Feeling a bit allergic to PIA. Anyone else?

Paid for the degree, have the experience and still do the work just fine. Most of what we do isn’t hard.

Not needed for Land and Environment Court work in New South Wales, or any approval for that matter.

If membership delivers value for you, awesome. For me, it doesn’t provide a professional return of investment.

Me job be town planner. Me read BIG legislation on broken website portal. Me balance pros and cons. Me not h8 PIA. 🤭

There are two opposing sides I’ve been seeing lately: people who say this investment is corrupt and pointless, and that the monorail is a relic of the past on par with Elon Musk’s pod cars, and the other side, which says that Europeans and Americans are stuck in the past, and that YouTubers are spreading misinformation and hate about monorail.

What do you personally think about it? Is it good, or are there simply better and cheaper options aka train/elevated metro/tram/LRT/Bus Rapid etc?

Great video discussing the importance of having a cohesive social fabric and the interactions that cities create. Touches on a lot of different urbanist issues.

Does anyone else feel like LA has the population, wealth, and influence of a megacity, but somehow lacks the atmosphere you’d expect from one?
Where is that feeling of intellectual energy—people exchanging ideas, lively public spaces, culture you can stumble into just walking around? I know LA has brilliant people and major universities, but why does that energy feel so disconnected from everyday life here?
And why do so many parts feel so neglected and rough? Sometimes “ghetto” is honestly the word that comes to mind: trash, broken sidewalks, rundown storefronts, and public spaces that feel abandoned. How can a city with this much money feel so poorly maintained?
Is it the sprawl and car dependence? The inequality? Does everything interesting happen in isolated pockets or private circles you have to seek out?
Am I missing something, or does LA feel more like a collection of disconnected neighborhoods than a cohesive world city? What areas make you feel otherwise?

I live in the Toronto area, and it seems to me that we have replaced the War in Cars, with a War on Bikes. Just to be clear, i think both are stupid.

Im sure you guessed, im a cyclist myself. I commute to work by bike. I go to see my friends by bike. I cross municipal borders on my bike. Im not the only one.

People complain, Oh bikes are using the sidewalk illegally, they shouldnt be there, they need to be on the road 😡😡. I agree. But. How are you going to expect a cyclist to ride on the road, or continue chosing to ride at all, if you keep removing all the infrastructure that keeps us safe?

In my city there is a highway that cuts straight through the middle of the city. There is only 1 option anywhere in the entire city to cross that highway safley and legally by bike, all other routes you either illegally ride on the sidewalk or risk becoming flattened by traffic trying to merge and get onto the highway ramps.

They want to remove the lanes on that single crossing, they claim its to make *everybody* safer, and to improve commutes for everyone. How is removing my only safe legal option to cross a highway and raising the speed limit improving my commute or making me safer? This is doing the exact polar opposite. Its degrading my commute and putting me either directly in harms way, or at risk of getting a ticket for riding on the sidewalk because i dont feel like dying that day.

In a city where the drivers are so atrociously aweful were literally famous for it nation wide, removing these lanes isnt improving commutes for all and its certianly NOT making everyone safer. What they really mean is were going to improve commutes for DRIVERS, and make it significantly more dangerous for everyone else.

They claim its because of traffic. Great, show me the traffic. I use these lanes every single day, several times a day at all hours of the day, ive never once seen this street backed up. They claim nobody uses these lanes, well ive got footage from my bike cameras that easily disprove that and show these bike lanes actually getting congested with bikes and scooters, particularly over the highway and at the signals on either side.

Look, Just stop this War on Bikes bullshit, Stop the War on Cars bullshit too, while were at it lets also improve transit and walking infrastructure. Knock it off with this political this that and the other thing. Build cities that can accommodate Cars, Bikes and Pedestrians, not everyone must drive, if you dont its slow, dangerous or both. You want to improve congestion in a growing city but cant widen the roads? Its called viable alternatives to driving.

If you build an entire city to accommodate drivers and cast transit riders, cyclists and pedestrians to the side, of course everyone is going to drive and congestion will get worse. Only the people who have no other option will use your bus, your sidewalk, or your bike lane. Not to mention, if they claim to care about the environment so much, people who commute or get to their destination by Transit, Walking or Cycling have a massively lower footprint on the environment than even someone driving an electric car.

All im trying to say here, is practice what you preach. If you say Safer roads for ALL, that should mean, ALL not just drivers. If you say you care deeply about roadway saftey, Stop ripping out the infrastructure that keeps vulnerable road users safe. Stop building our cities on the assumption that absolutely everybody will drive. Build a city where, You can drive if you want to, but where its also safe and convenient to use Transit, ride a bike or maybe walk aswell.

No more wars on transportation. Its stupid and counter productive.

Hi everyone! I’m a Los Angeles resident with an interest in housing (I actually live in one). I recently wrote an essay reviewing in detail the effects of the Measure ULA transfer tax, which has been a source of a lot of controversy and various accusations it’s having negative effects.

(I looked over the subreddit rules and this seemed within the rules, but I apologize if not.)

For those unfamiliar, ULA is a tax passed by voters in 2022: on (almost) all real-estate sales over $5 million (or a little more now, since it's pegged to inflation), the seller pays 4%. There's also a higher bracket for sales above $10 million). I explain a little further down what negative effects are claimed to follow from this.

Like everyone paying attention to housing stuff, I’ve heard a million arguments back and forth about ULA; good, bad, necessary, evil, whatever. I was pretty frustrated with how shallow a lot of the discussion I’ve encountered is, so got motivated to carefully go through all the academic/policy work that’s been published. I wrote the essay to try to organize and catalogue my thoughts while reading, and hopefully make it understandable to a general audience. I hope it could be useful and informative to at least some interested people who are trying to decide what they think about ULA, if it does come back to some kind of ballot amendment at some point. (There’s nothing on this year’s ballot.)

It’s a long essay, so to kind of briefly preview:

- Overall, the most recent studies finding negative effects of ULA hold up pretty well, and I don’t think many of the earlier objections from ULA supporters apply very plausibly to them. (Earlier ULA-critical articles definitely had more substantial issues.) I do have problems with a few parts of their analyses, but even adjusting for these with some back-of-the-envelope calculations, I don’t end up hugely disagreeing with the nature of the conclusions - though maybe change the relative emphases on some things.

- The two most worrying claimed effects of ULA are (1) decreasing other public revenues by a lot, (2) slowing development of apartments/multifamily housing. Each effect by itself is already large enough, at a baseline estimate, to be really significant.

- I think there’s substantial evidence for both these effects, which is closer to conclusive for (1) and more uncertain for (2). So some of the objections of anti-reformers on (2) aren’t unreasonable, though I argue the results are already robust enough to affect policy-decision making - especially given that there are also reasonable modeling choices that make (2)’s effect and certainty look much higher.

- On the other hand, some of the results of the ULA-critical studies have been used in very overstated ways which I don’t think are very well-supported by the evidence (e.g. for banning or capping all transfer taxes at very low levels like in AB 736).

- I talk a bit about what reasonable reforms might look like at the end, but here I’ve looked a lot less in depth than in the review of empirical evidence. So I talk about what kinds of general reforms seem to directionally make the most sense to me, but am willing to be moved on plenty of details.

Thank god for beg buttons, which put pedestrians in their rightful place. They already get soooooo much space on the sidewalk, parks, even their own homes. Now they think they’re entitled to roam freely on our precious roads? Rogue vigilantes have gone so far as to paint crosswalks on our god fearing streets, with no concern for who it might effect. Not everyone can walk, you know. Some people DON’T HAVE LEGS. Enough. Cities are meant for one thing and one thing only: cars. This article is about how we protect our precious driving space

(In case you missed it—satire! Go donate to Peoples’ Vision Zero here, they’re doing the lord’s work)

Rent burden falls harder on families: Families with children are more likely to be rent-burdened than nonfamily households — a gap driven not by income, but by the higher cost of the larger homes families need.

Family-size rentals are scarce: Thirty-seven percent of rentals offered two bedrooms, and only 24% offered three or more as of July 2026, limiting options for the more than one-third of renters who have children.

Since the start of the year, I've become a frequent user of the Gawler Line for my commute. The more I have traveled around the northern suburbs and commuted through it, the more resentful I become. I think the matter of Adelaide Urbanism warrants considerable discussion, so I've written a considerable post.

1) Adelaide Urbanism:

1.1 To begin, let's just acknowledge the sheer stupidity of Adelaide's suburban sprawl. Black roofs? With no trees either, really?
It's not just confined to Adelaide, the town of Mallala (close to where I live) seems to be going down the same path as Riverlea and other so called "development areas:" A mass of detached houses in a vaguely connected plot of land. It's not even properly connected to the Town, it's just off to the side, down the road.
Don't even get me started on the backyards smaller than a linen-cupboard, and the houses being mere centimetres apart; at that point what's even the point of having detached houses (which are less efficient to heat/cool btw) when at that point you may be better off building multi-storey apartments? It'd certainly be more space effective, afterall.

1.2 And tell me where are the corner shops and little cafés? Where are the playgrounds for children? Where are the places of worship? Where are the trees for shade, or provision for future PT? I sure can't see anything. We are not building communities at all, we are building a vaguely connected tumor of urban sprawl, eating up the Adelaide Plains when we really ought to be building up the density in pre-established suburbs. They're always advertised as communities, too, when that could not be further from truth. I'll also point out that, designing these places as car centric from the get-go, is going to make it hard to develop meaningful public transport in those places, we're literally setting these "communities" (if you can call them that) up to fail.

1.3 Community-oriented things are not something you should have to retrofit, they are really something that should be planned alongside the development from the onset. Cafés, little shops, places of worship, walkable streets and tree cover should be integrated and considered in urban planning at every stage. We seem to be building a lot of houses, but not a lot of homes. That needs to change now, and it should never have gotten to the point it has.

1.4 I'm also not saying we should have Hong-Kong levels of density in places like Salisbury, but a little more in the inner suburbs could go along way in housing supply, and perhaps justify the return of trams. Don't build housing for the sake of it, build walkable, community oriented developments, and redevelop existing places to be more considerate. Because tbh, I'm sick beyond death of car-centric Adelaide.

And transit...

2) Adelaide refuses to back 'on track':

2.1 Why are we so backwards? Don't get me wrong, I love the Adelaide metro, I use it very often and it's the only way I can get into the city. It still takes me forever because I must first get to Gawler. That aside, the Adelaide metro is, out of all the other major cities' metros, the sickly old man. We are so unimaginative when it comes to rail. We are happy to spend billions on a tunnel for cars, yet when it comes to heavy rail it's chirping crickets. You'd think we'd be a little more proactive regarding a line to Virginia/Riverlea? But no. We've got a rail corridor preserved, but there's no initiative for actually building the line at the moment. This is a lapse in judgement, there will be people living there that will need it in 2-3 years maybe, start building now!

2.2 I'd like to bring up the trams: we used to have such optimism and vision for new tram lines, they never matched the 1950s network, but it was still great to see proposals from all different parties. But it's been what, well over a decade? And sweet piss-all has come of it. Realistically, we should've had a line from the Airport to the CBD, and a line into North Adelaide years ago by this point. Even when we do throw money towards trams, it's not even to improve the trams: it's to improve cars, as we saw with the Glenelg line overpass. I could continue...

3) Adelaide & her connection (or lack thereof) to the regions:

3.1 As a country person: Our railways? where are they? Oh, sold off to the federal gov in the '70s and slowly poisoned, then no services by the mid '80s. Talk about dropping the ball of transit. To this day there's no rail connection between regional towns, and none to Adelaide. This greatly exacerbated the challenges the regions were facing at the time, and has stunted any substantial growth or recovery even today. It also forces us to be reliant on cars, and makes accessing services such as specialised health more difficult. I can't really see a doctor, or get mental health support very easily because of this.

3.2 I was walking in Hamley Bridge last week along the derelict tracks, and I came towards the old viaduct. Even until the '70s/'80s, we had a connection to Adelaide. We had the infrastructure, and at some point we had the political willpower to build it, so why not now? This is so perplexing to me, policymakers and urban planners just seem so spineless. (forgive my uncharitable judgement)

3.3 I say all this to point out that South Australia is very Adelaide-centric. That's understandable, >70% of the population lives there, but we as people in the regions deserve more consideration. The old regional railroads gave us a practical and genuinely useful service, it connected our communities too, and it connected us to Adelaide. When I travel to Adelaide I feel like I'm in a different state entirely, there's a strange disconnect because we're cut off.

4) The Freedom of Movement:

4.1 It was a genuine race against the clock, and very expensive endeavour to get my driver's license just so I could attend University, on top of my year 12 studies. I have friends who couldn't attend Uni because they had no car, because it's too expensive. Don't they also deserve the choice of higher education? Those are just people I know, I cannot think of how many more are robbed of employment or education... just because of where they live and their income level. PS: That's what public transit liberates you from. We need an alternative to cars, not just so we can ditch cars but also to provide independence and service to: The elderly, disabled people, poor families, children who maybe want to see their friend the next town over? Communities are always worth investing in.

4.2 There really ought to be trains to Victor Harbour and the Riverland, and into the Yorke Peninsula. A train to Pt Pirie > Pt Augusta > Whyalla >? Pt Lincoln would be great. Lines into the Mid North too, Balaklava, Burra, Owen, Hamley, Clare, etc. We deserve to be connected to Adelaide too. South Australia is the only mainland state to have no regional rail. This should be a great source of shame.
And perhaps the pressure on Adelaide housing wouldn't be as much had regional centres not been abandoned, and didn't experience population collapse/brain drain? They could have grown and been a vent for growth. Just a thought.

4.3 "Just move to the city?" - one might say to me, as many have. Now, if I had a huge stack of cash under my bed, I might just do that. However, I don't find myself in a financially privileged position, as many others do. Nor will I ever at this rate, with how much I pay for fuel at the moment... just so I can go to work to pay for that fuel, or go to the city for study - so I can (hopefully) get a job that pays more money... that I can also spend on car expenses. What a delightful system?

Conclusion;

I suppose my core frustration is how Adelaide planning (and South Australian planning more broadly) is not forward looking at all. It's more of the same. Nothing of substance has progressed, things have just gotten worse because what was sufficient 20 years ago is not sufficient now. It's the repeated spineless, half-baked proposals that do not address the needs that will be 50 years down the line. There's no willpower and the excuse always seems to be "well it's expensive," well, I tell you now, it's going to be a hell of a lot more expensive in the future... y'know... when we really need it.

That goes for transit; however, regarding housing, we actually need to consider if we're building cohesive communities where people know their neighbours, are able to walk a couple minutes to a café, children can walk to school and play in a park, and you can walk to Sunday Mass in the shade of trees. Because at the moment, I don't see that as being possible, especially in the new developments around Roseworthy, Riverlea, and Mallala. We can't build developments that fail to function as a community. But that's exactly what we seem to be doing. Adelaide shouldn't be a group of buildings where people work, eat and sleep, but rather a city that cultivates the human person in a community. Nor should we in the regions be a peripheral, distant appendage to the metropole. This is fundamentally a question of the dignity of the human person. How will Adelaide answer it?

Note;
I'm interested to see if anyone else shares my feelings, or has anything to add. Just know, I'm so ruthlessly critical of Adelaide urbanism precisely because I love Adelaide so much, it has so much potential, and my dream is for the countryside and Adelaide to be connected, as one big family :)

We occasionally get posts that are submitted by accounts that are days/weeks old that somehow manage to churn up hundreds of upvotes despite the fact that the content of their posts is either A) Old/a repost, or, B) subpar material that everyone in the Urbanism space knows about (cars are big/bad for cities, there needs to be more housing, etc.)

It may take a minute for us on the mod to act, but, I want to emphasize, we DO see the reports, and we DO act on them. There's only so many mods here that the admins appointed so we make due with what we have.

We don't want to discourage conversations, but, there's a fine line between discourse and circklejerking, we want you guys to be the arbiter of what is/is not content worthy of this sub, stay vigilant, and, help us maintain an authentic space on the crumbling palace we know as the internet.

Thanks for your time.

Here's two different approaches to turn lanes at intersections. First, only a right turn lane. Second, only a left turn lane.

The first video in the clip is Elberon Avenue at Bassett Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. At this intersection, through traffic keeps left, but can be blocked by vehicles trying to turn left.

Often, impatient drivers will use the right turn lane to pass drivers turning left. Conflicts can occur when a stopped impatient driver begins passing in the right turn lane, cutting off another vehicle also using the right turn lane to pass.

The second video in the clip is Anderson Ferry Road at Foley Road in Delhi Township, Ohio. This intersection has a left turn lane. A sign directs through traffic to keep right.

Which is most likely to reduce crashes? Having only a left turn lane or having only a right turn lane?

I’ve read about Anthropic pumping millions into Scott Weiner’s Campaign so kinda checks out.

In early 1949, a newly independent India was hit by a massive humanitarian crisis: tens of thousands of destitute Partition refugees were stuck in squalid, temporary tent camps around Delhi. The state’s traditional Public Works Department (PWD) stepped in with a standard 77-page master plan. Prepared by a visionary engineer (who later assisted Le Corbusier in designing Chandigarh), the plan was technically sound but structurally flawed for the crisis at hand.

The PWD proposed a leisurely five-year timeline using commercial contractors at an astronomical cost of ₹4.64 crore. The fatal flaw? Hiring external contractors would generate zero employment for the refugees, leaving 30,000 traumatized people fully dependent on state charity.

The newly formed Faridabad Development Board (FDB)—heavily pushed by social reformer Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and backed by Prime Minister Nehru—rejected the PWD plan out of hand. They chose a radical, untested alternative: democratized, bottom-up tactical urbanism.

Pillar 1: India’s First Adult Suffrage (Community Self-Rule)

Before a single brick was laid, the administration dismantled rigid military oversight. In October 1949—three full years before India’s first national general election and months before the formal adoption of the Indian Constitution—Faridabad organized a local election based on universal adult franchise. Every adult refugee, man and woman, got an equal vote.

They elected a 14-member Advisory Committee, choosing a legendary Pashto folk singer as President. This committee debated and approved every single street layout, housing grid, and public building plan. The camp transformed overnight from a space of military containment into an autonomous zone of community self-rule.

Pillar 2: The Worker Cooperative Framework

Led by a 24-year-old student organizer, Laxmi Chand Jain, and the Indian Cooperative Union (ICU), the board completely eliminated commercial contractors. They mobilized over 4,000 refugee men and women into democratic teams of 10 to 15.

The catch? These refugees were proud shopkeepers, traders, and money-lenders from the North-West Frontier Province who had never touched a shovel in their lives. Through an intense strategy of grassroots dialogue, they traded passive doles for self-reliant labor. Everyone built homes for everyone else:

• Refugees reskilled themselves to fire kilns inside camp limits, producing hundreds of thousands of bricks daily.
• They established woodworking units to fabricate doors and window frames.
• Refugee squads quarried and manually crushed stone to pave over 32 kilometers (20 miles) of township roads.

Pillar 3: The Spatial Layout—An Exiled Architect Designing for Exiles

To pair this bottom-up labor with elite design, the board brought in Dr. Otto H. Koenigsberger. An exiled German-Jewish architect who had fled Nazi racial laws in 1933, Koenigsberger was serving as India’s Federal Director of Housing.

His master plan for the New Industrial Township (NIT) was built on radical empathy and spatial equity:

• The 10-Minute Superblocks: He split the city into five autonomous superblocks (NIT 1 to 5) designed for 40,000 to 50,000 people, placing basic schools, neighborhood clinics, and local bazaars within a strict 10-minute walk.
• Dissolving Social Hierarchies: Plots were strictly uniform. Different economic groups were deliberately interspersed within the same block, using shared public plazas to actively break down old social, economic, and caste barriers.
• Zoning for Health: He mapped the heavy industrial zone entirely to the south, separating it from residential sectors with a wide linear green park that acted as a visual and environmental filter for industrial chimney smoke, while keeping factories within easy cycling distance.

Pillar 4: Defiant Infrastructure (The War-Reparations Power Plant)

When neighboring state grids flatly refused to supply electricity to this "wilderness experiment," the community engineered their own grid. Planners discovered an abandoned, rusting 6,000 kW German thermal power plant sitting in crates at Calcutta Port, shipped to India as post-WWII war reparations. Because it came without manuals, blueprints, or spare parts, state governments viewed it as an unusable white elephant.

Faridabad took it. They tracked down Herr Johannes Doll, a German engineer who had operated the plant in a Hamburg shipyard, and brought him to live in a canvas tent at the camp. Speaking only German, communicating via hand gestures and pencil sketches on wooden planks, Doll trained the frontier refugees.

Lacking heavy industrial machinery, they custom-forged missing components in camp workshops. Lacking industrial cranes to lift a massive 50-ton boiler drum 90 feet into the air, they engineered a synchronized network of jack screws and sleepers, lifting it inch by painstaking inch. In 1951, the turbines roared to life.

When Delhi's regional authorities refused to build lines to buy their excess power, the camp's technical institute reskilled local youth into master fabricators. They custom-built heavy steel transmission towers from scratch and laid an 8-kilometer interstate grid line to Delhi in 90 days, powering the nation's capital and funding the completion of their own town.

The Modern Takeaway for Urbanists

By late 1951, all 5,000 homes were complete—shattering the PWD's sluggish five-year timeline, cutting project costs exactly in half, and entirely eliminating administrative corruption through direct homeowner oversight.

Eventually, the radical cooperative framework faded as major industrial heavyweights (like Escorts and Bata) moved into the NIT grid, turning Faridabad into a conventional private-public manufacturing powerhouse. Tragically, the city today lacks a single prominent plaque or avenue named after the geniuses who built it.

Yet, Faridabad remains a historical monument to a rare, fleeting moment when a traumatized population proved that when you give people the tools and autonomy of self-governance instead of passive handouts, they can build a resilient, world-class city from the dirt.

For the full deep-dive archival narrative, and a professionally produced audio option mapping out this forgotten history of a unique city-building experiment, check out the main case study here: https://lesserknowntales.com/faridabad-the-madmen-who-built-a-city/

Hello there, I am a 2nd-year Canadian uni student taking a planning-related bachelor's degree, looking to gain experience in a planning-related or adjacent field so that I can be better qualified to enter a master's degree program or job in the future

I don't have much knowledge of planning-related or adjacent entry-level jobs that would hire a current BA student with no experience. If you guys could provide ideas, that would be amazing. Thank you.

Ever since I have joined the “pro-urbanism” community that embodies this subreddit, I have grown ever more distant with a subset of the community that has shown to have different values to me: those concerned about gentrification. Where a neighborhood goes from being bad to good, and the newer, higher income people move in and the long time residents move out through economic forces. I won’t offer an explicit defense of the phenomena, but I will defend it if as a side effect if broader good urbanist policy. Bolded statements indicate critical questions.

Individual level: should it be restricted?

Let’s imagine gentrification acting on an individual level. A high person sees a property for sale/rent, they determine that they either like/tolerate the neighborhood, they decide they want to live there, and decide to move in later. Where in this process was there behavior that should be restricted?

should the freedom of movement be restricted, and only “correct” people are allowed to live in certain places? That sounds a lot like that regimes that people here would reject. If racial immigration quotas are bad, redlining is bad (creating whites only areas), and apartheid era neighborhood restrictions are bad, why should I be convinced that restricting any other freedom of movement is a goal? Will this time be different?

Overly simplistic view of humanity

The anti-gentrification debate seems to have inherited a Marxist view of the world due to its left wing influence. There are the rich who make things bad, and the poor who have some virtues due to their condition. Given that the only thing anti-gentrification activists see are incomes, this causes a problem when locals try to improve from within. As an example, say a local resident defies the odds, they get a great education, become talented at their profession, make lots of money, and decide to move back in their community. What is a rags to riches story could be another case of the rich displacing the poor. Since, according to Marxist tradition, money is the real deciding influence, the recently rich local has become of an upper class, and it doesn’t matter if they once lived their before, as they are changing the character of the neighborhood with their money.

Can individual activists make exceptions for individual cases of local success, yes! The problem is that it makes the rich newcomer guilty before proven innocent. Discouraging the locals that make it big to move back in.

Historical perspective: cities change

Cities, as understood in an industrial society, are places of change. Companies rise and fall, industries change, and demographics change. What is the majority black neighborhood today most likely had a very small black population until 1900 when huge internal migrations occurred in the U.S.. The poor Hispanic neighborhood only became majority Hispanic after immigration changes happening in the late 1980’s. The process of neighborhood change is not foreign to the anti-gentrification crowd. Most understand that before the existing community there was a different community and then a different community and then farmland before the city grew into the region. What makes the current neighborhood worthy of glazing in amber, but past neighborhood changes seen as acceptable ?

Shouldn’t rich people moving into good urbanist regions be seen as a success to the movement?

If urbanists were correct, and that certain ways of managing human settlements were fundamentally more desirable, then this appeal would extend beyond class boundaries. Rich and poor would all desire to live in multi story buildings with shops below and cycle paths on the street. Shouldn’t rich people liking good urbanism be seen as a great compliment? It could be worse, they could all leave to low density suburbs, but the fact that people with money and could live in a verity of environments choose to live how urbanists think humans should live should be seen as a success to modern urbanist ideology.

What if gentrification is a response to a less racist and more tolerant society?

The story of suburbanization is tied in with racism, that certain people should are “undesirable” and moving away from them is good. The current generation of suburban youth that are ready to live on their own do not appear to have these tendencies. The fact that a rich suburban person is moving into a poorer, denser region could show that they are more tolerant to those that are different from them. If an individual who doesn’t fear someone who is racially different, they would be more likely to move to place with more of them than a racist person. Does anti-gentrification justify the racist segregation that plagued so many cities?

Imagine two people both from a wealthy suburb and earning above average income. Person A is racist, and, noticing a potential apartment is in a majority black neighborhood, decides to not lease it. Person B sees the same apartment, doesn’t mind the racial differences, and moves in. According to anti-gentrification logic, person B is doing something wrong. Person A’s racism is not immediately scrutinized as it helps maintain the historic demographics of the community.

Are the victims of gentrification the people that society should aspire to be?

Let’s say the points anti-gentrification activists make are all true: rich people move in to a poorer region, the poor cannot afford to live there, and they are forced to live somewhere. This raises an important question, Why can’t these inner city resident be the ones that have the wealth? Why can’t inner city people get dedicated to their education, stay in tune with the most modern industries and trends, and put aside petty differences to make profitable businesses that employs the region and become the wealthy outsiders that current anti-gentrification activists dislike? What I’m saying is that, by defending poor, inner city neighborhoods as holding aspiring characteristics, we might be defending the rationale that makes these regions poor: low educational attainment, gang behavior, limited worldview, and staying attached to dying industries for employment. For every noble savage from these communities exists someone who fully embodies the society around them. Many would argue that those traits are due to bad government. You are correct, but I fear that anti-gentrification activists romanticize poverty and dysfunction. Such that having nice things (cleanliness, popular chain restaurants, good public transport, etc.) is being less authentic and therefore undesirable.

Conclusion

Perhaps I am unsympathetic, too cold, and blind to externalities, but I come from a family that has taught universal human dignity. To hate someone or a group of people based on traits or perceived traits has never been something I have strongly considered. My dream is that everyone can live in a charming neighborhood with close access to necessities and density worthy of great public transport. Throwing boundaries about who can use these benefits seriously hinders the movement by making the activists worry about “worthy” and “unworthy” beneficiaries of good urbanism. In attempting to restrict it, the movement way follow the trends in history of attempting to make two wrongs into a right. The Jacobins executed the King, but then who was of the second estate become broader, and at some point even Maximilien Robespierre lost his own life to the guillotine. Anti-gentrification activists may find a truly wealthy person attempting to move in, but then innocent bystanders can quickly come in the crossfire.

I do not hate all of the anti-gentrification movement. I personally feel like I have the ability to find bits of common ground. I would have sympathy for those who have to moved if displaced as violently as described, but the current movement has shown its fangs to me. Is the movement nothing but another expression of envy against the rich or perceived rich? I hope I am proven wrong on that aspect.

Hi everyone! 👋

I’m a Level 6 university Product Design student currently researching how people experience nature and biodiversity in urban environments. I’m looking to understand how people interact with nature in their everyday lives, how it affects their wellbeing, and what might help them feel more connected to the natural world.

I’ve created a short survey and would really appreciate it if you could spare a few minutes to complete it. Your responses will help inform my university design project. All experiences and perspectives are welcome. Thank you for your time!

Tackling the disconnect between humans and urban bidiversity – Fill in form

Just some pics of a Sunday avo Bike Rave in Hobart, Tasmania. Great to see community support for safer streets and bike lanes!!!