Talk:Urbanism

WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as stub, and the rating on other projects was brought up to Stub class. BetacommandBot 05:56, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Ridiculously biased
This article is ridiculously biased in favor of cities and/or urban culture. For example:

"Cities have historically been the driver of culture."

and

"Outside of cities, most people are not exposed to the same level of diversity-in both thought and personal characteristics-as they are within them."

In many places true culture is considered something which arises from the countryside (e.g., rice farmers in Japan, the mid-Western family farm, etc.) And while cities have more diversity because of greater population and different peoples there is also often IMO a level of superficialty in certain notions of "tolerance"; also there is often *less* diversity in terms of religious, political and/or spiritual beliefs (many cities tend to be dominated by liberal secular culture[s]).

Quite frankly I'm surprised an article this obviously biased is considered acceptable to Wikipedia.Historian932 (talk) 01:33, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Work in Progress
If the author of the previous comment bothered to read the comments in the "Talk" section, he or she would realize that the page appears to be a work in progress. While I agree with some of the critiques made by others about this page, it is already a vast improvement on the previous "Urbanism" page. I find the framing of urbanism to be much more sophisticated and the case studies much more illuminating than the previous one, which was so "unbiased" as to be incredibly dull and useless. I also find that one has to read the entire Wikipedia page--much as one would read the entire entry on the Encyclopedia Britannica--to understand it fully. I think it should be given a chance to be be read and improved, before being summarily and unfairly dismissed by critics such as Historian932. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Naagarik (talk • contribs) 21:32, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

NPOV required
In order to maintain NPOV, the article needs to address both positives and negatives of urbanism. The positives are well covered. Perhaps sourced data can be included regarding the following negatives of city living: higher cost of living, higher risk of children developing asthma, typically (not always) lower quality public education. Specifically, one can contrast the benefits of reduced heat energy consumption from living in apartments to the loss of exposure to natural daylight (energy is saved by having less surface area exposed to the exterior).

Additionally, the article should address the intellectual theories behind urbanism, including past successes and failures.

Most importantly, the credibility of the article is completely lost in the lack of cited sources. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Granpachook (talk • contribs) 01:31, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

Class project
It appears that there is a class project editing this article. This is a good thing, but it's not doing much to produce a unified, concise encyclopedia article. Instead, it's produced a rambling overlong jumble of individual elements, which don't do much to illuminate the concept. The article is far too long, goes into far too much detail about individual projects, and written in excessively academic prose. Would some of the participants please broaden their focus to overall article improvement, removing extraneous detail, improving the prose and focus, and generally improving the article rather than your particular segment?  Acroterion   (talk)   18:07, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

This page has become part of an assignment for a graduate class of Urbanism. Approximately 20 peoples are working on editing its content. We are hoping that by the end of our collaboration we present an interesting view into Urbanism from a pragmatic perspective. The deadline is May 14th, midnight EST. The page should be complete by then. Thank you for you patience. User talk:Dlteif 18:17, 8 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Excellent, thanks for clarifying. As I noted, it seems to be going into a lot of depth on individual examples rather than covering a broad discussion of the subject, appropriate to an introductory article for laymen.  Please keep this in mind as you edit: it's very easy to end up with too much detail and too little exposition of the concept, and a round of strategic cuts at the end, together with a summing up and appropriate lead paragraph(s) would be appropriate. A little less reliance on references to thinkers on urbanism and more discussion of urbanism itself (with appropriate references to the originators of the concepts) would help make the prose less academic in tone. I look forward to the finished product!   Acroterion   (talk)   18:44, 8 May 2012 (UTC)


 * In addition to Acroterion's gentle nudge, I would like to add that I hope the referencing improves. There appears to be entire sub-sections that don't provide a footnote indicating where the information is coming from. maclean (talk) 04:21, 9 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Sorry, but let me be the bad cop here. I've seen this article go from bad to worse over the last week, week and a half. Involved editors do not seem to be interested in editing according to Wikipedia's guidelines, and the quality of the article has suffered. I've made a few quick edits to undo some of the glaring violations, but this article will need a lot of work to be coaxed into an encyclopedic form. If the editors are indeed interested in helping to improve the article, their help is welcome. But if this is just an assignment to them, with no eye for our guidelines and policies, that cannot be acceptable. Drmies (talk) 04:57, 14 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Well, being the good cop didn't work, and I was planning much the same thing, but as you noted at ANI, those of us with day jobs are somewhat handicapped.
 * To summarize, the article (or conglomeration) was a disjointed set of individual segments, many of which were poorly referenced, or were original research, tangential or synthetic statements.  Encyclopedias aren't publishers of original thought, and while original research and original thought are encouraged in graduate school, an encyclopedia amounts to a summary statement of previously published material, an abridgement of published mainstream thought. Encyclopedias don't publish original research, and they are (or should be) careful to avoid a novel synthesis from separate sources.The article must strive to explain the topic to a lay person, without reference to jargon, academic prose, insider knowledge or excessive detail. It must read as a general-interest exposition, readily accessible to someone with no previous encounter with the topic. What happened here was rather like quilting: each person worked on a separate panel, with no reference to the whole or to the overall welfare of the subject, no framework or outline for development, and no attempt at summary.   Acroterion   (talk)   13:50, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
 * 71 edits later we have this. It has a couple of references (Dewey and Rorty still seem to be favorites in that classroom), but nothing else redeems it. I just left half a dozen notes for the recent editors, and I saw your notes on everyone of those pages. Those editors need to come here and start communicating, or I will ask for protection for this article to prevent this ongoing catastrophe. It's great to have interested editor (though again I am wondering about motives here), but content simply needs to meet our guidelines. How better to explain the difference between argumentative, expository, academic writing than to point at the diff I gave above and a decent Wikipedia article, say, Attachment theory? Drmies (talk) 01:22, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I am disappointed to hear that you find our work to be a "catastrophe". Unfortunately, we were not given the opportunity to make our work more complete before it was erased, but I do think many of the things we wrote were both factual and integral to the understanding of urbanism. We were going through the process of verifying information, adding footnotes and sources and an overall flow to the article. This work was interrupted. We had asked previously for a pardon to continue our work until a certain date and time, and I find it frustrating that we were not given that chance. Although we are still learning, we do know more about urbanism than the average person. We have done a great deal of reading and each spoken to a variety of experts. We were offering a variety of different perspectives and ideas, (not our own but well-rsearched, valid concepts) as requested by the Wikipedia guidelines. I'd also like to suggest that our work has already (even with the deletions) improved upon the urbanism article as it was when we started. All in all, this has been an interesting experiment and I hope that any editors who might be reading this will allow us to continue to work with you to improve upon the article as it remains in an incomplete state right now. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pukekom (talk • contribs) 17:14, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
 * It was pointed out (repeatedly) that a couple of rather important things were not right with the article. I don't want to use the word "flow", but it was like a patchwork with no view of the whole--this may well be inevitable if twenty people are working on the same topic. If twenty people working on the same topic does not seem to produce an acceptable result (in the eyes of those who have some experience on this project), then maybe the initial set-up was not well-conceived. But more importantly, in my opinion, the tone was not encyclopedic from the beginning. As I pointed out above, Wikipedia articles are not like essays, yet I haven't seen a single edit that attempted to improve that tone, nor a single question on this talk page seeking clarification of it. The latter, a lack of talk page discussion, warrants a final comment: Wikipedia is a collaborative project. That does not mean "a lot of people working on an article" since that is what you have apparently done--each their own little piece of it. Rather, it means discussing things on-wiki with the intent to come to consensus on tone, content, system of referencing, et cetera, and given the nature of the project that will have to involve other people, outside of your group. I see no edit summaries, no talk page discussions, nothing, and those are the things that help make good articles into good articles. I pointed to a good article above, and I can point you to others: look at Featured articles, and look at individual articles how much work and how much collaboration goes into it--and look at the FA reviews to see what peer review means here (it means a lot): in the case of Featured article candidates/Polish culture during World War II/archive3, it took three efforts before an article got promoted. All of the issues need to be dealt with collaboratively, and on this very talk page there are more comments by non-group members than by group-members, yet you apparently outnumber "us" 20 to 3. Drmies (talk) 15:06, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

Pragmatism section
After planning to rewrite it, I removed this section as unsalvageable, a mixture of OR and WP:SYNTH. It attributes Bernstein's interpretation of Dewey to Dewey himself, and makes claims not supported by the sources. It cites no one but Bernstein in support of this supposed affinity between pragmatism and urbanism--which, incidentally, is poorly defined--suggesting an over-reliance on a single point of view, in fact a single source. There is no evidence that Bernstein's conscription of James and Dewey is of sufficient importance to the topic of urbanism to merit such a section, or that the view enjoys widespread acceptance. One swallow does not a summer make. ---- Rrburke (talk) 15:35, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

Urbanism of European Dictatorships
https://uedxx.net/about/ Xx236 (talk) 09:46, 16 July 2021 (UTC)