Holy shit, his liberalism and euro-fawning is egregious here.
He praises Luxembourg for having free transit across the country RIGHT AFTER he mentions Walmart (which is far from alone there) using it as a tax haven. And earlier he talked about the income of Walmart’s tax lawyers being dependent on screwing over communities elsewhere. But wow, free transit
Also Luxembourg has the highest car ownership rate in Europe and half of the people who work in the country live outside it because it’s too expensive.
Walmart losing out in Germany to “local retailers like Aldi and Lidl” and because countries in Europe have “strong unions”
And of course there’s the incessant praise of small businesses and “mom and pop stores” like they are somehow fundamentally different (almost every big chain in Europe began as one guy with one store). His aforementioned description of chains like Aldi and Lidl as “local” in comparison to fucking Walmart might as well read: “I don’t want to lick the boot of a FOREIGN capitalist”. Especially when he mentions 60 percent of Walmart stuff being made in China when talking about “money leaving the community”, as if that percentage doesn’t hold true for almost anything.
Liberal idealism that you can just contain their size with regulations.
He’s had his issues before but now I actually dislike him, the glazing in Europe has gone too far, and I live in the country he praises the most.
Yeah, a bunch of YT channels in the urbanist space are anti-communist and pro-market to a really bad degree. Canadian channel I watched a couple weeks ago was both-sidesing the housing crisis by saying “the left” needs to be more open to market solutions (even though public-private partnerships are literally part of the reason nothing gets built here and one of the guests in the video basically said as much). Stupid to think there’s even been a “left” substantially in power enough here to affect housing like that.
The channel was Oh, The Urbanity or whatever. Already wiping them from my memory.
Yeah, “Oh, the Urbanity!” Ugh…
To those patterns I’ll add sentiments along “we don’t make buildings like we used to” and a “small is beautiful” mentality that often leads to an outright hatred towards modernist architecture that feels completely disconnected from material circumstances.
I can’t watch oh the urbanity just because for some reason their voices sound like 2010’s era voice generators to me.
lol
i think a factor in this is that these talking points are usually produced as a result of interacting with local governments that have low ambitions and tight budgets alongside being influenced by a tiny minority of fervent conservative retirees.
“it has been done in place X so it’s doable” “it’s not a radical solution” “it’s market based” “we’ve done this in the good old days” “it’s gonna save us money” “it’s gonna help small businesses” “it’s gonna help property values”. it’s all geared towards addressing the anxieties of the local councils. i think it’s partly deliberate for the content creators in the urbanist space to self censor so that if someone takes their arguments to their local government they have a better shot of being enacted.
kinda unrelated but this trend of “urbanism” is kind of reminding me of the “flag community” in the sense that both of these communities in online spaces turned a set of guidelines for better design into dogmatic rigid rules that must be followed and evangelized to the point of sucking life out of everything. im sure Amsterdam is a fine city but every place can’t be Amsterdam and not every city planning or architecture must be replaced by european ones.
and not every city planning or architecture must be replaced by european ones.
just about every place i’ve ever been would be improved by not being post-automobile american and if we’re not gonna do land back any time soon we might as well have amsterdams instead of suburbs.
My benefit-of-the-doubt interpretation was that they’re saying there’s other ways of building sustainable cities like socialist micro-blocks in various architectural styles, not simply a kneejerk defense of car-centric design a la “well some of it is necessary”
sure, i’m just dying for any improvement
I get you, it is the reason I hadn’t really minded his rhetoric up until now and brought up the stuff about small businesses at the end or the use of the worst of North America as a reference point for declaring Europe a utopia: he’s targeting average Americans/Canadians so I’m not expecting him to go “and all this is the natural progress of capitalism, so no mercy for the petty bourgeois”. But this time I found him exceptionally reckless l, especially on his rose-tinted picture of Europe, that I could no longer ignore him. We have shitty suburbs and hypermarkets too.
I generally appreciate this channel but agree this video was particularly lib and included a lot of cherry picking regarding Europe.
He also tends to over emphasize small businesses in his analysis, but that’s not surprising considering he doesn’t seem to be a leftist.
Are there any actually leftist urban planning channels?
For those people who have Nebula:
https://nebula.tv/videos/notjustbikes-these-ugly-big-box-stores-are-literally-bankrupting-citiesI found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
