What is Urban Planning? Crash Course Geography #47

[@JamesScantlebury]

As an urban planner in London - great video! Lots of change in urban planning still happening - such as "15 minute neighbourhoods" which provide residents access to most of their needs within a walk, bike or transit ride from their home

[@benjaminwaters275]

As an urban planner, the history of urban planning could be its own crash course

[@nobody8328]

Yes, please!

[@Antenox]

I mean, that's the nature of education, isn't it? Every academic subject is a rabbit hole 😝

[@armanke13]

That'd be crushing course

[@swedneck]

get Jason Slaughter of NotJustBikes to do it, or maybe Mark Wagenbuur of Bicycle Dutch

[@shadebug]

But I want it all illustrated with Sim City

[@1ce_dr4g0n]

Urban Planning is what I hope to someday study and work as a career, this is a great first step into learning what it's all about

[@MajoraZ]

3:05 - 3:25 Ah, Mesoamerican urbanism and architecture is one of my favorite topics, so I'll post a few paragraphs about that to clarify and expand on what was said here! Firstly, to be clear, "Latin America" is too broad an area: The civilizations of Mesoamerica (the Aztec, Maya, etc in the bottom half of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, etc) developed independently from and with little contact with the ones of the Andes (in Peru, Bolivia, etc), for examples, so they had different urban traditions. As stated in the video, Mesoamerican cities tended to have a central, dense urban core monumental architecture and planned layouts: You'd have palaces, temples, ball courts, noble housing, and other civic, ceremonial, and communal structures., which were richly painted and decorated: when you see ruins today, you're seeing the inner fill of rough stones and mortar or the brickwork over them, usually not the clean stucco and then painted frescos and intricate reliefs, sculptural facades, friezes, and other accents, which are only preserved occasionally: Look up the frescos found at the residences of Teotihuacan, or the Rosalila temple at Copan, or the paintings made by Scott and Stuart Gentling of Aztec cityscapes to get a feel for how they would have looked in their heyday. These were generally organized around open plazas, with their arrangement aligned to maximize things like public viewing or human traffic for ceremonies and gatherings, or for ritualistic alignments: For example, the Maya E Group, for example, is a common arrangement of 3 structures that when viewed from another location, align with astronomic phenomena at certain times of year. Or how at Teotihuacan, the San Juan river was recoursed through the city's grid layout (which is unusual, I'll get back to that) to appear perpendicular to the Temple of the Feathered Serpent and the Ciudadela complex/plaza it's located inside, as those structures were heavily associated with water (the plaza even capable of being flooded like the Roman Colosseum), so when viewed from specific angles it would appear the river is coming forth from those structures. Speaking of, complex water management systems were also quite common: At Tikal, for example, there were a series of massive reservoirs connected to one another, with dams and channels which allowed them to flow into one another if needed to prevent flooding; with structures and plazas in the surrounding area having drains to similarly redirect rainwater or water from floods into the reservoir network. Some of these reservoirs even had advanced filtration systems, and some of the connections between them even had switching stations to choose how the water flowed. Lastly, much like how the structures themselves in sites today are misleading with only the inner grey masonry being visible, modern archeological sites and their maps are often misleading as they exclude many structures which are either still buried or destroyed. Compare tourist site maps of sites like Teotihuacan or Palenque which only show major structures for visitors, with the archeological surveys of those sites from Millon and Barnhart, respectively: those both show hundreds of additional structures! Significantly, tourist maps also exclude the suburbs around the urban core, which is the other key half of Mesoamerican urban layouts: While the urban core has a high density of planned structures foe elites, ceremonies, or groups, which are built of stone and have fancy accents and decorations, the suburbs that surrond the cores are low density, are commoner residences interspersed with agricultural land (sort of giving a similar mental image to suburbs today, with homes spaced out between greenery), and are less planned: Commoner residences would have been built out of wood, straw, or adobe brick, usually on a stone foundation, with homes in so called "patio groups", with 2 to 4 homes built facing one another around a sort of mini-plaza. These homes and patio groups would radiate out from the site core, gradually decreasing in density, as the area became more rural, without a clear end point, which makes defining the limits and populations of Mesoamerican cities quite iffy. Also, while these were "less planned", then the urban cores, much of the area the suburbs covered would still be landscaped (not necessarily, deforested, though sometimes: When tree cover was kept, it was in managed groves with a cleared underbrush for agroforestry and shade), and some would have "mini cores" with temples and some elite residences. Some large Mesoamerican cities, particularly Maya ones, had absolutely massive suburban sprawls covering dozens or even hundreds of square kilometers, like at Tikal, El Mirador, Copan, and Caracol, to the point where in the former two examples, you literally had multiple different city centers connected via the sprawls into Megalopoli. Tikal's in particular had a significant amount of infrastructure across it's sprawls, with palisades and more hooked up water management systems for agriculture and flood prevention and drinking water. What i've described is the "typical" large Mesoamerican city, but obviously there were exceptions, some examples being Tenochtitlan, Teotihuacan, and Palenque: Tenochtitan was located on an island (and technically made up of many islands: the chinampas labeled in the video at 3:05 are artificial islands with canals between them, so the city was like venice, and the chinampas could act as hyperefficient hydrponic farms), so it had a clear limit, though there's still a identifiable more urban core and surrounding suburbs around it. Tenochtitlan also unusually had some of it's structures on a grid layout, contrary to the plaza based ritualistic planning I described. This is attributed to a specific urban revival of Teotihuacan's city planning, which was even more unusual: Almost the whole city layout was one giant urban sprawl on a planned grid, which covered 22 square kilometers, entirely composed of palaces and temples, organized around a central road, rather then pazas. The city did have suburbs, but they covered a much, much smaller amount of space compared to the urban area and most of the city's denizens lived in fancy palaces. For Palenque, the city was founded on a relatively small flat area of an othertwise steep hill, so it has it's commoner residences on acropoli (which themselves weren't uncommon, moreso for palaces and temple complexes though) packed tightly next to/alongside it's elite and ceremonial structures. I wish I was able to link images of all of this, but youtube tends to act iffy when I do that. If anybody wants help finding them, I'm Majora__Z on other platforms!

[@taylorkim2918]

As a master student in urban planning - this is such a great educational source!

[@pendragon2012]

When I was doing grad work on cities in colonial America, my advisor showed me how you can read the worldview of a city's framers from the plan of the city. Boston, where Puritans believed in the will of God being sovereign, was a city built in circles around the natural set-up while more Enlightenment (and later) cities like Philadelphia and Savannah were built in squares with straight roads because their founders believed humans could apply their reason to the way the city was laid out. Fascinating video, Alize!

[@ShireseLouie]

I am an urban planner and know many planners who need to view this crash course.

[@devynorbit]

Urban Planner here. Never trust real estate agents to tell you the nitty gritty about the property. If you live in a buyer beware state you need to call community development to make sure that you don’t have to end up correcting what the prior owner made a code violation

[@elenagoldsborough3734]

As an Urban Planner, very nice overview with out being overwhelming 👍

[@winstonchen7423]

This episode is good. It literally sums up and makes connections in a whole semester of urban history class in my college.

[@afrinaut3094]

As an African-American, who is researching African civilizations and traditional urban design. Thank you so much for mentioning Indigenous American city design! We all live in the Americas, we need to learn how the original cities were built, not only the cities of Eurocentric designers.

[@wallied3583]

Thanks for this video and your others. In my mid 40s I decided to go back to University and this is exactly what I am studying.

[@DragoniteSpam]

A One Piece reference 0:36 is not something I expected to see in Crash Course today, lol.

[@runner4life551]

I’m interested in urban planning, but am not sure if it’s a good idea to pursue a master’s in this - can anyone explain what it takes to thrive as an urban planner, and the career prospects?

[@buggyridge]

Have been doing urban planning for 40 years. We're losing momentum. Poorly designed urban areas are what is heating up the planet. Used to manage Northern Virginia for USDA NRCS. Better planning 20 years ago than today.

[@VashdaCrash]

I wonder why. Isn't it very important for the economy?

[@dedu98]

That is not true. Maybe it's true for the US but not for Sweden where I live. I'm proud of my country. We have a lot of wood and other materials to support a sustainable urban development.

[@audiencemember26008]

We need to think about environmental change like some kind of Climate Town. We need cities with good public transport infrastructure, and not have so much room dedicated to cars. We ride trains, buses, trams and all sorts of things, Not Just Bikes, but bikes are cool too.

[@youngschannel4686]

It really helps me a lot in learning English. Thank you very much.

[@_samuelwillian]

Heeey, I'm born and raised in Brasilia. Didn't expect it to appear here on Crash Course Geography, but really... Why wouldn't? As addressed, inequality here is crystal clear. The city is yet unable to support all of its growth, infrastructure-wise. Even though the "satellites" are technically city neighborhoods.

[@oblonskywithdementia233]

As an urban planner, this is about urban planning.

[@milicavelickovic2968]

Thanks so much for putting this in free access no charge online

[@afrinaut3094]

I also wanted to point out that the institutional-racism towards African Americans in regards to geography & urban plannings relationship towards equity & equal opportunities is far worse than what is summarized here. I wrote this earlier today: The ghettos & hoods were made intentionally, by decades of systemic racist policies & their consequences. Considering Redlining, for-profit prisons (Raegan loved those), defunding mental health funding, racial covenants, “white flight” (the origin of the suburbs), home equity discrimination, police militarization, The destruction of black farmers by banks, highway community displacement, mass incarceration, false home appraisals, “food deserts” (or “greasy spoons” as my parents used to call them), the war on drugs, & (other policies that skyrocketed in the 80s after the assassination & arrest of civil rights leaders). Whether it’s America or any other country, it’s not enough to legally “end” a policy, the consequences of those negative policies must be addressed. And the United States does not do that. Nobody here knows about the “red summer”, when African-Americans managed to create prosperous communities in spite of institutional racism, such as Tulsa (with the Zulu lounge), and Greenwood (etc). White mobs destroyed those thriving ebony communities with guns, artificial lakes, & sometimes with bombs dropped from planes across hundreds of prosperous negroe communities in the 20th century. With that being said, allot of my family comes from the South Side of Chicago. “The Black Belt”, Redlining and other segregationist policies that were employed throughout every city in the United States, including Chicago. Don’t forget about Robert Moses and to a lesser extent Walt Disney. The South Side is dangerous as heck, not proud of that. I don’t care what white people think or “model minorities”, It’s just I want my people especially my women, to be safe, they deserve that. Although, inspite of the violence with those areas, AfricanAmerican businesses (& other African descent businesses), churches, etc thrive. Uncle Remus, Heralds, Mic Arthur’s, Jay & Jay Fish, Churches, Djenne Collection, Kayra Imports, DuSable Museum of African American History, etc. Don’t even get me started on the groundbreaking talent, that pioneers American culture, that has come out of these areas, with a lot of love in spite of the violence. The high violence in ghettos, projects & hoods, tends to give America’s corrupted criminal justice system an excuse to further generalize and discriminate against black Americans. When Covid broke out, it predictably negatively impacted African-American and Native American communities the worst, because high-poverty tends to follow racial lines. The same thing happened with Zika and Covid in Brazil & other Latino counties, the most poor populations tend to be African and indigenous descent populations.

[@C_Bat]

I study in Surveying and I’m still learning stuff here and there from this video

[@masoomlarki9755]

Had a lot of difficulty in understanding important economic topics. But thanks to channel now I gotta grasp on them. Kindly, make a video on foreign reserves. Thanks

[@TheOGCoZy]

I wasn't expecting Luffy to be on the trampoline at the beginning hahaha!

[@Mrwolfgd]

As a cities skylines urban planner this is amazing!

[@harayaespadrilles6108]

I so love this series, esp the host is engaging. 😌

[@trishgreen4074]

Omggggg thank you for this content!!! Right on time

[@jstarzz7069]

This is a really great comprehensive video 👌🏽

[@shadebug]

It’s weird to define suburbs as car dependent when here in London the suburbs are very much train dependent. There are definitely more cars than in town but that’s mostly for people that don’t commute in

[@TheMesosuchus]

It's when I plan.

[@GaasubaMeskhenet]

give people control over how their own homes are repaired and constructed. No more evictions from primary residences!

[@emberandfriendsanimations2454]

Cool, just started the urbanization unit in ap human geography today

[@princedavid7016]

You guys should make crash course math

[@1038bro]

to learn more about Urban Planning I highly recommend the channels City Beautiful, Not Just Bikes, and Alan Fisher to start!

[@Shredder-o6w]

fascinating

[@thegreatarcanist890]

+1 production to all cities

[@SiddharthaGhosh-f6t]

great video - Loved it

[@debobrotodolon5869]

very informative video

[@chandrasingha9750]

well explained. Good one.

[@delmarramirez6940]

So what should I major in to be an urbanist?

[@DestructionChannel]

This is interesting

[@sacman3001]

Awesome content. Transition sound is really distracting to me.

[@asmashafi5209]

Hi there, with an educational background of Applied Psychology, I intend to apply Master in urban planning. Any advice would you like to offer ?

[@gailaltschwager7377]

Thank you! ❤️

[@franbalcal]

Weird that you used Lima as an example instead of Cuzco, the capital of the Inca empire, where the spanish literally built the Spanish city on the Inca one, often building upon or repurposing using existing Inca structures. If you are going to stick with the Lima example would have been cool to include how it has grown well outside the Colonial structure and now the wealthy areas are in other places, as well as the most deprived areas and the financial districts. Also weird the in the beginning you mention the colonial cities the spanish built in "central american" and the "American South West " then give as the first example Lima which is in South America...

[@milicavelickovic2968]

Amazing

[@XavierZara]

Trampoline streets don't sound very ADA compliant to me

[@dedu98]

Transition sound is a bit annoying but good video with a lot of quality information.

[@c-allanwats4239]

love the random luffy

[@itsbobybobmr2880]

is that a one piece reference ??????

[@tangierla2682]

nice program but i hope she can be abit slower so that beginners can understand better

[@joseconcepcion7010]

What three characteristics urban planners weave together to reach their goals?

[@joewilson3575]

ATTENTION BRITISH URBAN PLANNERS!!! Please stop making estates that are all curly, they look pretty on a map and have some charm in real life too, but they are simply too big if made of semi detached houses to be walkable, but if you insist on them at least don't have random fences which fence different estates off even though there is no house or garden or anything between them because I keep getting lost when I try and and get off the noisy smelly main roads I have to walk around to get anywhere because your predecessors did a bad job accounting for the fact that humans exist.

[@aphxyia]

anyone else peep tina belcher?

[@abdulkadhim7471]

Cool

[@prosocial_lad]

that is a killer shirt

[@NisuUuno]

Urban planning is something that has failed in the US

[@dedu98]

Can't agree more.

[@mirandajennifer2001]

Where’s Waldo? No Where’s Tina? 😂

[@Jayc5001]

🔥

[@Gimme_bikelanes]

Sending this to everyone who tells me Geography is a useless degree or thinks the only thing I can do with it is teaching.

[@ivano9028]

0:35 is that luffy????

[@Martyr217]

Aren't those apartment buildings in Italy mostly empty because of bugs? I could be thinking of the 1's that are in China I forget there's so many new fancy buildings now with green spaces.

[@rubikscubemadeeasy3142]

Yay

[@هيِوَ-ص6ر]

1

[@electroflame6188]

test comment

[@FozzyBBear]

"Brasilia is considered a modern design masterpiece" Those must be some powerful drugs. Next you'll try and tell me that Pruitt Igoe was a wonderful success. What is urban planning? Cities designed by people that hate people.

[@MehreenHassan225]

ALL THE MURP PEOPLE GATHER

[@Bacciagalupe]

: )

[@demauryobispo2442]

pawwwfwect video im neva gone stopwaching cwash cwose :>

[@spy6924]

first :)

[@TimothyJamesHunting]

First

[@rubikscubemadeeasy3142]

Yay