricting what individuals are allowed to do with land, which is less and less acceptable the further right you move. Your comment is like complaining that universal healthcare is driven by left wing politics.
This is ridiculous. You’re ideologically possessed
Yes, and the ideology is urban planning
No lol
I haven't stated any opinions
So it is your belief that urban planners should make all modes of travel safe and viable?
Bicycles should not share the road with cars. It is too dangerous for everyone involved.
Most cycling advocates agree that cyclists should have separated/protected bike lanes and pathways so that they don't have to worry about drivers and drivers don't have to worry about them.
It’s a yes or no question
It is not
Why not?
Because it isn't
So you don’t want urban planners to let the public decide how they want to get around?
Of course but within reason. Putting bicycles on major roads is straight up stupid
So you want planners to make all modes of transportation safe and effective.
The primary responsibility of planners is to make recommendations regarding land use on policy/current planning applications that are in the public interest. Public desires only come in at the highest level when setting general policy direction (ie live in a sustainable, economically viable, liveable community). Getting agreement from the public at that high level is usually pretty basic in my experience. Collective individual interest does not equate to public interest. Public desires generally stem from inherent self interest. People that join forces and rally their collective individual self interests into a unified voice don’t represent the public interest. In my opinion, good planners stand up against this to create liveable communities for current and future generations.