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The Future of Cities

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Re: The Future of Cities

#31

Post by TeMPOraL »

enraged_camel wrote: post #27
rhapsodic wrote: post #9

> For a rich white dude up in a 50th floor penthouse, “the future of cities” might mean zipping around in a flying car while a robot jerks you off and a drone delivers your pizza. The guy must think people of color are incapable of attaining that level of wealth. Unintentional racism, but racism all the same.

Well, if you want to go there, it's also sexism. He said "dude". Does that mean he thinks women are also incapable of attaining that level of wealth? I think he simply wanted to rely on a common stereotype to refer to ultra-wealthy people who live completely different lives and are generally out of touch with reality.

Well, had the author said "black gal", half of the Internet would be on Twitter with pitchforks right now. I do believe that people breaking symmetry inherent in racism and sexism are creating a problem in the society. For any statement containing $race and $gender, it's either racist/sexist or it's not, regardless of the actual values of $race and $gender.

Re: The Future of Cities

#32

Post by TeMPOraL »

1_2__3 wrote: post #11
baron816 wrote: post #8

"We do damage to nature...and we do less damage to nature when we occupy less of it." Edward Glaeser is the man.

I have to admit this line of thinking never really resonated with me, and it resonates even less as I get older. My goal in life is not to have minimum impact on my environment, and yes, that includes nature . I think the nuance of the middle gets lost in these conversations. The right tends to think humans should have dominion over all (while ignoring the fact that we haven't "conquered" nature, and we have ample ev…

I agree.

And since there doesn't seem to be any other form of consciousness other than humans around, I'm going to say that the nature is here for us. Extereme right view is obviously stupid because we need a stable environment to survive. Extreme left view is equally stupid, because it's self-destructive. We're the only part of nature that can care; the rest of it doesn't care, it simply is.

So my goal, and my POV on the goals for society, is to be a responsible gardener. To exploit nature in order to safeguard our survival and comfort of this planet, realizations of our dreams and desires. And that involves a lot of pro-environmental efforts, because our natural environment is pretty helpful and damn useful if we don't go around and indiscriminately destroy it.

Re: The Future of Cities

#33

Post by TeMPOraL »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #25
lg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

everything from our pets to our lawns to our roads and farms does damage to biodiversity though, which ultimately makes all life less resilient.

Yay I'm not the only one! Preserving biodiversity is oft-unstated most important goal of environmentalism. It's our meta-darwinian imperative.

Why would we care about biodiversity? There are only two reasons that come to my mind, and both IMO should be addressed directly:

- because it's cool and fun to have all those cute plants and animals around

- because biodiversity reduces the chance of sudden ecological collapse that would leave us without food

Re: The Future of Cities

#35

Post by rmason »

snrplfth wrote: post #16
[deleted] wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

I live in Toronto and this is pretty much how it goes. (The city works in spite of planning, not because of it, generally.) Planners come up with some grand region- or city-wide objectives, with lots of criteria and performance metrics, and then when it gets down to the gritty job of building new stuff, it's all "we don't like it, because it's not what currently exists!" No surprise that the really big development te…

I was born in Detroit and I follow the city pretty closely. The mayor there recruited a city planner, Maurice Cox, who has been getting all sorts of favorable press.

The broken down state of the city's neighborhoods offers a unique opportunity to redesign them. Things like creating a walking path between two small colleges and creating biking paths from old rail lines. Cox wants to enable each neighborhood to have basic services within a twenty minute walk.

http://www.freep.com/story/money/business/columnists/2016/12...

Re: The Future of Cities

#36

Post by rhapsodic »

enraged_camel wrote: post #27
rhapsodic wrote: post #9

> For a rich white dude up in a 50th floor penthouse, “the future of cities” might mean zipping around in a flying car while a robot jerks you off and a drone delivers your pizza. The guy must think people of color are incapable of attaining that level of wealth. Unintentional racism, but racism all the same.

Well, if you want to go there, it's also sexism. He said "dude". Does that mean he thinks women are also incapable of attaining that level of wealth? I think he simply wanted to rely on a common stereotype to refer to ultra-wealthy people who live completely different lives and are generally out of touch with reality.

> I think he simply wanted to rely on a common stereotype to refer to ultra-wealthy people who live completely different lives and are generally out of touch with reality.

Well, yeah. Can you name any other race-gender combination aside from "white male" where negative stereotypes are tossed around as casually as this, by people who purport to be enlightened and fair-minded?

Re: The Future of Cities

#37

Post by cmurf »

[deleted] wrote: post #10
Synroc wrote: post #2

While I'm glad that this topic is getting addressed, that video was pretty difficult to watch. I know it would be unwise to spend extensive amounts of time on each topic in the video, but the way it was cut made it hard to think about the topic before moving on to the next part. Otherwise, this topic is likely what I want to focus my career in at some point, understanding how to improve the ways cities run, given how…

[deleted]

Don't include the tower in the initial reveal. Figure out a way to make it someone else's idea, that someone being the person who can sell it.

Re: The Future of Cities

#38

Post by cmurf »

rhapsodic wrote: post #9

> For a rich white dude up in a 50th floor penthouse, “the future of cities” might mean zipping around in a flying car while a robot jerks you off and a drone delivers your pizza. The guy must think people of color are incapable of attaining that level of wealth. Unintentional racism, but racism all the same.

That's a stereotype, not racism. It could be a cliche stereotype (rich white dude), which is itself a bit racist and sexist. But at the base level it's a stereotype, not racism.

Re: The Future of Cities

#39

Post by rhapsodic »

cmurf wrote: post #38
rhapsodic wrote: post #9

> For a rich white dude up in a 50th floor penthouse, “the future of cities” might mean zipping around in a flying car while a robot jerks you off and a drone delivers your pizza. The guy must think people of color are incapable of attaining that level of wealth. Unintentional racism, but racism all the same.

That's a stereotype, not racism. It could be a cliche stereotype (rich white dude), which is itself a bit racist and sexist. But at the base level it's a stereotype, not racism.

>That's a stereotype, not racism. It could be a cliche stereotype (rich white dude), which is itself a bit racist and sexist. But at the base level it's a stereotype, not racism.

Would you consider the cliche stereotype "black woman on welfare" to be racist?

Re: The Future of Cities

#40

Post by Tiktaalik »

[deleted] wrote: post #10
Synroc wrote: post #2

While I'm glad that this topic is getting addressed, that video was pretty difficult to watch. I know it would be unwise to spend extensive amounts of time on each topic in the video, but the way it was cut made it hard to think about the topic before moving on to the next part. Otherwise, this topic is likely what I want to focus my career in at some point, understanding how to improve the ways cities run, given how…

[deleted]

> My two cents: this incident illustrates the biggest obstacle to progressive urban policies: upper-middle class NIMBYs politics inform city planners, which ultimately results in policies that favor NIMBYs.

Ultimately its council that approves/disapproves development, so I think while you're right here that NIMBYs are dominant at the community consultation level, and can impact design choices here, ultimately this is a political problem caused by the fact that established land owners show up to vote and other people don't.

It's hard to speak to your 82m tower without more details, but there is a lot that goes into these design decisions. You're right that NIMBYism and politics is involved, but there are plenty of other of reasons why a tower of that scale may not be appropriate for that location. I think it's too simplistic to say that we need more residences, so let's max out the density on every opportunity we see. I'm a bit critical of this in fact, because an outcome from this approach is that rich, low density single family neighbourhoods are completely untouched by any development at all, while poorer, slightly higher density areas are constantly razed and gentrified. Inclusive zoning can mitigate some of the harms here, but ultimately this is clearly an inequitable design approach.

My one other thought is that with platforms like twitter urban planners are no longer faceless bureaucrats, so we can listen to them and try to understand what they're up to and what they're trying to accomplish in our cities. Toronto's chief planner is on twitter at https://twitter.com/jen_keesmaat

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