It Could Happen Here - The Problem With Urban Living, Ft. Saint Andrew
Episode Date: March 14, 2022Saint Andrew comes on to talk about cities and how to make urban living more ecological. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privac...y information.
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Oh, it could welcome here
the podcast that happens.
Shit.
All right, well,
St. Andrew,
I'm gonna pivot to you to pull us out of this tailspin I've locked us into.
Hello, hello.
What's the scene, everyone?
Today, I wanted to go on a bit of a personal meandering, I guess, on some of the ideas and concepts that are just kind of floating in my head surrounding sustainable city planning and city living.
Honestly, a lot of these ideas and stuff, I've kind of just crimped them from all over the place.
And in some cases, they're a bit less, I say viable than others but i do find like the work of for example lowtechmagazine.com and um and so on to be very inspiring in terms of our capabilities
um what potential there is in obsolete technologies what low-tech solutions exist for issues, and what we can do as people to just kind of make living in urban sprawl or suburban hell a little bit less hellish.
little bit less hellish yeah that is definitely a topic close to my heart as
well as someone who lives in a city I
would like cities to be less hellish
yeah it seems like a joke and I would
like suburbs to not exist so eternal war
on the suburbs we have to ally with
rural America
in order to protect the suburbs
yes
my crank proposal has always been
reintroducing mastodons
just having mastodons
walking through and destroying buildings
because that's what the suburbs deserves
mastodons isn't the actual
animals
yes yes I thought you meant the social media platform the suburbs deserves. Macedons isn't the actual animals. Yes, yes.
I thought you meant like the
social media platform.
No, I think we need to clone
leopards so that they breed as quickly
as rabbits and just let them loose.
Wasn't Dr. Doofenshmirtz
raised by leopards? Sure, why not?
Robert, do you know
who Dr. Doofenshmirtz is?
No.
Okay.
Let's just move on I think we are
roughly in the same age bracket
for television we watched
you both have a lot of a lot of Tremors movies to catch up on.
I'm very familiar with The Good Doctor.
Perry the Platypus Pilled.
Yes, I am very platypilled, as they say.
Platypilled.
Let's continue.
Right. right so um there are a lot of aspects of my evil plan to make the entire tri-state area more
sustainable but um i think i would want to start with something that tends to consume a lot of the
energy in cities and that is like heating and cooling i mean for me living in a tropical country heating has
never been a consideration yeah um i mean the coldest it gets is in like the
i would say like 80 19 20 degrees celsius area wow um so and to me that is like chilly that's like
layering up kind of thing because i can't handle that kind of cold um which is kind of wild to me, that is like chilly. That's like layering up kind of thing.
Cause I can't handle that kind of cold,
which is kind of wild to me that I ever considered moving to Canada.
I don't think I'll be able to handle it.
It does.
It does get, it does get much colder.
I mean, we, when I was in Canada, we would have not,
not uncommonly have minus 40 Celsius a weeks.
So yeah. would have not not uncommonly have minus 40 celsius uh weeks so yeah yeah i've never experienced
minus degrees before i don't know i don't know if that's like real oh no it is oh it's fine it's
it's not a big deal you just put on an extra pair of socks you're good to go okay so when it when it
hits negative 40 degrees uh fahrenheit you've experienced negative 40 degrees
it's not like
arctic temperatures
negative 40
Fahrenheit is
the temperature of the surface of Mars
on a sunny day
negative 40 Fahrenheit
is the same as negative 40 Celsius
oh is it?
they actually converge at that point.
Yeah.
It's like, you just.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just pain.
Like it's not even cold anymore.
Like you just, like your, your face just hurts.
It's great.
It's a good time.
I'm going to call out my, my, my favorite meme again and have negative 40 Fahrenheit,
negative 40 Celsius, Celsius clapping hands in the middle.
Yeah. Yeah.
Classic.
Classic.
Anyway, yes.
Very cold.
Honestly, I can't even conceive of that kind of temperature.
I am an island boy, so that's how I operate.
Got it.
And as an island boy, I had to say that heat is very, very uncomfortable.
Humid heat is even more uncomfortable.
Dry heat is also extremely uncomfortable.
Also extremely uncomfortable.
When you have a hot day combined with like Saharan dust in the air and no clouds in the sky, it is truly, truly miserable. imagine um what life in a city would be like if um you know these sort of temperatures continue to
climb as they are climbing um as we see you know global average temperatures rising by you know a
half degree or a degree or two degrees celsius that's just ridiculous let alone three or four degrees celsius increase
especially compounded with the fact that in a city there's this thing called the urban heat
island effect so cities are 10 degrees celsius hotter than the surrounding countryside and the
reasons for that are numerous you know you have like vehicles emitting heat constantly.
You have air conditioners pumping heat into the air.
You have concrete and asphalt covering every surface,
just like absorbing and radiating the sun's rays.
And you have these urban canyons between tall buildings
that prevent heat from escaping and keep keep it at the sort of street level
it's miserable right and the typical solutions the individual solutions the short-term solutions they
just make the situation worse because i mean when you're feeling hot i mean i was just feeling hot
just now and i turn on the ac right when you're feeling hot you know you turn on the ac or you put on a fan but not so much a fan
but the ac continues and fuels this vicious cycle of heating the outdoors to cool the indoors
making external spaces even more uncomfortable so you end up with air conditioning use accounting
for like one-fifth of global energy electricity usage of building related
global electricity usage and you end up with the thing that's supposed to be cooling us
heating things even more because you know as developing countries you know they have access
to more and more air conditioning especially and you know developing countries tend to be in the
have access to more and more air conditioning and developing countries tend to be
in the hotter sides of the world
the use
of air conditioning just continues to skyrocket
and
the International Energy
Agency actually estimated that it
would take
the amount of energy needed to cool buildings
will triple by 2050
which is equivalent to the current
electricity demand in the u.s and germany
combined so on top of all that you also have an issue of like heat and heat deaths right the
deaths and injuries caused by heat i mean heat stroke is becoming more and more
of an issue in cities especially when you know temperatures reach above 25 degrees celsius
people you know manual laborers people who work outside people who just have to move around a lot
you know experience the symptom the symptoms of heat stroke whenever there's like this spike in temperature right and then even
even if you don't experience like a heat stroke
heat is
exhausting it is
energy draining it's
utterly sapping
and
it requires a lot
out of your body to keep you
cool and prevent you from like overheating
and surprisingly lot out of your body to keep you cool and prevent you from like overheating
and surprisingly this overheating issue is not just like you know a tropical issue or like a hot country issue like places like moscow had like an estimated 11 000 people
died due to heat wave in 2010.
And so with all these heat waves and stuff,
we need to like figure out what to do with all these giant concrete buildings.
I mean, I know for some people like eco-brutalism is, you know, wow, so cool.
To me personally, and this is just my subjective opinion
I find it ugly and disgusting and I hate it
but you know
to each their own right
brutalism discourse
I mean what do you all think of brutalism
I think
Yugoslavian brutalism was cool
every other kind of brutalism is just like
my opinions on brutalism boil down to thinking the game control is fun
i have stayed in a yugoslavian brutalist architecture hotel which was one of the
weirdest nights of my life because it was clearly made it was like one of these gigantic like
people's hotels that was meant to provide everyone with vacations and so there there's like 20,000 rooms and we were like the only three people
there.
So there was one person at the desk and it's just cavern of empty rooms.
Yeah.
Such this,
everything felt like a liminal space.
It was,
it was very odd.
It can be,
it can be very,
very uncanny.
It wasn't like bad.
It was like reasonably well constructed.
It was just like deeply strange
i mean that's a place to spend the night i think that's what makes the game control so cool is that
yeah it plays with those uncanny feelings on brutalism while still being like very cool like
it's still it's still control is the game that um jacob geller made a video about right yes he made
a he did make a video i think i watched that recently this is
like the sort of oldest house yeah i'm saying yes right right right right yeah yeah yeah i want to
check out that game because i mean that's what that's kind of like my issue with brutalism it
feels like a boss level in a video game yes like you have to go through each level clear out all
the minions and make it to the top and beat the boss.
It's kind of unsettling.
Yes.
And then like eco-brutalism is just like, oh, what if trees?
Trees or moss.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's like, okay, cool.
But I mean, like one of my many occupations and I still maintain it seasonally.
I was a power washer and I still maintain it seasonally. I was a power washer
and I hate moss.
And so to see moss all over buildings
just really bothers me.
Like I just want to get, you know,
my spray gun and just
clear it all off.
And especially in like this climate,
moss is like a very significant issue.
That makes sense.
You know.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. one of my pet peeves among
many so i mean there are many different ways we could combat the urban heat island effects um
that don't involve eco-brutalism and they can also help to facilitate, you know, creating more attractive spaces to live and to play.
You know, obviously the solution isn't to just like build
every building that has ever been built
and make it more sustainable, you know,
with vernacular materials and stuff.
Though, of course, new buildings should be built
with those principles in mind.
But, you know, it's unpractical to,
or even sustainable to destroy all the buildings
we've already built and rebuild them. You know, the best thingical to or even sustainable to destroy all the buildings we've already built
and make and rebuild them you know the best thing we can do is try to
mitigate and adapt with what we already have
um greenery and i know i was just roasting eco-brutalism for just trap slapping trees
and everything but you know greenery is an important part in that, right?
Because it causes evapotranspiration,
which is where water evaporates from plants' leaves
and cools the temperature.
It also improves people's psychological well-being.
And they're just nice to look at um they're nice to look at they keep things cool in fact they can help cause temperatures
to drop by like two to three degrees celsius in the like the surrounding area i think people
certainly misinterpret it but like this is one of the big things you can see with with racism in the
u.s where like you can literally like you can literally track racial
divides in a lot of American cities by the
temperature because like
places where not a lot of people live
just don't have trees
and you know
this has like a
just this sort of like cascading
series of environmental
and social effects which are
yeah a disaster and yeah environmental racism yeah yeah it's really stark honestly if you look
at the heat maps of some of these cities and you could literally see you know where poor black folks
live you know you can see the places with less trees the places next to factories with like
talks like you run off and waste and that kind of thing it's just you know right there and it sucks
which is why of course part of any sort of efforts to improve cities and make things more sustainable would involve you know social justice and would
involve responding to and addressing the compounding effects of like environmental racism
over the past several decades so you know and part of the issue again tying things back to environmental racism is that
a lot of the climate change policies that you know ostensibly are meant to favor like
high density urban smart growth you know like sustainable blocks and that kind of thing they are not conceived or implemented in a way that involves
the people being affected by them you know in fact a lot of these like sort of green um
projects raise the cost of food energy water transport housing for people in the area you know they create these sorts of like
gentrified neighborhoods essentially where the original inhabitants can no longer afford to live
there so if we want to develop like a sustainable city a resilient city a sustainable over resilient neighborhood it requires social justice it requires you know
equity and you know like the involvement of all affected through you know consensus or democracy to just really shape the future that they will be experiencing
because they're the ones being affected by it.
There are a lot of other ways as well to heatproof, as it were, a city.
Reflective roofs and roads can also help reduce the absorptive powers of solar radiation by concrete and asphalt.
coating that um has been implemented in some 500 000 meters squared of roof space that saves an estimated 2282 tons of co2 per year from cooling emissions i mean all it takes really is just like
that sort of white reflective coat and it saves dividends in the long run um nasa had done some research on this and it
demonstrated the results demonstrated that a white roof could be 23 degrees celsius or 42
degrees fahrenheit cooler than a typical black roof um on a hot new york summer day
um on a hot new york summer day um and in places where like yeah yeah yeah i'm sorry i just kind of like glossed over but that is crazy that is absolutely absolutely wild
and in cities where like we're like 10 of the land area is like asphalt you can imagine how that sort of
that sort of
reflective sealant
can impact
the cooling or the
heating of the area
water
of course is another
important aspect
of cooling cities
in Andalus
which was like
the Muslim kingdom
in Geberian Peninsula
in the 14th century
they used to have these
courtyards with pools and fountains
that would stimulate
water evaporation and cool
the air and so like cities today you know take some hints from that you know you have ponds and
pools and fountains and misting systems and stuff that can sort of chill things out i mean we see
that being um implemented in china um where you have like for example um water misters at like bus stops which
can chill the air and you know cool passengers as they wait um and they found actually that
adding water features and like cool coatings reduces the cooling requirements of an area by 29 to 43 percent
and also lowers the overall average air temperature by 1.5 degrees celsius so it's like honestly
wild how like these little things can have such a major impact on temperature. Speaking of like old methods of cooling, ancient methods of cooling, there's this Middle Eastern
shading device called the Mashrabiya, or I think it's Mashrabiya.
And it's basically an architectural element that is usually built by um wooden lattice work and sometimes stained glass and it's used to like
catch and cool the wind through like having these basins of water in them is let me see if i can try
to describe it it's like a window jutting out of a building
with sort of decorated by latticework
with jars and basins of water placed within them
to let the wind pass through.
And as the wind is passing through,
it's causing evaporative cooling.
Then it chills out the interior.
And so these mashrabias,
they've been used since the middle ages
by you know the coptic churches of egypt and the art deco movement in iraq and and by you know
the architecture um in baghdad as well and so these sort of construction methods, while they tend to be
developed for individual homes or individual buildings, they can in fact be implemented
with even the aesthetics of Islamic geometry to help to cool a building and reduce its overall CO2 emissions.
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So I've been talking about heating and cooling and stuff for a while now.
And speaking of, I should probably turn on my AC.
Turn off my AC, rather.
I think I heard either
it was you, Andrew, or maybe it was Robert
talking about the ceramic
kind of cooling idea.
Ceramic cooling.
Yeah, I mean, that's a big thing in
parts of the American Southwest, like
New Mexico. There's a lot of swamp coolers
that are basically working.
Right, yeah. Swamp coolers. it only works in certain climates right like you
wouldn't really i don't yeah because if it's if it's too uh in oregon it's too humid it's not
gonna work you're just gonna yeah well so even more humid yeah i think there's kind of a broader
thing there architecturally which is that like we have a lot of sort of like
like we've we've lost a lot of in in the way we do architecture we've lost a lot of
the sort of like build we've lost a lot of sort of building techniques adapted to specific locations
yeah for natural architecture yeah yeah and like that's something that has to be reversed
like immediately because yeah like our current model of building houses out of oil is uh going
to get us all killed oh really what's yeah what's the problem there what's wrong what's wrong with
that i mean on top of that right it's not just vernacular architecture, but vernacular clothing.
I mean, it's, I mean, as, again, someone living in a tropical country,
I see it for myself, like working people going to work wearing like full long sleeve dress shirts
and long, long dress pants and, you know, like formal shoes.
And it's honestly absurd you know sometimes like
they have the whole tie like you know pulled up and everything it's not it's entirely based on
like european standards of professionalism and um it needs to be abolished abolish dress codes
all right abolish like this whole idea that you know
we have to dress this particular way um despite you know the temperature because it's more
professional or whatever fuck professionalism honestly yeah we we at we at podcasting are in
the vanguard of this but uh we need your help to destroy professionalism once and for all.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Show up to work in your bathing suit.
Yeah.
But yeah, like vernacular buildings as well.
You know, obviously you had in Africa,
in different parts of Africa,
you'd have different structures that were particularly tailored.
So, you know, if you were in a tropical rainforest environment,
you would have a building that's tailored to, you know,
keeping mosquitoes out and maintaining a certain temperature within
and maintaining comfort as well within.
Or, you know know in cooler regions you would have
um certain construction that would keep heat within the building and prevent
um excessive discomfort you know um and they were also of course like when it comes to like
cooler areas you were also expected to sort of keep yourself warm as well as, you know, keep your building warm.
In fact, it was more so keeping yourself personally warm.
So keeping yourself layered up even when you're indoors.
And of course, that's kind of lost today.
People are expected to just, you know, turn on the heater and vibe for the months of winter.
But it isn't sustainable. A lot of things we enjoy today aren't
sustainable and it keeps coming back to that but yeah speaking of things that we enjoy that are not
at all sustainable how about cars yes get rid of cars please get rid of cars i mean cars are very
convenient in terms of like if you want to get somewhere very specific, you know, if there's a place you want to go, I'm the one you need to know.
I'm a car.
I'm a car.
I'm a car.
You know, kind of thing.
Thank you.
Yes.
My little musical interlude there.
Thank you for appreciating it.
I appreciate it.
for appreciating it i appreciate it but ultimately like they honestly aren't sustainable they honestly aren't something that we can maintain in the near or even far well potentially in the
in the neighborhood it's much the far future i mean people are already know the problems with
gas cars really know why gas cars are bad but you know things things are just sort of pivoted towards electric cars and who electric cars let's get a bunch of
electric cars but electric cars aren't better i mean the materials they require is quite frankly not sustainable
in the long run. And it just
lengthens
the amount of time that we spend
dependent on cars
for short and long distance
travel. And especially how
in the States we've built our cities
around the idea of a car which has expanded
the urban terrain unnecessarily.
And if you look at all the space taken up by like highways and overpasses and how much of just like urban space
has taken up but just been built around the idea of the car it really kind of makes the whole idea
of a city so much less useful it's it's really it's really frustrating and i think it's also
working the cars are so unbelievably dangerous.
Yes, that is true.
We're very much used to having these death machines
driving around at all times.
And that makes for a very cool series of metal band song names
or whatever.
But the death statistics aren't funny when it comes to cars
no and like the average transportation time having cars has not actually decreased like the amount of
time it takes to get from place to place based on like where you live in your city has not actually
decreased because now everything has just spread further apart. So 100 years ago, it would take a 15-minute trek to get to the market or something.
It can take oftentimes longer, especially if you're driving in rush hour traffic,
to get just a couple of miles.
Or even in some cases, a decent jog could get you there faster.
Just because of how we've just designed cities all around these rolling metal death cages.
Yeah, it's not great.
It's one of the reasons I don't currently have a car.
Yeah, and that's something that's shocking to a lot of people
when I tell them that really I have no intention of ever buying a car,
of ever owning a car.
It's not something that I want.
a car it's not something that i want and i mean i live relatively close to like some of the major transport um arteries of the country and you know trinidad has like this unique ish um transportation
system public transportation system so we have these privately owned maxi taxis that um they're like
vans um with seats in the back um and you know you could you just kind of jump in um depending on
where they're going which route they're taking um and they're they're convenient enough for me
and for my purposes so i just you know I go where I need to go with them.
But they're also gas guzzling, inefficient machines.
I mean, they're better than, you know, all those people driving cars.
I mean, as an island, you know, like, I don't know why we're so obsessed with having more and more cars on the road.
know why we're so obsessed with having more and more cars on the road um but at the end of the day they still aren't the best in terms of sustainability and in terms of um viable
reliable sustainable transport um we also have like personal taxis as well but they have the
same problems as regular taxis and what's frustrating is that we used to
have um a train line um that went along the entire east-west corridor of the country that's where
most of the people in Trinidad live along the east-west corridor um but that was destroyed
in the 1960s I think to make way for highways and a priority bus route.
So instead of having a nice,
convenient, cute little train
that we could take to go from place to place,
we have to rely on
buses and maxis and taxis
and cars.
Yeah, that is
quite... That's not cool.
That is quite... It's not cool that is quite it's not good quite quite grim because
we need to reconfigure seriously i would love for them to bring back
trains to be able to take a train do not have to rely on i mean
government bureaucracy makes all things unreliable but I think a train would have been
slightly more reliable than
a bus
very much on the pro train
on the pro train train
I've had fewer
moments more happy
than riding the Portland
Max line and street car in a
no face costume
it's very fun i think also like another
thing about about cars right this is just this is just just on a very pure political level like
cars are the thing that allow suburbs to exist and the existence of suburbs has produced just
generation upon generation of like frothing reactionaries who are the source of like enormous percentages of the world's problems.
And so if you get rid of those places, you produce less of them.
Yeah.
Which is just a political benefit for anyone who wants to not die.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I mean, we don't think about it because there are already so many things to think about.
But if you actually sat down and pondered the death toll of cars and really brought it to the forefront and really made it less of a necessity,
I think more and more people would be open to the idea of rejecting cars,
to keeping them as at most a benign novelty that maybe one or two exists in an entire community for use, if needs be.
But otherwise, I don't see how each and every person in the world
owning their own car
is at all
the best way to go
also cars are kind of ugly
to me
yeah
we really didn't design them to look cool it's just it's i mean there's some cars that
look kind of cool like some of the more classic ones but i don't know that's part of the issue
right they're getting uglier to me and they're also getting larger you know like
they're raising their grills more and more. So like you basically a pedestrian killing machine.
We've effectively undone most of the benefits of making cars safer for passengers by making them much more dangerous for as useful um and in a lot of cases more useful for
like practical farm work for hauling and whatnot than the trucks they're making today they they
haven't meaningfully gotten better they've just gotten a lot larger for no real reason other than
it makes people feel like big men well and you get these fun you get these fun you can you can
look at their marketing people like explicitly talking about how like, yeah, like they like basically explicitly playing into the fantasy of running over protesters.
And it's, it's great.
It's yeah.
So get rid of cars and you won't have to deal with that.
But Chris, how is that sustainable or viable hmm good question
introducing super blocks oh yes super super blocks are basically um neighborhoods of nine
blocks so i don't think they have to be i think the philosophy and ideas behind super blocks
could be implemented to suit different um cities with different histories and different layouts
especially with like localized like especially with like localized um streetcars within each
city within each super block like system exactly. Exactly. So just to clarify,
the idea, superblocks are basically
neighborhoods of nine blocks
where traffic is restricted
to the roads on the outside of the block,
which means that the interior
of the superblocks are entirely walkable.
That combined with the idea
of a superblock being um mixed use means that people
are mostly able to access their basic necessities within their city block are able to like spend
more time have more open space to spend more time to meet with people to talk to do activities to
you know have some relief from noise pollution and air pollution from vehicles
and to really like connect people with the space they're living in and make the space they're
living in more livable i mean i don't live smack dab in the middle of like urban urban town but
i could imagine people living in like new york or whatever you can't
exactly step out of the apartments and play in the road on a typical day if you have kids or
whatever you know they can't exactly just go run outside um you will die exactly so fast exactly
exactly i mean people complain about like oh kids these days don't go outside as much but
i mean look at outside yeah you know look at what look at what has been created um
and reflect on that i mean part of the issue is um the way social media algorithms are designed
to suck people into like cycles of addiction but that's a whole nother
topic right um i think a lot of people more people would be willing to would be able to
pull themselves out to that sort of um harmful algorithmic hell if there was an outside to
pull themselves out to you know but honestly cities especially are notorious for like not having
places you can be where you don't have to spend money and that sucks
so i think um super blocks being places where you know libraries and um places people can eat.
Makerspaces, community kitchens.
It does seem to be missing or ignoring what we're going to lose
with super blocks, which is how am I going to roll down the street
smoking endo, sipping on gin and juice if I'm not allowed to drive
within my block?
Wow.
I think we can.
Where am I going to do that i think i think
you could just get a bike booze cruising on the bicycle have you tried smoking indo sipping on
gin and juice while riding a bicycle it's it's impossible get a cup holder anything is possible
this is snoop dog erasure. No, but the idea
of having community gardens,
community kitchens,
makerspaces, libraries,
all these within this super black
framework, like green spaces,
it does make actual urban
city living seem attractive
and not like you're just living in
nested concrete boxes.
Yeah, I mean, people like living in cities because that's where everything's happening
right but yeah
you want people to take part in the things that are
happening but the place
is unlivable
yeah you have the table I will continue to
complain about until the end of time which is the table
in Chicago Chinatown that threatens to arrest you for
sitting at it like it's
yeah yeah like the hostility of and I mean this goes back to like racism because of
course everyone does everything does but you know a lot of these loitering laws and stuff were
designed to target black people and to target you know poor people um like vagrancy laws and
that sort of thing just hostile people just hostile to people's existence.
And that gets into like hostile architecture
and that sort of thing.
But I think with these super blocks,
you know, we open up our spaces
to make them welcoming to human existence.
Spaces that are not built around cars,
built around commutes,
built around work.
And this obviously is a transformation
that requires more than just,
you know,
vote for so-and-so
and make the city green kind of thing.
You need something more substantial than that.
You know, within these superblocks as well,
you're able to take stock of
how as well you're able to take stock of how your block or whatever you have a better mental sense
of um community and able to take about a sense of even things like how your block can
communally sustain themselves and you know reduce waste and all these different things.
This in conjunction with struggle against capitalism in the state.
But, you know, that is implied.
This is, you know, this is the show.
This is what could happen here.
I don't know if you expect in like electoralism, but that's not really what we do around here. I don't mean the benefits to these sort of like
super blocks, you know, these 15 minute zones where people can walk within 15 minutes to get
the essentials. The benefits are innumerable, you know, better air quality, less noise,
less noise, healthy lifestyle, mental health boost.
But the issue is without a combination of, you know,
these projects and these activities with like anti-capitalism and anti-statism,
it tends to lend itself towards gentrification. And we've seen that in Spain,
which is where some of these superblocks
have been implemented.
They've created these locations
that are obviously more desirable
because who doesn't want to live
in a superblock where
you actually have a sense of community
because we're all desperate for that.
And at least an increase in property demand,
higher prices, higher rent it basically
creates these pockets of unaffordable neighborhoods yeah displacing local residents so you have to get
into the fight against gentrification in order to make this you know idea um viable Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo.
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The last thing that I want to get into really is,
as Carl mentioned, community gardens.
I want to talk about urban farming because that is crucial.
I mean, part of what makes cities cities
in a lot of cases is the fact that they import all their food right
they have the urban rural divide that you know delineates the two areas
but considering the transportation costs the energy, all those things that compound to sustain a city's food needs.
We have to look to ways that we can sustain cities and sustain neighborhoods within cities
within themselves. Before I continue, I just want to point out that the future of urban farming is not in vertical
farms um they look very cool you know like those tall kind of like pillars of like lettuce or
whatever growing out of thing but the land that they save is usually cancelled out by the land they need
to produce the energy to power them like they're very energy intensive um spaces so until that
issue is resolved and i don't know if it will be considering you know how the energy requirements
are sort of built into the vertical,
the concentration of energy requirements built into the vertical farming design.
We have to look to more practical methods.
Land ownership tends to be a major hurdle when it comes to organizing community gardens and maintaining community gardens.
I mean, like folks like Black Futures Farm, Oakland Avenue Urban Farm and the Victory Garden Initiative.
They've been working to like provide fresh produce to those in need, especially in urban food deserts.
But in a lot of these projects, they go in good for some years and then the city suddenly spins around
it's like we need this land for development so they just snatch it up and you know those years
of efforts just basically go down the drain um community land trusts have been put forward as a potential solution to that issue.
But like a lot of these things,
I mean, it's a good band-aid, I would say,
but it's not necessarily
marking the end of capitalism.
Another issue that there is
with the whole urban farming thing
is that the culture that develops around them
while they provide education and community
and connection for people within them,
and that is extremely valuable.
I think some organizers fall into this habit
of creating this sort of like shared delusion around community gardens
you know claiming to be sort of feeding the people quote unquote and what really brought
this to my attention was um inhabit territories newsletter they had an article on it last year i
think on you know urban community gardens.
And it was written by Gabriel Aysin, the co-founder of At Planta, which I find to be a very, very creative name.
Basically asked the question, are we really feeding ourselves?
I mean, these local food initiatives, they do produce food that people eat.
I mean, these local food initiatives, they do produce food that people eat, but it can be a bit harmful to be overly optimistic about our food autonomy at this organic, nutritionally dense crops and stuff, and that's great.
That's helping people.
But, you know, oftentimes it usually just means that, you know, the people might be getting, participants might be getting like a salad or you know a couple tomatoes it's not necessary that
they're cutting down their grocery bill in a sustainable long-term way because i mean
if you've tried gardening you know that like when you're working with a limited space
you know you grow your first set of tomatoes the tomatoes are cool but they don't last forever
you know yeah and you have to wait until the next harvest to get more tomatoes or whatever the case may be same for like lettuce or whatever it's kind of rough you know it doesn't
it helps for like a meal or maybe two depending on like your living situation but it doesn't
meaningfully cut into our reliance on groceries and, you know, food imports.
Yeah, it definitely takes a bit to get to that point.
And you have to do it with a combination of like food preservation and like canning and like, you know, like jarring and a whole bunch of other stuff to actually make that a worthwhile endeavor, as opposed to just making like, great, I spent three months making these tomatoes.
Now they're ready for one meal and then they're
all gone we have like one sauce yeah yeah you do have to really kind of figure out how to grow
enough to keep enough ready to be harvested for jarring and canning for future use um and make
sure like you're you know harvesting them when they are ready so that you can you know you don't
lose stuff and that you have like you know an ongoing ongoing process of like preserving the food that you do grow for later um as well
so you could definitely take a lot a lot more like mental effort and planning than just you
know planting it and then you know using it and cooking it when it's when it's all ready
yeah i mean a lot of energy itself is put into
growing things like greens and roots and fruiting vegetables and they're healthy you know they have
the vitamins and micronutrients but you know people still need meat dairy eggs you know protein yeah
heavy high calorie dense stuff you know like potatoes and other starches they can really
hold people over wheats and that kind of thing and that just isn't being grown right now you know
wheat and rice and soy and nuts and corn and sugar these staples and stuff don't tend to be produced
by these community gardens and by these you know garden plots
by these community gardens and by these garden plots.
Not many
legume patches
at your local community garden.
Yeah.
I'm in the process
of growing some
pigeon peas right now.
They are taking
a very long while and what i realize is that um i mean i
just planted them so i'm being a bit impatient but what i realize is that i when they do grow
out and i've seen you know some mature pigeon pea trees and stuff so i know how big they tend to
grow by time harvest rolls around,
you know, you get all those different pods
and you put in the work,
you pick all the pods
and you pry open the pods
and, you know,
you put in some more alliteration
into the sentence
and, you know,
you get those peas out.
Once those peas are out of the pod
and you put them in a pot,
they are not potent enough to hold you over for more than one meal you know like you pick like a tree's
worth of peas in a pod and you know that's like sometimes like half of a meal. And really, honestly,
respect to the people
who are producing all of our food right now
because I can't imagine
having to be shelling peas all the time.
It's kind of ridiculous.
I mean, it can be fun,
but I can't imagine doing it all day.
I mean, work is work, right?
It's going to, yeah.
Yeah, work is health.
We know this.
But yeah, so I mean, community gardens, they're good.
You know, they have, you know, education.
They build community.
They provide outdoor activity and stuff.
But, you know, I think what community gardens, urban gardens and stuff need to do is find ways to, and this isn't to disparage the work that's being done
massive support, I'm doing that myself
kind of thing
but
we've got to like, as the article argues
we can't get caught up in the fluffing
up of the reality for marketing purposes
you know, we need to look for ways
that we can actually
feed ourselves, that means
getting into caloric foods that means
um you know like dried beans potatoes fruit trees that kind of thing grains nuts all that jazz
and also connecting with farms outside of the city you know local farms outside of the immediate urban landscape
seeing what cooperatives can be developed that can
work aid each other mutually to build a more potent capacity for food autonomy so i mean get in touch with the soil you know
get the sun in your face but also think about
what more we can do to sort of take this to the next level and yeah that is
what I believe
could in fact
happen here
this is happen here good
yeah it's nice to have a positive one of these
yeah we should do that more often
if only
we had the power
well come back tomorrow when we'll be talking about another bad thing and then if only we had the power to control what's
well come back tomorrow
when we'll be talking about another bad thing
and then abandoning you to deal with your thoughts
about it
wow
we try
we do try this is us trying
well this is us having St. Andrew try
you're welcome thank you very much this is us trying well this is us having saint andrew try you're welcome thank you thank you uh
very much this is a topic i've wanted to discuss for a long time in terms of yeah because we get a
lot of people talking about like yeah how you know and whatever like post-collapse fantasy that you
can imagine where you're able to kind of reconfigure society how would you
plan urban living and you're like well yeah there's a lot of actually really cool ideas for
like keeping people close together can be a very ecological idea if you do it certain ways it's
just a lot of the ways we've defaulted to over the past like really 300 years has uh made it not that
with the invention of the car really,
really screwing us over.
So,
yeah,
thank you so much for talking about urban living and super,
super blocks and all this kind of stuff.
Where can,
where can people find more of your work in writing on the interwebs?
You can find me on
YouTube at St. Andrewism
and you can find me on Twitter
which hopefully
when you hear this I am still
not on
at underscore St. Drew
fantastic
St. Andrew just put together a really great
episode about
anti-work stuff and
the way that debacle
has happened
and what we can learn from it
and that kind of thing.
And why you should still actually care about
anti-work.
So we'll definitely recommend
the anti-work video for
recent stuff.
Let's see. If you want to uh feed your brain into the uh addiction driven social media algorithm you can follow us on twitter and
instagram at happen here pod and cool zone media and uh yeah let's uh go think about go think about
makerspaces and community gardens that seems like a good a good way to dedicate your thought time and roll down the street smoking endo sipping that gin and juice
while you still can on a bike on a bike before the bike as i am personally bestowing my moral
judgment upon you okay before before the fascist anarchists take away your F-150s, yeah.
Look, if we can democratize military-grade weaponry the way the Ukrainians have,
we can form neighborhoods that cannot be forced to live in the traffic,
the auto-industrial complex.
We could also really reduce frivolous air travel. What a fantasy. Really reduce frivolous air travel.
What a fantasy.
Otherwise we'll end up in a Mad Max world.
And I mean,
who wants that,
right?
Well,
you know,
aspects of it.
Aspects of it.
Yeah.
All right.
See you later,
everybody.
Bye.
Peace.
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You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources.
Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow.
Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright.
An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories
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