𝕹𝖞𝖝 妛彁 :xf_nyxsigil: :xf_nyxdisapproving: on Nostr: you may think that my ranting on the tl about eastern bloc urban planning comes from ...

you may think that my ranting on the tl about eastern bloc urban planning comes from the position of being some kind of sheltered ignorant westoid leftist, like some "Holiday in Cambodia" type of shit

... but the thing is that this is all informed by my own experiences. the way the US has designed its cities is a form of perpetual class warfare. if you're poor, having to deal with owning and maintaining a car (which are known for being money pits that only lose value) is at best rather difficult. but in most places -- including in the city I live in which is relatively good as far as density, walkability, public transit, etc. compared to most of the US -- if you don't have a car you literally cannot get access to basic goods and services or get to work.

it actively makes my life worse and more difficult that I can't just walk to a nearby store and get some groceries for the week, or walk to a third space like a cafe to read a book/be on my laptop and people watch. there literally is a term for this in a different west coast city, the "Seattle freeze", that describes how the way the US designs its cities makes people more antisocial. and I'm saying this as a weird introverted socially awkward person. I'm very far from being an extrovert and even I recognize how much this is a sign of a sick society.

this also extends to my housing circumstances. because the US in the mid 20th century focused on designing its cities on car-dependent infrastructure, where people commute into the inner cities from the suburbs, there is a major problem in population-dense parts of the US with housing. because there is no dense housing, for a lot of other complicated reasons around being able to build shit. and this, too, makes my life actively worse as an impoverished tranny. I have been in a state of housing insecurity almost continuously for like a decade because affordable housing is difficult to come by and scaling up by having roommates is itself difficult, because most housing is built as single-family units.

by the way, this whole planning initiative around single-family housing was *explicitly* meant to create de facto racial segregation after the Civil Rights movement. the term "white flight" from the cities describes this. it's why "urban" is a euphemism white liberals use to describe Black folks. and they not only have systemically failed to plan cities well in the US but in fact actively made them worse by cutting through huge swathes of inner cities with highways and high-rise office buildings, driving up the cost of living, making them less walkable, and decreasing the amount of space available for people who actually live in the cities to have access to the things they need to survive. this is why the Black Panthers used the concept of internal colonialism to describe the conditions of Black people in the US.

this all is informed by my own circumstances, and it's troubling how often I hear people on fedi reproducing all these willfully ignorant fascist narratives about urbanism and city planning. the Nazis called it Lebensraum and it has a very clear and obvious lineage in reactionary ideology, class war, and racism that continues to this day and disproportionately affects people like me.

so yeah, eat shit, fuck you, I am not arguing about this