I'm on a tear with this website.
Five Ways Federal Infrastructure Spending Makes Cities Poorer
partner piece, Five Low Cost Ideas To Make Your City Wealthier
Thoughts?
I finally got around to reading The death and life of great American Cities Despite being written in the early 60's and with the language of that era including talking about old New York as a current phenomena, I now have a greater understanding of the philosophy of the New Urbanists WARNING FUCKING AUTOPLAY FUCKING VIDEO. STOP THIS SHIT WEB DEVS. Turns out that it it hard to build a neighborhood that can sustain itself over a longish period of time. Tearing down all the old buildings pushes out the poor an low margin people and enterprises. Making all the buildings the same kills the city's ability to have a viable street life. Urban planning is still rooted in the idea of an 1880-1890's city where there were slaughterhouses and factories. And the Baby Boomers are still idealizing the suburbs to a degree that warps reality. When I get the moment I will go through their vids. thanks for the link.
My city, San Jose, has no money because everyone lives here but nobody wants to spend time here. Every day during morning rush hour you can watch the exodus of our population to the places they work and entertain themselves, and during evening rush hour you can watch them all return home to sleep and wait for the next opportunity to leave.
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/3/five-low-cost-ideas-to-make-your-city-wealthier five thoroughly unconvincing micro solutions that ignore profit motive
Ive only gotten through the first 2 videos. Video 1 was meh for me, I dont think share bike/car lanes are a good use of space in any city that gets significant snow. Since in most cases its not practical to use bikes all the time peak road usage will still occur during bad weather. Also IMO dedicated bike only paths and arterials are a good idea IMO because its safer for both biker and driver and the paths are like a park for all the local residents. Video 2 is interesting but for small people to become developers they need support from local government. Otherwise shit like this happens and drives up rent/costs for everyone. If you go to their website https://leanurbanism.org/videos/ its clear that the speaker has very sympathetic regulators. He talks about successfully bending/interpreting rules and not totally getting F-ed over by the the regulators. For example the city let him call access roads parking lots to avoid setback regulations. Haven't watched the rest
What did you think? In this article that you link, Bloomberg makes a recommendation through his twitter to listen to this Econ talk episode. I'm really glad I did. too long; didn't listen? First off, listen to it. Just straight up stimulating stuff (although I'm not a huge fan of the Econ talk podcast host, but that's personal). And secondly, the answer is ultimately what our intuitions tell us: difficult to generalize innovations that are started bottom up. But it's more interesting than that.
I listened to the econ talk. It was interesting I like their ideas, i'm just not sure how they would go about implementing. The curse of the engineer that has a great solution to a problem that he/she is not actually in charge of addressing (happens to me all the time). Btw steve your comment and my comment made the podcast this week: http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/17/the-week-ahead Looks like chuck or rachel found hubski. Maybe we could invite them to do a Q&A session. mk cgod what do you think?
I mean I DM'd them on twitter that there was a nice conversation happening on Hubski around their content. And shared the link w them.
That was you! :D So yea, there's all this awareness on Strong Town's part of the conversation on hubski, between their articles and podcasts. I was wondering what brought their awareness to us. It's funny how we have all these social media and it never occurs for me to use it.
Back when I had more time, I used to do it all the time for two reasons: 1. Often an author of a piece would stop by. 2. It's nice for the creator of content to get feedback, even if its from a small corner of the internet. These people work hard to create their sites, blogs etc. It's nice to let them know that their work is appreciated.
Couldn't agree more. And it's great to see how buzzed they are about our conversations. Win-win.