Solarpunk Urbanism

A huge congratulations to @philipthalis on his well-deserved award.

Philip is undeniably both one of Australia's most respected architects and a tireless advocate for good urban design.

More importantly, he's not afraid to speak up publicly against bad state government planning decisions, as he did with Barangaroo, even when there's a personal cost.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/architect-philip-thalis-paid-the-price-for-being-outspoken-now-he-s-won-the-profession-s-gold-medal-20240510-p5jcjb.html

@urbanism #Planning #UrbanPlanning #Cities #Urbanism #Buildings #Architecture #Transport #Architect #Walking #Walkability

Inklusibo’s new manual on housing rights provides an in-depth narrative of the urban poor’s right to housing and livable spaces. This is the first free publication under the Housing and Living Spaces category.

Why do alt-history people never focus on infrastructure or innovation? What would have happened had bikes been invented centuries before cars instead of around the same time? How different would the built environment and our culture have looked?

Personally, I think centuries of more established bike use would have created an infrastructure that limits how well cars take off. Cities would have entrenched themselves in a cheap, dense manner of transit.

I could be wrong, lots of dense cities were wrecked by the car when it was commercialized. I'd love to hear any thoughts :)

From Australia to Ontario, cities are taking up unnecessary stretches of concrete and asphalt, allowing nature to take hold in their place.

This is quite a long text, but you don’t need to read the chapters in order and each chapter is on a different urban experiment. It looks at “radical municipalism” or a communities taking back power of their city and rebuilding it into what they want to make of it. The rebel cities are:

1. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2. Rojava, Northern Syria
3. Chiapas, Mexico
4. Warsaw, Poland
5. Bologna, Italy
6. Jackson, Mississippi
7. Athens, Greece
8. New York City, New York & Warsaw, Poland
9. Reykjavík, Iceland
10. Rosario, Argentina
11. Newham, UK
12. Valparaiso, Chile
13. Porto Alegre, Brazil; Greensboro, North Carolina
14. Montevideo, Uruguay
15. Communes, Venezuela
16. Cape Town, South Africa
17. Goma, DR Congo
18. Jemna, Tunisia
19. Gdansk, Poland
20. Dakur, Senegal
21. Mumbai, India
22. Phan Ri Cua & Binh Thuan, Vietnam
23. Seikatsu, Japan
24. Catalonia, Spain
25. Barcelona, Spain
26. Denmark and Scotland

(5) To deviate from our defined spaces on the street is to become a “jaywalker.” “Jaywalking” was an invention by automobile capitalists to shift blame on accidents from cars and drivers to pedestrians. After all, the jaywalker shouldn’t have been on the road if they didn’t want to be run over!

(6) The creation of “jaywalking” then becomes part-and-parcel of the enclosure of the street reserved for automobile use.

(7) That is to say: to create a jaywalker, one must create jaywalking. Ursula Le Guin says it best: “‘To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.’”—from The Dispossessed. (Le Guin, 1974).

(8) Thus, the enclosure of the streets needs no physical barriers (though these may still be used). The enclosure is ideological—its manifestation is the invention of jaywalking. This criminalization of jaywalkers is in turn enshrined through ordinances and enforced by the police.

(9) Yet the police are not actually necessary to enforce this enclosure. Michel Foucault’s reading of the panopticon reminds us that we do not have to be watched at all times to ensure that we police our own behavior. The very regime of enclosure, its ordinances, and its police has accustomed us to obey its delimitations, even if we are not actively policed. That, and of course, the very threat of death by automobile.

(10) Yet the invention of jaywalking itself is part of a larger logic of organizing our cities according to the logic of automobiles—an automobile urbanism (if it may be called that).

I believe our cities should belong to us. They should be cooperative, co-creative, ecological, and egalitarian spaces, by and for the people. We have so much untapped urban potential just waiting to be explored. Join me as we determine how to build a solarpunk city.

The ‘right to the city’, as a slogan, a demand, and a body of intellectual work, calls for a radically democratic city. It comes from the work of Henri Lefebvre – French philosopher, Marxist, sociologist, flamboyant revolutionary – from a short piece that came out in 1968, that canonical year in left wing mythology. The right to the city is an appealing idea, because it promises to unite disparate urban struggles on a whole range of issues – from anti-gentrification activism to reclaim the streets marches, community gardens to housing co-ops, anti-police violence campaigns to the fight for better public transport, and so on – into some kind of radical whole; a vision that coalesces around the demand for a city that is more substantially controlled by those who live in it.

Well, mods have enabled walkable cities for some years, but it didn't work well. Recently, the modders of SimCity 4 invented a new way of building walkable cities. And I have to say, it's pretty fun.

SimCity 4 is a game that has well-internalized the automobile-centered urbanism of the United States. But despite these faults, community interventions through game modification can allow players to design entirely new urbanisms in the game that breaks with car-centrism.

In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.

This book is about that.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/652429

https://twitter.com/Ollie_Cycles/status/991440149606264833

mobilitate.eu/tpbi-consulta-pi…

In 1957, Valencia experienced a devastating flood that forever changed the city’s relationship with the Turia River. Nearly 3/4 of the city was inundated by floodwater and over 60 people lost their lives. The following year, the city embraced a plan to divert the river around its western outskirts to the Mediterranean Sea.

A park wasn’t the city leadership’s first idea—in an effort to alleviate traffic congestion, they envisioned an elaborate highway system through the heart of the City. But by 1970 the citizens pushed back and protested the highway proposal under the motto “The bed of Turia is ours and we want green!” By the end of the decade, the City approved legislation to turn the riverbed into a park and commissioned Ricard Bofill to create a master plan in 1982. The plan created a framework for the riverbed and divided it into 18 zones. Currently, all but one of the zones has been developed.

The resulting design establishes a monumental 5 mile green swath within a dense and diverse urban fabric, including the historic center of the city, and has an average span of 600 feet, from bank to bank. The park comprises over 450 acres and is characterized by bike paths, event spaces, active recreation fields, fountains, and many notable structures.

A bit more history and a lot of pics of the park in the former riverbed.

Fun fact: now the traffic bridges don't go above the river, they go above the park.

Openstreetmap, for those interested in a detailed view.

Do you know of any other weird parks like this?

Using ideas submitted by residents, Rijnvliet is implementing an ecologically resilient 150,000 m2 urban food forest with over 200 species of (edible) flora that doubles up as green infrastructure offering recreational benefits and ecosystem services, including water management, reduction of heat, and cleaning the air.

With the projected 75% of the world's population living in Urban centers by 2050, forecasters are pushing for "bolstering" nature within cities for resiliency and economic reasons.