YIMBYcon in fond remembrance

I always get back to where I was a minute ago. So this is - more or less - what I said as one of my themes for our YIMBYcon workshop a couple of days ago:

In Finland, the highway projects of the 1960s were one of the key factors in the rise of urban activism. It was very strongly linked to all the other activist movements of that time, especially to the environmental movement - first as a no to nuclear power, then on a broad front of nature conservation.

For perhaps the past two decades, and, as so often, somewhat later here, we see a new rise of urban activism. Jane Jacobs is back. But to what general activist movement is this linked? Is the net the reason for it all? At least not very populist; actually, this urban activity seems to want to keep populists at arms length (and at least in Finland, the populist movements roots are in the rural regions).

Urban activism has been criticized as a latte class hobby: let's gentrify the city so we can have some fun! Or as a party political broadcast: let's all be moderate pragmatic greens!

So, where is the soul of present-day urban activism and does it have the staying power needed to truly influence the development and life of cities?

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(Meditations by a retired urban and transport planner: architect, who started as an environment consultant for the biggest road projects then in being (they failed), then as town planner for a Helsinki area local authority, Sipoo (Helsinki took a big part of the area I planned later on), then again as a conultant,  then as the environment manager for the Finnish Road Administration, nowadays Traffic Agency)

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I think we got a very good answer from our discussions, slightly supported by Maija Faehnle's previous presentation that gave us the term 'do-ocracy': today, activism is one of the main tools democracy needs to be at all relevant to where we're at..