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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32908 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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The concept of '15-minute cities' came up a few weeks ago, but since then it appears to have piggybacked off a local dispute in Oxford to become the locus of the latest so-called 'far-right conspiracy theory'. The proposed measure certainly codes as dystopian to me on this side of the pond, even as someone who is generally supportive of new urbanist ideas, but I can't speak to how it plays in Europe.

I've often felt that the culture war battle lines on these urban planning issues have not been as clearly drawn as those on gender, immigration, or abortion, mostly due to a lack of attention, but that time appears to be coming to an end. Though seeing as we already can't build anything, I suppose it isn't much of a loss.

The proposed measure certainly codes as dystopian

Ssome questions (not a gotchas) to try to probe your sense of dystopian:

If they had just removed a central road and made it ped/bike only, would that be comfortable to you?

How do you feel about toll roads generally? What about modern highly automated toll systems?

How do goods get into local stores? Vans and trucks? Then very few vehicular roads can be removed. Particularly not those roads used to reach local shops.

How it works in Europe is that vans and small trucks are allowed in in the early mornings to restock shops and then the road is pedestrianised during business hours.

A van can traverse a cobblestone path if it's wide enough, you don't need a proper road which such a small amount of vehicular traffic.

Either making the central road car-free or a permanent toll road would be preferable in my eyes. The core of it is that I already find the omnipresence of security cameras in the UK to be unsettling and the measure here doesn't go far enough in visually distinguishing the new state from the old (i.e. the way installing a large toll booth would, even with the same automated systems) to remove the nagging fear that fines for driving in other locations could be added in the future without public knowledge.

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