The Deleted Scenes - New and Old #171
What Young Fogeys get wrong about housing, Unherd, Travis Aaroe, July 4, 2024 Unherd is one of those sometimes-interesting right-wing/anti-woke-ish online magazines. At least, that’s my impression of it. This here fits the interesting category: it’s basically a quasi-anti-urbanism piece from a European/British point of view. Specifically, it critiques the conservative framing of YIMBY as a “return to an urban past” as being kind of facile, and not really how societal changes work. Okay, I’m listening. After listing the highs and lows of Renaissance Italian cities, Aaroe writes:
You see the concealed argument he’s making: calling an old city a “15-minute city” is projecting a newfangled idea into the past, sort of like speculating that Shakespeare was gay or whatever (not that that’s “newfangled,” either). When really, it’s backwards: “15-minute city” is trying to adapt an ancient idea into modern advocacy and policymaking language. This is a little more interesting:
In other words, urbanists read a sort of quaintness, almost pastoralism, into old cities, which is inconsistent historically with how they functioned and why they arose. Interesting. Aaroe, unfortunately, misses a chance to cite Russell Kirk, who called the car a “mechanical Jacobin” all the way back in 1962!
That date is important: unlike a young person today, someone in the 1960s could still remember life before the total dominance of the car. Russell Kirk wasn’t just thinking up a figure of speech; he was actually describing something he had seen. There’s a lot here, and it’s apparently in good faith and some of it is worth thinking about. He asks, for example, what “low-traffic neighborhoods” mean for tradesmen and other people who need a vehicle to do their actual work, like plumbing and electrician jobs. It seems easy enough to say, “Just let them drive easily, then,” but maybe it actually isn’t—maybe there are some irreducible costs and frustrations in trying to remake classical urbanism in the modern world. My largest pushback would actually be this: most of what Aaroe writes is within bounds for arguments among urbanists. Disagreeing with some of the views of this one particular faction he calls “young fogeys” doesn’t put him, as he seems to think it does, on the outside. So many critics of this or that thing “urbanists” say are placing themselves outside the fold, thinking their disagreement is fundamental, missing that we’re a diverse bunch. Give it a read. On Pilgrimage and Package Tours, The Hedgehog Review, Tara Isabella Burton, Summer 2024
Tara Isabella Burton is a really interesting writer. I won’t spoil more. Read the whole thing. The Carry-On-Baggage Bubble Is About to Pop, The Atlantic, Ian Bogost, February 14, 2024
Okay, now that’s interesting: increasing the capacity for carry-on bags will mean more travelers bringing more of them, which means it will remain just as hard or even harder to get an overhead space for one. Or as Lewis Mumford put it, about highway capacity and traffic congestion, building more lanes to ease congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity. I was intrigued when I saw this piece, because I’ve flown a few times this summer and have almost needed to check my carry-on the gate a couple of times. I noticed that a lot of people had a carry-on plus a big personal item. Lots of couples had two carry-ons. We did. I have almost no leg room by the time I stuff my massively overstuffed backpack under the seat in front of me. Anything to avoid paying for a checked bag and waiting at a baggage claim carousel. Anything to not have my bags lost or damaged. And it seems that increasingly everybody does this. Plus, it looks like almost all of the carry-on bags technically exceed the maximum dimensions, though unless you’re lugging a steamer trunk nobody ever seems to check the measurements. Bogost has no true solution, nor do any of the people he interviews, but several suggest we should simply pack less. There is a sort of panic you feel as you stuff a bag. I always feel the need to bring a second pair of “nicer shoes” that I never end up wearing, for example, and by the time a trip is over I’m thinking about how we probably could have brought one fewer pieces of luggage. If everybody did that… You Need More Neighbors, D Magazine, Matt Goodman, April 9, 2024
I’ve watched Joe Minicozzi present before, and he’s great. He describes how putting three or four floors and businesses in the bottom—like an old Main Street—yields far more revenue per unit of land than the spread-out stuff we typically build in suburbia. Why is it like that? It’s not magic. It’s commerce. It’s efficient land use. Minicozzi doesn’t say everything we build should be as efficient or financially productive as possible. Rather, he says he wants to empower cities to make the right zoning and planning choices for their finances based on his findings. He’s as much a consultant as an advocate. And whatever you think of what we should be building, can you agree this is no way to do it?
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Banking Your Shot
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What Do You Think You're Looking At? #171 ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
Soft On Cars, Tough On Driving
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Taking driving seriously and treating the car with respect go hand in hand ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
Sleepdriving
Saturday, July 13, 2024
You can't stop and smell the roses speeding in your car ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
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