I just watched this video from Not Just Bikes on YouTube, I have few questions : urbanplanning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
Disclaimer: I'm from Slovakia, Eastern Europe, so bear in mind, I'm confusion
He keeps on talking about how cities and suburbs have to meet certain types of regulations. For example the parking lot size, the road width, etc. Then he says there can be only one family houses. There can't be any businesses inside these residential suburbs and also no schools.
My questions are:
What do you actually do? Are you always stuck inside? What did you do when you were a child and couldn't drive?
Why do you have these sorts of strange regulations? Are your officials so incompetent? Is this due to lobbying from car or oil companies? I don't get it.
Why is there no public transport? It seems like the only thing is the yellow school bus, idk.
He says there can be only one family houses. Why? Why can't you have idk a commie block in the middle of such a suburb? Or row houses or whatever.
Why are there no businesses inside these? I mean, he says it's illegal, just why? If I lived in such a place, I'd just buy a house next to mine and turn it into a tavern or a convenience store or whatever. Is that simply not possible and illegal?
These places have front and backyards. But they're mostly empty. Some backyards have a pool maybe, but it's mostly just green grass. Why don't you grow plants in your yards? Like potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes or whatever. Why do you own this land, if you never use it?
Whenever I watched an American movie and saw those suburbs, I always thought these streets were located somewhere in a small village or something. Turns out these are located within cities up to 30 km away from Downtown...
These questions are such a brutal own on the entire American project.
All these well meaning technocratic responders with their dense answers be like
Well first you have to understand that the Home Owners Loan Corporation in the 1930s—
Lemme :blob-stop: you right there
Capitalism and white supremacy. That's it.
:amerikkka:
I imagine the comments are pure cope of "personal choice, don't like clutter of cities, enjoy open skies, avoid congestion" etc.
Defending choices that they weren't given an alternative to and the alternatives were actively lobbied against and bulldozed
I mean, I guess we have some sort of these weird authorities that must give you the "permission to build" something. But nobody really takes it seriously here, unless you are going to build a giant building like a hospital or whatever. Here I be like: "Let's rebuild the roof and we can start tomorrow morning."
And my neighbors have nothing to say about my property. This is kinda ironic. I can't imagine living in these countries.
You can't imagine having weird authorities in your country? Weren't you under Stalin for like fifty years?
Some redditors have takes in the comments
You can’t imagine having weird authorities in your country? Weren’t you under Stalin for like fifty years?
Liberation of Czechoslovakia: 1945
Death of Stalin: 19538 is the same as 50, right?
You can’t imagine having weird authorities in your country? Weren’t you under Stalin for like fifty years?
Americans are literally prohibited by law from walking in the street and they have the gall to call other countries not free
Americans are literally prohibited by law from walking in the street
:what-the-hell:
I love that this dude is obviously already aware of the answers to all these questions and is just asking the to deliberately rub /r/urbanism's face in the steaming pile of shit that is the American suburb.
I'm now imagining just a suberb but some of the houses have like a cute pub inside as this guy suggested. Or a general goods shop maybe. And fuck now I'm sad because that almost makes them nice. Best Americans get is an Applebee's 8 miles away surrounded by a giant parking lot. That's your community.
this what decades of socialist policy building your post war cities does to a mf, and then they are confronted with the capitalist reality that built America in the post war
Careful posting shuch talk, least you summon the dread City Planning Expert. They lurks these forums, waiting for unsuspecting suburbanites to utter heresy against the great Petroleum Chariots that rule atop the food chain of our concrete biome.
I watched a city planner play city skylines once, can't find the video, and he basically just recreated the worst shit you could imagine lol even though he had infinite money cheats. All low density sub urb style home hell scapes with the sub urban style roadways and one arterial road to industry and jobs - NO public transit. Something about going to city planner school just warps your mind and makes you incapable of imagining better apparently.
Looks like what you described. Curved nonsensical streets full of dead ends in the suburbs, with one way to get to the commercial area
The funny thing about zoning is that if you had no zones at all and just let the "free market" decide where everything goes you would probably get massively more healthy layouts for towns and cities, moreso than what currently exists anyway. The zoning in america literally makes it hostile to human living.
They used to not have zoning but you'd get slums and shitty housing mixed into industrial smog belching factories or smelly and dangerous tanneries and shit. The advent of single family residential and the car has turned America into a hellscape though, there's just better zoning and planning than what we're doing. I get your point, though, its still shit even if we won things like separation between industrial and residential or fire escapes or ventilation etc.
Hot take but slums are objectively better than homeless people and factories should be near the people that work in them. Regulating their emissions is better than over regulating their locations and would solve that problem by a different means.
I'm sure homeless also existed when those slums were around but having them is better than eliminating them through policy-based gentrification which is something we fight non-stop here in the UK.
Lawns are a status symbol. "I have so much money I can have this empty land and waste effort maintaining it when it doesn't even give me anything back. I can pay people to bring me food instead of toiling in the soil to grow food."
I feel like the guy who wrote
this is actually just Yugopnik in disguise.Actually I just remembered, Slovakia is next to the Czech Repbublic, and was never a part of the Yugoslav SFR. I have finally had a proper :amerikkka:n moment.
You were just mixing up Slovenia and Slovakia. I did the same thing when I was bumming around Europe on a eurail pass, lol. Got to see Slovakia though, Bratislava was actually super nice. Plus it was the first country I saw that had the old soviet style rows of concrete apartment blocks.
:yea:
i way prefer czechia for this reason, might go back to the country to live for retirement. sucks the job situation there is so bad and trans stuff is not hot
Huh, I thought Prague was ok and kind of a mecca for digital nomad techbro types.
its cheap if you have a foreign remote job, yeah
also sex pesting is what those dudes are mostly in prague for
