urbanism
A place to talk about urban design, transit, and all things cities
@miawintam
“Bastard Chairs” by Michael Wolf, photographed between 2003-2005
“Photographed in the back alleys and streets of Hong Kong and mainland China, these hybrid seats were improvised repairs made by local residents using whatever materials were available. Broken plastic backs grafted onto wooden stools. Metal legs bolted into mismatched frames. Tape and wire binding incompatible parts into something functional.
Wolf documents them as he found them. Each chair reflects a culture of necessity and repair. Objects extended beyond their intended life through practical invention.”
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@naomiii
Less is more when it comes to bus stops. I never thought much about the bus stop placements until this weekend when reading this article.
Seems like an actually very practical, fairly simple to implement way to make bus service better. Gave me some newfound appreciation for the real-time panels showing what buses are about to arrive they got at bigger Hamburg stops ^^
That said, I live in a small town with meh bus coverage, but distances are small enough to easily cover them by bike - often quicker than with the bus.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-united-states-needs-fewer-bus-stops/
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@miawintam
https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/how-blockchain-technology-could-make-zoning-work-for-people
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@miawintam
I wrote a cheeky little piece on SF's AI billboards and how I want to brick them away from existence
https://miawintam.substack.com/p/who-gets-to-write-the-citys-surface
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@miawintam
Portland’s 1978 bus network (TriMet)
You can see that there’s very few crosstown routes. This kind of radial network design was very typical of American transit agencies prior to the 1970s
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@miawintam
Micromobility is very important, but Citibike is just too damn expensive.
NYC’s Citi Bike system is the most expensive bike share program in the US, by a lot.
Citi Bike is the only US bike share system with no government subsidy. All the others have at least some public funding.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/11/19/citi-bike-rinses-riders-compared-to-bike-share-in-other-cities-report
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@miawintam
“Traffic jams are a problem that is not meant to be solved but managed—one possible approach to the challenge of distributing aggregate benefits and costs among individuals. The jam is a feature of traffic, not a bug—less a failure than the janky avoidance of failure, a necessary compromise, the sufficient but “dumb” management of high throughput. What is traffic, after all, but a multitude of cars on the road, each driver pursuing their own self-interest, using transportation infrastructure for its intended purpose? You aren’t stuck in traffic. You are traffic.”
- Drew Austin, “Protocols Don’t Build Pyramids,” from the Summer of Protocols, Protocol Reader
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@miawintam
This is the book that started it all for me!!! I read this 5 years ago and it helped me decide to go to urban planning grad school.
It put words into what I’d felt for so long, growing up in a suburb. the design of our built environment shapes our quality of our life every single day. And that when that design is centered around cars, it robs us of everyday quality of life in small ways. Those small losses add up to big ones.
It was cool to read this as a design-oriented person because the book outlines tangible changes to the urban fabric, steps to materially improve pedestrian life and enjoyment
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