Bought a steel frame bike for 80€. Fixed it up and it’s definitely the best set of wheels I’ve owned so far. It’s most definitely originally stolen. In close inspection the wheels don’t match and the lock frame has been removed. Bough it of tori.fi, which was in the news a while back for bike stealing deals. I’m contemplating which is more ethical: Stealing a bike by myself or buying a bike I know is stolen. Paying 80€ makes me both a thief and an opportunist.
What is urban planning’s role in the maintenance of capitalism? (2019) Samuel Stein.
Planning itself is not inherently racist; in fact, it is central to racism’s negation. But racial capitalism asks planners to sort out who will go where, under what conditions and for whose benefit. Such actions are intrinsically coercive. Planners often describe the force underlying their work as “police power.”
Planners also secure consent by cloaking their power in rationality. While the capitalist state can be considered a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” it often operates as a republic with some democratic features. For the most part, planners cannot simply foist their plans onto the public, but must convince them that these plans are in fact the most rational option.
As planning theorist Bent Flyvbjerg maintains, however, “power defines reality” and “rationalization presented as rationality is a principal strategy in the exercise of power.”