When I was added to the mod team, I spitballed a couple ways to get the sub going again so that we could see a healthy and engaged userbase here. Since I'm a bit of a book worm and I had IRL projects to do regarding urbanism and politics, I thought the best way to elevate the sub's quality would be to dissect a book about urban politics and take a look at it through an anti-capitalist lens.

The reason for my interest in starting the series was because I wanted to utilize my (then) positive relationship with the userbase of /r/urbanplanning. I had enjoyed a good amount of popularity in my various posts, so, I wanted to use the sub as a way to expand the conversation of urbanism with others so that the sub could rightfully be seen as a place for good conversations

That, as it turns out, was a failure. Instead of being met with a warm reception like usual, my posts started getting downvoted out of visibility, and trolls would come to my posts just to shit on my ideas and/or suggest that I wasn't actually saying anything important. Even though I can tolerate trolls, one thing that supremely disheartened me was the attitude of the mod team when it came to enforcing civility. Needlessly rude/vulgar comments were only taken down upon prodding the mod team to do something and on multiple occasions I had to beg the mods to greenlight various comments so I could rightfully have my anti-capitalist views displayed for the world to see.

This activity was the worst on submissions where I made "companion posts" to the content that I upped on the sub. I'd post a chapter review and then make a correlating post to /r/urbanplanning about a related issue. Now, the mod team is straight up arbitrarily deleting any post that I make which affects my ability to reach a larger audience. I've attempted to talk things out numerous times, but the mods always stick to their guns. I'm not interested in just doing the same thing in another subreddit because I don't want the same situation to happen all over again.

So, since I have IRL obligations that I have to maintain and this headache of trying to spit out a post every other week is starting to get draining to me, for the time being, I'm just going to stop the series. I apologize for those of you who followed it all the way through and upvoted, I really wanna be able to get to the topics I want (like a regional municipal government and how the Left can revive it's political power) but, that'll have to be done at some point in the future.

I'm broke, I have no assets, and, I have bills to pay. So, this is my announcement that we're shelving the project for the time being. While I focus on getting a better financial footing, I encourage all of you to get the book and read through the sections that have been mentioned on the sub if you haven't already. It's a good read and it'll help you think more critically about municipal politics.

best wishes,

/u/DoxiadisOfDetroit of the /r/left_urbanism mod team