walkable cities

Not Just Bikes argues that urban noise comes mostly from motor vehicles, drawing on the book Curbing Traffic and a visit to Delft, a city that takes noise seriously.

Jacob Geller's video essay on empty cities and what they say about our relationship to places, using games, literature and aerial imagery. It touches on works such as Invisible Cities.

Not Just Bikes argues that self-driving cars will worsen sprawl and car dependence and harm cities. The video compares car-centered and people-centered urban design and weighs what cities should do instead.

The first episode of a Cities: Skylines series on urban politics and planning, focused on parking. It uses the game to show how parking minimums shape cities, drawing on Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking.

Not Just Bikes argues that people in walkable, bikeable Dutch cities stay healthy because exercise is built into daily life, which he calls the gym of life. It contrasts this with car-dependent cities that require deliberate workouts.

A four-minute Not Just Bikes comparison of grocery shopping in Amsterdam versus car-centric North America, arguing that frequent small fresh-food trips beat bulk shopping. It ties this to land use and reduced food waste.

Not Just Bikes takes on the common excuse that a country is simply too big or spread out for good transit and walkable cities. The video argues that city density and short everyday trips matter, not national size or overall population density.

A short Vox video on Barcelona's superblocks, an urban design approach that closes interior streets to through traffic to return space to pedestrians.

The first video in Not Just Bikes' Strong Towns series explains the financial instability of North American cities, based on Strong Towns research. It argues that low-density suburban growth costs more to maintain than it brings in.

The School of Life sets out principles for making attractive cities, arguing that the art has been lost in the modern world.

Physicist Geoffrey West speaks at an FQXi conference on time about complexity and scaling laws. He covers how metabolism, growth and lifespan scale across organisms and how the same mathematics applies to cities and companies.

Not Just Bikes contrasts traditional and suburban development in North America. It looks at the financials behind each pattern and argues that suburban development leaves cities unable to pay for their own infrastructure.

A Vox explainer on how mandatory parking minimums and free parking impose hidden costs on cities. It draws on Donald Shoup's work and gives the history of parking requirements.

Episode 8 of the Fall of Civilizations podcast, a roughly two and a half hour history of the Sumerians. It covers their mysterious origins, invention of writing and mathematics, great early cities and eventual collapse, with myths, proverbs and recreated music.

Not Just Bikes explains the Strong Towns argument that car-dependent American suburbs cost more to maintain than they generate in taxes. It describes the growth Ponzi scheme that props up municipal finances.

Not Just Bikes explains how many American suburbs, built all at once rather than incrementally, cannot cover their infrastructure costs and survive on growing debt. It draws on Strong Towns' work on the growth Ponzi scheme.

Not Just Bikes explains how small pockets of shops and restaurants inside residential Dutch neighbourhoods create liveliness and help reduce traffic. It argues this kind of mixed-use design has been illegal in most of the US and Canada for a century because of zoning, and should be brought back.

A Climate Town video on how the auto industry reshaped American cities and culture through advertising, lobbying and campaigns like the 1939 World's Fair. It is snarky in tone but backed by a published source document.

James Howard Kunstler's TED talk argues that American public spaces and architecture have become unworthy of care, damaging civic life. He presents suburban sprawl and car-first design as failures of the common good.

Not Just Bikes explains why living in a dense, bikeable Dutch city sharply reduced his family's environmental footprint and improved quality of life. It is a collaboration that continues on Climate Town.

Not Just Bikes visits Paris to see how Mayor Anne Hidalgo's policies are turning it into a '100% cyclable' city. It looks at the changes that took space from cars for bikes and people.

The 1966 film Walt Disney recorded weeks before his death, laying out his plans for the Florida Project and especially EPCOT, a planned city of the future. It uses models, concept art and animation to describe the circular city, monorails and people movers.

Cities: Skylines experiment measuring traffic flow across 30 different four-way junction designs, comparing vanilla traffic AI with the TMPE mod.

Oh The Urbanity! argues that most city dwellers live in dense residential neighbourhoods outside downtown, which can be calm and peaceful. It draws on older, denser parts of Toronto and Montreal.

Oh The Urbanity! questions the framing that urban planning reforms like bike lanes and traffic calming wage war on suburbanites. It argues that suburban and urban residents alike want less traffic on their own streets.

Not Just Bikes reflects on five years in the Netherlands and tours small towns and cities, from Haarlem to Veenendaal. It argues that good urbanism with walkable streets, bike infrastructure and transit is found almost everywhere there, not just in Amsterdam.

A WIRED Future Cities documentary on Shenzhen, covering its hardware-prototyping culture and shanzhai copycat manufacturing. It looks at how the city's ecosystem evolved and what the rest of the world can learn.

Part 3 of WIRED's Future Cities series on Shenzhen. It examines how attitudes toward patents and intellectual property differ from the West, and how shanzhai (copycat) manufacturing created an ecosystem of rapid iteration and distribution.

Not Just Bikes explains why the channel exists, through the creator's walk in suburban Houston. It shows how car-dependent design makes cities hostile to pedestrians.

A short BicycleDutch video on how the Netherlands got its cycling infrastructure, including the 1970s protests and the shift away from car-centric planning. The channel later published an updated version.

A video explaining why Japanese cities look the way they do, through Japan's national tiered zoning system that permits mixed use and flexible development. It compares this approach with more restrictive zoning elsewhere.

Not Just Bikes argues that car-dependent suburbs rob children of independence, contrasting North American suburbia with Dutch cities where kids walk and bike on their own. It is the creator's remake of an earlier video on the topic.

Climate Town traces the history of American parking minimums, how they came from shaky research and ITE guides, and how they shape zoning, cities and housing costs. It is a long, comedic video essay.

A mini-documentary by a Canadian living in Japan explaining how an average family can afford a new detached house in Tokyo. It covers how houses are treated as depreciating assets and how Japanese zoning and building practices keep prices low.

Not Just Bikes argues that oversized American fire trucks and fire department requirements push cities toward wide roads and dangerous street design. He compares this with the Dutch approach to emergency response.

Not Just Bikes explains the Dutch concept of autoluw, or nearly car-free, streets and how it is applied across the Netherlands, with examples from Toronto and Copenhagen. It also covers Amsterdam's move toward a nearly car-free city.

Not Just Bikes explains that car-dependent suburbs are not the only option, using Toronto's Riverdale as an example of a pre-war streetcar suburb. These walkable neighborhoods are popular but are now effectively illegal to build.

A Vox explainer from the 2020 election series on why American public transit is so poor. It traces the effect of the interstate highway system on cities and the resulting car dependence.

A sped-up two-minute view of morning rush hour at a busy Utrecht junction, where thousands of bicycles and buses pass each day. It illustrates a city where about a third of trips are by bike.

A one-minute clip of slime mold placed on a map with food at the cities around Tokyo, growing a network that approximates the Tokyo-area railway system.