Testing Concepts on Reddit, Learn from Burns
If I've had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with you throughout the years, you probably know about my fixation with Reddit. My history reading Reddit and origins in digg-ing are boring and uninteresting, but the quality of content and information I've extracted from Reddit are nothing but the opposite.
On a different note, if you've read anything I've published over the last year, you know I've become equally fixated on urban design, urban planning, urban upgrade, and anything that touches the intersection of cities and technology.
This deep interest has lead me down many outlets outside of writing, including joining the Climate Reality Project action squad in Alameda County, starting and launching a business on housing affordability in Oakland, and working on some small-scale policy drafting for the City of Oakland on urban resilience and residential energy efficiency.
Lately, this interest has turned me on to urban design principles and learning about urban planning concepts on a macro scale. From the 15-minute City to the 1-minute City, all signs point to an urban design that decentralizes the core and distributes "value" from a city's downtown center to small urban districts where work and entertainment can all be found within smaller and smaller transit radii.
It's easy to get lost in these trendy concepts that are intentionally designed to conjure an image. They quickly take me down a path of exploration where I might combine several shiny ideas to create my own little concept city. But just as easily as these ideas come, they can and should be challenged.
Brasilia, the master-planned capital city of Brazil, is widely regarded as a failure in urban planning for its adherence to modernist architecture that compartmentalized the city and created a plan that segregated communities by socioeconomic position.
Yesterday, I found such a concept, posted by a brave soul named u/fantazity. In their post “Urban design concept for city centers, : base level,” they present their concept of an ideal city, where transit and personal motor vehicle infrastructure are designed on the ground level and the layer of the city for people is above — think of it like an apartment building where parking is relegated to the first floor and living is above.
In theory, the idea is idyllic — it separates daily life from the dirty and unsafe reality of cars.
But in practice, it's far from practical — it requires unnecessary infrastructure to vent fumes and heat, not to mention requiring a "clean slate." One replier captions it aptly: "Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure."
The thing is, despite the brutal and hostile response from the community, this person tried. They had good intentions and an eager disposition to solve systemic infrastructure problems. The solution may have been 100% off base, but when you work within the parameters of an informed, interested, and opinionated community like r/UrbanHell or r/urbanplanning, you'll find the feedback you need to evolve, even if it means collecting a few scars along the way.