The Most Insufferable Thing About Urbanists
What Is an Urbanist?
The term urbanist has been around for decades, though it has gained traction in recent years among certain circles. At its simplest, “urbanist” describes someone who takes a keen interest in cities and the built environment. But more specifically, it identifies a group that aligns with a pro-city stance, often in direct opposition to the patterns of suburban sprawl that have come to define so much of the American landscape.
Urbanists can be planners, architects, policymakers, bicycle and transit advocates, or everyday citizens frustrated by how our streets and neighborhoods have evolved—or failed to evolve. They tend to advocate for walkable, mixed-use areas, higher-density housing, robust public transit, and healthier, more sustainable ways of living. The “urban” in “urbanist” isn’t just about city centers; it’s about rejecting the inefficient, car-centric, and unsustainable development that characterizes so many places in North America.
The truth is, whether you love city life or prefer quieter rural communities, development patterns shape everyone’s lives. These patterns influence everything from housing affordability and health outcomes to environmental sustainability and infrastructure costs. The low-density model—acres of single-family homes, separated uses, and the near-mandatory car ownership—has consequences that are now inescapable. It consumes farmland, contributes to environmental damage, and creates tensions among farms, wildlife, and expanding subdivisions. The more spread out we build, the more resources and money we need to keep everything stitched together with roads, pipes, and power lines.
The logic in favor of more compact development is simple enough: when people live closer together, it’s cheaper and easier to provide basic services, maintain infrastructure, and connect households with jobs and amenities. Yet our legacy of sprawling growth patterns suggests something else entirely—a system many critics have likened to a Ponzi scheme, where new development fees prop up the maintenance costs of yesterday’s developments.
As Charles Marohn of Strong Towns and others have pointed out, the staggering unfunded maintenance liability lurking beneath our streets and behind our zoning codes is immense. Meanwhile, the environmental and public health costs of low-density patterns—from their role in climate change and pollution to their contribution to isolation, depression, and obesity—are harder to quantify but no less real.
All of which begs the question: If the costs are so high, why do we continue building places that so clearly harm our wallets, our health, and the planet?
The uncomfortable truth is that many people do not have much of a choice.
Elysian Fields: How We Got Here
Before we assume that the current suburban development pattern sprang fully formed from some sinister blueprint, it helps to understand the arc of human settlement itself. For most of our species’ existence, permanent settlement was rare. Hunters and gatherers moved according to available resources, and it took the development of agriculture to root us in place. Over millennia, the growth of agriculture and industry allowed humans to cluster in cities, enabling specialization, trade, and density unimaginable to our nomadic ancestors.
Yet the modern profession of urban planning is a relative newcomer. For much of the last century, especially after World War II, urban planning in the United States largely fixated on separating “incompatible” land uses—keeping factories away from housing, for instance. This well-meaning approach often morphed into rigid zoning codes that mandated sprawling, segregated neighborhoods of single-family homes inaccessible without a car.
Critiques of these planning decisions have circulated for decades. Jane Jacobs, in her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, famously lambasted the top-down, “expert knows best” approach that ravaged vibrant, mixed-use neighborhoods in favor of sterile, automobile-centric environments. While the planning profession has evolved since Jacobs’ time, some of the paternalistic, overly prescriptive land use controls she condemned remain deeply embedded in local regulations today.
The Illusion of Choice
At this juncture, it’s tempting to blame suburban dwellers themselves. Aren’t they simply choosing a bigger house and quieter street? In reality, many households settle in these places because they feel they must. Affordability often dictates relocation to car-dependent neighborhoods far from jobs or quality schools. Dual-income households struggle to find housing that’s simultaneously close to both workplaces. Others find that the absence of mixed-use development leaves them stuck in “food deserts” or heavily reliant on long, traffic-plagued commutes.
In other words, the built environment shapes our preferences as much as it reflects them. Over decades, we’ve quietly removed many of the urban design ingredients that allow people to live without a car, walk or bike safely, or access daily necessities within a short distance. Large-lot zoning, minimum parking requirements, and the prioritization of highways over sidewalks and transit lines have produced the default setting many Americans now take for granted.
This default is often mistaken as the product of “choice” rather than the lack of it. And so the suburban house, two cars in the driveway, and miles of asphalt-laced subdivisions become the norm—if not everyone’s dream, then certainly everyone’s presumed reality.
Beyond the Utopian Meme: The Rise of the YIMBY and #FuckCars
Enter the self-identified urbanists online—the YIMBYs (“Yes In My BackYard”) and their allies who broadcast a constant stream of walkable, bike-friendly European streetscapes and snappy posts shaming “car culture.” They champion denser housing, commercial uses integrated into neighborhoods, the elimination of parking requirements, and robust transit. Their platforms, whether social media accounts or advocacy groups like Strong Towns, stand against the entrenched status quo.
In many ways, this is great. A new wave of activists, influencers, and reform-minded professionals wants to dismantle the outdated regulations and systems that have created car-dependent landscapes. They highlight powerful examples and point to places where people can live without the daily grind of a multi-hour car commute.
But this is also where urbanists can become a bit insufferable. Their feeds often feature the same romantic European plazas or hyper-idealized “main street” scenes, with the assumption that these can be transplanted wholesale into American suburbs by simply ending parking mandates or tweaking a zoning bylaw. It’s a sort of meme-ified vision of good urbanism: a few well-chosen images, a handful of slogans, and—voilà!—the city is fixed.
The Limits of Simple Solutions
Good urbanism is about more than replicating photogenic cobblestone streets. Historic European cities emerged over centuries, shaped by cultural, economic, and geographic forces not easily replicated in a postwar American suburb. The challenges we face today—climate change, deeply entrenched regulatory regimes, decades of suburban infrastructure, and vast economic inequalities—cannot be solved with the flick of a zoning pen or a viral hashtag.
Much like Ebenezer Howard’s early 20th-century “Garden City” concept, well-meaning utopian visions sometimes gloss over inconvenient realities. They reduce urban complexity to a few design principles or a single scapegoat (the car), inadvertently downplaying how deeply embedded these issues are. This kind of simplistic thinking risks alienating potential allies and fails to acknowledge the incremental, grinding work many planners, advocates, and policymakers do every day within existing constraints.
Working Toward Real Change
We must, of course, challenge the entrenched dysfunction in the American built environment. We need more places that are walkable, functional, and inspiring—places that value people over cars, sustainability over sprawl, and equity over exclusion. But achieving this requires patience, dialogue, and a willingness to engage with political, economic, and social realities.
Many working urban planners already share the YIMBY or pro-urbanist mindset. They understand the dire need for reform. Yet they must also navigate local politics, code books the size of encyclopedias, and the entrenched interests of property owners and developers. Change does not come easily, and it rarely comes all at once.
So while the online urbanist community provides an important, even essential, counter-narrative to mainstream development, the most insufferable thing about some urbanists is the unwillingness to acknowledge complexity. The world we’ve inherited is messy; disentangling the threads of flawed zoning, expensive infrastructure, segregation, and car-dependency will never be as simple as posting a pretty street scene or tweeting #fuckcars.
Urbanism is at its best when it balances bold vision with hard-earned pragmatism. It thrives not by shaming everyone who drives or lives in suburbia, but by inviting more people into the conversation—helping them see that a different way of building and living is possible. We should be careful not to reduce the cause to a series of memes or superficial talking points. Instead, we must engage deeply, work incrementally, and remember that real human lives and histories shape every block and boulevard.
In doing so, we can move beyond the insufferable and toward the transformative.
