Welcoem to posts!!
in the future - u will be able to do some more stuff here,,,!! like pat catgirl- i mean um yeah... for now u can only see others's posts :c
Good morning, everyone!
Just posted my first members-only video on patreon. I reviewed Carlos Moreno's book "The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet." Somehow, what I thought would be a 10-minute review ended up being about 45. If you'd like to support the channel and get access to videos like this, my patreon is just $3 a month: patreon.com/RadicalPlanning
-Josh
25 - 6
Morning, all!
Video is almost done. I will release it next week, should everything go to plan.
If you didn't see my most recent video, I started a patreon (patreon.com/RadicalPlanning). There's not really anything on there right now but I will be uploading monthly bonus videos (book reviews and reactions to current events in urban planning). You can sign up for a free tier where you don't get the bonus videos but you would have access to the feed where I'll be cross-posting channel updates between there and here. Just wanted to throw that out there if any of you spend more time on patreon than on youtube's community tab.
Anyway, I just posted this long thread on bluesky where I don't really get any engagement at all lol. Thought I'd share it here:
bsky.app/profile/radicalplanning.bsky.social/post/…
Thread text:
my next video is coming soon - sometime next week. i’ve been working on this video since May 2024 and the ideas i share in it are so wrapped up into me at this point that i hardly know what to say about it. but let’s talk about how to define what urban planning IS.
we can define things as what they actually are (eg. what planning is) or by what we think they should be in an ideal form (eg. what planning ought to be). all mainstream definitions of urban planning fall into the “ought” category- the mainstream does not critique the existence of urban planning.
either form of definition (is or ought) can be called a “theory of planning.” however, mainstream planning theory (always what planning ought to be) has little substance. it portrays planning as a universal human tool, not something created by and bound to its respective society.
to conceptualize planning like this is problematic for two reasons: 1. it leads to the idea that mainstream urban planning can solve problems inherent to capitalism and 2. it leads to the idea that mainstream planning is passive rather than an active mechanic of the preservation of capitalism.
the State is a mediator of the relationship between society and property. we can call this “production,” which is capitalism in our society. because urban planning is an arm of the state, it cannot itself modify the relationship between society and property that the State is designed to maintain.
this means that anything mainstream planning accomplishes, it does so first and foremost to satisfy the society-property relationship. any subsequent societal benefits that come from this are not in conflict with the needs and goals of capital. mainstream planning theory obfuscates this.
theories of what planning is, on the other hand, define the limits of urban planning. actually you’ve been witnessing that type of theory unfold here in this thread: urban planning is an arm of the state that manages the society-property relationship on a spatial level.
A theory of what planning is is useful to us in predicting the intentions and outcomes of mainstream planning actions. and these theories are also useful in helping us craft our own theory of what planning ought to be.
yes- the left needs a theory of what planning ought to be in combination with a theory of what planning is. we need to imagine what urban planning should be doing, but understanding that mainstream planning will never get us there.
was this boring?? i hope not. as i said my video is coming out soon and i’ll be explaining all of this in greater depth. this thread is mostly sourced from Scott and Roweis (1977), which i highly recommend getting your hands on. www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/978131…
-End Thread-
Talk soon!
-Josh
39 - 3
Morning, all! Just finished the rough cut of the video (meaning no graphics, music, or effects). I'm pleased with it so far. I did end up cutting out a lot during recording - it was just too massive for me to control. Right now the run time is 51 minutes, but will probably be a bit longer once I'm done editing. Anyway, don't get too excited - I will still need a couple weeks to wrap this up lol.
Tentative title: "You Don't Know What Urban Planning Is"
90 - 13
Finalizing the script today!! This was an enormous undertaking and resulted in over 12,000 words (which will be over an hour in video time). I threw away four different scripts that attempted to get where I wanted to go, but I finally got there. I appreciate your patience and will keep you posted on how the filming and editing is going.
66 - 8
Good morning!
I've been hard at work on the script - I think an early September release is feasible. I fell down a few rabbit holes, but that's the joy of creating this sort of content. A big part of my essay is discussing "is" versus "ought to be" as presented in the Scott and Roweis paper I linked in my previous post. Essentially the idea is that mainstream planning theory (which happens to be employed by urbanists) only describes planning as it ought to be - it cannot address what planning actually is. This means that mainstream planning theory ignores capitalist realities and instead presents planning as a sort of tool kit. It claims things like, if you have X problem then you can fix it with Y solution. But planning is not really a proactive action as it's name would make you believe. It is very much reactive and is a mediator between capital and society. In describing planning as it ought to be, you ignore what it actually is and you impose your own values on to it. This will be more clear in the video!
Anyway, I decided to take the concept of is/ought back to its origin with David Hume. Hopefully people will not tune out! I found this video that explains is vs. ought really well if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNmyc...
-Josh
12 - 2
Monday!
I have started writing the script. Not sure what the title of the video will be yet, but it is taking shape. What I do know is that this video will be a very long one about radical planning theory. I will still be making the condensed version for the 101 series, but 12 minutes doesn't seem like an appropriate length for a video that explains why I made this channel in the first place. While we all wait for me to finish writing, I thought I'd share the bibliography with y'all.
Josef Engels, 1872 - "The Housing Question." www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-q…
Engels' seminal work on the relationship between developers, landlords, and the working class.
Stephen Grabow and Allan Heskin, 1973 - "Foundations for a Radical Concept of Planning." www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1…
The paper that first outlined radical planning theory.
A.J. Scott and S.T. Roweis, 1977 - "Urban planning in theory and practice: a reappraisal." journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a091097
The paper that established the general form of radical planning theory's critique of capitalism.
John Friedmann, 1987 - "Planning in the Public Domain." Chapter 10: The Mediations of Radical Planning. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv10crf8d
Career theorist John Friedmann's reflections on Radical Planning's first 15-ish years of development.
Robert Lake, 1993 - "Rethinking NIMBY." www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01944369308975….
A discussion of NIMBY as a reaction to the advancement of capital (highly recommend that you read this one).
Richard Behan, 2004 - "Degenerate Democracy." scholarworks.umt.edu/plrlr/vol24/iss1/3/
A discussion of how the US Constitution protects private property rights and suppresses popular movements.
Sam Stein, 2019 - "Capital City." www.versobooks.com/products/602-capital-city.
A book-length discussion of how urban planning is in service to capital not the public. This is a fantastic book to start with if you're new to radical planning theory.
Ståle Holgerson, 2020 - "On Spatial Planning and Marxism: Looking Back, Going Forward." onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/anti.1261…
A reflection on the decline of marxism in planning theory and how to progress radical planning theory.
Ben Teresa, 2021 - "Planners' Alchemy Achieved? How NIMBY and YIMBY reproduce the housing question." onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-2427.1306…
A paper that revisits the Robert Lake paper I linked above. Discusses the dialectical relationship between NIMBY and YIMBY.
Riveting!
-Josh
55 - 11
Good morning, everyone!
I'm reading "The Housing Question" by Engels for the next video. If you're unfamiliar, this 1887 work is foundational to marxist critiques on cities. I'm not sure if it's more comforting or horrifying to know that the housing problems we face to day look almost exactly the same as in Engels' time. The essay is structured around Engels' responses to the housing solutions proposed by a French socialist/anarchist (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) and an Austrian economist (Emil Sax).
Sax argued that the the housing crisis could be solved if the working class owned their own homes. Engels has many arguments against this, chiefly that the working class has to be mobile - they need to be able to move where there's work. To some degree this concept has been diminished by car ownership, but the idea is the same - lower-wage jobs tend to be scattered and higher-wage jobs tend to be concentrated. Engels also argued that working class home ownership, in most cases, burdens the worker with debt (mortgages) so the economic advantages of ownership are absorbed by creditors.
Sax believed that the only difference between the working class and capitalist class is the working class's lack of property (here he is conflating personal property with private property). Sax argued that if they were to own their own homes, then they would become capitalists themselves. Does this sound familiar to you? Sure, in this context Sax sees this as a positive - he believed that being a capitalist was a good thing. But this also echos a common urbanist sentiment I hear a lot today. The idea that home owners are a particularly selfish class of capitalists and their greed is driving up housing costs and limiting supply. Whenever I see this argument, it's always used to exculpate the inherent capitalism of real estate development. The urbanist argument is that developers provide a needed service and home owners hinder it. Engels provides a great response to this line of thinking in "The Housing Question," writing:
"Capital is the command over the unpaid labor of others. The house of the worker can only become capital therefore if he rents it to a third person and appropriates a part of the labor product of this third person in the form of rent. By the fact that the worker lives in it himself the house is prevented from becoming capital, just as a coat ceases to be capital the moment I buy it from the tailor and put it on. The worker who owns a little house to the value of a thousand talers is certainly no longer a proletarian, but one must be Dr. Sax to call him a capitalist."
The urbanist propaganda machine works diligently to cut the tie between landlord and developer (I explored this in my first video, "Don't Fall Down the YIMBY Pipeline"). However, the concept that developers build and then sell their units after construction is primarily a suburban model of development. This only occurs when the developers' building is built for purchase (condos, single-family, row houses, etc.). For apartment construction, the developer - who by definition owns the land prior to construction - will continue to own the building and collect its rents after construction. That makes the developer a capitalist. The home owner - even if they think of their house as an investment vehicle - is not a capitalist (in regards to owning a home specifically) unless they use their investment earnings to purchase more homes and rent those homes out.
I do not believe home ownership will solve the housing crisis. However, it's important to understand the distinction between home owners and capitalists. I received multiple comments on my Third Place video that argued against the possibility for the Right to the City on the grounds that homeowners would prevent that from ever happening. This, I think, comes from anti-NIMBY sentiments, by which I mean the urbanist's very successful campaign to make NIMBYism appear like some rampant, well-organized mass movement. As an urban planner, I know how to deal with NIMBYs and I also know they are the minority. But more importantly I know how to distinguish a person's genuine concerns about the place they live verses a group of racists/classists. To focus on the financial selfishness of individual home owners is a distraction from the necessity to address how developers and landlords dispossess us of our income.
You can read "The Housing Question" in full here: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-q…
106 - 18
Happy Tuesday!
Lot's of bad news lately on the Federal level. This has shifted the topic of my next video a bit. It's now heading towards something more about how these fascist actions will be enacted through land use (and therefore, urban planning). Hoping to wrap up the research for that this week and begin the script writing process by the weekend.
I wanted to link y'all to a source I had in my notes. I can't remember which video I was going to use this source for but I do remember cutting a pretty long discussion of it at some point. I'll be revisiting it in my next video. Anyway, it's about how the US Constitution paved the way for the corporate takeover of the country - that corporatism is natural to this system rather than something that could be reformed out.
This should be free to read for everyone:
scholarworks.umt.edu/plrlr/vol24/iss1/3/
85 - 6
We just hit 11,000 subs!
I'm elated! Thanks so much for being here. Let me give you a channel update.
I'm working on four things right now: a long-form video about what radical planning is in theory and practice; a short-form video about radical planning for my 101 series; research for a video about the intersection of universities, debt, gentrification, and neoliberal violence; and finally a video announcing my patreon (more on that at the end of post).
One of my earliest videos is titled "Urban Planning for Leftists" and it covers much of what I want to say in my next video. However, that one lacks depth - it's very brief. I may unlist it after I release the new one since I am also using many of the same sources. I don't want to abandon my 101 series, so I'll still create a very brief explainer under the 101 "brand" - I plan on incorporating that video into the larger one and releasing a modified version as a standalone as well.
As for universities, I have been planning this one out for over a year. The waves of university and police anti-protester action a few months ago has made this video more urgent (though I am still slow-moving). I'll be examining the books "In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower" by Baldwin, "Can't Pay Won't Pay" by the Debt Collective, and "Governing by Debt" by Lazzarato among others.
Finally, I am starting a patreon. I always had the goal to start one once I hit 10,000 and we are well over that now. This is much sooner than I anticipated so I'm pretty unprepared. I need an announcement video so I'm working on that one now. I'll release it independently and also incorporate it into that larger radical planning theory video I discussed. I want there to be two tiers - free and paid. I'd like to offer all members access to an annotated bibliography (please clap) that provides links to all the sources I explore with summaries and short analyses. I want to give everyone access to this because I believe that your radical planning education should continue without me - I should not be your sole source of knowledge. A paid tier will be predictable - early releases, commercial-free vids, and occasional stripped-down videos on topics I don't cover on the channel. All tiers will have access to channel updates (much like this one here).
Ok all that said, I want to gauge how well y'all know how to grab academic articles. Youtube will not let me give you a multiple choice, so I did my best here. You don't need to answer this if you are not interested in pulling your own academic articles in the future
42 - 9
Welcome new subscribers! Thanks for the positive response to my third place video. Just some quick notes on this channel. I work full time and my job is exhausting. It's pretty difficult to find the time to complete my research, write the scripts, and record while having a 9-to-5. At the same time, I am finding it more and more difficult to release short-form content. I have so much to say and I really enjoy building large-scale arguments. When you combine a demanding 40-hour work week with the ambition to create hour+ videos, you get a very slow release schedule. My apologies for that. I'm trying to get things out as soon as I can - not just for your entertainment but also so I can keep moving down my very long list of videos I intend to make. All this to say - bear with me and I really REALLY appreciate you being here.
One finally thing, do y'all ever look at these community pages? I know that I don't myself but if there is an audience here, I will be happy to post updates on my research and creative process. Take the poll:
46 - 19
Critiques on neoliberal cities and land policies with an American context. Attempting to deliver videos monthly, bear with me!