"Beautiful Cities are a human right"

[tory]

I'm not sure about the "right" but this is a worthwhile read.


medium.com/@streetlevelaustralia/beautiful-cities-are-a-human-right-a03e50e61963

As the UK Government’s Living with Beauty report notes, ‘people do not only want beauty in their surroundings. They are repelled by ugliness, which is a social cost that everyone is forced to bear. Ugliness means buildings that are unadaptable, unhealthy and unsightly, and which violate the context in which they are placed. Such buildings destroy the sense of place, undermine the spirit of community, and ensure that we are not at home in our world.’

Unfortunately, in our built environment, ugliness is pervasive ⁠ — both in the deliberate desecration of existing beauty and in the newly designed streets, suburbs and buildings that Australians tolerate. People typically do not intentionally create or seek out ugliness. It is our contention that much modern architecture annihilates beauty and has the effect of repelling and alienating us, damaging our psyches, compromising our mental health and fragmenting our communities.

[Reactionary Rage]

Scruton wrote the Living With Beauty report did he not?

[wobblie]

"When tradition was eliminated..."(from photo caption).

Does that mean when the colonizers appeared and displaced the aboriginal peoples?

You know what would really be beautiful? Everyone having a fucking roof over their heads.

[tory]

Westerners built houses and homes. The Aboriginal peoples of Australia never did. Making colonial-themed digs isn't the point of the article.

[wobblie]

One's 'dig' is another's truth. Aboriginals built simple shelters when needed. There was beauty everywhere. It's called nature.

I couldn't make it through the entire article as it was written from such an elitist, western perspective.

[sloopjohnc]

The suburb we lived in for 30 years raising the kids did a good job of city planning. Fremont, where we lived, was five townships incorporated into one town in the late '60s/early '70s. It's now fourth largest city in Bay Area after San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland. Land-wise, it's the largest.

They did a great job when expanding housing tracts of figuring in big, spacious parks all around the city.

Fremont went from 43,000 people in 1960 to 100,000 in 1970 to 130,000 in 1980 (I checked census). It's now 244,000. All that planning in the '70s paid off.

They are going through another cycle of building as the last open spaces and farms are being replaced by high density housing. I know why they're doing this in under-housed, overpopulated Bay Area, but they are not taking in the same considerations they did when they expanded in the past.