Fuck Cars
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
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Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
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No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
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Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
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No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
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No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
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No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
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No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
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I learnt from a, Tom Scott, I think? that malls were originally intended as community hang-outs, before it turned out packing them completely with shops was more profitable.
Basically this?
@uis @milicent_bystandr The architect you're thinking of is a guy by the name of Victor Gruen.
The short version is that he was a socialist from Austria, who wanted to basically recreate the great walkable streets and plazas of Vienna indoors in Minnesota.
His views on cars, ironically, wouldn't be out of place on a @notjustbikes video: "Suburban business real estate has often been evaluated on the basis of passing automobile traffic. This evaluation overlooks the fact that automobiles do not buy merchandise."
He hated cars, and saw this as an antidote to car-dependent development:
"But Gruen had a grander vision. He wanted to re-create in microcosm the walkable, diverse and liveable town centres he so loved in Vienna.
"Part of his motivation was seeing how reliance on the automobile was affecting cities. In his classic book, Shopping Towns USA, Gruen rails against the development of drive-by shopping centres focused on catering to passing motorists.
"The original plan was for commerce to be broken up by numerous attractions like aviaries, fountains and works of art. The mall itself would be surrounded by residences, offices, medical facilities, schools and everything that made a community.
"The mall was inward-looking, not to keep people focused on spending but to shelter pedestrians from cars and away from their fumes and noise.
"Here’s the first painful irony, then. Rather than developing the new mixed-use centre envisioned by Gruen, the only thing built was the mall and car parks. The grand vision was reduced to a monoculture of big shopping brands surrounded by massive car parks, all accessible only by automobile."
https://theconversation.com/triumph-of-the-mall-how-victor-gruens-grand-urban-vision-became-our-suburban-shopping-reality-172393
So the modern American shopping mall is basically a perversion of Gruen's original walkable town square/main street in a building vision.
#Urbanism #UrbanPlanning #capitalism #cars #malls
Neat. Thanks for the interesting write up!
@milicent_bystandr
I just read a blog about that today:
https://www.beyondeasy.net/2017/06/ghost-malls-dissipation-of-space-process.html?m=1
@uis @ajsadauskas