Episode 22: Urbanism, Concrete, and Supremacy
Hi there. I occasionally send out emails to anyone who's asked to receive updates from me/my website, https://josh.works. If you don't want these emails, hit the unsubscribe in the bottom of the email! I'll warn you, and will keep warning you, that the cadence of these emails might go up, and I'm 'finding my voice' to talk about whatever is on my mind. Thanks to the way my brain does/does not work, everything relates to everything else. My own mundane experiences of joy and sorrow is like a MAX of two conceptual nodes away from say, cobalt mining in the Congo, genocide in Palestine, genocide in Yemen, and ethnic cleansing in Denver in 2023. That makes me fun & terrible to spend time with. 😬 Sorry for all of us.
I've been a mix of busy and not-busy since the last episode, all the way back in May.
I've traveled back to Bali, twice. Then Nepal, and currently, where I'm writing this particular email, Thailand. Once to Iceland. To DC, then via the train to NYC, and back. Lived the whole range of the human experience. Watched yet another genocide unfold on the internet. Roiled with anger and pain and hurt. Experienced joy and happiness. Spent time with friends and loved ones. Been profoundly depressed. had interesting conversations with a diverse group of humans. CEOs and C-suite types. entrepreneurs, large and small. American city planners, city engineers, police. children. houseless people. Taxi drivers. Food delivery workers.
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A theme from the last few months has been collecting 'footage' of a type I don't often see elsewhere on the internet, and I'm a chronically online person, so if the internet isn't bringing me footage like this, there's a chance it doesn't exist.
I have a lot of drone footage, and some 360 camera footage. Mostly from my scooter, in Bali. I think it's neat, here's some examples:
- Drone footage of scooting from A to B in Bali
- 360 camera time lapse of scooting from A to B in Bali
- 360 camera time lapse scooting down a volcano in Bali
- 360 camera downtown ubud
There's a bunch more on my tiktok account. Mostly I'm kicking the tires with trying to explain the stories I want to explain. I've not figured it out yet, how to express in just a few seconds what I want to express.
This video, comparing the built form of Penestanan, a neighborhood just west of Ubud, Bali, to Estes Park, Colorado, gets closer to expressing what I want to express.
I'm obsessed with exploring the differences between how Bali's land is used and how American land is used.
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I keep coming back to the truth that in America, the very way that concrete and steel is poured is directly tied to supremacist ideologies.
Road networks + 'car culture' + the american zoning regime is institutionalized supremacist culture, but the thing that makes it really pernicious is there are layers and layers of propaganda wrapped around the combination of these three things.
So, to that end, I started a Substack around 'land use norms'. It's drafting on the idea of a book titled Legal Systems Very Different Than Ours:
Zoning Norms Very Different Than Ours
👆that link takes you to the series introduction.
There's something I do that makes some people uncomfortable - I talk a lot about ethnic cleansing.
Hilariously, the people that are made uncomfortable by it seem to be unable to appreciate how comforting this kind of talk is for others.
Some people, generally people of the global majority, also known as 'nonwhite people', instantly express feeling deeply safe and seen when me, a white-passing person, can freely discuss the overlap of ethnic cleansing and americanism.
Here's a few other episodes:
Episode 1: Parking Minimums as Ethnic Cleansing
Episode 6: Interlude, A Pattern of Repair
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I personally don't think there will be an improvement in how cities in America function until there is a full appreciation of how enmeshed the American legal regime is with ethnic cleansing.
Urban Renewal of the 1950s was a government-funded, white-people-led act of genocide against people of the global majority. A portion of this was using federal highway administration dollars to bulldoze non-white neighborhoods, and replace them with highways.
Example:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CuzKdarM3X6/
The political process was carefully crafted to leave 'democratic' power in the hands of white people that already supported ethnic cleansing, so the government could conduct ethnic cleansing while absolving itself of culpability. Maintaining neighborhood character, implementing the will of the people, etc. It was all lipstick on the pig of ethnic cleansing.
The simple existence of single-family neighborhoods is ethnic cleansing. To live in these neighborhoods is a morally neutral act, I suppose, but everything about the lifestyle of single-family-home neighborhoods is an enactment of a regime of social control, cooked up by eugenicists.
If you live in an 'R-1' neighborhood, you're living in a disney-park-like cultivated and pruned and subsidized and controlled potempkin-villiage like facade of a place. (if you're not sure if you're in an R1 neighborhood, and you live in America, if it can be called 'the suburbs', it's a single-family residential neighborhood. If it's the suburbs and not in America, it's inspired by American R1 zoning. often, but not always, government leaders around the world love regimes of social control, and are happy to implement ethnic cleansing.
Here's a screenshot of an important document, written in 1922, that became the law of the land for the entire united states and still operates in full force today:
Y'all. This is the foundation of America's modern zoning regime. This document was 'ratified' by the supreme court in Euclid vs. Ambler, 1926.
I don't think anyone but politically powerful white people will be able to dismantle the regimes of ethnic cleansing and supremacy in America. I don't think most politically powerful white people will care, though, until they can see clearly that they are being victimized by the very regime that claims to care for them.
For example, a fancy house in the suburb is touted as the American ideal. The guy that invented suburbs originally called them "white zones", and called the non-suburban housing "colored zones".
As you might imagine, living in 'his' world is a terrible place to live. Most of America lives in his world. Most Americans, though, still think this is desirable, because the propaganda is strong. Here's another carry-over from that 1922 document that operates today:
This picture, and this document, is why you cannot find a neighborhood coffee shop, bakery, grocer, or any of the other 50 businesses that would exist in neighborhoods.
It's why everyone has to get in a car and drive a long distance to a supermarket.
Its why your teenage kids cannot get a job within walking or biking distance.
Its why 'rush hours' exist. It's why there is no good-enough public transit near you, or anyone else in America.
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it was white churches in America that, in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, spent the most time and money maintaining segregated neighborhoods. I feel like a GREAT starting point for undoing this institution of horror and evil would be for some of those churches to lead the movement in the other direction.
Currently, when I talk to self-described christians about this issue, they say "well, man's heart is evil and perfection on earth will not be had until the second coming of Jesus."
Me: "I'm not asking for perfection, I'm suggesting that you consider removing the collective boot of supremacy and social control from the neck of the oppressed."
Them: "It's too much to ask for. No one is perfect."
I'm not good at tactfully changing minds, and I'm perhaps leaning into that. I've done a lot of fawning in my life, and I'm trying to recover a healthy sense of self-advocacy and willingness to be uncomfortable.
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Would you believe that in some situations, I'm extremely conflict averse? Interpersonal conflict can really mess with me in a way that I don't like, and I think some of what I do when writing online is recover some of that self-advocacy. I've not sorted it all the way, and I've noticed an extreme discomfort around publishing anything online. Even the substack I linked above was uncomfortable to write, and nearly any blog post I've drafted up (many) I've not yet sorted out how to publish.
- Josh
PS in the near future, instead of these giant emails, I'll probably 'just' link to some blog posts I've written, and i'll send out much shorter emails. Huzzah for all of us.