My introduction video!

#Femboy #Introduction #Paper #Sissy #Gay #RoseBoy #Bisexual #Cute #LGBTQ #Mask #Origami #Masked #Educational #LinkTree #Breedable #Pride #eGirl #CrossDresser #Kawaii #NeuroDivergent #Silly #Skirt #Strong #Muscle #Blushing #LongHair #NonBinary #Trap #Athletic #eBoy #Nerd #Autistic #Trans #City #Comfy #Design #Diet #Exercise #Brighten #Submissive #GenderQueer #CityDesign #Twink #Anime

Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
An example of what happens when noise pollution is taken seriously, with the example of the city of Delft (Netherlands)
#CityDesign #Urbanism

Crosspost from Cohost:

[Note I wrote this to add to people's discussion of Borges short story the Immortals, specifically how terrifying the City of Immortals was built, so that it felt utterly hostile to human life.] It reminds me of the book I'm currently reading (and nearly finished) by Murray Bookchin.

Now Bookchin is a communalist (though he's adopted by the anarchist crowd, I'm uncertain if he directly called himself that), and he writes a lot about how cities were where people gathered and built their community. The book I'm currently reading of his is called From Urbanization to Cities: The politics of Democratic Municipalism. In it, he painstakingly goes through the history of Europe - focusing on that to limit his scope but also to show how the way we each the history of Europe is wrong - to show how for much of its history, people and their politics were rooted in a city, people's ties and their kinship was city-based and not specifically to any empire or nation. How even in the medieval ages, much of that time period was cities run by the people, and that those cities heavily resisted (often quite violently) any sort of monarchy or absolutism that tried to centralize power.

So how did these cities form into nations then? How did we go from having walkable cities that were the center of communal life, where people would gather in councils to debate ways of running the city and other necessities?

Partly due to capitalism. Capitalism stripped that from us. It alienated us, isolated us, and corralled us into narrow confines. Into labyrinths. Why? Because we can't overthrow capitalism and the centralized bureaucratic authority that caters to capitalism if we can't band together and build community.

He digs into it a heck of a lot deeper than just that, but I wanted to briefly sum up some of his conclusions.

He believed that the best way to overturn capitalism was to take back our cities and create decentralized communities and city confederacies. To tear out the labyrinths, the car-centric natures, the top-heavy authority, and focus on building community with one another. Where the community meets in councils to decide what is best for their community and the city. To build a commune so to speak. Hence communalism.

Near the end of his chapter on "politics to statecraft," he writes:
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"That there is a logic in certain historical premises, one that unfolds more as a tendency than a necessity, is certainly not arguable: nationalism does foster totalitarianism, and the centralized state tends to develop into an all-embracing state. But it is certainly difficult to argue that a super human phenomenon called "history" exists and predetermines a society's development. The Communeros [of Spain] had opened a pathway to a cooperative, unified Spain that could have yielded a very different dispensation from that which came with a centralized nation-state. So, too, had earlier city confederacies, whose achievements meet with so much disdain [from historians]. Politics had to be structured around a community of one kind or another, whether as a polis [Ancient Greek], Gemeinde [Medieval Central Europe], burg, commune, or city. Lacking the flesh and blood of politically involved people and comprehensible self-governing institutions, the human phenomenon we call "society" tends to disintegrate at its base, even as it seems to consolidate at its apex.

Centralization becomes most acute when deterioration occurs at the base of society. Divested of its culture as a political realm, society becomes an ensemble of bureaucratic agencies that bind monadic individuals and family units into a strictly administrative structure or a form of "possessive," more properly acquisitive, individualism that leads to the privatization of the self and its disintegration into mere egoism. The city, in turn, is no longer united by any sort of ethical bond. It becomes a marketplace, a destructures and formless economic unit, a realm in which the Hobbesian war of "all against all" becomes a virtual reality, ironically designated as a "return to nature."

Such a condition and the mentality it produces constitute a dissolution of nature and society's evolutionary thrust toward diversity, complexity, and community, a problem that appropriately belongs to the newly developing field and philosophy of social ecology rather than urban sociology. It is a social problem because we are talking about one of the most elemental forms of human consociation - the city - where people advance beyond the kinship bond to share, create, and develop means of life, culturally as well as economically as human beings. Here, humanitas as distinguished from the "folk," comes into its own. And it is an ecological problem in the sense that diversity, variety, and participation constitute not only the basis for the stability of human consociation but also for the creativity that is imparted to us by diversity, indeed, ultimately the freedom that alternate forms of development allow for the evolution of new, richer, and well-rounded social forms.

Urbanization, which I see as the dissolution of the city's wealth of variety and as a force that makes for municipal homogeneity and formlessness, is a threat to the stability, fecundity, and freedom that the city added to the social landscape."

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Here he is discussing his conclusion after a very thorough examination of how Europe could have instead developed confederacies of city-states, which is what the Swiss Confederacy was for most of its existence. These cities built confederacies to limit the power of the papacy and another absolutism governments (like monarchies) and were in existence for hundreds of years off and on. They showed up in the region of Italy (much of Italy's history is actually city confederacies and it's only recently with the onset of Capitalism that Italy became a full nation-state), Greece (especially Ancient Greece such as Athens and so forth), Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and even Scandinavia.

Our history is riddles with cities that were built by people and for the people, but Capitalism and the centralized authority of nationalism stole that from us.

This is why American cities, especially in the Midwest and outside of the Eastern Coastal states, are built the way they are. Capitalism and a centralized authority demands it. The dissolution of the public sphere in cities is necessary to keep the population from revolting against the exploitation Capitalism demands in its endless hunger for more profits, and a centralized authority cannot retain its power over people if the city's public sphere was to become robust again. The Eastern Coastal states were originally built during a time where the city sphere still had its heart of people running it (before America became a nation-state), and that can be seen in the walkable cores of those cities, but look at their sprawling suburbs now? Those were added to steal the life from the core of the city. To bleed it dry of its creativity, its people, and kill its heart.

Look at the time under the Trumpocalyse? When Trump did some horrific things against immigrants, cities fought back and created Safe Cities for Immigrants, this was such a threat to his centralized authority, that these cities then got hammered with economic sanctions by federal government and other penalties to try to stop them. We are seeing this again, as cities are fighting back against the lack of inaction on Climate Change, and so city governments and the people who live in that city are starting to participate again and create their own form of governance to try to curtail Climate Change with their own initiatives. How does Capitalism and the Centralized authority handle such instances? They try to suffocate them or violently disband such initiatives.

Look at the recent uprisings in cities like Minneapolis, Ferguson, Seattle, and other cities. Look at how people banded together and created forms of mutual aid to help one another. In fact, in several of them there was an autonomous zone of people working together in solidarity due to the state abandoning them (until that zone was violently taken back the the state. See Seattle's autonomous zone in 2020). Look at how the centralized authority tore apart those bonds of community every way they could.

Why do that? Because when we band together and organize ourselves and govern ourselves we become a threat to the centralized power structure that upholds capitalism and white supremacy above all else. (Because let's be real, America was founded on white supremacy and capitalism and not on actual freedom for all people. America was never For Freedom FOR All , but also about Freedom TO do harm to others that don't fit what the centralized power structure/white supremacists/capitalists decide is the "right human.")

We, the people, hold tremendous power, especially when we come together in larger communities. That is a threat to the elites who require our subjugation to continue their machines of war and profits.

Thus, cities have their hearts torn out of them because if city's were allowed to retain their hearts? The centralized power structures and capitalism itself would be threatened and likely soon dismantled. Thus we are all living in what Borges' short story Immortals called City of the Immortals. Our cities have been made to be hostile to us because it's one way the centralized authority and capitalism keeps its hold on us. To be truly free, we have to remake the city and place people back in its heart.

P.S. I highly recommend N.K. Jemisin's The City We Became series that is about how once cities reach a critical mass of people active and participating within it and building communities within it... the cities become a live, and each city has a human avatar to represent it. However, there's an otherworldly horror that threatens to kill cities and infect humans that the city's avatars need to work together to defeat.

What I love about Jemisin's series is that it really digs into how cities are about community and building that community. A city cannot be alive without its people, who participate and build and create within it.

#City #CityDesign #CommunityCare #Community #Diversity #Variety #Communalism #Anarchism #Decentralization #AntiCapitalism

@rvaughnmd Absolutely. Being able to ride on safe routes is key. Dedicated, separate infrastructure is best, but changing the mindset of people is also important. I am certainly not an expert in city design, but cities fit for biking can be much more compact because they need much less space for cars to drive or park. And compact cities are easy to cycle because the small distances invite you to bike. #biking #safety #citydesign #compactcities #cycling

These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us

https://youtu.be/jN7mSXMruEo

#politics #citydesign #notjustbikes #SUV #trucks

#introduction for new server. I moved my anarchist account and I hope this will be the last time. :)

I'm Aidan -- nickname Bird, hence my screenname here: TheBird.

I am a #nonbinary, #queer, #disabled #ScienceFiction #writer. I have #LongCovid, and it sucks. I am still working on diagnoses for other possible chronic illnesses.

I have a second account at Aaidanbird@disabled.social, where I focus on needs of that community there.

Interests: #Anarchism #CommunityCare #MutualAid #Justice #DisabilityJustice, #Antiracism, #LGBTQIA #Accessibility

#CityDesign #WalkableCity #AccessibleCity

#gaming, #GameDesign, #writing #poetry #cartography, #physics, #astronomy, #worldbuilding, #music, #cats, and #art. I draw #maps.

My Elivera world, of which most of my writings are set, is located here: http://www.worldanvil.com/w/elivera3A-the-lost-ones-aidanbird

My Elivera world is a solarpunk world, where I explore various #AntiCapitalist ways of existing. Capitalism has never existed on Elivera and will never exist. A lot of the "nations" of Elivera are run by horizontal democracy and are experiments with collectives (some anarchist in bent and others experiments with communist approach to society).

I keep a database of saved #Covid studies and articles. I update it 2x a month. It's on #notion. I set it up with tags. Link: https://bit.ly/AidansCovidDatabase

#CovidIsNotOver #MaskUp #AirFilter #MasksAreAnAccessNeed

I have a SUPER FLUFFY cat named Sgt. Quark Amaya McFluffers. He's my little buddy.

And that's about it. I'm not new to Mastodon by the way. I'm just posting this so I can pin it for others to see.

"Saying that single family homes in the suburbs are cheaper and more affordable than dense multi-use units in the city is like saying that businesses who are on the verge of bankruptcy are selling their product more affordably than healthy businesses." - Chuck Marohn, 2023

This man continues to have amazing quotes on nearly every podcast he's on. Absolutely phenomenal.

#UrbanPlanning #CityPlanning #CityDesign #UrbanDesign #StrongTowns

OK, so. My interests.

#music #art #literature #dance #cinema #theatre #acting #writing #media #photography #poetry #drama
#fiction #rpg #creativity

#science #astronomy #physics
#space #spacetravel #stars #planets #aerospace #geology #tectonics #evolution #paleontology #earthscience

#archaeology #culture #psychology #myth #symbolism #humanities #philosophy

#urbanplanning #architecture #future #citydesign #democracy #humanrights #government #AsiaPacific

#dining #tea #wine #cocktails

OK, so. My interests.

#music #art #literature #dance #cinema #theatre #acting #writing #media #photography #poetry #drama
#fiction

#science #astronomy #physics
#space #spacetravel #stars #planets #aircraft #aerospace #geology #tectonics #evolution #paleontology #earthscience

#archaeology #culture #inventions #psychology #symbolism #humanities #philosophy

#urbanplanning #architecture #future #citydesign #democracy #humanrights #government #AsiaPacific

#travel #dining

#DnD, too.

#introduction

I'm Aidan -- nickname Bird, hence my screenname here: TheBird.

I am a #nonbinary, #queer, #disabled #sciencefiction #writer. I have #LongCovid, and it sucks. I am still working on diagnoses for other possible #chronicillness. I have second account at Aaidanbird@disabled.social, where I focus on needs of that community there.

Interests: #Anarchism #CommunityCare #MutualAid #Justice #DisabilityJustice, #Antiracism, #LGBTQIA #Accessibility

#CityDesign #WalkableCity #AccessibleCity

#gaming, #gamedesign, #writing #poetry #cartography, #physics, #astronomy, #worldbuilding, #music, #cats, and #art. I draw #maps.

My Elivera world, of which most of my writings are set, is located here: http://www.worldanvil.com/w/elivera3A-the-lost-ones-aidanbird

My Elivera world is a solarpunk world, where I explore various #AntiCapitalist ways of existing. Capitalism has never existed on Elivera and will never exist. A lot of the "nations" of Elivera are run by horizontal democracy and are experiments with collectives (some anarchist in bent and others experiments with communist approach to society).

I keep a database of saved #Covid studies and articles. I update it 2x a month. It's on #notion. I set it up with tags. Link: https://bit.ly/AidansCovidDatabase

#CovidIsNotOver #MaskUp #AirFilter #MasksAreAnAccessNeed

Centuripe, East-Central Sicily, Italy

That's just a FANTASTIC aerial view!

#photography #italy #travel #traveling #centuripe #sicily #europe #italian #photo #photos #amazing #citydesign

I'm Rowland. I'm a software engineer with preferred focus on operations.

I like to learn in public, and I share what I learn on my website: https://row.land.

I'm interested in and would love to connect on:
#ResilienceEngineering
#WalkableCities
#CityDesign
#AppropriateTechnology
#Elixir
#SystemsThinking
#Japan
#Walking
#SoftwareDesign
#Antifragility

#introduction

I'm Rowland. I'm a software engineer with preferred focus on operations.

I like to learn in public, and I share what I learn on my website: https://row.land.

I'm interested in and would love to connect on:
#ResilienceEngineering
#WalkableCities
#CityDesign
#AppropriateTechnology
#Elixir
#SystemsThinking
#Japan
#Walking
#SoftwareDesign
#Antifragility

#introduction

It occurs to me that a "hashtag synonym" feature might be usefully added somewhere. #BuiltEnvironment #UrbanPlanning #UrbanDesign #CityPlanning #CityDesign

I need this shirt

#UrbanDesign #UrbanPlanning #CityDesign #CityPlanning #meme

"This is a message from cyclists to city decision makers. Thank you for your kind attention."

#citydesign #bikeinfrastructure #cycling #cyclelanes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acVQLNQH0Ps

Huge chunks of city hotspots are covered in ugly and wasteful parking lots. Why do we do this to ourselves? #urbanism #CityDesign #StrongTowns

#introduction

I'm Aidan -- nickname Bird, hence my screenname here: TheBird.

I am a #nonbinary, #queer, #disabled #sciencefiction #writer. I have #LongCovid, and it sucks. I am still working on diagnoses for other possible #chronicillness. If you wanna follow my writings on disability and the intersection of my other interests with disability, I will post more of those on my Aaidanbird@disabled.social. (For longer essays on it, I may post them here when they intersect with community building, justice, collectives, and anarchism.)

Interests: #Anarchism #CommunityCare #MutualAid #AnarchistCollective #Justice #DisabilityJustice, #SocialJustice, #Antiracism, #LGBTQIA #Accessibility

#CityDesign #WalkableCity #AccessibleCity

#gaming, #gamedesign, #writing #poetry #cartography, #physics, #astronomy, #worldbuilding, #music, #cats, and #art. I draw #maps.

My Elivera world, of which most of my writings are set, is located here: http://www.worldanvil.com/w/elivera3A-the-lost-ones-aidanbird

Important Note about my Elivera World: It's a solarpunk world, where I explore various #AntiCapitalist ways of existing. Capitalism has never existed on Elivera and will never exist. A lot of the "nations" of Elivera are run by horizontal democracy and are experiments with collectives (some anarchist in bent and others experiments with communist approach to society).

I keep a database of saved #Covid studies and articles. I update it weekly. I did have a few folks helping, but we all got #LongCovid, so it's down to just me again. It's on #notion. I set it up with tags. Link: https://bit.ly/AidansCovidDatabase

#CovidIsNotOver #MaskUp #AirFilter #MasksAreAnAccessNeed #Disability #Science #Pandemic

P.S. If you want to help, I'll need to vet you first. Feel free to share and let me know if there's some newer articles/studies you'd like to see saved here.

Other Important notes: I'll never shut up about #Covid. It's a #justice and #access issue. Please #maskup as this is airborne (plus masking will decrease chances of catching other airborne diseases and decrease allergens). Please push for #CRBox and other #AirFilter devices to be placed in all interior spaces. If we work together in solidarity, we really can push back this disease and slow (if not stop) the mass death and disablement that is currently happening!

Mask up and stay safe friends. Thanks for reading.