I know it’s an unpopular opinion given current circumstances, but I’ve always been a huge nerd about Russia. The history, the geography, the music, etc. And as an American, I’ve always found it fascinating how U.S.-Russian relations have fluctuated over time. We’ve gone from allies, to enemies, to frenemies. This doesn’t mean I support Z or Putin, of course. What are you a nerd about?
My friends would all tell you how tired they are of hearing me go on and on about urban planning and infrastructure.
The ways in which our communities are built have such a large and profound impact on our lives, yet most people give little thought to it. IMO a great deal of the social woes we’re dealing with (at least in North America) are caused or made worse by our lack of sensible city-planning, from carbon emissions to social isolation.
There exists so many cool and interesting ways to build solid, sustainable communities! It’s really exciting! Sadly I have to live that excitement by researching other countries. The only form of city-planning that seems to exist here in Canada is “highway going through a parking lot interspaced with strip malls and encircled by single-family housing suburbs”.
this is the one i always get most worked up about, just because it’s so important and no one seems to realize it
like good god if we just agreed to stop building terrible infrastructure we could have so much more pleasant lives, we would save lives, and we’d save money! AAAAAAAAAAAAA
Where can I learn more about this? It sounds interesting!
There’s a ton of good resources out there! If you’re in North America, Strong Towns is a great place to start. On YouTube there are great channels like Not Just Bikes, RMTransit, and City Beautiful.
We need to build a strongtowns community on here
That’s a really good idea. Just checked and c/strong_towns does actually exist! It’s not active but if we all start using it we could make it into something.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !strong_towns@lemmy.world
I subbed
I second the recommendation for Not Just Bikes on YouTube, probably one of the online content creators who’ve had the biggest effect on me. Another good one is Oh The Urbanity!
I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, but I’ve heard many recommend Confessions of a Recovering Traffic Engineer written by the founder of Strong Towns. Honestly, a lot of sources I’ve seen reference this book or are inspired by Strong Towns.
I’m into this too. Is there a good Lemmy community dedicated to urban planning and infrastructure?
This would be interesting to me as well!