Review of Understanding Urbanism - Utter propaganda

Utter propaganda

☆

“As a fellow Australian I was so excited when I stumbled across this podcast. After listening to countless other podcasts from various other parts of the globe on the subject of urbanism it was refreshing to hear the familiar accent. Finally I’d be able to listen to discussions on my favourite subject from a more local point of view. How horribly disappointed I was. If you like your politics extreme left, identity politics, social justice, and think virtue signalling your white guilt is essential to understanding urbanism then this is the podcast for you. If you love using words like coloniser, white privilege, racial and sexual equality, settler academic, and stolen land then you’ve just hit a gold mine. If you think that biased political views don’t really have a place, (like pretty much every other pod on the subject) in discussions about the built environment then perhaps you should give this one a miss. I tried. I really did. I tried to turn a blind eye to the virtue signalling nonsense. I told myself that it’s healthy to listen to another point of view, and that perhaps because of this I’d find new insights that I hadn’t heard before. I got halfway through the series before I realised I hadn’t actually learnt anything about urbanism. I was about 3 hours deep and I’d heard suburban sprawl mentioned in passing once, the word transit maybe twice, hardly anything that I would recognise as actual discussion about urbanism. I had yet to hear the words: neighbourhood, bicycle, density, walkable, place making, or liveable. I’m not exaggerating when I say that 50% of what I’d listened to so far was about how the land for our cities was stolen, indigenous rights and how racist Architects, Town Planners, and Engineers have been. The final straw for me came during the discussion about the commercialisation of public places, and how inequitable it is for a restaurant to have alfresco dinning on the sidewalk, because now you’d have to pay to use that bit of public space. It was at this point the penny dropped and I realised that this echo chamber of idiots doesn’t care at all about building communities, just their extreme ideologies. And with that, I listened no more. The saddest part is that this podcast is by university professors about a textbook they’d written, presumably for the use for teaching today’s built environment profession students. But I console myself with the fact that despite this textbook being released for sale just last year, it is already marked down 50% of its original sale price. I’m hoping that means I’m not alone in my disappointment. One star, because I cannot give zero stars.”

R.L.Daniels via Apple Podcasts · Australia · 06/04/21

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