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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Does Density Solve Affordability? Explaining New York and San Francisco (youtu.be)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A well-researched video that explains why some dense urban areas are quite expensive.

TL;DW: Despite a substantial historic housing stock, our most expensive cities have built very little housing in recent years, leading to very low vacancy rates and high prices. Ramping up housing construction will be a necessary part of solving the affordability crisis.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It still irks me how there is incentives for private companies to build dense, but they literally cannot since zoning laws make it illegal. Like, how often are the incentives of corps aligned with the public?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Not often. I think in general they are not that aligned, it’s just that overly restrictive zoning and other bad policies have created such a severe crisis that the free market solution, which in a better society we might spend more time critiquing, has become dramatically superior to the status quo.

I think long-run we should still develop better systems to build and distribute housing according to the needs of the community as a whole instead of private investors and the wealthy, but those systems today are virtually non-existent, and they take time to build. Today, people are literally dying on the streets because housing is too expensive. I think it’s harmful to be too ideologically purist about solutions in the midst of such a serious crisis.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I totally agree with you. I'm simply astonished that we're in this situation at all.