EcoGecko
patreon
Deciding the Next Video: Your Vote Matters!
🕑 Added 2022-02-06 15:10:43 +0000 UTCHello everyone,
As mentioned in the new video post, I'm leaving it up to you to decide what our next video topic will be. The options are described below. This poll is only open to Patrons, so your vote counts!
Our first topic is about the rise of local control and gated communities in the United States and elsewhere, with a special focus on "The Villages", an infamous master-planned development in Florida. This video would draw on social theory about tourism, fear of crime, and the "resortification" of built space to examine the interaction of conservatism, privatization, and inequality in America's neighborhoods, and speculate on where class segregation is headed in the US given current trends.
The second topic is about ancient cities, specifically, what ancient sites in early Mesopotamia, Neolithic Europe, and Copper Age India can tell us about society, egalitarianism, and democracy in early human civilization. There's been a lot of great literature recently debunking the common belief that agriculture led to both urban life and hierarchy in human society, along with evidence about early democracy and self-government at the dawn of urban civilization.
The third topic is best practices in building better suburbs. We addressed this at the end of the recent "Building Better Suburbs" video, where I briefly described how nations much poorer and smaller than the US have addressed housing crises through large-scale, progressive, affordable projects. The idea here is to expand this out to a full video, exploring exactly how these projects are created, including details of financing, design, and democratic consultation.
Comments
Christiana
Love coming back to your videos, hope you're doing alright <3
Mateusz Borowiecki
Yeah, Graeber in particular is infamous for extrapolating a lot from very limited data (a pretty consistent problem in DoE, unfortunately). I'd love to read some more of the primary research myself and summarize it in a video with a slightly more critical eye.
Dori
I second this notion, especially after what you wrote about the myth of agriculture. Then again, it might have been the most reasonable conclusion on the data available at the time. Since there weren't many writings I presume research had to infer a lot.
Mateusz Borowiecki
I recently finished Dawn of Everything, which discusses both of those cities, and my interest was also piqued. I'll definitely make a video about it eventually, hopefully with a lot more detail than Graeber & Wengrow go into within their book.
Jake Mecham
I would be very, very interested in your take on ancient cities. I feel the best way to understand the present is to de-familiarize it with comparisons to how humans used to live, and ancient cities may be the starkest of comparisons. It may be beyond the scope of your topic, but I think touching on meso-american cities like Tikal and Teotihuacan would be an interesting addition to the topic, despite the dearth of information.
Matthew Bell
The most recent video on Building Better Suburbs is my favorite video in your catalog. It is relatively easy for anyone to point at problems and say "this is bad," but showing how to do it right is so necessary and powerful, as it shows how to fix the problem. Your last video really inspired my imagination, and I hope to see the "best practices" video, since it definitely follows in the footsteps of "building better suburbs".
LiterallyJudas
I'd love to look into ancient cities and their structures and especially ancient democracy, being quite interested in the Roman Republic myself. However its very clear how the vote is going right now, so a teardown and analysis of The Villages sounds fascinating.
Mateusz Borowiecki
You would definitely see DoE cited a lot in that video--I'm also just finishing it now.
Mateusz Borowiecki
Yes, these are all topics I want to eventually discuss! This is mainly to decide what I'm prioritizing.
AJ Fine
Recently read Dawn of Everything, so #2 is very tempting. I assume you'd bring your own fresh perspective to the matter
Todd
Idk if that’s the plan but I would love to see all of these topics explored eventually!
