City Beautiful

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Watch this video on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/citybeautiful-can-i-design-the-perfect-neighborhood-street

We are used to the usual street in front of our houses: wide, parking, driveways, maybe sidewalks. But is there an optimal design? One that improves safety and makes it nicer to live along?

# Resources mentioned in this video

- Oregon Neighborhood Street Design Guidelines

# Other stuff!

Produced by Dave Amos and the fine folks at Nebula Studios.
Written by Dave Amos.
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People need places to live, but providing quality, affordable housing in the right size and location can be challenging. This video explains the basics of planning for housing and housing policy.

This is part of the new "Basics" series. Two more videos to come!

This video is funded by the Cal Poly Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activities Grant program. Thanks!

Produced by Dave Amos and the fine folks at Nebula Studios.
Select images and video from Getty Images.
Black Lives Matter.
Trans rights.

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This episode is the unlikely story of a public toll road sold to private interests for $1.8 billion dollars, the story of the Chicago Skyway.

Resources on this topic:
http://trrjournalonline.trb.org/doi/pdf/10.3141/2297-15
http://www.chicagoroads.com/roads/chicago-skyway/
https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-blogs/chicagos-highway-in-the-sky/b38ffc79-0a1b-4d4b-985f-c5a1225f2c10
http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Chicago-Skyway-Toll-Increases-Take-Effect-in-New-Year-408833865.html
http://ibtta.org/sites/default/files/unrestricted/38250_Section1.pdf

Dashcam video provided by Paul Donovan: https://www.youtube.com/user/PaulNDonovan

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The subway was my favorite part of living New York. The New York subway has more stations than any other metro system in the world (472), meaning I could just pop up just about anywhere in the city and live there entirely without a car. It was great. When I moved away, I couldn’t help but wonder — why do so few U.S. cities have subways?

Resources on this topic:

How Much Does Rail Transit Cost to Build and Operate:
https://www.thoughtco.com/rail-transit-projects-costs-2798796

Urban Densities and Transit: A Multi-dimensional Perspective:
h...

In April of 2017, Bertha, the massive tunnel-boring machine successfully completed digging a nearly 2 mile deep-bore tunnel under Seattle. The tunnel will carry traffic from the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which had been damaged and deemed seismically unsafe after an earthquake. The tunnel will be much less intrusive than the wall-like Viaduct structure, which cuts Seattle off from its waterfront, and the tunnel, new surface street, and transit will take care of the Viaduct’s 110,000 vehicles per day.Why did Seattle move the highway from above ground to below ground? What we're the replacement options considered? How did Seattle settle on th...

In many places in the United States, residential streets were as wide as busy city streets. I understand why urban streets might need to be wide — parking, buses, traffic, and bike lanes all need the room. But why do quiet residential streets need to be so wide? Why do they need parking when all of the houses on the streets have garages and driveways? Why do they need wide lanes when most of the traffic is just cars and minivans? Why are we building residential streets as wide as big city streets?

Resources on this topic:

There’s an ongoing mystery that planners and urban historians have been trying to solve for over 100 years. How did an amateur planner forego centuries of established city design and implement a pattern that resulted in one of the most charming, walkable historic centers in the U.S.? For many, it’s just too hard to believe that he designed it out of thin air — there must’ve been an obvious precedent. Scholars have been searching for this precedent to solve this mystery since the 1800s.

The Making of Urban America, by John Reps: https://www.amazon.com/gp/p...

Stay on top of host city road conditions with TomTom’s world championship traffic dashboard: tomtom.com/citybeautiful And to get your hands on the data, try TomTom’s Move portal — free for 30 days.

TomTom transportation dashboard: https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/world-championship/?utm_source=influencer-citybeautiful&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=influencer-citybeautiful-campaign&utm_content=influencer-citybeautiful-campaign-test1

Tech companies are building hundreds of massive data centers in communities around the US. Planners have to grapple with the impacts (power, water, noise) those data centers cause. How do they do it? And should they stop it?

# Resour...

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Little Island at Pier 55 is an iconic park built in the Hudson River in 2021. It was largely funded by a billionaire, and almost not built at all, thanks to another billionaire. The Little Island story is one of commerce, cruise ships, hurricanes, billionaires, and park acreage.

Resources on this topic:

Pantitanonta, A. (2022). Little Island: Its big journey through legal battles. Journal of Urban Regeneration & Renewal, 15(3), 262-274.

https://www...

Cities have a profound impact on the natural environment due to emissions, sprawling land use, water pollution and more. But people living in dense urban areas also pollute less and are overall better for the environment than people living in the suburbs. How can cities be made more sustainable and attractive for everyone?

his is part of the new "Basics" series. One more video to come!

This video is funded by the Cal Poly Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activities Grant program. Thanks!

Produced by Dave Amos and the fine folks at Nebula Studios.<...

Check out “Beyond the Bleachers”! https://nebula.tv/videos/maapify-beyond-the-bleachers-part-1-where-stadiums-are-built-europe-vs-north-america
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Watch this video on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/citybeautiful-why-can-two-cities-host-the-olympics-now

In recent years, the International Olympic Committee had a difficult time recruiting qualified cities to bid on hosting the Olympics. In response, they changed the rules to allow multiple cities and even regions host. Is this a good thing?

Resources on this topic:

Information on how the bidding changed: https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1081246/significant-changes-to-olympic-bid-process-approved-by-ioc-session

Data abou...

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Highways are noisy and full of polluting cars. How bad is it to live near one? And why do we keep building new housing next to them?

# Resources mentioned in this video
- LA Times: L.A. keeps building near freeways, even though living there makes people sick
- Great book: City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways
- My video on highway...

On September 1, 1964, the city leaders of Fresno, California broke ground a new pedestrian mall along Fulton Street (Fulton Mall), one of the city’s main thoroughfares. On March 3, 2016, when city leaders broke ground on the removal of that pedestrian mall. Will the removal reverse Fresno's fortunes?

Resources on this topic:
http://www.gofresnocounty.com/Fulton%20Mall/FultonIndex.htm
http://tclf.org/landscapes/fulton-mall
http://kvpr.org/post/fulton-mall-project-become-reality
http://mall-hall-of-fame.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html

Videos courtesy of Archive.org's Moving Image Archive and the Community Media Access Collaborative.

Photo cr...

I do three things in this video. First - I explain what Agenda 21 REALLY is. Second, I describe smart growth, the city planning concept that Agenda 21 promotes. And finally, I give you my explanation for why smart growth became tangled in a conspiracy theory that also relates to climate change denial and fears of a one world government.

Resources on this topic:

Obama Will Abolish the Suburbs? (Slate):
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/onearth/2013/03/agenda_21_no_the_government_isn_t_going_to_confiscate_your_property.html

Anti-Government Conspiracy Theorists...

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In the spring of 2007, the Chicago Housing Authority demolished the last of the 28 buildings in the Robert Taylor Homes housing project. Robert Taylor Homes is one of several high profile housing project demolitions, from St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe to fellow Chicago project Cabrini Green. The demolitions serve as an admission that high-rise public housing wasn’t a good idea. The housing that replaced them are all low rise projects better integrated within existing neighborhoods. So why did anyone back then think it was a good idea? Why...

Many U.S. cities were founded with a street grid. Why? This video describes the historic factors that contributed to the adoption of a grid. This includes influential city designs from Versailles, London, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Reno.

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U.S. architect Frank Lloyd Wright proposed Broadacre City in the 1930s. It was a vision for a decentralized, low-density city that presaged the exurbs, or the most rural of the suburbs. What did Broadacre City get right, and what did it miss?

Resources on this topic:

- The Disappearing City by FLW: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015047936219

- The Suburbanite of FLW's Broadacre City: https://journals.sagepub.com...

Check out “Beyond the Bleachers”! https://nebula.tv/maapify/beyond-the-bleachers?ref=citybeautiful
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Watch this video on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/citybeautiful-why-are-city-boundaries-so-weird

Many city limits look like a tangled mess. Why? The answer is a combination of politics, taxes, autonomy, systemic racism, contiguity, and topography.

Resources on this topic:

The Most Segregated City in America: https://www.amazon.com/Most-Segregated-City-America-Birmingham/dp/0813923344

Fiscal case for annexation: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Evgenia-Gorina/publication/326867365_Fiscal_effects_of_municipal_annexation_Evid...

Watching videos can introduce you to the world of city planning, but if you want to make change in your community, you need to get involved! This guide discusses all of the ways you can make a difference where you live.

Here are some more videos about social issues:

https://nebula.tv/videos/citybeautiful-the-highway-fight-that-changed-cities-forever

https://nebula.tv/videos/city-beautiful-the-most-miserable-city-in-america

This video is funded by the Cal Poly Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activities Grant program. Thanks!

Produced by Dave Amos and the fine folks at Nebula Studios.

Co-written...