Why We Can’t Build Better Cities (ft.Not Just Bikes)

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Esther Addley, “‘This is political expediency’: how the Tories turned on 15-minute cities,” in The Guardian
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion
Bernadette Atuahene, “Predatory Cities,” in California Law Review
Bernadette Atuahene, “The Scandal of the Predatory City,” in The Washington Post
David Banks, The City Authentic
Adam Barnett, Michaele Herrmann, and Christopher Deane, “Revealed: the Science Denial Network Behind Oxford’s ‘Climate Lockdown’ Backlash,” in DeSmog
BBC News, ‘How 15 Minutes Cities Became a Lockdown Conspiracy’
Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?
Alice Capelle, “The Anti 15 Minute City Conspiracy is Ridiculous”
Alice Capelle, “The manosphere meets the climate movement”
Lisa Chamberlain, “The Surprising Stickiness of the “15 Minute City”,” in World Economic Forum
Steven Conn, The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is (And Isn’t)
Samuel R. Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Gareth Fearn et al., “Planning For the Public: Why Labour Should Support A Public Planning System”
Hannah Fry, “A ‘failure to launch’: Why young people are having less sex,” in Los Angeles Times
Edward Glaeser, “The 15-minute city is a dead end – cities must be places of opportunity for everyone”
David Harvey, “The Art of Rent”
David Harvey, “The Political Economy of Public Spaces”
David Harvey, “The Right to the City”
Tiffany Hsu, “He Wanted to Unclog Cities. Now He’s ‘Public Enemy No. 1.’,” in The New York Times
Frank Laundry, “The USA Will Never Build Walkable Cities”
David Lawler, “A World of Boomtowns,” in Axios
Eisha Maharasingham-Shah and Pierre Vaux, “‘Climate Lockdown’ and the Culture Wars: How COVID-19 Sparked A New Narrative Against Climate Action,” in Institute for Strategic Dialogue
Michael Naas, “Comme si, comme ca” in Derrida From Now On
NotJustBikes, Designing Urban Places that Don’t Suck (A Sense of Place)
NotJustBikes, How Suburban Development Makes American Cities Poorer
NotJustBikes, Suburbia is Subsidized: Here’s the Math
NotJustBikes, The Great Places Erased by Suburbia (the Third Place)
Oh the Urbanity! “15-Minute City Conspiracies Have It Backwards”
Feargus O’Sullivan, “Where the ‘15-Minute City’ Falls Short,” in Bloomberg
Feargus O’Sullivan and Daniel Zuidijk, “The 15 Minute City Freakout is A Case Study in Conspiracy Paranoia,” in Bloomberg
QAnon Anonymous, “Attending the 15 Minute Cities Oxford Protest with Annie Kelly”
Elliot Sang, “Nowhere To Go: the Loss of the Third Place”
Chris Stanford, “The 15-Minute City: Where Urban Planning Meets Conspiracy Theories,” in The New York Times
Darin Tenev, “La Déconstruction en enfant: the Concept of Phantasm in the Work of Derrida”
Trashfuture, “Cell Block IPA”
Trashfuture, Honk if You’re Honu ft. Dr Gareth Fearn
Joy White, Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City
Kim Willsher, “Paris Mayor Unveils ‘15-minute city’ plan in re-election campaign,” in The Guardian

#philosophy #education

– This is the building where I was born! It used to be a hospital, but now it’s luxury flats: apartments in there go for about £600,000! Ironic that I can’t afford to live in the room where my life began. This is Newcastle, a city in the north of England

With a population of about 900,000 if you include all the boroughs. According to data from the UN, 55% of the world’s population live in urban environments, and that number’s only gonna go up. The design of cities affects people’s access to healthcare, housing, and utilities. Cities play a critical role in our economy

And they shape the people that live in them, but the way our cities are developing is causing some major problems. To solve them, we’re gonna have to think differently and that might be very difficult. So come with me on a journey from the city where I was born,

To the city I live in today. [thoughtful dramatic music like “Hmm yes I am watching an edutainment BBC documentary only better”] Howdy, y’all! We’ll start today not with the big bad city but with the countryside. After all, cities can be dark, dangerous, cutthroat, fast paced, full of corporate types,

Living complicated lives in a way that’s just plain out of touch with the down home, clean, authentic, morally minded way of independent living you can find in the country. Am I right? No, I’m not right, I’m full of sh*t! I don’t even know how to play this. What is this, a violin?

Someone get me a cappuccino! Where’s my iPhone?! I’ve been reading this, “The Lies of the land” By historian Steven Conn, and it turns out that a lot of the things we think about the country aren’t actually true. For example, we might think that the countryside is clean, but actually thanks to agribusiness, mining,

And the military, a lot of the American countryside in particular is very polluted. We might think that the country is closer to nature, but actually the miles of corn and soybeans are the result of decades of biological engineering. We might think that living in the country is better

For the environment, but actually low density living is a lot less efficient. More distance between homes means more miles of cables, roads, pipes, less public transport… It might sound counterintuitive, but Conn says that if you live in a city your per capita energy consumption is probably a lot lower.

We might think that the countryside offers a simpler way of life, but actually rural areas are often at the forefront of innovation in technology, finance and worker management. That’s because though we may think of them as small and quaint, actually rural areas are the stomping ground

Of some of the biggest corporations in the world. And that’s not always a good thing. We might think that rural Britain is more “authentically British” But actually a lot of the big corporations that work out there are really dependent on migrant labor. And we might think that people in the country are living independently, but actually a lot of them are under pretty tight corporate and government control. According to this article from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism,

British farms are inventing all new ways to brutalise and exploit migrant workers. The conditions they describe are horrific. Britain may even be violating modern slavery laws to grow our food, all seemingly with the government’s knowledge. All of which is to say that we tend to romanticise a lot

When we think about the countryside. Conn says that city dwellers might enjoy the fantasy of a simpler life. Maybe we think about living on a farm someday, but always we dream of being the person who owns the farm, not the person working it! And country folk might want to believe these myths too.

Partly because it’s profitable – think of country music and tourism selling this fantasy of a simpler life – but also the desire to believe the lies of the land goes even deeper. One of the common themes that I found in my research for this episode is that places

Produce the people that live in them. In technical philosophy language, we’d say that they produce subjectivities, ways of thinking and seeing and being in the world. Longstanding viewers of the show might remember a similar idea from our episode on transhumanism. In that we learned that technologies have ways

Of seeing which they lend us when we use them. Like if all you have is a hammer, all your problems look like nails. Well, we might think of an urban place or a rural place as a piece of technology, as something that has been designed for human beings to use.

And so we might ask, what kind of subjectivities does it produce? How does it make us see and be? Conn gives a great example when he talks about army towns. The US military builds a lot of bases in rural areas, so many in fact that if you added them all up

They’d be their own state the size of Kentucky. And the presence of a base in a town gives people a sense of identity. If you grew up somewhere where there are a lot of troops around, maybe you talk to them occasionally, maybe members of your family sign up to “serve their country,”

That’s gonna affect the way you see the world. Serving cuntry is actually my profile name on Grindr! Conn says this produces a kind of contradictory subjectivity ’cause on the one hand, the people in those towns are dependent on the bases staying open ’cause that’s their whole economy!

They are invested – literally! – in the US constantly expanding its military budget. But on the other hand, because the military recruits a lot from those towns they also disproportionately bear the costs: a lot of the American casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan were country boys and country girls.

And Conn speculates that this two-sided relationship might explain Donald Trump’s popularity in military towns in the 2016 election. Trump criticised the politicians who sent the children of those towns to die whilst at the same time not criticizing the institution of the military itself and in fact promising to expand it.

The people who liked that message had been shaped by where they live. It affected how they see the world. Everything I’ve told you so far is an amuse-bouche. I have already given you everything that you need to understand the rest of this video, including the twist!

But we’ve got a ways to go before we get there, ’cause it’s not just the countryside we need to mythbust! Before we reach the city, we have to walk through the suburbs. And for that, I’m gonna need some help from my friend Jason, better known by his YouTube handle, Not Just Bikes.

– [Jason] Ah, the suburbs, the concept has been around for a long time, but they really took off as soon as trains were invented. The early modern suburbs were found along train lines or streetcar lines and the streetcar suburbs of the early 1900s were peak North American urban planning.

But in the US and Canada, it has been illegal to build these kind of neighborhoods for about 70 years, so when most people think about suburbs today, they think about suburbia, the modern car dependent suburb. Something that didn’t exist until about the 1940s. Canada (the country where I’m from eh!)

Is very much a suburban country. Over 75% of Canadians live in a place that could be considered suburban, and the majority of those places are car dependent. This means that the people who live there need to use their cars to do almost anything.

Even something as simple as buying a bag of milk requires a motor vehicle. There are lots of myths about car dependent suburbia, but the one that is the most incorrect and damaging is the idea that the people who live there are somehow financing urban areas

When in fact, we now know that suburbia is financially insolvent. Suburbanites want to have the benefits of rural living. The space between your neighbours, the big yards and lawns, the romantic idea of living independently and driving a pickup truck. Though the suburbanite version has leather seats

And a truck bed too small for a sheet of plywood. But suburbanites also expect all of the benefits of urban living: paved streets, sidewalks, good schools, connections to municipal water and sewage lines, snow clearing, garbage pickup, reliable electricity, good coverage of police and fire services, and no traffic ever.

Ugh, why won’t they widen this road already?! Unfortunately, all of these urban amenities come with a cost. Every extra mile of road and lawn means another mile of water main sewage pipes, electrical wires, flood protection infrastructure and asphalt. Every new house means another car

Or six that needs to be accommodated for, both in the size of the roads and the size of the parking lots. That’s free parking of course, we’re not a bunch of Europeans! So car dependent suburbia has a very low value per acre for tax purposes, but a very high cost per acre

For infrastructure services and amenities, especially the replacement cost of that infrastructure at the end of its lifecycle, which is more than the initial cost to build it. This mismatch between tax revenue and the cost of infrastructure has been questioned for decades, but it’s only recently that these costs have actually

Been calculated in detail. One of the first to shine a spotlight on this issue was Strong Towns, a nonprofit organisation started by an American traffic engineer who used to build painfully ugly and inefficient places like this. He realized that his city did not have the money required

To build the car dependent places he was building without taking on debt. But what was worse is that they also had nowhere near enough money to maintain them in the future. And these growing long-term liabilities put his town on track to becoming financially insolvent. Inspired by Strong Towns, the consulting company

Urban3 has started working with municipalities to help them understand where the gaps are in their financing. They have worked with real data from dozens of cities and towns to create visual maps of which regions are a net positive and which are a net negative to city finances,

And they have found the same results. Car dependent places like this always require more money to support them than they generate in tax revenue, and walkable places, even the rundown, poverty stricken and blighted urban downtowns that suburbanites are scared to go to consistently subsidise wealthy suburban neighborhoods. It’s actually kind of messed up!

This is one of the reasons why cities all over the world have been trying to urbanize their suburban places by bringing more density where there were previously parking lots, by trying to bring some public transit to car-centric suburban places and by encouraging people

To walk and cycle and just generally trying to make them slightly less hostile to anybody outside of a car. But it is a monumental task to urbanise these seas of asphalt and bring them into the realm of financial and environmental sustainability. We know however, that the design of places shapes the subjectivities

Of the people who live there. So when suburbanites build their entire lives around driving, it can be very hard to change that behavior. – Jason is right. This is Jesmond, a suburb of Newcastle, about 10 minutes walk from the old hospital/luxury flats where I was born.

And just like he said, this area was developed out of farmland in the 19th century along a train line for wealthy Victorians to escape the coal dust of the city. Using Jason’s distinction, Jesmond is definitely more suburb than suburbia. For one thing, it’s got pretty good public transport

’cause in Newcastle we have something called the Tyne and Wear Metro, which I suppose Americans would call a subway and Londoners would call the overground. It’s a train line, it runs somewhere just behind me over here, it goes all the way into the city. And for some reason in 2011, the BBC decided

To make a musical about it. Yeah, f**k Hamilton, I’m listening to the Tyne & Wear metro musical, son! But Jesmond is not where I grew up. I was raised in suburbia, the other half of Jason’s distinction, much further out of town. So like he said, my family were very car dependent.

We stayed in the same house for my whole childhood and the neighborhood definitely got ritzier around us as I grew. Having a keen sense of justice from an early age, I asked about this and I was told that our family were lucky, so we should always be kind

To those less fortunate and help them whenever we could. That’s actually why I started Philosophy Tube, to give away my education for free. So the place that I was raised shaped my subjectivity, shaped who I became. But I can’t help but wonder who I might have become

Had I known from the starts that places like that exist not alongside those less fortunate, but like Jason said, because others are less fortunate. And really fortune and chance might not be the right language to use. I wasn’t just lucky to be raised in suburbia, I was privileged.

And to understand the difference, let’s go somewhere else. Welcome to Forest Gate in Newham! This is London, the city I live in now. Forest Gate is not my neighbourhood – don’t worry, I’m not about to tell the internet where I live – but it is the subject of a very interesting book.

“Terraformed” By Joy White. This is a book about gentrification. [Cool thoughtful music like oh okay she’s changing it up. Sick, sick, I was hoping she’d talk about this] – Forest Gate has historically been a pretty poor area, and in her book, Joy White gives a potted history of the neighbourhood.

It got the sh*t bombed out of it in WWII, and then it was hit hard by de-industrialisation and austerity. In contrast to where I grew up, it’s also pretty racially diverse. After the war, a lot of Black and South Asian people were encouraged to move here from all over

The British Empire and later the Commonwealth. It’s also been a hotbed for racist violence by white supremacist gangs and the Metropolitan police. But I repeat myself! That mix of people and influences helped Newham create a new kind of music: this is one of the neighbourhoods

Where grime was born. And today Stormzy is probably the most well known grime artist – he was the first to get an album to number one – but it was young black people from neighbourhoods like this one who invented and popularised the genre. If you’re watching the YouTube version of this video,

Then this is where I would play you some grime music, but YouTube’s copyright scanners won’t let me, even though it is fair use. But if you’re watching the Nebula version, then you get to listen to some grime now. [royalty free jazz that is definitely not grime] White says it’s really no surprise

That neighbourhoods like Newham would generate this kind of creativity. She writes that through grime- – [Voice of Princess Weekes] Black youth can take on a new identity as an artist, a performer, or an entrepreneur. In a socioeconomic landscape that is beset by racism and inequality, this emancipatory aspect cannot be ignored.

Making music allows these young men to respond to the racial terror of black lives lived under occupation. It enables them to resist in multiple ways the marginal roles that have been mapped out for them. – Today, Newham is being “regenerated,” which is to say gentrified. So let’s talk about what that actually involves.

I’m gonna start by giving you the easy version and then I’m gonna kick it up a notch. White people, including me, might think of gentrification as mainly an economic thing. The price of rent goes up, the price of coffee goes up. A lot of trendy bars get built in places like this

With exposed brick. Exposed Brick is my profile name on Grindr! And to understand that aspect of it, I read this, “The City Authentic” by David Banks. Banks asks, if you’re a city in the modern age and you want investment to help you grow, how do you go about getting it?

In centuries prior, you might’ve gotten an industrialist to open a textile mill or a car factory in your town, but these days a lot of those manufacturing jobs have been globalized out to China and the Philippines where wages are lower, and unless it’s somehow be comes profitable again,

Those sorts of investors ain’t coming back. So instead you have to mount giant wheels to your city and start moving around, consuming smaller cities and static settlements until eventually we’ll consume the stars themselves! Municipal Darwinism, Mr. Natsworthy! The finest system in the world! I’m kidding.

Banks says the city has to become a brand. If you can convince people that your area is unique and authentic, bursting with special character, then there’s money to be made. He calls this ‘authenticity peddling,’ or cultural commodification. And really what a lot of it comes down to is

Digital marketing aimed at real estate developers and business owners, or as they prefer to call themselves these days, “entrepreneurs.” And Banks says this strategy does very little to improve the lives of the people actually living there. When an area does get regenerated, a lot of the actual money goes to those entrepreneurs,

So people who own businesses. Local elites get richer as an area realigns itself to suit the interests of businesses rather than people. And it’s self-defeating! According to geographer David Harvey, gentrification undermines itself. Part of the appeal of moving to a gentrifying neighborhood is low rent, but the more it gentrifies,

The more landlords raise the rent. The area caters more and more to middle class residents until eventually even they can’t afford to be there anymore. The small businesses owned by those local elites get gobbled up by the big businesses that they helped bring in until the only people

Who can afford to be there are the big corporate chains. And at that point, the unique authentic area becomes exactly like everywhere else. And at this point, let’s just pause and ask a really obvious question. Why spend money on regenerating a high street to attract entrepreneurs instead of just investing it

In the people already living there? Why court gentrification when we know that it’s bad? And really this is the same sort of question that comes up a lot in our society, like why spend money on bombs rather than healthcare? Why are Saudi Arabia trying to build a massive

Impossible luxury city in the desert rather than doing literally anything else? And David Harvey has an answer to that too. Urban development turns money into capital. Capital is money that generates more money, an investment that gives you returns. So why spend money on bombs rather than healthcare? Because it’s profitable.

Why spend money on businesses rather than people? Because it’s profitable. Capitalism is a system in which things are done because they generate profit, not necessarily because anybody needs or wants them, and that dynamic affects the development of entire cities.

[Voice of Tom Nicholas] Let us look more closely at what capitalists do. They begin the day with a certain amount of money and end the day with more of it. The next day they wake up and have to decide what to do with the extra money they gained the day before.

They face a Faustian dilemma, reinvest to get even more money or consume their surplus away in pleasures. The coercive laws of competition force them to reinvest because if one does not reinvest, then another surely will. To remain a capitalist, some surplus must be reinvested to make even more surplus.

– But all of that is only part of the picture because Joy White says we should also understand gentrification as a form of slow racial violence. Parts of the neighborhood, like the High Street, get invested in but other parts, like the bits where predominantly black families actually live, don’t.

When developers brand Newham as, “a nice place to live” they erase the nasty parts of its history, like the racist violence, which gives the impression that the pain of those communities isn’t with remembering and they aren’t an authentic part of the area. They also don’t talk about the actually unique culture

Like grime because that would involve showing the unequal conditions that inspire that kind of music. Instead they talk about the delis, the new coffee shops, the exposed brick, and those things require disposable income to access. Time was, the UK invested in things like youth centres with recording equipment where people could go

And do things like invent grime music. Nowadays, thanks to austerity, a lot of that is gone, so if you wanna participate in the community now, you need money. And you might remember, on the last episode of Philosophy Tube, I talked about a sociologist called

Melinda Cooper who says the house prices have gotten so high that these days if you want to own a home, you basically have to come from a wealthy family. Well, what writers like White and others point out is that police violence against people of colour ruptures families and makes it that much harder

For them to accumulate wealth. Putting it simply, if someone in your family is arrested or deported, they aren’t earning. So police violence and housing are actually one issue that intersects right here in Forest Gate. Sometimes this racial violence is really stark. For example, scholar Bernadette Atuahene studied the city

Of Detroit between 2009 and 2015 and found that the city artificially inflated the value of a lot of houses and raised property taxes on them resulting in around 100,000 homes being foreclosed on for non-payment of tax. This happened primarily in poor black neighborhoods and was completely illegal,

But most of the people targeted didn’t have the resources to hire a lawyer. Essentially, their homes was stolen from them by local government. The stolen homes were then sold at auction and snapped up by developers. Gentrification at its least subtle. And police violence is inseparable from this

Because Atuahene says this same process is also carried out through civil asset forfeiture and fines that are disproportionately dished out to black people. At this point, I’d like to shout out a great video essay from a smaller creator on this topic. Frank Laundry’s video, “The US will never build

Walkable cities” goes into amazing detail on the racial violence of gentrification in the US. Frank shows that when neighborhoods like Brooklyn reorient themselves towards wealthier residents, this comes at a huge cost to the people already there. In these ways, Joy White says, gentrification creates expanding pockets of whiteness. The neighboyrhood “gets nicer,”

But the people who actually made it into a neighborhood in the first place get f***ed. And now that we have a handle on Forest Gate as an example of that, we are ready to talk about one of the most famous books in urban studies and the 2002 movie “Phone Booth”.

Phone Booth is a 2002 thriller starring Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland, Forrest Whitaker, Radha Mitchell, and Katie Holmes. Farrell plays a guy called Stu, a phony baloney publicist who gets trapped in a phone booth in New York City by a sniper threatening to shoot him if he hangs up.

– [Stu] Nice try, pal, go to hell! [sniper rifle cocking, music like OH SH*T!] – I really like it. It has a stage play vibe to the premise that appeals to me. It was written by a guy called Larry Cohen (no relation to the Coen brothers) who also wrote another thriller

In 2004 called, “Cellular”. Damn, guess he was really *hung up* on this idea! [sniper shot, glass shattering, Wilhelm scream] What I wanna zoom in on though is that the film takes place specifically in Midtown Manhattan at 53rd and 8th, 10 minutes walk from Times Square. This is, “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue”

By Samuel R. Delaney. It was published in 1999 and it’s one of the most famous books about gentrification, specifically the gentrification of Times Square. Nowadays Times Square is a tourist destination. There’s billboards and an Olive Garden and a swanky hotel where I hooked up with my ex one time.

All of that stuff Delaney calls Times Square Red, but from the 60s till the 90s, Times Square was famous for smut! There was pornographic movie theaters, sex workers, and a lot of public gay sex, which Delaney remembers fondly. It was a working class area and if middle class people were there,

They were there to party! All of that stuff Delaney calls Times Square Blue. Also in Times Square Red you can catch Scyther, but in Times Square Blue you could catch Magmar! Delaney says that the Times Square of old facilitated contact between people of different social and economic classes, especially in the porno theaters,

But the New Times Square doesn’t really allow for that. By making it family friendly, which really means tourist friendly, which really means you’ve gotta have money in order to be there, it has become a class segregated space just like what’s happening in Newham right now! And in Delaney’s academic opinion, this sucks.

It used to be cool and gay! – [Voice of F.D. Signifier] The old Times Square and 42nd Street was an entertainment area catering largely to the working classes who lived in the city. The middle class and or tourists were invited to come along and watch or participate if that indeed was their thing.

The New Times Square is envisioned as predominantly a middle class area of entertainment to which the working classes are welcome to come along, observe and take part in if they can pay and are willing to blend in. – Delaney says the design of a place incentivises

Different kinds of interactions, and in so doing creates different kinds of subjectivities, and he draws an interesting distinction between two kinds of interaction, contact and networking. Contact is less structured, it can happen unexpectedly and across different social classes. For example, when I moved into the building

That I live in now, I bumped into the hot guy who lives upstairs and he helped me move in a bunch of my stuff, and now whenever I bake cookies or cakes, I share them with him. Sometimes contact is a conversation in a stairwell. Sometimes it’s anonymous gay sex in a public toilet!

Delaney says that contact makes life nicer and it also creates neighborhoods because it turns people who live near each other into neighbours. In Phone Booth, Stu is a guy whose whole life is networking. He lies to his clients, cheats on his wife, abuses his assistant, strings along his girlfriend

With promises he’ll make her a star. And even when he’s threatened by the sniper, he responds by offering to become his publicist. – I’ve never done anything for anybody who couldn’t do something for me! – We could read Stu as an embodiment of the kind of subjectivity brought into existence

By the newly gentrified midtown. Remember how in Newham, austerity has limited people’s chances to hang out without spending money? Well, Delaney says when that happens, people not only lose the ability to make contact with others, they also learn to desire it less. The more it costs to hang out, the choosier we get

About who we hang out with. – [Voice of F.D. Signifier] A park with no public eating spaces, restaurants or small item shopping on its borders forces mothers who live adjacent to it and who thus use it the most to share everything or nothing in terms of offering facilities or bathroom use

Or the occasional cup of coffee to other mothers and their children to use the park but do not live so near. Because the local mothers feel they must offer these favours to whomever they are even civil with since such services are not publicly available, they soon become extremely choosy

And clique-ish about who they will even speak to. The feel of the park becomes exclusive and snobbish and uncomfortable and inconvenient for mothers who, in carriage, dress or race or class do not fit a rigid social pattern. – The YouTuber Elliot Sang made a great video essay on this called

“Nowhere to Go, the Loss of Third Places.” He starts out noting that Gen Z is apparently facing an epidemic of loneliness, which he says is caused in part by the increasing cost of just hanging out in public. When public space becomes the exclusive playground of the wealthy, everyone else gets isolated

And dependent on digital community instead. I’ve heard it said that Gen Z are having less sex than previous generations, and one thing I’ve never heard anybody mention as a potential cause is a lot of young people can’t afford to live anywhere except with their parents,

And at the same time, dating has become more expensive. Indeed, Delaney says that’s exactly what happened in Times Square! – [Voice of F.D. signifier] Similarly, if every sexual encounter involves bringing someone back to your house, the general sexual activity in the city becomes anxiety filled, class bound and choosy.

This is precisely why public restrooms, peep shows, sex movies, bars with grope rooms and parks with enough greenery are necessary for a relaxed and friendly sexual atmosphere in a democratic metropolis. – You don’t necessarily have to think everybody should be shagging in public toilets all the time,

But Delaney’s general point is the same one we learned at the start about army towns: the design of our environments shapes our subjectivities. Are Gen Z a bunch of prudes, or do their attitudes about sex reflect their material conditions? But still, you might say that the New Times Square is safer,

Especially safer for women. But Delaney considers this and he says it’s not really safer for the women who were living there, is it? ‘Cause they’ve all been forced to move! If it is safer now for middle class women, which is debatable, then that has come at the cost

Of making it more dangerous for working class women, especially sex workers. If you’ve been watching this show for a long time, you might remember an old episode that we did on sex work back when the show was presented by… my brother. In that episode, we learned that making women safer in the context

Of public policy usually means more cops and that usually means more police violence inflicted on sex workers. In this way we can see that gentrification isn’t just a form of racial violence, it’s also a form of misogynist and queerphobic violence too. Delaney says the New Times Square doesn’t represent safety, it represents conformity.

In fact, he thinks that a lot of the time when people talk about crime and danger in public spaces, they aren’t really talking about those things. They’re actually doing something else. And I can give you a great example from my own life.

A while ago I was having dinner with a handful of Brits and one American from Seattle. And one of the Brits asked a question. – [Voice of Tom Nicholas] Is Seattle a clean city? – [Voice of Princess Weekes] Well, like a lot of places we have a big homeless problem.

– Now, strictly speaking, that response is a non-sequitur. That’s like if I asked you, “What’s the weather like in Sydney?” And you said, “My pantaloons are full of eels!” The American did not answer the question unless homeless people themselves are a kind of dirt, and obviously that’s not the case.

Every human being is precious and unique and worth exactly the same as every other. Homeless people may have dirt on them, they may have rubbish or waste that they leave lying around, but that’s because they are denied a place to wash or dispose of their waste.

And perhaps the speaker meant to say that because there are a lot of homeless people in Seattle, they leave their waste lying around and it, the waste, is what makes the city dirty. But if that’s what they were going for, then it would’ve been more accurate to say, “We, the people

Of Seattle, some of whom are homeless and some of whom are not, have a housing and waste disposal problem”. So given that the answer doesn’t make sense, why was it said? Well, David Harvey says that although gentrification does require the violence of casting some people out,

We prefer not to think about that ’cause it makes us feel bad. Interclass contact summons up all kinds of anxieties which we prefer to simply banish by sending homeless people away. There is a lot of content on YouTube that dehumanises homeless people. Thought Slime recently made this excellent video exposing some of it.

The instinct to simply send them away obviously requires violence to carry out. There are politicians who promise to crack down on homelessness, licensing police to confiscate people’s belongings or even put them in camps. Videos like the one Thought Slime exposes build consent for those kinds of violent policies

By dehumanising the people at the sharp end, and they do that by playing on people’s anxieties. I hasten to add that the American in this conversation wasn’t an oil baron or a slum lord, but a queer woman and a Democrat. She’s someone that I know well and love dearly

And she graciously gave me permission to use this example. She herself experienced homelessness some years ago, and like a lot of people who came up from poverty, retains the fear of being sent back to it. So what I think happened in this exchange was an anxiety about interclass contact got expressed

As an anxiety about hygiene. A fear of precarity, of possibly being made homeless again was projected onto the bodies of people currently experiencing homelessness, rendering them almost infectious in the mind of the speaker as if merely by seeing them or having to interact with them, she might become homeless again herself.

As if they had dirt on them, in them that could be transferred indelibly to her. And obviously that’s not possible. That anxiety, however deeply felt, simply does not correspond to reality. Homeless people per se are nothing to be afraid of, they can’t turn you into one of them.

In fact, the people who can make you homeless probably own several homes! They’re just poor, they’re not zombies. This whole discussion about anxiety and projection is what we in the screenwriting business call foreshadowing. Remember this when we get to the twist! The violence inflicted on Stu in Phone Booth

Is a reflection of the violence required to create people like him in the first place. His desire to isolate himself in a world of class-homogenised networking comes at a cost to the people he treats like dirt. He wants to limit the contact he has with others and he’s punished ironically

By getting trapped in a glass booth with only a hostile voice to talk to. The film could have been set anywhere, but I think it’s a strong artistic choice to make it specifically one of the last public phone booths in midtown Manhattan. Surprise, that wasn’t foreshadowing

Because it’s time for the twist right now! Here’s where I’m gonna tell you not only what this video is really about, but also what the next couple episodes of Philosophy Tube to are going to be themed around. You see, we’ve learned a lot of interesting facts about urban development,

But none of those facts matter if you are one of the people caught up in the conspiracy theory about 15 minute cities. [creepy synth music like OOOOOHHH what a twist, that’s the Philosophy Tube magic baby, that’s what we came here for!] In reality, 15 minute cities are a fashionable concept

In urban design being trialed in lots of places. The idea is that everything you need in your neighborhood from healthcare to leisure to education should all be within 15 minutes walk or cycle. There’d be some advantages to that, like reducing car dependency and making neighbourhoods nicer, and some criticisms:

Nicer neighborhoods could be a cover for gentrification as we saw in Newham. But that’s all in reality and we are leaving reality far behind! In February 2023, protestors gathered in the centre of Oxford to shout about 15 minute cities. They said that a pledge by Oxfordshire County Council

To consider 15 minute cities as a planning goal was really a conspiracy to imprison people, take away their cars, and enslave/depopulate the earth as part of, “Agenda 2030” Or, “The Great Reset” a fictional plan by the UN which includes faking climate change, faking coronavirus, trans people,

Digital currencies, Greta Thunberg, critics of Andrew Tate, the committee of 300, (which also doesn’t exist) 5G, drag queens, Antifa, the US election, the Brazilian election, Klaus Schwab, and Just Stop Oil. Thousands of people took to the streets to shout about these unconnected and largely nonsensical topics.

I tried to get some footage of that protest to show you, but many of the sources I can find are far right media organisations and I didn’t want to give them exposure. If you’d like to listen to some of those protesters actual words though, the source I’d recommend is the work of sociologist

Annie Kelly who interviewed some of them for the podcast, “QAnon Anonymous”. The full episode is two and a half hours long because many of the people she spoke to in Oxford have verbal diarrhoea, sliding from one unconnected topic to another and vomiting so much disinformation

It would honestly take days to explain every way in which they are wrong. So my question is, what happened to these people’s minds? Philosophy Tube is now 11 years old and having made educational content for over a decade, I’ve realised there’s a problem. Some people don’t want to be educated.

Some people are committed to ignorance. So committed that they will give up their money, their relationship with their loved ones and even their connection to reality to maintain that ignorance. They are caught in phantasms. Phantasm is a technical philosophy term. It’s a way of mentally organising feelings, selective observations and misrepresentations,

A way of interpreting the world that also does things to the person using it. In a way, it’s like looking at the world through a prism. They’ve been discussed by a few philosophers including Derrida, Lacan, and Laplanche, but I first encountered the idea in Judith Butler’s new book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?”

It’s about phantasms and transphobia and I’ll be doing a video on it later this year. But for now, I’ll explain phantasms with original examples. So, for example, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) are a humanitarian charity currently working in Gaza. On the 3rd of December 2023, they tweeted

That Israeli tanks had targeted cars marked with the MSF logo, and in response, British journalist David Collier accused MSF of protecting Hamas, acting as Hamas agents, and enabling the horrific terrorist attack of October 7th. Now, whatever you think about the conflict, we must surely agree that literally speaking, Collier’s claims are false.

MSF does not do any of those things. I mean, unless he has some truly stunning evidence to the contrary. So if it’s not true, why did he say it? Is he just mistaken? Well, he is mistaken, but to understand phantasms, we have to go beyond true and false. Philosopher Michael Naas says phantasms

Refract an, “As if” Into an, “As so”. For example, “This makes me feel as if MSF are Hamas” Becomes, “They are”. “15 minute cities make me feel as if the government is trying to control me” becomes, “They are”. “The presence of a trans person in a public bathroom

Makes me feel as if I’m under attack” becomes “I am”. Your feelings are refracted through the phantasm and projected out onto reality. If you listen to conspiracy theorists, you’ll quickly notice that the things they say don’t make sense. For example, the ones Annie Kelly interviewed

Say that the 15 minute cities conspiracy is communist, but also that it’s being done by the World Economic Forum, one of the most capitalist organisations there is. A lot of the protestors associated cars with freedom and traffic calming or pro-cycling policies with surveillance and tyranny. But this too is completely backwards.

The YouTube channel, “Oh the Urbanity” has a great video on this in which they point out that if you wanna drive a car, you need a photo license from the government, and a number plate that can be traced to you and modern cars harvest a lot of personal data

Because they’re filled with computers. You know what doesn’t do that? Feet! It doesn’t make sense, but phantasms aren’t supposed to. According to Butler, people deploy phantasms when they feel anxious, but not the kind of anxiety that you get from drinking too much coffee; the kind you get when you’re in danger

Of believing something that would force you to reassess who you are. For example, at the time of recording, I am not a vegetarian. If I looked into industrial meat production, then I might form the belief that eating meat is morally wrong, and if I believed that, my subjectivity would have to change.

My relationship with my family and my hometown, which is very centered around meat-based traditional recipes would have to change. My relationship with my body would definitely change. And I don’t want that. I am anxious about forming that belief, and so I try to avoid it, usually by just not thinking about the topic.

But if I was compelled to think about it then to protect my subjectivity, I might deploy a phantasm. According to literature professor Darin Tenev, phantasms allow the user to stand on both sides of a contradiction and protect themselves against cognitive dissonance. For example, funerals are an exercise in phantasm.

We treat the dead with reverence. We consider what they would have wanted and imagine what we would want to happen to our own remains, and all of that allows us to imagine the dead as both gone and in a way still with us. That’s a contradiction.

It doesn’t make sense, but we do it anyway. And the phantasm contains that contradiction. – [Voice of Princess Weekes] It is not that people are unmindful of the contradiction and need to be enlightened. No, the contradiction itself is what works, in effect emancipating people from the task of developing a rational position.

– For this reason, phantasms are also about power in that they allow the user to think the unthinkable, to contain the contradictions that would otherwise threaten their subjectivity. Phantasms give the user a false sense of mastery over that which they refuse to understand. For this reason, conspiracy theories often attract people

Who feel powerless and tell them that they are important. “There is a sinister plan going on behind the scenes, but you, brave warrior for truth, are standing your ground and will surely help liberate humanity”. So what kinds of anxieties and contradictions are contained by the 15 minute city conspiracies?

I think we can see the answer really clearly when members of government use the phantasm. In 2023, British Transport Secretary Mark Harper said 15 minute cities are a sinister plan to remove people’s freedoms. Our energy Minister Andrew Bowie concurred. Conservative MP Nick Fletcher said that they were

The first step to taking away people’s freedom and even prime Minister Rishi Sunak said there is a relentless attack on motorists. None of that is real. There is no such attack, there is no such plan. What is real is that the United Kingdom has big problems with development.

According to this report by over a dozen academics, deregulation, cuts to local planning departments, and the commodification of housing mean that when development is done in my country, it serves the interest of private corporations, not the people. And we already saw this with the section we did on gentrification.

The result is a planning system that is wasteful, corrupt, and doesn’t meet our need for climate resilient, affordable buildings. We used to have a hospital, now we have luxury flats. These problems are systemic, caused by a system of behaviors and practices that -like your hometown –

Shapes the subjectivities of the people who live under it. Many people are invested (sometimes literally but always psychologically) in the system in which we live, and yet at the same time they see the problems. They know something has to be done, but the solutions are unthinkable.

To be blunt, if you’re a conservative housing minister, you cannot allow yourself to think that the policies you support are the problem because if you believe that you’ll have a f*****g identity crisis! This is the contradiction that the phantasm contains. Two things result from extended phantasm use.

The first is the person trapped in the phantasm doesn’t examine where their initial anxieties came from. Why does the idea of a 15 minute city make you feel as if the government is trying to control you? Why does the idea of a trans person in a public bathroom

Make you feel as if you are under attack? When did you first start worrying about that and why? These sorts of questions will not occur to someone who is trapped in a phantasm. They occurred to me though, so I read this report from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue exploring exactly

Where this conspiracy theory started and how it spread online. Turns out it began with right wing think tanks funded by fossil fuel companies pushing the myth of climate lockdown to turn people against green politics. By the time those people took to the streets in Oxford, they’d already started powering the phantasm

With their own disparate anxieties, but the seed was planted by explicit climate deniers. Those people weren’t just daft, they’d fallen into a mental trap. And yes, that is also my profile name on Grindr! Since those protesters are worried about having their freedoms restricted, it’s worth asking whose freedoms are actually restricted.

We opened this video noting that migrants working on British farms are tightly controlled, possibly enslaved, seemingly with the government’s knowledge. British governments imprison people without trial in detention centers and on offshore barges. They want to deport people to Rwanda for seeking asylum and maybe actually confiscate people’s properties simply for being homeless.

All of that is far more tyrannical than a traffic filter! Here we see the second effect of phantasms: they justify actions that otherwise wouldn’t be. If the government really are trying to imprison you using 15 minute cities, then protesting makes sense and all that other stuff is kind of small beans.

If trans people really are trying to attack you in public bathrooms, then excluding us makes sense. If MSF really are Hamas, then open fire. This is what allows phantasms to be used as a tool for political recruitment. And as luck would have it, I found my very own example in the wild,.

This Twitter account (which I won’t name ’cause I don’t wanna give them exposure) brands itself as being against Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. As well as tweets about Mayor Wu, the account is also routinely transphobic, xenophobic, pro-Trump and anti-Palestine. It says that bike lanes and traffic calming measures

Are woke and the prioritising cars would be much better. But look, this is clearly photoshopped. Like, that, that’s not possible. How are you gonna fit six lanes of traffic in here? Are these clown cars? This guy’s been in an accident that’s got his whole vehicle over on one side.

Could be worse though, this guy’s been cut in half! Have you f*****g tried driving through Boston? I’ve done it twice with like, two different partners and both times it nearly ended our relationship. If you removed this section where I-93 crosses the Pike, the Massachusetts divorce rate would halve!

Accounts like this can be found on almost every social media platform. The mishmash of nonsensical positions provides several on-ramps to the world of the phantasm. Whatever your anxiety is, there’s a place for you in unreality. If you don’t like driving in Boston, then maybe

That frustration can be channeled into a dislike of cyclists or lefty vegans. If you enjoy laughing at traffic wokeness, maybe you’ll also like to own the libs by adopting a conservative position on gun control or trans rights or foreign policy. If you agree that the city is being ruined

By traffic calming measures, maybe you’ll also agree that it’s being ruined by anyone who isn’t white. This is an Amazon recommendation algorithm for radicalisation. Its function is to build a political coalition by loosening your grip on reality one fingernail at a time. And if it made sense, it would be less

Effective at doing that! This leads us to a crucial insight. The Oxford protestors, that Twitter account, and the queer Democrat at dinner exist on a spectrum. The distance between conspiracy theory and polite liberal discourse about homelessness is a matter of degree, not kind. You and I are not immune to phantasms.

[creepy music like oh damn, I was really hoping I was immune to phantasms actually] So, what can we do about all this? Well, there are some solutions to our urban development and gentrification crises. That report that I mentioned earlier recommends things like reforming our tax system, reversing austerity, maybe getting rid

Of the British aristocracy who still control a lot of our land. When you live in practical reality, there are practical steps that you can take and whole channels like Not Just Bikes dedicated to talking about them. Ultimately a lot of it comes down to making public investment,

So I guess we should be grateful the solutions are so simple. But what about all the people in the phantasm? Can we get them out? How do you educate people who refuse to learn? Well, that is the subject of our next episode! And between now and then I’m cooking something else!

I have written a short film and it just got greenlit. It explores many of the same things that we’ve talked about today, like how do you get somebody to realise something that they really don’t wanna know? It’s about two women dealing with the trauma they got

From a bad relationship, and they’re both vampires because their ex is Count Dracula! [dramatic music like OH WHOA that sounds like an amazing premise for a short film wow I can’t wait to see that!] We are going to be filming in a few weeks time in Hollywood.

It’s only recently sunk in for me this is a real thing that’s actually gonna happen. I’m gonna be in the film and starring alongside me will be Morgana Ignis and Brandon Rogers from Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss, two of the biggest shows in the world right now!

And if you would like to see the film when it comes out, there’s a link in the doodly-doo already. go.nebula.tv/dex. We also have some amazing producers, a streaming service called Nebula. And what they’re hoping for is that people sign up to Nebula to watch the film.

That’s how they make back the budget that they gave us. But since we announced it, so many of you have signed up that we’ve already made the budget back. My debut film as a screenwriter is making profit before we’ve even started rolling. That’s amazing. And even better, rather than just pocket that money,

Nebula decided to reinvest it so they increased the budget and gave that money to the creative artists so we can make an even higher quality film. And even better, if you sign up to Nebula using that link specifically, I get a cut of your subscription, so you’d be helping out Philosophy Tube

And my weird acting ventures thing at the same time. Genuinely, I can’t tell you how nice it is to be working with producers who actually care about independent media and new writers. Not just to say they do (because everyone says that they do) but who actually do.

Nebula are even letting me keep the rights to the film. So it’s not like Netflix where you write a thing and then they cancel it after two seasons and you can’t do anything. I own Dracula’s Ex-Girlfriend, like the rights to it stay with me.

That is also a radically new way of producing film and it’s kind of a gamechanger. So, wish me luck on set and fangs for watching! [Cold in Amarillo by Luke Levenson plays – it’s a chill moody country bop and it slaps, thanks Luke for letting us use it!]

[Pretty happy with this one! An unexpected collab, a real ‘zig when they expect you to zag’ move] [Oh man, tell you what, I’m in a good mood today: I just had a really nice cinnamon roll for breakfast from the bakery down the road. Mm-mmm! a special treat for hard working girlies!]

[By the time you read this, YouTube fans, we’ll already have started rolling on DEX. Amazingly exciting!] [The acting industry is in such a weird place right now with COVID backlogs and the strikes: it feels good to be able to make my own stuff, y’know?]

[I’m lucky to have Nebula at my back for that. And lucky to have all of you at my back too!] [It’s not lost on me that I’m trying to do something that’s never really been done successfully before: cross over from the YouTube world to the traditional acting world]

[Or rather, have one foot in both – combine them! It’s a new approach, and it seems to be working pretty well so far!]

[SO excited to be working with Morgana & Brandon. Heyyy, shout out to all the Helluva and Hazbin fans! I’ve met a few of the fans of those shows already: lovely, lovely people!]

[Morgana and Brandon seemed like great fits for the roles: I know they can both do queer horror/comedy AND drama, so, perfect casting honestly] [And Valentina Vee, what a talent! Feel very safe with her hands on the tiller of this thing, she’s honestly an absolute scientist]

[Last thing I have to do now is get the thumbnail for this episode sorted, but I think it can wait. For now I’m gonna do a quick bit of yoga and then have some lunch] [Made some amazing roast pork with fennel last night, gonna have the leftovers of that. *chef’s kiss*]

[Feels nice to relax on the diet a bit. I got really jacked and dieted a lot in preparation for a big role that I then didn’t get cause they rewrote the character to make her small lol. I was gutted, but hey, it means I can relax a bit now lol]

[LMAO what were they cooking when they made this????]