This is the video I wish I could have seen 20 years ago, it would have saved me a lot of time figuring out where I wanted to live. Which is here, in the Netherlands. I like cities. There are places where people get together and do interesting things. But you gotta admit, some cities are better than others, and not all cities are great. Why is that? I grew up in a typical, car-dependent, car-infested city called London. No, London, Ontario, Canada. Like most people in small cities, I gravitated to the nearest big city, which in my case was Toronto. It was pretty clear to me that this was a much more interesting place than where I grew up, and so I wanted to move there as soon as possible. I assumed that the reason Toronto seemed so great to me was because of the populations, so I get moving around to bigger and bigger cities to find the one that was right for me. San Francisco. London, Hong Kong, Taipei, and several others. And I did like these places, so it seemed like population was important. And it certainly explains why I like living in London, England. But hate is London, Ontario. But there was something missing, because even within a city, not all places were equal. I wanted to know, why did I like downtown? And yet, I hated the suburbs. My initial assumption was population density. I mean, the more people you have in a small area, the more interesting stuff can happen, right? But that didn't really seem to explain it all either, because not all dense places were interesting. And this is when I stumbled across my first bit of real urban planning, the concept of walkability. Now, this describes how easy it is to walk in an area and how easy it is to sort of go about your daily routine only by walking. A comparison between where I lived in both London's made this pretty clear. Walkability was an important metric of what made a place interesting to me. Of course, when you delve a little deeper into the concept of walkability, it becomes very clear than until about a hundred years ago, just about every city was walkable, because well, how the hell else are you going to get around? Oh yeah, delicious. So the most walkable places were very often sort of old places, or the old part of the city. But it's still assumed that you're going to need to have that population in order to make a place interesting, walkable or not. The place that shattered that assumption for me was Harlem in the Netherlands. So here was a city with a population of under 200,000 people, and yet it was full of life. There were people out there enjoying themselves, there out in cafes and restaurants, busy outdoor patios, you know, there were cool micro breweries, great public transit, and all these interesting things to see and do. And after a little bit of exploring, I found out that Harlem was not the only interesting small city in the Netherlands. There were actually several others like Utrecht and Chroningen, Neimeichen and, you know, similar cities that are impossible for English speakers to properly pronounce. So what was it that made these places so interesting while London Ontario made me want to escape as soon as possible? Well, ultimately, I suppose that's what this YouTube channel is about. Why are Dutch cities so great to live in? What makes them so much more enjoyable to be in than cities in many other countries? And what can we learn from these places? So I'm going to explore these questions in some greater detail in some future videos, because I found there's actually a lot of good reasons why Dutch cities are so great. And it's not just bikes.