200 most important geography topics - Sykalo Eugene 2025

Urban planning

Urban planning isn’t about “nice cities” or “green space.” It’s a battle of wills between geography and ambition, between history and the future, fought in the medium of asphalt and zoning codes. It’s how cities express who has power, who doesn’t, and what compromises were made to get there. It's as much about containment as expression. And every block tells a different kind of lie.

The Grid is Never Innocent

Take Manhattan. Its grid—often praised for clarity, efficiency, and navigability—was drawn in 1811 with such ruthless disregard for topography that it sliced through hills and swamps as if erasing nature itself were a moral imperative. But why? Because the grid, beyond its rationalist sheen, is an engine of commodification. Easy to buy. Easy to sell. Easy to patrol.

Compare this to the meandering alleyways of Fez or the tightly coiled courtyards of Kyoto—organic growths of centuries, often baffling to outsiders. Not because they’re poorly planned, but because they were designed with different fears and needs: shade, privacy, defense from invaders or taxes. In these cities, walking feels like reading an ancient diary—full of strange abbreviations and private jokes.

Grids, by contrast, are declarations: This city belongs to the state. And you, citizen, are invited to move efficiently.

Zoning: The Hidden Weapon

When I lived in Houston briefly—a city with no formal zoning—I experienced a strange dissonance. One day you’d pass a neon-lit tattoo shop wedged between a daycare and a dentist. Strip clubs blinked near synagogues. It was anarchic and, in a way, honest.

Most other American cities are ruled by zoning codes that began as a response to genuine 19th-century horrors: slaughterhouses next to schools, lead foundries near bedrooms. But the 20th century mutated that impulse into a far quieter segregation.

In 1916, New York’s zoning resolution was sold to the public as a tool to preserve light and air. But it also ushered in a spatial class system that persists to this day. High-rise towers for elites; public housing clustered far from economic lifelines. And racial exclusion? It wasn’t just redlining maps and mortgage policies—it was zoning that prohibited “multi-family” units in suburban zones, a euphemism so transparent you’d have to work not to see it.

So yes, planning is power. But power prefers to dress in spreadsheets and regulatory language, not uniforms.

Streets: Arteries of the Social Contract

You can tell when a city was built for people versus when it was built for cars.

Walk down a narrow street in Palermo—pale laundry strung between balconies, kids darting between mopeds—and you feel cradled. The city acknowledges your existence. Now try crossing a six-lane road in Phoenix in August. The heat is malicious. The sidewalk, if it exists, feels like an afterthought. There is no shade. No bench. No place to simply be. You’re not a citizen there—you’re an intruder.

Urban streets are more than conveyance systems. They are stages for democracy or isolation. Haussmann's Parisian boulevards, with their dramatic, military-grade width, weren’t just beautiful—they were wide enough to prevent the construction of barricades. An aesthetic of control.

In contrast, Copenhagen, where 62% of residents commute by bike, made an entirely different pact. The infrastructure whispers: We trust you. And you can trust us.

Informal Cities, Formal Realities

Lagos. Karachi. Dhaka. Here, urban planning often follows the people, not the other way around. Cities metastasize before governments can draft a single plan. More than a billion people globally now live in informal settlements—favelas, bustees, kampungs—not as a failure of planning, but as evidence of its irrelevance to their daily survival.

I remember walking through Dharavi in Mumbai, guided by a young man who worked in an aluminum recycling operation. Every inch of space was used—rooftops stacked with materials, passageways barely shoulder-wide. And yet, in its density was logic: clusters of similar industries, shared infrastructure built through negotiation, not fiat.

The irony? These unplanned cities often exhibit more human logic than the sterilized masterplans drafted in air-conditioned think tanks. Their economies hum. Their social cohesion is real. What they lack in drainage and legality, they compensate for with vitality.

Still—should we romanticize hardship? Of course not. But we ignore the ingenuity at our peril.

Green Space: The Illusion of Neutral Ground

Parks are political. Always.

When Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park, he saw it as a democratic lung—a place where rich and poor could mingle, breathe, recover their sanity. But in practice, parks often serve as soft borders: who feels welcome, who is surveilled, who is displaced when property values rise.

The modern obsession with “green space” often cloaks a darker impulse: cleansing. Entire neighborhoods are bulldozed to make room for speculative eco-developments. Trees become emblems of gentrification. Even sustainability, once the language of ecological humility, has become a glossy branding exercise in some quarters.

And yet… when done well, green planning can be sublime. Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon restoration, which tore down a highway to revive a buried stream, was a civic act of remembering. A gesture toward wholeness. There’s real power in that. A kind of quiet redemption.

Surveillance and the Algorithmic City

Contemporary planning doesn’t rely solely on concrete and steel. It deploys data like mortar.

Cities like Shenzhen or Songdo are laced with sensors—measuring traffic, emissions, even human movement in real time. Smart planning promises efficiency, but it also tightens the net of control. Public spaces become labs. Your presence becomes a variable.

What happens when the city knows you better than you know yourself?

In theory, predictive algorithms can help deploy buses where people need them, adjust streetlights for pedestrians, reduce crime. But we must ask: who builds these systems? Who trains the data? Bias, once encoded, becomes invisible. And once invisible, unquestioned.

The Ghosts in the Pavement

No planner can account for memory.

Berlin’s stumbling stones—tiny brass plates embedded in sidewalks, naming Holocaust victims—interrupt the act of walking. They force remembrance into routine. In contrast, cities that bulldoze their past—post-war Belgrade, swaths of Beijing—often feel eerily rootless. Planned, yes. Alive, not quite.

Planning must therefore contend not just with future needs, but past traumas. The scars of riots, forced evictions, earthquakes, revolutions. You can paint over history with new façades, but the ground remembers.

The Future Isn’t a Blueprint

We must abandon the fantasy of the omniscient planner.

Good urban planning today is adaptive, not prescriptive. It listens. It prototypes. It allows for unpredictability. Medellín, once the world’s murder capital, transformed through a network of cable cars, public libraries, and outdoor escalators—not because of a sweeping masterplan, but because planners paid attention to where the city ached.

There is no universal answer. A utopia in Stockholm may be a prison in Lagos. A pedestrian paradise in Portland might be an economic desert in Detroit.

Instead, we must ask harder questions: Who benefits? Who decides? And who gets erased?

Coda

Cities are the collective exhale of civilization. They embody our needs, our fears, our dreams—and our blind spots. Urban planning is not a clean science. It’s more like surgery: invasive, messy, and never entirely predictable in its consequences.

If you want to know what a society values, look at its zoning map. Walk its sidewalks. Notice which neighborhoods have playgrounds and which have liquor stores. Look at where the shadows fall.

And when you stand at a corner, like I did in Barcelona, and the sun cuts through the alley in a perfect diagonal line—ask yourself: who planned this? And why?

The answers, like the city itself, are rarely simple. But they’re always worth pursuing.