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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27236 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I watched this recent video about a city that Guatemala’s rich built for themselves. It’s clean, it’s beautiful, it looks like a nice European city. Sure, the majority of the country lives in third world conditions, but that didn’t stop the largely European elite from building this.

Thanks for this link. This is very informative in terms of city planning, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design and application of advanced security master planning. I'm sure things are sugar coated and that there is a need for paying security and police to maintain that environment as an open city within a country like Guatemala, but it's an inspiring example of what can be done with public space. The security consultants would have had a heart attack.

Yeah, they don’t go into huge detail in the video but I suspect that a combination of narrow, winding streets, heavy pedestrianization and only a few access roads because it’s on top of a hill mean that it’s hard for criminals to get in and out easily.

I don't know much about criminology, so I have little idea how narrow, winding streets aid urban crime prevention.

They help prevent the kind of smash-and-grab organized crime raids commonplace in wealthier parts of very unequal Latin American countries.

Ok. Point taken. I'd think that ambushing unsuspecting people is easier on a narrow, winding street than on a wide, non-winding one, but thankfully that's not something I have experience with.

There are often other subtle considerations such as deliberate lack of public transport to the area that can make things like remote suburbs attractive to certain residents.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things is in an arms race with elites for the battle over public spaces.

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