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A Traditional City Primer (and how modern cities are utterly broken, and even New Urbanism doesn't fix the core issue)
(www.andrewalexanderprice.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
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Solarpunk Urbanism
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A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.
- Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — 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.
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@PuddleOfKittens It is very much a mistake to suggest that "traditional" cities grew "organically" or "naturally", or even that they represent "human scale". Human settlement has always been subject to land use restrictions. The European and Japanese cities featured in this article as exemplars evolved they way they did under severe feudal land restrictions, not because there was any kind of conscious choice to build that way. Article is 11 yrs old, "New Urbanism" is no longer fashionable.
Ok, how about the city of Pompeii (which was entombed by the volcano in ~50BC), or Tenochitlan/Mexico city (which was built before European contact, or the city of Cusco (ditto), or the city of Petra (which had plenty of spare desert)? Or Venice, or Mateba, or pick-a-town-any-town.
What "severe feudal land restrictions" do you mean? Can you elaborate?
Here on slrpnk.net I see quite a few "new urbanists" endorsing solarpunk visions with wide streets. I posted this partially in response to that.
I could link a newer article, but this one works just fine. Articles don't have an expiry date, if you have an actually valid criticism then say it.
If it helps, replace "organically" with "incrementally and due to decentralized choices".