EcoGecko

Deciding the Next Video: Your Vote Matters!

Hello everyone,

As mentioned in the new video post, I'm leaving it up to you to decide what our next video topic will be. The options are described below. This poll is only open to Patrons, so your vote counts! 

Our first topic is about the rise of local control and gated communities in the United States and elsewhere, with a special focus on "The Villages", an infamous master-planned development in Florida. This video would draw on social theory about tourism, fear of crime, and the "resortification" of built space to examine the interaction of conservatism, privatization, and inequality in America's neighborhoods, and speculate on where class segregation is headed in the US given current trends. 

The second topic is about ancient cities, specifically, what ancient sites in early Mesopotamia, Neolithic Europe, and Copper Age India can tell us about society, egalitarianism, and democracy in early human civilization. There's been a lot of great literature recently debunking the common belief that agriculture led to both urban life and hierarchy in human society, along with evidence about early democracy and self-government at the dawn of urban civilization. 

The third topic is best practices in building better suburbs. We addressed this at the end of the recent "Building Better Suburbs" video, where I briefly described how nations much poorer and smaller than the US have addressed housing crises through large-scale, progressive, affordable projects. The idea here is to expand this out to a full video, exploring exactly how these projects are created, including details of financing, design, and democratic consultation.

New Video and Poll for New Topic

Hello everyone!

As promised, I'm returning to a more regular video creation and posting schedule. This time, we're stepping back from cities for a moment to start a new, sporadic series: Journal Clubs. In these videos, I'll be reviewing the cutting-edge academic literature on a specific socioeconomic topic. Don't worry, this channel is still (mostly) about urban planning--but I'll occasionally address other topics as well. In this episode, we review the evidence to determine if Americans are getting richer or poorer, and why this is.

As usual, this video will remain exclusive to you for five days before being made available for everyone. 

In addition, I will generate a Patron-exclusive poll in a separate post to decide our next video topic. I also welcome your suggestions in the comments of both posts. I will leave the poll open for about a week before selecting the topic based on your votes. The topics are described in more detail within that other post.  

New video! Alternatives to sprawl and building better suburbs

Hello everyone! 

My last few videos have been relative downers, and so this time I have some hopium for y'all. For the next week you should have exclusive access to my longest video yet, in which we review examples of groundbreaking, livable, transit-oriented, and family-friendly suburbs that have been built in recent decades in Denmark, Austria, Germany, and Sweden. We conclude by reviewing policy changes that would allow any country to build better 'burbs, rather than the endless sprawl. 

I apologize for the delay--I moved to Amsterdam for grad school over the last few months, and the combination of the move and the new classes completely halted work on the video for a while. I've settled into a more consistent life pattern now however, so new content should come slightly quicker. The move also disrupted my recording environment, so you'll notice that the audio quality is a bit iffy at times in this video. I will work to improve that for the next video. 

As usual, if you spot any editing issues that I missed, let me know and I'll re-upload before making the video completely public. Thank you again for your patience!

New Video and Future Video Plans

Hello all!

Thanks for your patience as I've put this new one together! This time we're talking about the revolution in urban policing that has taken the US by storm in the last thirty years: broken windows policing. While it has done little to address serious crime, we discuss how the broken windows strategy is actually a critical component of America's urban transformation in the last thirty years, forming an illusion of order and prosperity to prop up a society increasingly plagued by soaring inequality and intractable social problems. It's a bit of a downer this time around, but I felt this was a topic that must be discussed, even if the outlook seems quite bleak.

The next video is already in the works, and should come together much more quickly. Since this video is quite pessimistic, I've decided to put together something more optimistic: a video documenting the best alternatives to sprawl from around the world, demonstrating what's possible and what the US can strive for in the future.

However, I do want to give y'all some input in exchange for your generous contributions, so I will be putting up a poll sometime soon to decide on the topic for the video after that. If you have any ideas on what should be included in the poll, please leave them in the comments below and I will select those that appeal to me the most for the final poll.

I also wanted to briefly mention the reason for the delay. I've been in the midst of graduate school applications since March, which dramatically slowed down video production for the last few months. I'm glad to announce that I've been admitted to a program in the Netherlands and will be starting this fall. Since I will be in a graduate program while working part-time, I expect video production may slow down for the duration--I'm setting a target of at least one video every three months once school starts and will do my best to stick to it, but I can't guarantee anything.

New Suburban Wasteland and Future Videos

Hello all! After a year-long hiatus, we're back with some more Suburban Wasteland content, this time about the deleterious effects of suburban upbringings on children. 

This one was quite a doozy: I initially planned it to be split in half between children and seniors, but there turned out to be so much research just about kids that it cannibalized the other half of the video. 

This video is currently unlisted on YouTube, with the link available to all y'all exclusively for the next week. I will make it publicly available on the 29th, but until then it's all yours.

Additionally, I'm currently planning my next video and thought I'd ask all of you for feedback on what you'd like to see. I have a few potential topics in mind but I'm also interested in other ideas any of you my have. The current prospective topics:

• A first episode of an “Ancient Cities” series where we discuss what we know about ancient urbanism in Mesopotamia, the Indus River Valley, etc. and what anthropology and archaeology from those sites can tell us about human society historically and today.
• A video about broken windows policing and the role of “order maintenance” in cities today, generally at the expense of the poor, minorities, homeless, etc.
• A follow-up to the latest video in which I would discuss how to best build cities for children, focused more on concrete examples in Europe and East Asia instead of the usual academic paper spam.

Let me know what you think in the comments on this post!

Sotsgorod: The Socialist "New Cities" & Planning for Utopia

Hello all,

My latest video, the second in the Sotsgorod series, should now be accessible to all of you via the link included in this post. The video will be available to the general public on 2 February 2021.