[Flo Crivello, @Altimor] Americans severely underestimate how dirt poor most Europeans are. They go spend their American wages there and are amazed at the "quality of life," not realizing that they're taking the equivalent of a trip to Disneyland, and everyone around them is the staff.

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome] Median size of a dwelling in every US state vs the same thing in Europe. [presumably a map or chart]

“As culture shaped us as a single species so too it shapes us as separate individuals. This … is what we have in common. Oddly enough, many of our subjects seem to realize this more clearly than we anthropologists ourselves. In Java, for example, the people quite flatly say, “To be human is to be Javanese.”

Don't necessarily disagree with this framing (would say it differently), but I believe a large percentage of Europeans would swap their tiny apartment three miles from downtown Brussels, or Marseille, their tiny car, for a ranch house in Jacksonville beach with three cars & a yard for the kids to play in. Not sure many Americans would take up the opposite offer, other than grad students wanting a quaint experience Maybe I'm wrong, but that's my sense.

Phoenix is a large grid, of mile-long four-lane sides, with shopping plazas at the corners, and an inside of twisting single-lane roads and simple ranch homes on half-acre plots. Those residential insides are the nice parts, and showing that they’re nice is partly why I’d come to Phoenix: to highlight a version of the American Dream, which, while I might not love and isn’t necessarily “walkable,” is still very appealing to lots of people. It’s what I wrote about last week, when I cautioned that walkability doesn’t necessarily translate into livibility. [https://walkingtheworld.substack.com/p/so-what-makes-a-city-more-walkable ]

Most of us receive government support, for one thing. When asked, 71 percent of Americans say that they are part of a household that has used one of the six most commonly known government benefits — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, or unemployment benefits. And many people who benefit from government largesse fail to realize it: Sixty percent of Americans who claim the mortgage-interest deduction, which applies to homeowners, say they have never used a government program. If you’ve driven on public roads, gone to public school, or used the postal service as part of your business — well, we all rely on collective infrastructure to get ahead.

I went to public schools through eighth grade. My parents were able to save for some of my college costs through a plan that provides tax relief for those savings. I stayed on my parent’s health insurance until I was 26 under the Affordable Care Act. I have received the earned income tax credit, targeted at those with low or moderate income. I took out federal student loans to go to law school.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US congress and kept accurate by the national institute of standards and technology and the US naval observatory, I get into my national highway traffic safety administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the environmental protection agency, using legal tender issed by the federal reserve bank. On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the US postal service and drop the kids off at the public school.

Or think about the idea of family, in the context of everyday life. It’s one thing to talk about family values as a theme, or a wedge — but what’s it actually like to have a family? Your family does better if you get a fair wage, if there’s good public education, if there’s good health care when you need it. These things intuitively make sense, but we’re out of practice talking about them. I also think we need to talk about a different kind of patriotism: a fidelity to American greatness in its truest sense. You think about this as a local official, of course, but a truly great country is made of great communities. What makes a country great isn’t chauvinism. It’s the kinds of lives you enable people to lead. I think about wastewater management as freedom. If a resident of our city doesn’t have to give it a second thought, she’s freer.

In the short run, all these things are harmful to the profession and to California’s communities as well. But it’s possible that some kind of shakeout and rethinking of how planning works in this state is long overdue. Maybe we’ve become too dependent on the same ol’-same ol’ – tax-increment funds, developer impact fees, and so forth. Maybe it’s time to find a new model – one where the local governments play a smaller or at least different role, and developers and nonprofit organizations play a bigger one.

Our projects primarily engage the micro scale of the neighborhood, transforming it into the urban laboratory of the 21st century. The forces of control at play across the most trafficked checkpoint in the world has provoked the small border neighborhoods that surround it to construct alternative urbanisms of transgression that infiltrate themselves beyond the property line in the form of non-conforming spatial and entrepreneurial practices. A migrant, small scale activism that alters the rigidity of discriminatory urban planning of the American metropolis, and search for new modes of social sustainability and affordability. The political and economic processes behind this social activism bring new meaning to the role of the informal in the contemporary city. What is interesting here is not the ‘image’ of the informal but the instrumentality of its operational socio-economic and political procedures. The counter economic and social organizational practices produced by non-profit social service organizations (turned micro-developers of alternative housing prototypes and public infrastructure at the scale of the parcel) within these neighborhoods are creating alternative sites of negotiation and collaboration. They effectively search to transform top-down legislature and lending structures, in order to generate a new brand of bottom-up social and economic justice that can bridge the political equator.