Urban planning

Urban planning  (social control)

Urban planning, also known as town planning, city planning, regional planning, or rural planning, is a technical and political process that is focused on the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportation, communications, and distribution networks and their accessibility.

Official narrative

Healthy urban planning is about planning for people. It means putting the needs of people and communities at the heart of the urban planning process and considering the implications of decisions for human health and well-being.

Urban redesign for military control

Paris underwent a vast public works programme commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III and directed by his prefect of Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, between 1853 and 1870. One of the purposes of Haussmann's creation o fwide boulevards was to make it easier for the army to manoeuver and suppress armed uprisings; Paris had experienced six such uprisings between 1830 and 1848, all in the narrow, crowded streets in the center and east of Paris and on the left bank around the Pantheon. A small number of large, open intersections allowed easy control by a small force. In addition, buildings set back from the center of the street could not be used so easily as fortifications. There was only one armed uprising in Paris after Haussmann, the Paris Commune from March through May 1871, where the Communards were beaten easily by the army.

Suburbs

Car-dependent suburbs are designed to maximize control over the population and atomize them politically. Self-sustainability becomes impossible through the creation of national and international food chains and energy grids. The fact that there is no town center in suburbs is an intentional feature designed to limit the ability of the population to come together to discuss politics or other issues important to the community.

Noam Chomsky said that suburbia "was created in the 1940s by the biggest state social engineering project in history under the Eisenhower administration –beyond anything they did in Russia. The specific goal was to eliminate public transportation, destroy the inner cities, forces everyone to use cars, trucks. And in the 1940's there was an authentic conspiracy, a real one, between General Motors, Firestone Rubber, and Standard Oil California to buy up the public transportation, destroy it, and force everyone into buses and cars. The conspiracy went to court and they were convicted and fined –I think $5000 or something. Then the government moved in and took it over, under cover of defense."

In 1961, the sociologist Lewis Mumford wrote that "In the mass movement into suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless pre-fabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible."

15 minute cities

Full article: 15-minute city

Total surveillance

Full article: Smart City

 

Examples

Page name	Description
15-minute city	Preventative measure to mitigate climate change or part of a nascent global control grid?
Low Traffic Neighbourhood	A top-down scheme implemented to reduce through-traffic in residential areas through the use of filtered permeability and traffic calming.
Suburbanization	Population growth in cities

Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.