NotJustBikes is getting dragged on Twitter for this post.
What do you think? Is he right? Wrong? Not wrong, but an asshole?
When I see how hard advocates and sympathetic planners have to work in 2023 to get a halfassed facility that would never make it off the drawing board in the Netherlands, it’s hard for me to say he’s wrong.
IIRC he gave up on Canada and moved to the Netherlands because he wanted to raise a family and Fake London was hostile to human life. That’s very understandable, and I’ll probably end up doing something similar. However, he creates urbanist propaganda so it’s pretty weird to tell his audience to give up. I thought the point of his videos was to change things? I think he’s just having a heated urbanist moment, it’s OK.
Anyway it’s pretty ironic that his kids will have to move out of the Netherlands to raise a family. Cause, you know, the Netherlands won’t exist in a couple generations.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a call to action in one of his videos; he just does “this is bad” content for the most part
his call to action is basically “move somewhere better peasant” because he’s a lib, but one that recognizes that bourgeois liberal governments (he doesn’t call them that ofc) aren’t responsive to the advocacy of citizens so you might as well just go somewhere that already has the urbanism you want. This is of course quite difficult and generally dependent on having money and being
but he doesn’t really address that, presumably sees it as a necessary evil at best, or keeping out the brown hordes at worst. no idea how racist he is or isn’t but the vibes aren’t the best and neither ontario suburbs nor the netherlands are the best about that
If he weren’t a lib he might have hope that more radical change is possible, given the right organization and situation, or find a way to recognize that most people simply can’t give up on their life and move because they can’t afford it, and maybe aren’t such an alienated capitalist subject that they’d want to abandon their whole life and move across the world
I have watched pretty much all his videos. I don’t think he is racist since he does acknowledge the racist nature of suburbanization and has even talked about the racism in the car friendly infrastructure in Bahamas. He is also one of the few YouTubers to point out the success of that “abandoned” metro station in Chongqing.
But you are correct about the rest.
yeah idk where I got that idea tbh. honestly I think it was just seeing his face in this video combined with his very… gentrified perspective. He slobbers all over amsterdam but amsterdam is incredibly unaffordable and the cheaper areas in the country aren’t necessarily so good from an urbanist perspective depending on who you ask.
Its not fair to call him racist just based on him looking like a an albino white devil but idk I just can’t shake the feeling