Solarpunk Urbanism

Interesting article with some great linked research and practical solutions to the issue of traffic deaths.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1630538

It's nice to see more and more people taking action against car dominance in the UK, it feels like people are starting to take road safety more seriously after years of ignoring it.

I thought Alt Urbanism might enjoy this! A fun little tool which I mainly use to redesign annoying junctions that I've cycled through. It's a really good demonstration of just how much space cars take up and how much better things could be if less roadspace was dedicated to cars.

Your local NIMBYs don't like barrier-protected on-road bike lanes?

But you have wide footpaths?

Consider doing what Klaipeda (in Lithuania) did, and put your painted bike lane on the footpath, rather than the road.

Yeah, it's not an ideal solution, but it's better than fighting traffic.

@urbanism@slrpnk.net @fuck_cars@lemmy.ml #Urbanism #bike #bikes #bicycle #bicycles #cyclist #bicyclist #UrbanPlanning

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.

Dedicated bike lanes, separated from the road and the pedestrian footpath, in Vilnius, Lithuania.

It's a concept many local councils in Melbourne and Sydney are struggling with, apparently.

#urbanism #UrbanPlanning @Fuck_cars@fuck_cars@lemmy.ml @urbanism@slrpnk.net #cycling #bike #bikes #Vilnius #Lithuania #Lietuva

This is my full interview with Kim Irwin, the Executive Director of Health By Design about her work advocating for expanded transit and other urbanist policy in Indianapolis. It was a great conversation. Check out the more polished version of the video here.

Densely-packed housing makes urban areas vulnerable to overheating, pollution and dangerous wind gusts. The effects of climate change can aggravate these problems, but we can also work to prevent them. This can be done by simulating microclimates. …

… So, how can urban planners take a warmer climate into account? Advanced simulation tools such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are able to calculate air movements in a variety of environments. …

… CFD can also be used to make high resolution calculations of wind conditions, such as turbulence and wind speed. In this way, it will be possible to identify sites where urban wind turbines for local renewable energy generation can be profitably located.

Oh sure, these cafes and bars in a public square in Vilnius, Lithuania, attract a great crowd on a weeknight.

But.

Ask any Melbourne shopkeeper and they'll tell you this scene couldn't possibly be real. You know why?

No parking spots out the front.

#urbanism #UrbanPlanning @urbanism@slrpnk.net @fuck_cars@lemmy.ml

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