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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What if bikes had been invented earlier? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 7 months ago by Nyssa@slrpnk.net to c/urbanism@slrpnk.net

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Why do alt-history people never focus on infrastructure or innovation? What would have happened had bikes been invented centuries before cars instead of around the same time? How different would the built environment and our culture have looked?

Personally, I think centuries of more established bike use would have created an infrastructure that limits how well cars take off. Cities would have entrenched themselves in a cheap, dense manner of transit.

I could be wrong, lots of dense cities were wrecked by the car when it was commercialized. I'd love to hear any thoughts :)

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[–] Rocketpoweredgorilla@lemmy.ca 5 points 7 months ago

We had bikes before cars, that wasn't the problem. People wanted the luxury of cars. You could go faster in heated comfort along with your entire family and cargo for hundreds of miles with next to no effort in virtually any kind of weather, something bikes still can not do.

Even if we had modern tech with bikes 200 years ago the rise of cars was inevitable due to their convenience and low cost at the time. Combine that with the push of the car industry and that most people were unaware of the true cost of the damage cars were causing, and bikes never stood a chance. Even now, bikes simply can't replace cars for everyone but at least they can make a dent in the problems that got us here.