This Kind Of Smart, Walkable, Mixed-use Urbanism Is Illegal To Build In Most American Cities

About

This Kind Of Smart, Walkable, Mixed-use Urbanism Is Illegal To Build In Most American Cities is a catchphrase and copypasta that refers to American infrastructure and urban planning, labeling it as unintelligent, non-walkable and inefficient compared to some foreign counterparts. It started with a tweet in mid-2022 that captioned an image macro of a street from Bob's Burgers. From there, multiple Twitter users captioned their own image macros parodying it.

Origin

On June 11th, 2022, Twitter^[1] user yhdistyminen (private) posted a tweet that captioned a screenshot of the city street from Bob's Burgers with, "This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities," earning roughly 39,800 likes over the course of three days (shown below).

Spread

The tweet inspired confusion and questioning regarding the statement, mostly from users wondering what yhdistyminen meant by "illegal to build in most American cities." On June 11th, 2022, Twitter^[2] user YaBoiShagNasty reiterated the idea in a reply that stated, "everyone loves old neighborhoods with shops that come right up to the sidewalk and have a few floors of apartments above them but they're also illegal to build almost everywhere," receiving roughly 2,600 likes in 10 days. When questioned further, Twitter^[3] user YaBoiShagNasty posted another reply stating, "the zoning of most of the area of almost every american city bans at least one attribute of those building," earning over 500 likes in 10 days (thread shown below).

Twitter users started to repurpose yhdistyminen's phrase in the replies to their tweet. For instance, on June 11th, 2022, Twitter^[4] user wophugus posted a reply that replaced the word "American" with "Earthian," in reference to Futurama, earning over 45 likes in 10 days (shown below, left). On June 13th, Twitter^[5] user RexKwonDo92 captioned a photo from the movie Howl's Moving Castle, earning over 370 likes in eight days (shown below, right).

On June 14th, 2022, yhdistyminen's tweet was screenshotted and reposted to Facebook ^[6] by the page Computer: E n d C a p i t a l i s m, where it received roughly 1,300 reactions and 1,200 shares over the course of seven days. On June 15th, Twitter^[7] user SoBendito captioned a cartoon diagram of Osama Bin Laden's "Moutain Fortress" with the phrase, earning roughly 19,100 likes in six days (shown below).

Multiple iterations with different images surfaced on social media going into the remainder of June 2022 with each referencing different fandoms, subcultures and memes.

Various Examples

Search Interest

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External References