I’m not an urbanist any more. I’ve been radicalized. The stabbing in Charlotte is not about the video, not about mental health and also not about transit. It is a painful indictment of every single urban policy that has “doubling down on failed ideas” as its preferred response. An indictment of everyone whose only solution is to throw more money at things, an indictment of activists, academics, weak policymakers, and even democracy, if we dig deep enough.
Those of us who love cities see them as man’s greatest creation. This is where man has developed innovations in healthcare, science, industry, commerce, and education. We love cities and we are not willing to see them die. We’ve tolerated enough, we’ve let ourselves be shamed into coexisting with squalor in the name of compassion. But that has to end. Charlotte might be our Rubicon (or, better, our frozen Delaware🇺🇸). Alea jacta est.
The word compassion has a Latin root that means shared suffering. Somewhere along the way, the fate of every city dweller became to celebrate suffering, and the Apotheosis was reached when suffering was shared. It is appealing to these high ideals that we have long justified putting ourselves in high risk of becoming a statistic. An isolated incident. An outcome of adverse socioeconomic factors. A sacrifice at the altar of progress.
What is the course of action for those of us who refuse to go gentle into that good night, who have hope that kindness, beauty, and truth can speak to those who want to hear, and inspire them to create? Rage. That is the course of action. Pure, unfiltered, unadulterated Rage, against the dying of the light. Against fear taking up all our living spaces. Against squalor. Against stubbornness. Against the greatest civilization the world has ever seen dying in the hands of stupidity.
Too long have our cities suffered. Too long has a twisted understanding of compassion trounced common sense. Too long have we been shamed into accepting it. Now is the time to build a new way. Forge a new path. Tread unknowns as the ancients trod, fearlessly, when they built the peace and wealth we now enjoy.
The name of the Greek goddess of peace was Eirene. She was also associated with prosperity and societal harmony. Often depicted holding a cornucopia for abundance, a scepter for authority, or an olive branch for peace. In ancient Greece, Eirene was revered in times of post-war recovery, embodying the restoration of calm.
The slavic form of Eirene is Iryna. Rage, rage. But build. Don’t let rage win. Don’t let them win.
Yeah sure we’re all maxis here but some don’t get paid to maxi and have other stuff to talk about. Is that even what plebs wanna use nostr for?
My vibe:
- Destination Branding and marketing
- Experience strategy for retail/f&b businesses
- Design coaching for storefront business owners
- Placemaking
I think it’s weird to have prices fluctuating based on the availability of a mostly useless metal. Like, what happens when we’re in a trade deficit and another country asks to redeem all its dollars for gold, so we end up with very little left? What happens when a gold miner stumbles across a large cache of gold?
These are not theoretical questions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/09/gold-standard.asp (specifically the world war 1 part)
It’s also silly because it doesn’t grow with our economy. Eg what happens in 30 years when people have hoarded all the gold? Or hell, a random google search shows that there’s only $12T of gold in the world. You want to contract the worlds economy so much?
It has to have an honest size. The game, however, is not hoarding metal but pursuing diverse interests, (hoarding, building, manufacturing, etc) which can’t be carried out if one is occupied all day beating others up to take their gold. How would the security men get paid? Who would feed them? Where’d they get their weapons? Hoarding doesn’t pay for any of that. So the game is breaking a few eggs to make an omelette that is larger each time. That’s how the economy grows and we get specialized and get to charge more for more complex things.
Physical scarcity and demand, as opposed to political will and trust, which have proven to be detrimental.
What do we normally talk about in urbanist spaces? The most successful social media posts belong to people who find a brand and stick to it.
They become trusted sources in a specific niche; people keep them in mind paired with specific issues and they are sought after when their expertise is required.
In time, brands evolve and find more and better ways of explaining the world and reaching effective solutions to serve their clients.
In the small network I converse with on social media and in person, we talk about cities and urban issues: transportation, Placemaking, housing, small businesses, economic development and Main Street.
Most of the chatter circles around efforts to make transportation more efficient and less polluting, designing streets in a more humane way, including everyone in the conversation and giving a hand to pillars of the communities.
We delve into construction, regulations and Historic Preservation. Some coach small developers and others teach tourism and planning officials about marketing, branding and urban design.
However, we rarely talk about the economy. The economy is a space where the sum of individuals’ logical choices about their daily lives create trends and shape societies around institutions.
Institutions are trusted elements of society. Nonprofits, charitable organizations and religious congregations, and also laws, unwritten rules or customs are examples of institutions.
Our role as observers of the economy, focusing on downtown revitalization, urban development, housing and other issues, is to try and use “Praxeology” or the study of human action, to understand the logic behind the choices that people make and the institutions they produce.
Sometimes, those choices will emerge as a fight or flight reaction, when subject to a shock.
The graphics below show the shock as it occurred. In 1971, President Nixon made a decision that eliminated the gold backing of the US Dollar. This process started with Bretton Woods, the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 and was cemented by the confiscation of gold bullion by FDR in 1930.
Fun fact. If you look at a $1 bill from before the war, you can read “Redeemable for $1 in Silver”, while new $1 bills conveniently omit that.
What this means is that political decisions, as opposed to the value of gold reserves, were to dictate 100% of monetary policy from then on.
Think of it as a credit card with no spending limit, that is not bounded by how much you can pay when dues come up. Let’s face it: both you and I would go to town, buying all sorts of things we don’t need.
We are putting up the wrong fight. We are strengthening a system that is designed to break up the wealth of the Middle Class and prevent upward mobility. Each new capital investment or program we pay for with debt is a nail in the coffin of our currency.
This is the reason why salaries haven’t increased since the 70s, and why housing, healthcare and education are more out of reach each year and why folks locked into student loans and other obligations are struggling to put food on the table.
And, importantly for us here in this space, it’s the reason why inequality, homelessness, displacement or crumbling infrastructure run rampant in our cities, aided and abetted by regulation that constantly, and hopefully unwittingly, erodes property rights.
So let’s talk about the economy and how, when we fix the money, we fix the built environment.
How would one know if this👆🏼 gets relayed or not? Still too new. Still too early.
Correct. Any taller and they need too large footprints and inhuman block occupation.
The Woolworth is IMNHO the best building in New York City. Built in a time before absurd zoning restrictions, where men of courage built wealth and manifested it in beautiful buildings. 
Yes. Slowly. At this point it’s mostly tech chatter but we’re the pioneers and there is value there.
Anyone talking about new private cities, charter cities, buying up entire declining cities and trying up new forms of governance? Among them: is anyone talking about how those cities should optimally look like?