🏙️ In a city of 40M people, thousands of 6-seat bars thrive in narrow alleys.

Tokyo's yokocho teach us that the best urban planning sometimes means knowing when NOT to plan.

How $50 liquor licenses & zero minimum lot sizes create human-scale magic 👇

#UrbanPlanning #Tokyo #Placemaking #Urbanism

Photographed a housing project in Santiago. Neighbor demanded credentials for shooting "his house". The hostility makes sense: blank walls, bars, deteriorated public space. Chile's municipalities can't fund what communities need to thrive.
#PublicSpace #UrbanDevelopment #Santiago #Chile

Read the full analysis (Spanish): open.substack.com/pub/marcelob...

Essential reading on urban transformation:
🔗 Salvador Rueda's superblock model: bit.ly/barcelona-su...
🔗 "Happy City" by Charles Montgomery
🔗 Strong Towns: strongtowns.org

What's your city doing about car-centric design? 6/6

The challenge isn't technical—it's political. We need to "domesticate" the automobile and remember cities exist for people to meet, not for cars to circulate.

Air pollution is the visible symptom of an obsolete urban model. 5/6

Barcelona's superblocks proved transformation is possible:
✅ 25% traffic reduction
✅ 70% of car space liberated
✅ 667 premature deaths prevented annually
✅ €1.7B healthcare savings vs €30M implementation cost

Multiply by 4 = Santiago's potential impact. 4/6

The perverse cycle: Air pollution goes hand in hand with urban quality deterioration and social isolation.

We've been displaced as citizens to sidewalks while the best urban space is reserved for vehicles. 3/6

As urbanist Salvador Rueda puts it: "We have a physical car in our brain and we can't think in any other terms."

We've normalized an urban model that subordinates public life to car circulation. Streets become "transit corridors" instead of meeting places. 2/6

🧵 THREAD: Why Santiago was the world's 2nd most polluted city last Thursday (and what Barcelona teaches us about fixing it)

I cancelled my bike ride to Cerro San Cristóbal. Air quality: 169 AQI. Worse than Delhi, Jakarta, Calcutta.

But the real problem isn't just the air we breathe... 1/6

substack.com/@marcelobauz...

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