Members of r/Urbanism have been quite vocal about the need to a greater variety of things in quicker amounts of time. The celebrations of up-zoning legislation, deregulation of home construction, SB79 in California, Austin's construction boom, and the success of Chinese high speed rail indicate that this subreddit broadly likes the idea of a society where things can be built at larger scale and faster.

The big question is this: how does a philosophy of looser construction approval work when construction is used in ways that feel wrong? If the legal framework for a bullet train can be constructed quickly, there is the same framework for a disruptive highway to be created. If the legal framework exists to minimize the restraints on land use, than what happens when a data center gets built near residential areas, or a skyscraper blocks out the sun of a residential home?

The solution seems to allow the "good" construction, and disallow the "bad" construction, such that only the high speed railways get built and the highways do not. Over the course of a society, it appears that every form of construction can be labeled bad. Highways are disruptive in a certain context, a train lines are disruptive in a certain context, high rise residential towers are disruptive in a certain context. A society that accepts that government should prevent "bad" construction will find itself labeling nearly all forms of construction as suspect. There will always be a case where a train line was too disruptive, a highway too noisy, and a high rise too out of place. The rock that forms from the sediments of each construction blunder is one where everything needs endless permits, studies, and local hearings to avoid the mistakes of the past. Many people come to this subreddit to discuss a society without such regulation on human construction (as it prevents "good" construction from happening).

Such a question about the validity of a system even if it produces mistakes is an ancient one. It was Thomas Hobbes who justified the absolute sovereign after a terrible English monarch not because he though a monarch was always in the right, but that, even in error, an absolute sovereign could become better and achieve greater than if there was no sovereign. The overall political philosophy is to not compare A with !A, but that A is replaced with B, and that B has its own issues and a holistic view must be taken to see if A should still exist.

This ties back to the desire to "building things". Lets say that r/Urbanism gets its way. Few limits on land use, governments wield near absolute power to construct any infrastructure with local opposition being crushed. This can produce high speed rail lines, subways, wind turbines and Haussmann inspired urbanism at scale, but the lack of oversight on construction could bring in a highway that cuts through the city as the government no longer has to listen to local objections.

Relevant example: A data center gets build near a community, the locals are upset, should the government intervene and regulate data center construction? Our current trajectory says yes. Data centers have proven to cause harm in a local incident, a mandatory local hearing would allow locals to raise objections, and the locals can halt the project (for a better society). We could say society has improved. A society that allows a data center to be blocked is also one that can block construction of California's high speed rail program. As voters in the past wanted controls over construction for the same reasons people want data center construction controls to exist. If we became more open to more construction, we might live with a disruptive data center and a beneficial high speed rail line. Are you willing to accept in error in data center construction for a society that allows a benefit in rail construction?

Conclusion: I am not an advocate for the U.S. Interstate's method of highway construction in cities, I do not want noisy data centers near people's homes, I do want people to be able to live with greater density, I am also not keen on utopian thinking. We can not only allow "good" construction in our lives, as "good" construction is a fad like anything else, but to allow the good we must be comfortable letting in the bad. the only way we get the urbanism and public transport we want is to accept that the reforms also let in other forms of construction that we dislike in certain contexts. Seeing a bad piece of infrastructure can get a new meaning. Instead of "this is bad, get rid of all of it", a nuance of "this is bad in this context, but the laws that allowed it to be built quickly are the same ones that will create the infrastructure of the future, once we get our way, we will be able to build quickly and it will benefit society" should be needed. The question becomes, how much bad are we willing to accept if there is good to be found?

P.S. I am in a Philosophy class and Hobbes is being discussed. I thought his ideas could be useful in an urbanism context.

This project uses e-scooter sensor data to map street-surface quality for better wheelchair navigation. The information is added to OpenStreetMap, where cities and map developers can use them to improve urban/digital infrastructure. E-scooters don’t always have the best reputation when it comes to accessibility, so I think this is an interesting use of the data. Do you agree?

As of last weekend, cars can no longer drive on the Jamsu bridge over the Han River. It came to be known that the bridge would need repairs to continue to support the weight of vehicle traffic, and Seoul made the sane decision of just removing the vehicle traffic and making it a dedicated pedestrian facility.

Here is the official press release:

https://mediahub.seoul.go.kr/archives/2019683

This video has auto-generated English subtitles with more info:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eayRpY3bWDA

They're going to completely remodel it as a park space for relaxation and events. Construction is expected to wrap up around next August, but the bridge will remain open when possible until then.

For most of our evolutionary history, we lived in spaces in which everyone was either directly involved in shaping their immediate environment or else knew the people who were responsible for shaping them; whether through building, various forms of craftsmanship or through management of local resources.

Until recently, all cultures were place based cultures. (Nomadic groups still set up camp for a period of time.) As long distance trade got cheaper, specifically, with the introduction of fossil fuels which reduced the cost of long distance shipping, we suddenly find ourselves in a situation where we know almost nothing about the places where the materials we depend on comes from. Moreover, our spaces are largely planned and designed for us rather than by us.

Being exiled from your land is perhaps the greatest trauma that any people can undergo. Look at the stories of Native Americans, aboriginal Australians, Jews, Palestinians and countless other people who have been torn away from an intimate relationship with a place which they shaped over many generations and which shaped them. Most of us are effectively exiled from a certain kind of relationship with place, though for most of us, that happened through a gradual process.

The reverse is also true. Our sense of well-being is greatly improved when we feel supported and held by an environment which we take care of and which takes care of us. ​When you get to do that as part of a tribe you're experiencing a (the?) primary motivator that drove our ancestors to innovate, commune, and build a culture and way of life - together.

https://sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100907104035.htm

Studies like this one point towards the underlying principle. I'd be shocked if the same principle didn't extend to neighborhoods.

An antidote:

https://mendelyaf-spec.github.io/prophets-fingers/city-country-fingers/

Does anyone else feel like LA has the population, wealth, and influence of a megacity, but somehow lacks the atmosphere you’d expect from one?
Where is that feeling of intellectual energy—people exchanging ideas, lively public spaces, culture you can stumble into just walking around? I know LA has brilliant people and major universities, but why does that energy feel so disconnected from everyday life here?
And why do so many parts feel so neglected and rough? Sometimes “ghetto” is honestly the word that comes to mind: trash, broken sidewalks, rundown storefronts, and public spaces that feel abandoned. How can a city with this much money feel so poorly maintained?
Is it the sprawl and car dependence? The inequality? Does everything interesting happen in isolated pockets or private circles you have to seek out?
Am I missing something, or does LA feel more like a collection of disconnected neighborhoods than a cohesive world city? What areas make you feel otherwise?

There are two opposing sides I’ve been seeing lately: people who say this investment is corrupt and pointless, and that the monorail is a relic of the past on par with Elon Musk’s pod cars, and the other side, which says that Europeans and Americans are stuck in the past, and that YouTubers are spreading misinformation and hate about monorail.

What do you personally think about it? Is it good, or are there simply better and cheaper options aka train/elevated metro/tram/LRT/Bus Rapid etc?

The modern world would benefit tremendously from breaking the mental stranglehold of the dualism that characterizes our discussions about spaces.

That dualism assumes that a shared resource must be managed by the state, or managed by private enterprise, or else it's unmanageable. Historically, people have effectively managed spaces, referred to as commons, which existed (and continue to exist) outside of the state-market dualism.

Examples abound and the relevant knowledge is very much out there. Elinor Ostrom documented these cases extensively and won a Nobel prize for it.

Or we can just continue to bury our heads in the sand and pretend that the disappearance of the commons isn't a primary force responsible for the growing mental health crisis.

Hot take: At its core, the mental health crisis is a direct outgrowth and expression of an environmental crisis defined by the disappearance of common spaces stewarded by self-governing communities.

Our environments suck so our internal experiences suck. That's how it's always worked.

Edit:

Some resources that go into more detail into the theory and practice of common pool resources (CPRs)

Elinor Ostrom's Nobel prize in economics lecture

https://mendelyaf-spec.github.io/prophets-fingers/

Great video discussing the importance of having a cohesive social fabric and the interactions that cities create. Touches on a lot of different urbanist issues.

Thank god for beg buttons, which put pedestrians in their rightful place. They already get soooooo much space on the sidewalk, parks, even their own homes. Now they think they’re entitled to roam freely on our precious roads? Rogue vigilantes have gone so far as to paint crosswalks on our god fearing streets, with no concern for who it might effect. Not everyone can walk, you know. Some people DON’T HAVE LEGS. Enough. Cities are meant for one thing and one thing only: cars. This article is about how we protect our precious driving space

(In case you missed it—satire! Go donate to Peoples’ Vision Zero here, they’re doing the lord’s work)

Feeling a bit allergic to PIA. Anyone else?

Paid for the degree, have the experience and still do the work just fine. Most of what we do isn’t hard.

Not needed for Land and Environment Court work in New South Wales, or any approval for that matter.

If membership delivers value for you, awesome. For me, it doesn’t provide a professional return of investment.

Me job be town planner. Me read BIG legislation on broken website portal. Me balance pros and cons. Me not h8 PIA. 🤭

Hi everyone! I’m a Los Angeles resident with an interest in housing (I actually live in one). I recently wrote an essay reviewing in detail the effects of the Measure ULA transfer tax, which has been a source of a lot of controversy and various accusations it’s having negative effects.

(I looked over the subreddit rules and this seemed within the rules, but I apologize if not.)

For those unfamiliar, ULA is a tax passed by voters in 2022: on (almost) all real-estate sales over $5 million (or a little more now, since it's pegged to inflation), the seller pays 4%. There's also a higher bracket for sales above $10 million). I explain a little further down what negative effects are claimed to follow from this.

Like everyone paying attention to housing stuff, I’ve heard a million arguments back and forth about ULA; good, bad, necessary, evil, whatever. I was pretty frustrated with how shallow a lot of the discussion I’ve encountered is, so got motivated to carefully go through all the academic/policy work that’s been published. I wrote the essay to try to organize and catalogue my thoughts while reading, and hopefully make it understandable to a general audience. I hope it could be useful and informative to at least some interested people who are trying to decide what they think about ULA, if it does come back to some kind of ballot amendment at some point. (There’s nothing on this year’s ballot.)

It’s a long essay, so to kind of briefly preview:

- Overall, the most recent studies finding negative effects of ULA hold up pretty well, and I don’t think many of the earlier objections from ULA supporters apply very plausibly to them. (Earlier ULA-critical articles definitely had more substantial issues.) I do have problems with a few parts of their analyses, but even adjusting for these with some back-of-the-envelope calculations, I don’t end up hugely disagreeing with the nature of the conclusions - though maybe change the relative emphases on some things.

- The two most worrying claimed effects of ULA are (1) decreasing other public revenues by a lot, (2) slowing development of apartments/multifamily housing. Each effect by itself is already large enough, at a baseline estimate, to be really significant.

- I think there’s substantial evidence for both these effects, which is closer to conclusive for (1) and more uncertain for (2). So some of the objections of anti-reformers on (2) aren’t unreasonable, though I argue the results are already robust enough to affect policy-decision making - especially given that there are also reasonable modeling choices that make (2)’s effect and certainty look much higher.

- On the other hand, some of the results of the ULA-critical studies have been used in very overstated ways which I don’t think are very well-supported by the evidence (e.g. for banning or capping all transfer taxes at very low levels like in AB 736).

- I talk a bit about what reasonable reforms might look like at the end, but here I’ve looked a lot less in depth than in the review of empirical evidence. So I talk about what kinds of general reforms seem to directionally make the most sense to me, but am willing to be moved on plenty of details.

Since the start of the year, I've become a frequent user of the Gawler Line for my commute. The more I have traveled around the northern suburbs and commuted through it, the more resentful I become. I think the matter of Adelaide Urbanism warrants considerable discussion, so I've written a considerable post.

1) Adelaide Urbanism:

1.1 To begin, let's just acknowledge the sheer stupidity of Adelaide's suburban sprawl. Black roofs? With no trees either, really?
It's not just confined to Adelaide, the town of Mallala (close to where I live) seems to be going down the same path as Riverlea and other so called "development areas:" A mass of detached houses in a vaguely connected plot of land. It's not even properly connected to the Town, it's just off to the side, down the road.
Don't even get me started on the backyards smaller than a linen-cupboard, and the houses being mere centimetres apart; at that point what's even the point of having detached houses (which are less efficient to heat/cool btw) when at that point you may be better off building multi-storey apartments? It'd certainly be more space effective, afterall.

1.2 And tell me where are the corner shops and little cafés? Where are the playgrounds for children? Where are the places of worship? Where are the trees for shade, or provision for future PT? I sure can't see anything. We are not building communities at all, we are building a vaguely connected tumor of urban sprawl, eating up the Adelaide Plains when we really ought to be building up the density in pre-established suburbs. They're always advertised as communities, too, when that could not be further from truth. I'll also point out that, designing these places as car centric from the get-go, is going to make it hard to develop meaningful public transport in those places, we're literally setting these "communities" (if you can call them that) up to fail.

1.3 Community-oriented things are not something you should have to retrofit, they are really something that should be planned alongside the development from the onset. Cafés, little shops, places of worship, walkable streets and tree cover should be integrated and considered in urban planning at every stage. We seem to be building a lot of houses, but not a lot of homes. That needs to change now, and it should never have gotten to the point it has.

1.4 I'm also not saying we should have Hong-Kong levels of density in places like Salisbury, but a little more in the inner suburbs could go along way in housing supply, and perhaps justify the return of trams. Don't build housing for the sake of it, build walkable, community oriented developments, and redevelop existing places to be more considerate. Because tbh, I'm sick beyond death of car-centric Adelaide.

And transit...

2) Adelaide refuses to back 'on track':

2.1 Why are we so backwards? Don't get me wrong, I love the Adelaide metro, I use it very often and it's the only way I can get into the city. It still takes me forever because I must first get to Gawler. That aside, the Adelaide metro is, out of all the other major cities' metros, the sickly old man. We are so unimaginative when it comes to rail. We are happy to spend billions on a tunnel for cars, yet when it comes to heavy rail it's chirping crickets. You'd think we'd be a little more proactive regarding a line to Virginia/Riverlea? But no. We've got a rail corridor preserved, but there's no initiative for actually building the line at the moment. This is a lapse in judgement, there will be people living there that will need it in 2-3 years maybe, start building now!

2.2 I'd like to bring up the trams: we used to have such optimism and vision for new tram lines, they never matched the 1950s network, but it was still great to see proposals from all different parties. But it's been what, well over a decade? And sweet piss-all has come of it. Realistically, we should've had a line from the Airport to the CBD, and a line into North Adelaide years ago by this point. Even when we do throw money towards trams, it's not even to improve the trams: it's to improve cars, as we saw with the Glenelg line overpass. I could continue...

3) Adelaide & her connection (or lack thereof) to the regions:

3.1 As a country person: Our railways? where are they? Oh, sold off to the federal gov in the '70s and slowly poisoned, then no services by the mid '80s. Talk about dropping the ball of transit. To this day there's no rail connection between regional towns, and none to Adelaide. This greatly exacerbated the challenges the regions were facing at the time, and has stunted any substantial growth or recovery even today. It also forces us to be reliant on cars, and makes accessing services such as specialised health more difficult. I can't really see a doctor, or get mental health support very easily because of this.

3.2 I was walking in Hamley Bridge last week along the derelict tracks, and I came towards the old viaduct. Even until the '70s/'80s, we had a connection to Adelaide. We had the infrastructure, and at some point we had the political willpower to build it, so why not now? This is so perplexing to me, policymakers and urban planners just seem so spineless. (forgive my uncharitable judgement)

3.3 I say all this to point out that South Australia is very Adelaide-centric. That's understandable, >70% of the population lives there, but we as people in the regions deserve more consideration. The old regional railroads gave us a practical and genuinely useful service, it connected our communities too, and it connected us to Adelaide. When I travel to Adelaide I feel like I'm in a different state entirely, there's a strange disconnect because we're cut off.

4) The Freedom of Movement:

4.1 It was a genuine race against the clock, and very expensive endeavour to get my driver's license just so I could attend University, on top of my year 12 studies. I have friends who couldn't attend Uni because they had no car, because it's too expensive. Don't they also deserve the choice of higher education? Those are just people I know, I cannot think of how many more are robbed of employment or education... just because of where they live and their income level. PS: That's what public transit liberates you from. We need an alternative to cars, not just so we can ditch cars but also to provide independence and service to: The elderly, disabled people, poor families, children who maybe want to see their friend the next town over? Communities are always worth investing in.

4.2 There really ought to be trains to Victor Harbour and the Riverland, and into the Yorke Peninsula. A train to Pt Pirie > Pt Augusta > Whyalla >? Pt Lincoln would be great. Lines into the Mid North too, Balaklava, Burra, Owen, Hamley, Clare, etc. We deserve to be connected to Adelaide too. South Australia is the only mainland state to have no regional rail. This should be a great source of shame.
And perhaps the pressure on Adelaide housing wouldn't be as much had regional centres not been abandoned, and didn't experience population collapse/brain drain? They could have grown and been a vent for growth. Just a thought.

4.3 "Just move to the city?" - one might say to me, as many have. Now, if I had a huge stack of cash under my bed, I might just do that. However, I don't find myself in a financially privileged position, as many others do. Nor will I ever at this rate, with how much I pay for fuel at the moment... just so I can go to work to pay for that fuel, or go to the city for study - so I can (hopefully) get a job that pays more money... that I can also spend on car expenses. What a delightful system?

Conclusion;

I suppose my core frustration is how Adelaide planning (and South Australian planning more broadly) is not forward looking at all. It's more of the same. Nothing of substance has progressed, things have just gotten worse because what was sufficient 20 years ago is not sufficient now. It's the repeated spineless, half-baked proposals that do not address the needs that will be 50 years down the line. There's no willpower and the excuse always seems to be "well it's expensive," well, I tell you now, it's going to be a hell of a lot more expensive in the future... y'know... when we really need it.

That goes for transit; however, regarding housing, we actually need to consider if we're building cohesive communities where people know their neighbours, are able to walk a couple minutes to a café, children can walk to school and play in a park, and you can walk to Sunday Mass in the shade of trees. Because at the moment, I don't see that as being possible, especially in the new developments around Roseworthy, Riverlea, and Mallala. We can't build developments that fail to function as a community. But that's exactly what we seem to be doing. Adelaide shouldn't be a group of buildings where people work, eat and sleep, but rather a city that cultivates the human person in a community. Nor should we in the regions be a peripheral, distant appendage to the metropole. This is fundamentally a question of the dignity of the human person. How will Adelaide answer it?

Note;
I'm interested to see if anyone else shares my feelings, or has anything to add. Just know, I'm so ruthlessly critical of Adelaide urbanism precisely because I love Adelaide so much, it has so much potential, and my dream is for the countryside and Adelaide to be connected, as one big family :)

Rent burden falls harder on families: Families with children are more likely to be rent-burdened than nonfamily households — a gap driven not by income, but by the higher cost of the larger homes families need.

Family-size rentals are scarce: Thirty-seven percent of rentals offered two bedrooms, and only 24% offered three or more as of July 2026, limiting options for the more than one-third of renters who have children.

I live in the Toronto area, and it seems to me that we have replaced the War in Cars, with a War on Bikes. Just to be clear, i think both are stupid.

Im sure you guessed, im a cyclist myself. I commute to work by bike. I go to see my friends by bike. I cross municipal borders on my bike. Im not the only one.

People complain, Oh bikes are using the sidewalk illegally, they shouldnt be there, they need to be on the road 😡😡. I agree. But. How are you going to expect a cyclist to ride on the road, or continue chosing to ride at all, if you keep removing all the infrastructure that keeps us safe?

In my city there is a highway that cuts straight through the middle of the city. There is only 1 option anywhere in the entire city to cross that highway safley and legally by bike, all other routes you either illegally ride on the sidewalk or risk becoming flattened by traffic trying to merge and get onto the highway ramps.

They want to remove the lanes on that single crossing, they claim its to make *everybody* safer, and to improve commutes for everyone. How is removing my only safe legal option to cross a highway and raising the speed limit improving my commute or making me safer? This is doing the exact polar opposite. Its degrading my commute and putting me either directly in harms way, or at risk of getting a ticket for riding on the sidewalk because i dont feel like dying that day.

In a city where the drivers are so atrociously aweful were literally famous for it nation wide, removing these lanes isnt improving commutes for all and its certianly NOT making everyone safer. What they really mean is were going to improve commutes for DRIVERS, and make it significantly more dangerous for everyone else.

They claim its because of traffic. Great, show me the traffic. I use these lanes every single day, several times a day at all hours of the day, ive never once seen this street backed up. They claim nobody uses these lanes, well ive got footage from my bike cameras that easily disprove that and show these bike lanes actually getting congested with bikes and scooters, particularly over the highway and at the signals on either side.

Look, Just stop this War on Bikes bullshit, Stop the War on Cars bullshit too, while were at it lets also improve transit and walking infrastructure. Knock it off with this political this that and the other thing. Build cities that can accommodate Cars, Bikes and Pedestrians, not everyone must drive, if you dont its slow, dangerous or both. You want to improve congestion in a growing city but cant widen the roads? Its called viable alternatives to driving.

If you build an entire city to accommodate drivers and cast transit riders, cyclists and pedestrians to the side, of course everyone is going to drive and congestion will get worse. Only the people who have no other option will use your bus, your sidewalk, or your bike lane. Not to mention, if they claim to care about the environment so much, people who commute or get to their destination by Transit, Walking or Cycling have a massively lower footprint on the environment than even someone driving an electric car.

All im trying to say here, is practice what you preach. If you say Safer roads for ALL, that should mean, ALL not just drivers. If you say you care deeply about roadway saftey, Stop ripping out the infrastructure that keeps vulnerable road users safe. Stop building our cities on the assumption that absolutely everybody will drive. Build a city where, You can drive if you want to, but where its also safe and convenient to use Transit, ride a bike or maybe walk aswell.

No more wars on transportation. Its stupid and counter productive.

We occasionally get posts that are submitted by accounts that are days/weeks old that somehow manage to churn up hundreds of upvotes despite the fact that the content of their posts is either A) Old/a repost, or, B) subpar material that everyone in the Urbanism space knows about (cars are big/bad for cities, there needs to be more housing, etc.)

It may take a minute for us on the mod to act, but, I want to emphasize, we DO see the reports, and we DO act on them. There's only so many mods here that the admins appointed so we make due with what we have.

We don't want to discourage conversations, but, there's a fine line between discourse and circklejerking, we want you guys to be the arbiter of what is/is not content worthy of this sub, stay vigilant, and, help us maintain an authentic space on the crumbling palace we know as the internet.

Thanks for your time.

Here's two different approaches to turn lanes at intersections. First, only a right turn lane. Second, only a left turn lane.

The first video in the clip is Elberon Avenue at Bassett Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. At this intersection, through traffic keeps left, but can be blocked by vehicles trying to turn left.

Often, impatient drivers will use the right turn lane to pass drivers turning left. Conflicts can occur when a stopped impatient driver begins passing in the right turn lane, cutting off another vehicle also using the right turn lane to pass.

The second video in the clip is Anderson Ferry Road at Foley Road in Delhi Township, Ohio. This intersection has a left turn lane. A sign directs through traffic to keep right.

Which is most likely to reduce crashes? Having only a left turn lane or having only a right turn lane?

In early 1949, a newly independent India was hit by a massive humanitarian crisis: tens of thousands of destitute Partition refugees were stuck in squalid, temporary tent camps around Delhi. The state’s traditional Public Works Department (PWD) stepped in with a standard 77-page master plan. Prepared by a visionary engineer (who later assisted Le Corbusier in designing Chandigarh), the plan was technically sound but structurally flawed for the crisis at hand.

The PWD proposed a leisurely five-year timeline using commercial contractors at an astronomical cost of ₹4.64 crore. The fatal flaw? Hiring external contractors would generate zero employment for the refugees, leaving 30,000 traumatized people fully dependent on state charity.

The newly formed Faridabad Development Board (FDB)—heavily pushed by social reformer Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and backed by Prime Minister Nehru—rejected the PWD plan out of hand. They chose a radical, untested alternative: democratized, bottom-up tactical urbanism.

Pillar 1: India’s First Adult Suffrage (Community Self-Rule)

Before a single brick was laid, the administration dismantled rigid military oversight. In October 1949—three full years before India’s first national general election and months before the formal adoption of the Indian Constitution—Faridabad organized a local election based on universal adult franchise. Every adult refugee, man and woman, got an equal vote.

They elected a 14-member Advisory Committee, choosing a legendary Pashto folk singer as President. This committee debated and approved every single street layout, housing grid, and public building plan. The camp transformed overnight from a space of military containment into an autonomous zone of community self-rule.

Pillar 2: The Worker Cooperative Framework

Led by a 24-year-old student organizer, Laxmi Chand Jain, and the Indian Cooperative Union (ICU), the board completely eliminated commercial contractors. They mobilized over 4,000 refugee men and women into democratic teams of 10 to 15.

The catch? These refugees were proud shopkeepers, traders, and money-lenders from the North-West Frontier Province who had never touched a shovel in their lives. Through an intense strategy of grassroots dialogue, they traded passive doles for self-reliant labor. Everyone built homes for everyone else:

• Refugees reskilled themselves to fire kilns inside camp limits, producing hundreds of thousands of bricks daily.
• They established woodworking units to fabricate doors and window frames.
• Refugee squads quarried and manually crushed stone to pave over 32 kilometers (20 miles) of township roads.

Pillar 3: The Spatial Layout—An Exiled Architect Designing for Exiles

To pair this bottom-up labor with elite design, the board brought in Dr. Otto H. Koenigsberger. An exiled German-Jewish architect who had fled Nazi racial laws in 1933, Koenigsberger was serving as India’s Federal Director of Housing.

His master plan for the New Industrial Township (NIT) was built on radical empathy and spatial equity:

• The 10-Minute Superblocks: He split the city into five autonomous superblocks (NIT 1 to 5) designed for 40,000 to 50,000 people, placing basic schools, neighborhood clinics, and local bazaars within a strict 10-minute walk.
• Dissolving Social Hierarchies: Plots were strictly uniform. Different economic groups were deliberately interspersed within the same block, using shared public plazas to actively break down old social, economic, and caste barriers.
• Zoning for Health: He mapped the heavy industrial zone entirely to the south, separating it from residential sectors with a wide linear green park that acted as a visual and environmental filter for industrial chimney smoke, while keeping factories within easy cycling distance.

Pillar 4: Defiant Infrastructure (The War-Reparations Power Plant)

When neighboring state grids flatly refused to supply electricity to this "wilderness experiment," the community engineered their own grid. Planners discovered an abandoned, rusting 6,000 kW German thermal power plant sitting in crates at Calcutta Port, shipped to India as post-WWII war reparations. Because it came without manuals, blueprints, or spare parts, state governments viewed it as an unusable white elephant.

Faridabad took it. They tracked down Herr Johannes Doll, a German engineer who had operated the plant in a Hamburg shipyard, and brought him to live in a canvas tent at the camp. Speaking only German, communicating via hand gestures and pencil sketches on wooden planks, Doll trained the frontier refugees.

Lacking heavy industrial machinery, they custom-forged missing components in camp workshops. Lacking industrial cranes to lift a massive 50-ton boiler drum 90 feet into the air, they engineered a synchronized network of jack screws and sleepers, lifting it inch by painstaking inch. In 1951, the turbines roared to life.

When Delhi's regional authorities refused to build lines to buy their excess power, the camp's technical institute reskilled local youth into master fabricators. They custom-built heavy steel transmission towers from scratch and laid an 8-kilometer interstate grid line to Delhi in 90 days, powering the nation's capital and funding the completion of their own town.

The Modern Takeaway for Urbanists

By late 1951, all 5,000 homes were complete—shattering the PWD's sluggish five-year timeline, cutting project costs exactly in half, and entirely eliminating administrative corruption through direct homeowner oversight.

Eventually, the radical cooperative framework faded as major industrial heavyweights (like Escorts and Bata) moved into the NIT grid, turning Faridabad into a conventional private-public manufacturing powerhouse. Tragically, the city today lacks a single prominent plaque or avenue named after the geniuses who built it.

Yet, Faridabad remains a historical monument to a rare, fleeting moment when a traumatized population proved that when you give people the tools and autonomy of self-governance instead of passive handouts, they can build a resilient, world-class city from the dirt.

For the full deep-dive archival narrative, and a professionally produced audio option mapping out this forgotten history of a unique city-building experiment, check out the main case study here: https://lesserknowntales.com/faridabad-the-madmen-who-built-a-city/

I’ve read about Anthropic pumping millions into Scott Weiner’s Campaign so kinda checks out.

Hello there, I am a 2nd-year Canadian uni student taking a planning-related bachelor's degree, looking to gain experience in a planning-related or adjacent field so that I can be better qualified to enter a master's degree program or job in the future

I don't have much knowledge of planning-related or adjacent entry-level jobs that would hire a current BA student with no experience. If you guys could provide ideas, that would be amazing. Thank you.