[tacticalturtle]

As soon as I saw it was the founder of Strong Towns it all made sense.

Strong Towns, Not Just Bikes, and all those content creators are fulfilling the “hobby” of city planning (ie, watching hours of city planning YouTube videos, but never actually organizing at a local level)

This is a really great video about one man’s experience with trying to improve his community, getting involved in local government, and his criticism that the city planning YouTubers always gloss over what this actually looks like - they just point out what we’re doing wrong.

https://youtu.be/bUs0ecnbOdo?si=8dVweyWfvIF5ddg-

So I think that’s why the logic doesn’t make sense. It’s not meant to be actionable. It’s meant to be easily digestible so that people participating in the hobby can feel enlightened.

[Rendello]

Strong Towns is "not meant to be actionable"? The whole modus operandi of ST is bottom-up change from local chapters of advocates who organize for change at the local level [1]. The organization develops things like the Crash Analysis Studio, which is a structured model for local citizens and municipalities to respond to car crashes in a similar way to aircraft crashes, and redesign streets to prevent further deaths [2]. Here's a panel for a city I lived in, Ottawa [3].

As for NJB, he's abrasive and I don't agree with everything he says or how he says it, but he does talk a lot about his past advocacy work with the local government on Toronto. He encourages action, but I don't understand what he's supposed to do here, make videos for specific local advocacy of every large city in the world?

1. https://www.strongtowns.org/local

2. https://www.strongtowns.org/crashstudio

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8OSNwo4KBU

[mcv]

Is your argument that what Strong Towns and NJB are doing is somehow invalid because they're not also doing something completely different? Raising awareness is also a very important role. Sure, maybe 5 friends can get you elected to a local office, but first you need to convince those 5 friends. You need to get people to care.

Of course organizing is important, but so is awareness, and that's certainly what NJB is all about (I'm less familiar with Strong Towns). And organizing is especially unimportant to NJB, because he already lives in a country where this stuff is better organized than he'd ever been able to come up with. He's just spreading the good word and showing the contrast with North America. And he's very effective at that.

The witty snarky videos about organizing are better made by people who know more about organizing. If you think they're not emphasizing the thing you think is most necessary, why aren't you out there doing that?

[Bukhmanizer]

I don’t think this tracks for me. Sure urbanist YouTube doesn’t really talk about local politics, but an extremely high percentage of people interested in city planning that I know have started doing something to influence local policy. One of my coworkers ran for city council recently. It turns out that people who are interested in watching multiple hour videos on the specific widths of roads are also not that bored by the ins and outs of local politics.

[OldfieldFund]

HackerNews folks are getting hooked on ragebait recently

[reb]

I dunno about that, the HN community has had a curmudgeonly streak as long as I've been a part of it (~15 years). Not exclusively, but... persistently!

[scoofy]

This is all based on a long and relatively technical book they published last year:

Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Town Response to the Housing Crisis.

https://www.housingtrap.org/

[alexb_]

What? Strong Towns is not just their "content creation", they ARE local organizations. You might have a chapter in your city. This criticism tells me that you don't know what Strong Towns is, what they do, the actual specific policy guidelines they come up with and push that have real influence on local city planning.

Strong Towns gives actionable proposals all the time, and their main purpose is local organizations to actually do local change. To accuse them of being a content creation scheme that does no organizing tells me that you have not looked into this at all and are making immediate assumptions based on the aesthetics of their content.

[davidw]

On balance, I think Strong Towns has done a lot of good, but in terms of organizing on the ground, I think the two large YIMBY organizations are better at equipping people to make change in their communities:

* https://yimbyaction.org/

* https://welcomingneighbors.us/

I happily read and share a lot of Strong Towns content - they do put out a lot of good stuff despite the occasional dud. But in terms of learning how to show up and get things done, I think that's not their strongest spot.

[tuna74]

Doing good stuff and improving cities is not a contest. No organisation can do it all, but if we work together we can do a lot!

[davidw]

Yeah, exactly, it's not a zero sum game.

[tacticalturtle]

Yeah I think my original comment was too cynical and misplaced when lumping in all of the Strong Towns organization with Not Just Bikes style content. I’ll read through what they have today.

Admittedly my experience might be colored by the fact that they don’t seem to have much of a presence in my home town of Boston - it’s more other groups like the Cyclist Union showing up at meetings carrying forward things like bike lane advocacy, etc.

[doctorpangloss]

i'm not sure why you are being downvoted, but the people you are talking to are the reason "It's all projection" is true.