this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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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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Mass transit must scale. An underground metro rail system is the most valuable intracity transit system, but it does not offer full value. A high-value comprehensive transit system also offers transit systems for getting users to the underground metro rail system from their local sources and destinations. This is usually done by trams, buses, or treating trams as the intermediary value transit system between buses and underground metro rail systems. If you rely exclusively on a high cost, high-value system like an underground metro rail system, your system will not be comprehensive enough as it will not reach all of your city's citizens, leaving many to rely on car infrastructure to get to and from the metro rail system stops.
Here in Greece, only one city (the capital) has an underground metro rail system and the second largest city has its metro system being built for the last ~20-30 YEARS. That city used to have a tram decades ago, but they removed it and now it only has buses/taxis...
You may ask why didn't they make a new tram.. Well, money/bribery (~most likely). That city may not be ideal for a tram, but still they could work it out and have it fixed much much sooner and cheaper and in the meantime the could be building the metro.. It said the main part will be finished by the end of the year (though this was said multiple times in the past)..
YUP. Don't refuse to create ad-hoc lower value transit systems because, hypothetically, you could have a monorail or underground metrorail. Some mass transit is better than no mass transit, and higher values of mass transit now are better than superior mass transit in the future.
And also hyperloop is never the answer.
Yeah, something ~is better than nothing, but they could do so much better if they weren't greedy..
The metro rail system in the city I moved away from recently had an expansion fail to open for 3 years because the contract selection process involved cronyist intervention by a former president and the result was the buildings not being built with safe concrete for building