Urbanists Have a Communication Problem, and it’s Costing us Great Cities, Challenger Cities, Iain Montgomery, March 12, 2025

Because when you strip the life out of how you talk about cities to the point of it becoming more of an academic exercise, people just stop listening. They assume urbanists are an insular clique, speaking in a different language and not in ways actual people do, where they care about things like more beautiful buildings, affordable homes, shorter commutes, better amenities or simply a nicer public space to sit, that isn’t next to a busy road or homeless shelter.

True of many things.

This point is important:

Frankly, people don’t really want a “15-minute city”. Not because they’re a bad idea (spoiler: they’re not) but the term wasn’t meant to be a customer facing one. It’s true a city that has all you need in a 15 minute walk or bike is likely to be more enjoyable, less stressful, cleaner, safer, prettier and well, easier to live in. And that might involve using a car sometimes. Cool. But it might also be so good to walk, bike or use transit it, that you wouldn’t even think about getting in your car.

It’s rare for urbanists to talk like that.

Jargon isn’t just boring or dense. For people who already have a certain generalized distrust of elites, it can induce more distrust. You wonder if they talk like this because they’re concealing something. And you can say to that, “Well, then the people are stupid!”, or you can, “I’d rather win than make a point.” And that’s not to say that the people are stupid—I think a distrust of impenetrable language is probably a healthy impulse, frankly. (I wrote a review of The 15-Minute City—check it out, the bit about speaking in plain language was one of my main points. I also did a podcast about my review and this topic in general.)

And this:

Nobody sells a holiday destination by showing you zoning maps. No travel show host has ever said, “This city has a well-balanced modal split!” and made you want to visit. Instead, they make you feel it. The magic of walking through Golden Gai and sampling a few sakes and meat skewers is pretty awesome though. The joy of effortlessly hopping on a tram in Vienna to get around the surprisingly vast numbers of things to see, do, eat and drink. The serendipity of finding an incredible pastry shop in Lisbon, because cities designed for people make life more interesting.

Basically, show don’t tell. And there’s another point I’ll add here: a lot of urbanists and people in adjacent areas are sick of having NIMBYs shoot down any tiny reform in this direction. I think to some extent they end up in a responsive, anti-NIMBY mode when communicating, because they can already hear the often-absurd objections to literally everything. But in addition to “show don’t tell,” one of the keys to “selling” urbanism/walkability/mixed-use/etc. is to make the NIMBYs look nuts to regular people.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who are kind of weakly but by default NIMBY. Their impulse is to groan when they hear about some new development. But they have absolutely no idea that people go to public hearings and chant and boo and shout people down. They’ll nod if you explain how making the hearing at 8pm on a weeknight makes it hard for a lot of regular folks to attend. They’ll think it’s suboptimal that a store can’t even rent an empty an storefront without a zoning fight. They think it’s kind of crazy that zoning reforms or development proposals get tied up in litigation for years. They don’t affirmatively want or like the urbanist stuff (or they don’t think they do—I think many haven’t thought about any of this much at all), but they’re not obstructionists. A lot of those regular people might even be latent allies. Just a thought.

Read the whole thing.

The Office Is an Efficiency Trap, Wired, Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel, December 9, 2021

With a few utopian exceptions, all of these designs have been oriented toward efficiency and productivity. Not in the service of less work, but in the hopes of fostering a life enveloped by it.

Maybe, although if people feel this way in their home offices too, it has a lot to do with the nature of modern office work as much as the nature of the modern office. (The piece does consider that point.)

This is the main thrust of it: “It’s an alluring vision: What if our tools could actually, legitimately, make us work less? And what if the time we regained from stamping out inefficiencies was truly ours?”

Now I can see the ways in which technology has shrunken and expanded work at the same time. It’s a lot like a concept I learned from my environmentalist professor in college known as the “hedonic treadmill”: that a higher material standard of living makes up happier for a little bit, but then our expectations adjust upward and we experience the same subjective happiness, but at a higher resource cost. His example was washing machines, and better washing machines over time. The more clean the clothes can be made, the more you demand clean clothes. The work expands to meet the potential. There’s never any point where your brain says “That’s that job crossed off the list forever!”

The classic example of Blackberries and then modern smartphones putting your boss in your pocket 24/7 is a similar kind of thing. It facilitates things that might have been more drawn out in the old days, but it absolutely also generates more demands and expectations. Inefficiency is a hedge against…whatever that is.

On the other hand, I had enough of an old-school work ethic drilled into me that the idea that stamping out inefficiencies should gain us “me time” sounds kind of…lazy and unambitious. I guess the key is a good job means you’re challenged and given new opportunities as you master old ones. If you just run out the clock doing nothing or if you just get handed pointless busywork, that’s not a good job.

This is the conclusion of the piece, and I’m not sure I buy it:

We love our old work friends. We’ve been to their weddings; we’re watching their kids grow up; we continue to share our lives with them. Those actual friendships aren’t what we regret, and they never will be. When we moved away from New York, however, we came to realize how work friendships had functioned as Trojan horses for work to infiltrate and then engulf our lives. These relationships didn’t make work-life balance more difficult. Instead, they eclipsed the idea of balance altogether, because work and life had become so thoroughly intertwined that spending most of our waking moments with some extension of our corporation didn’t seem remotely odd or problematic. It was just life.

Why Japan Succeeds Despite Stagnation, Uncharted Territories, Tomas Pueyo, February 16, 2025

This is an interesting, thought-provoking piece. I don’t entirely understand the economic analysis bit, and to what extent Japanese stagnation is “real” or not. Pueyo argues that it is, although productivity is high while GDP growth is very slow. I suppose that’s stagnation, but it’s also kind of mixed signals, to me, very much a non-economist.

There’s also this:

There is more to Japan’s stagnation than demographics. The challenges posed by falling population are magnified by a debt-funded resistance to creative destruction. This has kept Japan entrenched in industries where it lacks comparative advantage while stifling the emergence of new, dynamic sectors to replace uncompetitive ones.

I guess the issue with this is funding the care of an aging population (the demographic aspect being that combined with a low birthrate). But part of me wonders if the protectionist dream isn’t achievable. Why can’t a country collectively work hard, save, and then take it easy? Is there an absolute economic imperative to grow/compete/disrupt rather than pleasantly tread water? Or is this a kind of value judgment masquerading as a law of nature? (I asked this question of my international trade professor in grad school, who was George W. Bush’s lead trade negotiator, or USTR. For what it’s worth, she liked the question but came down against my curiosity on the matter.)

What’s interesting here too is the primary reason why Japan doesn’t feel stagnant: housing. Which makes me wonder, if you quantify the cost the housing problem imposes on Western and especially Anglo economies, how much does that take off from our nominal GDP growth?

There’s other stuff here too, and it’s a neat little diversion from my usual reading.

Moton, Motel 50, and More JBG Smith, Ryan’s Substack, January 20, 2025

A story of old-school American con and fraud, and a detailed history of an old motel whose surroundings have grown far more than anyone probably thought at the time. If this kind of thing interests you or you’re from the area, give it a read.

Related Reading:

New and Old #100

New and Old #101

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