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I know "walkable cities" is considered a buzzword and urbanists are increasingly seen as preachy liberal wonks, but we're literally right. If you spend enough time in an American city outside the literal bubble of your car you will see people carrying groceries along the shoulders of freeways, running for their lives to cross a street, or waiting for an hour to catch a delayed bus. If you read local obituaries about pedestrian and cyclist fatalities, they're not white tech bros in spandex but people in redlined neighborhoods without proper sidewalks. You spend enough time trying to own the urbanist nerds and oops, you start condoning a status quo that is overtly cruel and racist.

#god i wish that were me

Not only is this lady not the asshole, we should organize our society more like her life

Not to brag, but last year a couple good friends bought a house just the block down from mine.  And just this month another couple of friends but a house next to them.  So like, I’m pretty happy about having those wonderful people within easy walking distance.  Now I just need to convince a few more people to relocate to my neighborhood and it’s the next best thing to living in a commune!

This reminds me of living in an African village or compound. At the end of the day, the most important is having people around you and sharing living spaces and resources like gardens. It's also much healthier for ones mental health. Like a commune than isn't a cult or something similar is the best set up and it's interesting people somewhat naturally crave that.

this is why i can never look at brutalist architecture and enjoy it tbh. concrete is capitalism made visible, made into bridges and useless buildings. concrete is and looks so thoroughly violent to me. a look at big cities and their lack of permeable soil will break my heart.

I don't know if this makes sense but one of the reasons I love solarpunk so much is that it explicitly places hope at the center of the movement and therefore kind of.. takes away this daunting task of having to find hope on my own. Like, sometimes trying to stay hopeful in the face of everything that's happening seems impossible and can be so exhausting and isolating. But the hope that comes with solarpunk has been built up by a community of people rather than painfully and repeatedly dredged up out of some deep corner of my own mind, and it makes it that much easier to not fall into this well of dispair that seems to be constantly lurking nearby.