Urbasexual: a young urbanist who espouses the trendiest, sexiest, and most bandwagon-jumping-onest aspects of contemporary urbanism, while being ignorant of the more mundane aspects of planning practice, human geography, and urban history as a whole.
Some defining traits:
* They focus heavily on on transportation - specifically walking, cycling, urban rail, and services that reduce the footprint of car ownership (Uber, car sharing, etc). They're also obsessed with the idea of car-free cities. They hate, hate,
hate cars with the fiery rage of a thousand suns.
* They embrace buzzword urbanism - tactical urbanism, lean urbanism, popup urbanism, situational urbanism, and so on. They might think landscape urbanism is a great idea, too, until you tell them it's really just a rehashing of 1970s-style pod-path-and-park urban design.
* The "urbasexual view of the world" features only select "hip" cities - New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Austin, Vancouver, and Toronto. Detroit is their token Rust Belt idol.
* Their ideal rural-to-urban transect conveniently skips T3 and T4. They
despise North American suburbs. In the Rust Belt, it also includes municipalities outside of a core city, even those with dense urban scale neighborhoods. Lower density development from before WWII, and suburban "gayborhoods" (Lakewood OH, Ferndale MI, West Hollywood CA), get a pass.
* If an idea has its origins in Germany, the Netherlands, or Scandinavia, it has to be good.
* They oppose gentrification -- if it impacts traditional minority communities. For Little Italy, Little Tokyo, Little Warsaw, and enclaves of Orthodox Jews, on the other hand, bring on the Starbucks!
* They're extreme local first followers. They hate larger businesses and chains (except Whole Foods, Buffalo Exchange, American Apparel, Shake Shack, IKEA, Wegmans ...), and love food trucks and farmers' markets.
* They seem to believe a kind of folk history about how contemporary suburbia came to be. Before WWII, there were no suburbs as we know them, and urban neighborhoods were mostly mixed use utopias like the Greenwich Village described by Jane Jacobs. After WWII -- cars, freeways, National City Lines conspiracy, white flight driven by racism, and federal subsidies of sprawl, end of story. Nuance, backstory, and local conditions are downplayed. The built environment as a whole going on 15+ years of deferred maintenance, post-WWII housing shortages, rising incomes, shrinking household sizes, built-out central cities, millions of speculatively platted suburban lots sitting vacant since the 1920s, Northern Cities migration and the resulting housing crunch, busification starting years before NCL, and the late-19th century origins of contemporary suburbia -- well, you're just an apologist for the suburbs.