This Is What It Takes To Be a Strong Town. Is Yours One?
This Is What It Takes To Be a Strong Town. Is Yours One?
When it comes to improvements to your town or city or even country, it can often feel like you are powerless in the world. But you're not alone. A city is made of communities and communities are made of individual people.
One day our kids or our kids kids, or their kids, will be able to safely just walk to school. And it starts with finding your community, finding out what works from people all over the world, and then maybe introducing the ideas to your neighbours or voting for city/town council members who align with your goals.
I just wanted to drop a more hopeful message rather than news or information.
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To mention a couple more YouTubers in the strong town space I recommend following:
- Road Guy Bob explaining the reasoning behind traffic infrastructure and how municipalities often rethink and reimplement traffic features to meet the needs of the modern driver and the modern city.
- City Beautiful discusses city planning from transportation to urban design.
Good recommendations! I love both of those channels!
Here's some others that I follow. Maybe we should start a thread for content creators to follow.
https://www.youtube.com/@CityNerd "CityNerd is a channel and community that embraces all things cities and transportation, approaching things with a profound love for urban environments and an analytical bent. " Ray's dry, sarcastic, delivery of Top 10 worst lists are amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes Stories of great urban planning and urban experiences from the Netherlands and beyond. There are a lot of reasons why Dutch cities are so great; it's not just bikes.
I'm sure I don't need to actually list this one, but for completeness here it is. The OG.
https://www.youtube.com/@alanthefisher "The Numbers don't lie, and they spell disaster for you suburbs." Alan posts content on rail and urban ideas. "Just one more lane bro" guy.
https://www.youtube.com/@Shifter_Cycling "A channel about urban cycling, bike commuting and the ways we get around our cities with author, journalist and creator Tom Babin." This is a channel that's great for getting familiar with the more practical aspects of using bicycles as a mode of transportation.
https://www.youtube.com/@AdamSomething Makes urbanist content sometimes, other times he rants about various topics
https://www.youtube.com/@OhTheUrbanity "Oh The Urbanity! traverses cities by foot, bike, and public transit and aims to make informative and (hopefully) entertaining videos combining streetscapes and demographic data." Montreal based duo posting urbanist content
https://www.youtube.com/@RMTransit "Ever wondered why your city's transit just doesn't seem quite up to snuff? RMTransit is here to answer that, and help you open your eyes to all of the different public transportation systems around the world! " I have never seen someone as passionate or informed about transit systems worldwide as Reece from RM Transit
I myself live in an unwalkable urban hellscape dystopia, looking at strong town channels is like looking into another dimension!
When I travel, my absolute favorite thing to do is just walk around. And eat and drink and spend time among the people.
I grew up in one of those and have moved in the past couple of years to a place that is ever so slightly better but not by much. Currently it's a suburban sprawl dominated by single level strip malls surrounded by asphalt moats. It can be tough out there!