Favourite: civic infrastructure. I turn a lever and safe water comes out. If my entire city uses the bathroom at the same time, nobody gets cholera. I’ll be warm this winter. I can bike on a flat path to a lake owned by the public, then charge my phone for it at free and browse hexbear instead of looking at that lake. When infrastructure works and meets our core needs it’s a miracle of collectivism.

Least favourite: Atomisation and the idea of isolated “first/second/third place”. There’s no reason a park can’t be as educational as a university class or as enriching as a wilderness or as productive as a homestead, other than we choose to develop it for one limited set of recreation use. Downtown cores don’t need to be hyper-commercial, hostile spaces that are unsafe to walk around but we develop them for the benefit of capital instead of pedestrians. The ideal garden city is intensely focused on critical geography and situating people in a larger socioecological project. The lines should be blurred between grey and green space, between commercial/residential/social, and between human/natural enrichment as much as possible. It’s all the worse when you bring in the separation of town and country with those rural communities alienated from civic infrastructure and cultural participation and the urban communities alienated from touching something other than grass.

I really like how resistant we as a species are to propaganda. It doesn’t seem to matter how hard it’s pushed and explained, most people don’t fully buy into anything. That’s not always a good thing, but it means mistakes, regardless of their momentum, eventually get reconsidered. Also, in the digital age we’re losing track of how our own everyday technologies work, but considering how far we’ve come, it’s hella impressive it took this long.

I really dislike our tribalism and egotism.