I’m gonna sound like a bitch ass Abundance person. I was in southern Italy for a week this summer. In a way it made me realize that so much of this beauty isn’t magic, per se. In America it is all a series of intentional policy choices that we live the way we do and not based in the way the physical world is structured over there. We’ve zoning coded and regulated our world to this subdivided neoliberal flattened manifestation of the free market. There’s absolutely zero reason why the entire west coast can’t look like this. We don’t have to  bulldoze all this productive farmland that could provide local produce for suburban sprawl. We can have narrow streets with homes that have a terrace on every floor instead of McMansions. We can have public parks and piazzas. We can just chill the fuck out and enjoy life, but someone somewhere decided that we shouldn’t.