No because like, I genuinely feel like there has been a noticeable rightward shift in online urbanist content since 2020 when it really got big
I really don’t think that 4 years ago we would have seen people openly praising the Orbán government and claiming that our cities were destroyed by “modernist ideology”. It is incredibly concerning to me that a movement I care so much for is moving in a direction that would leave me behind
And while this isn’t as obvious as the examples I gave above. The constant talk of the economic benefits of urbanism over the social ones and the way we ignore the need for social housing and developer responsibility in the housing crisis. It all has a conservative taste to me. We seem to care more about the look of a building than what functionality it plays for the people in a neighborhood.
And I think that yeah a lot of it can be attributed to strong towns, they specifically promote urbanism on a pseudo libertarian economic model where to save the city we must remove all regulations which attracts people to the movement who are opposed to every social cause I support but they kinda like walkable neighborhoods, for the business benefits of course
Another thing that I think is causing it is the obsession with the past in urbanist spaces and this idea that things used to be better before cars were available to the masses when they often times were not, millions lived in abject poverty and Jim Crowe segregation was the norm, things were still bad when streetcar suburbs existed, they were built for the wealthy to escape the polluted streets of the cities they were destroying for profit, just in a different way than the businesses do today
And while the culture as a whole has moved rightwards, I find it scary that what started out as a left wing movement to improve the quality of life of city residents is being coopted by business interests and reactionaries