Anyone here gotten into the New Urbanism/NotJustBikes/Strong Towns rabbit hole recently? For the last year or so I’ve been reading about urban planning and concepts such as car dependency, walkability, and the history of urban planning and city design in North America and it has completely changed how I look at the world and the built environment around me. Curious if anyone else here has fallen down this rabbit hole because I’ve been seeing more and more people mentioning some of these concepts in the various circles I’m in.

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For those who aren’t as familiar, I was first introduced to these concepts by the Youtube channel ‘NotJustBikes’. I had watched a few of his videos before, but the one that really got me hooked was this one:

For context, I’m American and grew up in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts. Now, I thought the suburbs were pretty boring and I savored the few chances I had to visit downtown Boston, or visit my relatives who lived in Chicago. Eventually, I went to college in New York City, and I was very lucky to be able to take advantage of study-abroad opportunities; spending a year in Florence, Italy as well as a year in Shanghai, China. I was also very lucky to be able to take advantage of both opportunities to travel all around Europe and around China, as well as visiting Japan and Korea. Needless to say, these places were all amazingly different and wonderful in their own ways and I learned a lot about what kinds of places I liked, and what kinds of places I didn’t like.

The concepts I’ve explored over the last year haven’t just helped me realize why I liked certain places more than others, but have completely changed how I look at my own neighborhood, and the entire built environment around me. And the crux of these issues boils down to a very simple concept: When you design places for Cars, you make places that are worse for everyone, including drivers. 

I could continue talking about these things for hours, and certainly some of my friends know me as “that guy who always talks about car dependency”, but it is so fascinating to me and a surprising number of other people I’ve talked to.

If you’re interested, besides checking out NotJustBikes, I also highly, *highly* recommend the book Strong Towns by Charles Marohn. In my opinion it should be required reading for everyone who lives in North America and it discusses many of these topics in detail and with examples that I could only hope to talk about so eloquently.
 

Anyway, figured I'd post here and see if anyone on the forum has fallen down the same rabbit hole 😄

Edited September 1, 20223 yr by StAgre

In some ways the most interesting part of all of this has been learning about the decline of american cities. We talk about things such as de-industrialization of the rust belt and the midwest, but the proliferation of car infrastructure is actually a major contributing factor. I think some of the saddest pictures I've seen are simply before and after pictures of American cities in the 1940s and 1950s, and the same locations but photographed today.

 

I appreciate your comments but honestly, this is not a proper site for this discussion. You should join a sociology group which would be more in line with your thoughts.