The past, present, and future state of cities with Kurt Kohlstedt from 99% Invisible

Transcript

Julian Agyeman:

Welcome to the city’s church colloquium, along with our partners shareable on the Kresge Foundation. This is the final of our spring semester. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman, and together with my research assistants, Meghan Tenhoff and Perri Sheinbaum, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross disciplinary academic initiative, recognizing Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. And as our speaker was chosen by the Student Planning and Policy Association. I’m going to hand over to Becky Eidelman to take the proceedings further. Becky…

Becky Eidelman:

Great. Thank you so much for kicking us off, Julian. Welcome everybody and good afternoon or good morning, depending on where you are. I’m Becky and I co-chair the Student Planning and Policy Association with my good friend and co-chair Katy Swan. And we’re very excited to have critical said of the podcast, 99 percent Invisible and Emily Linke, who graduated from UEP (Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning) last year. Two podcasters — initially that it was not our theme necessarily. We were hoping to talk about design in cities, but through serendipitous and happy circumstances, we were able to get to people who think a lot about the way that we perceive cities and the way that we as planners communicate about cities. And I’m excited to hear from them both. With that, I will turn it over to Lily.

Lily Linke:

Hello. I see some familiar faces. My name is Lily Linke. I am a Tuft’s — very recent Tufts UEP (Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning) alum. I technically graduated in February because it took me so long to finish my thesis, whew! But my thesis was a podcast called Footnotes. It’s a five part series exploring the intersection of walkability and race. And my focus before grad school and continuing now is really on, like Becky said, how we communicate the planning and policy process to the general public — sort of become my obsession in the past couple of years. And in my new role I just started a few months ago at the Citizens Housing and Planning Association, I’m the municipal engagement program associate there. So I partner directly with communities to help build support for affordable housing at the local level. And now I will pass it to Kurt since we’re doing self-intros. Kurt…

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Hey Lily, thanks for having me. I share a lot of your passions, including podcasting and communicating about urban design with citizens. My background in a nutshell. I was trained as an architect at the University of Washington, Seattle, and I studied architecture, but I also took a lot of classes in urban design policy, historic preservation, even landscape architecture. So I’m kind of a generalist when it comes to built environments. And then for the last five years, I’ve been working at 99 Percent Invisible, which is a podcast about design. And in the broadest possible sense, it has things on urban design and architecture, but a lot more about design in general, too.

Lily Linke:

Awesome. Shall we dive in?

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Let’s do it.

Lily Linke:

Alright. So you started to touch on this in your self-intro, but could you tell us a little bit more about sort of your background before 99 Percent Invisible and how you got pulled into that world? And maybe tied into that for anyone — I’m guessing people who are here probably know about the podcast — but just in case they don’t, what it is.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

So, I mean, I laughed when you were talking about how long it took to complete your thesis, because that’s where I started, really. It was I was procrastinating my thesis and I launched this website called Web Urbanist. And it’s about urban art, architecture, design. And partly, I mean, I started partly to share this passion that I had for the subject matter with the public. Like I was always telling people stories about what I was learning in school and trying to get people interested. And so I kind of decided maybe what I’m good at isn’t design. Maybe I’m not meant to be an architect. Maybe instead I’m meant to write about these things. And so I launched the site. It became pretty popular. And I did that professionally for seven years before bumping into Roman Mars, who’s the host of 99 Percent Invisible. We got to talking and basically decided to team up. So I joined the show and it’s been an amazing year. I was a fan of his show, he became a fan of my website, we were kind of doing the same thing in different mediums. And it turned out to be like a really good opportunity to work together and talk about sort of similar things. Yeah, and he has this very different background where he kind of comes from a storytelling background. I come from a design background. And when we put that together we tell, hopefully, really good stories about design.

Lily Linke:

Yeah. Tell me more about the mission behind 99 Percent Invisible. When we spoke last, you sort of used the phrase like sneaking in the veggies, sneaking in the design curriculum. So maybe talk a little bit more about that.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Sure. I mean, I think both Roman and myself have our own ways of doing that. So I can nerd out about any design topic of interest. And so I’ll often try to find the most exciting thing that people can relate to, find accessible, that’s sort of visually compelling. So if you put images up, people are like, oh, OK, that’s that’s really different. I get that. And Roman’s vehicle for this is sort of the storytelling vehicle where he can find a really interesting story about the destruction of Penn Station. And then in the background, we’re learning about a big shift in attitudes towards historic preservation. But in the moment, you’re just hearing about these architects kind of protesting the destruction of a building and it’s got all the beats of a good story. But beneath that, you end up learning more about these things.

And the example that always comes to mind of this is like we’ve done stories on modernism, postmodernism, brutalism, like all these styles of architecture. But we never do one that’s like, here’s your introduction to brutalism. It’s like, no, we’ll take the craziest example or the most controversial example and we’ll tell the story of that thing so that you have this level of emotional investment in the thing and you understand it not from just a sort of theoretical or historical point of view, but from the point of view of these characters who have a stake in this particular building or design or what have you.

Lily Linke:

Right. And also, you’re making me think — not to bring up my podcast again, but I interviewed a woman named Karilyn Crockett and who’s just amazing — she’s in episode four. And she talks about history, trying to help people see that history is just a series of individuals making decisions. And I feel like you could apply the same idea to 99 Percent Invisible, helping people realize that cities are just a series of individual decisions.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Absolutely. And another example that comes to mind is like curb cuts. We take for granted these things that allow people to get up and down from street corners. And people of our generation, at least, people who are our age and and younger, that’s all we’ve ever known. But somebody had to make the decision to push for those. And it turns out that the struggle to make those things universal, they’re still not fully universal, bbut to sort of spread the good word of of curb cuts is a very personal story. It’s a really compelling story. And so telling that story helps people be aware of things that have been in front of them all along, but they’ve probably never really thought too much about. You know, that’s just the thing in the built environment. It’s like, no, somebody had to make that design decision and then really go out and promote that thing. And often – I think a lot of our of our listeners, they wouldn’t necessarily describe themselves as having been interested in design before listening to the show. They just come for the stories. But it turns out the stories are about design and that, in turn, shapes how you see the world around you.

Lily Linke:

Right. And making cities personal for people. I mean, I certainly feel like something that my urban planning education has given me, and listening to podcasts like 99 Percent Invisible has given me, is when I walk around either the city where I live, Somerville, or somewhere new, I’m able to connect with things — with these little moments that otherwise might have just totally not even paid attention to.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you sort of ask what the mission of the show is and, I mean, if I had to boil it down into one thing, that would be it. It would be to get people to be aware of their surroundings and to kind of come at their surroundings with a kind of critical perspective and say, OK, I’m not going to just take this for granted. I’m going to inquire about why that thing is the way it is. And there’s always a reason and sometimes it’s a good reason, sometimes it’s a horrible reason. But either way, until we interrogate these things we can’t really begin to evaluate whether or not they’re good or bad for our built environments.

Lily Linke:

And ultimately, I think something that we share is the belief that by then allowing people to be aware of these things and the fact that these are, again, just a series of decisions being made by individuals, is hopefully an empowering realization that if there is something in your city that you don’t like, whether it’s the transportation infrastructure or the housing infrastructure or a lack of public green space or what have you, that you do have the power, of course, not discounting all the ways in which people are disenfranchised and left out of the decision making process, but that these decisions are ultimately made by people.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Yeah. And as you say, I mean, it’s like, we might have unequal amounts of power, but even understanding that is a first step towards changing things for the better, changing power dynamics for the better, which in turn can lead to changing design for the better and cities for the better.

Lily Linke:

Yeah, I guess I’ll transition now. So we’re sort of talking about both the podcast and the book a little bit interchangeably. So last — was it last year?

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Yeah. Yeah.

Lily Linke:

Last year you came out with this book, The 99 Percent Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design, which is a collaboration with Roman Mars, in many ways an extension of the podcast. But tell me about your decision to branch into this new format. What motivated you to write the book?

Kurt Kohlstedt:

I mean, for me, it was a very logical extension. I mean, I’ve always been more of a writer. I’ve done more with text that I have with audio. And so the idea of putting together something that is text-based just kind of made sense. And then there was also just a kind of critical mass of stories and research that we just had gotten to this point where between us, we’ve been doing this for so long. We’ve collected all this material and we have sort of larger ideas about the city. And it was a question of like, well, can we use, again, these smaller stories that make things personal but but connect them and create arcs in such a way that we can make a whole big story out of it.

And to some extent, I mean, it’s called a field guide. Don’t pick it up expecting like an urban birding guide exactly, but partly the idea is that by the end of it you will spot things in your city and you will be able to sort of flip to the page that’s about those things. And it’s a way to teach people what we were talking about earlier, to see the things that they don’t notice in cities and realize — and this is what the last chapter really comes to — lot of it is sort of history and these historical stories and the last chapter, we really talk about how citizens can get involved and that kind of tension between top-down planning and bottom-up activism and the kind of good and bad things that can result out of all of that. But the idea is that by the end of it, hopefully people do feel more empowered to question whether the city is and try out solutions or at least seek out other people who see the same problem so that you can organize and act around that problem.

Lily Linke:

Yeah, so really empowering people to have that knowledge in their hands at the ready. One of my favorite stories from the book is in, I believe it was Oakland, correct me if I’m wrong. The man who put a Buddha on the median to prevent — it was becoming a place where people were dropping a lot of litter and he’d try it all these different ways to get people to stop doing that. And ultimately, he decided to put a Buddha there because he felt like it was sort of less controversial than maybe other religious figures, but would give the space an air of importance that would prevent people from littering. And then this entire shrine popped up around — just like kind of naturally — popped up around it as people in the community came to really love and revere the spot. And it became a place where tourists came by and I think that’s such an amazing story of a guerilla tactic that then was imbued with meaning by the community and then became this important thing that hopefully no one would dare to to take down.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Yeah, I mean, it’s a really remarkable story. And I kind of love the accidental nature of it. Like, he tried this thing and it turned out that there was this very significant local Buddhist community that embraced it and began to build out around it. And it sort of just worked for everybody. Like there was — nobody found it offensive. And, you know, it sort of did the job of displacing the trash that was piling up there. And when I went and visited — the most recent time – I noticed that there was a broom up against the shrine. And it’s clearly — people come by, if there is litter, they clean it up. And so for different parties, it serves different functions, like there are tourists who are just like, oh, that’s a funny Buddha. Sure, whatever. There’s the guy who lives next door who’s just glad that it’s not a trash heap. And then there’s this community that really, really reveres and respects this thing to the point where now, like two blocks down, there’s another little shrine popping up. And so it became the seed of this much bigger thing.

And that story also, I mean, that tells the dynamics of like — it’s like, well, if you do something, what will the city do? And the city did talk about taking it down, but ultimately it was like, well, this seems to be working for people. It doesn’t seem to be harming anyone. So one of the takeaways from that, and in other stories I think in the book is,try things. You never know how something’s going to work until you try it — or how well it’s going to work.

Lily Linke:

Yeah. And then sort of other end of this same idea of citizen intervention, another story in the book takes place just across the bridge from Oakland in San Francisco, where a group of wealthy neighbors, in the hopes of pushing away people experiencing homelessness and general loiterers from their block, spent like, pulled two grand to buy a bunch of giant boulders and just put them on the sidewalk so that people couldn’t stop and rest there.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Yeah, I mean, that’s the dark side, right? If you have people who feel empowered to intervene, they can intervene in ways that aren’t great for a community or don’t have the kind of consensus approval of the community. That was literally the last story we added to the book. And I remember I encountered it as a news story and I was like, oh my, this is just the perfect encapsulation of these tensions, we have to add this to the book. And so it was kind of a very last minute addition. And so basically, yeah, they paid to have these boulders trucked in, put along the sidewalks, they displaced people. People were like, well, where did these even come from? Did they come from the city? The city said, no, that wasn’t us. And so they started rolling the boulders back into the street. And of course, that was its own problem. And so the city kind of caught the middle of all this is like, well, we can’t have the boulders in the street, so let’s lift them back on the sidewalk. And then, of course, the same people who were upset with that again.

And it really highlights the kind of tensions between not just communities and the city, but also within communities about what our priorities? What are our values? And in the end, they remove the boulders. I mean, the kind of consensus community opinion was we don’t want to be displacing people. We don’t need to put obstacles in the way of people hanging out on the street. But there’s also kind of a noncommittal response from the city where they were like, well, we’ll look into what to do here. And so, yeah, it’s definitely not a universal good. And I think one of my takeaways from it is just that while we should feel empowered to make changes in the city, we should also really talk to other people around us before making unilateral decisions, especially big ones like this. I mean, it’s one thing to put up a guerrilla sign and see if it’s helpful. It’s another thing to drop in a ton of rocks, like a literal ton of rocks, which is an imposition on everybody if if that thing doesn’t work out.

Lily Linke:

Yeah. And I think this brings us back to the reality that people have different levels of access to the city and different levels of the ability to put their print on the city and make decisions for the city based off of various dynamics of power and privilege. And I mean, that’s something that was really the focus of of my podcast. And I think the story in my podcast that really summarizes it the best is from about a decade ago, a woman named Dr. Adonia Lugo, who I interviewed, she does transportation advocacy work. She was participating in Parking Day, which is something probably a lot of people here know about. It’s an annual event across the country where on one day people just sort of guerrilla take over parking spots and turn them into little parklets to help us reimagine what public space could be and what that space could be used for.

And so she and a group that she was involved with decided to participate. And this was happening all over L.A., there was a map, people knew that it was happening, but they chose to do theirs in a neighborhood that was predominantly Latinx and people of color because they wanted to bring this to that neighborhood where there weren’t a lot of other events going on. And within minutes of setting up their parklet, the police came in and kicked them out. And she tells the story of after that experience, biking down the street like half a mile over, she sort of crossed the neighborhood line into the white neighborhood where people were doing parking day all over the place, playing music and having a wonderful time and no one was saying anything about it because the people in those spaces were white. And so I think that’s just something that is needs to be constantly in our awareness as we think about guerilla interventions and who has access to doing that.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Yeah, I mean, in the example that always comes to my mind, which is sort of an extension of that, essentially, it’s like, well, Parking Day has been such a hit that cities like San Francisco have started to take it to the next level and say, well, you can make parklets, and the could be year round. But they have to like serve the city and they have to do X, Y and Z. The problem is that some of these end up looking like extensions of the businesses they are next to, in fact, they’re often sponsored by those businesses. Now, legally, anybody can occupy that parklet. But if it’s design language, it’s materials and it’s appearance, make it look like it’s part of the cafe next door, people are generally not going to feel — there’s a subtle message there that, you know, if you’re not buying coffee from this cafe, maybe you’re not welcome. Even if there’s like a little sign that’s mandated by the city that says, well, no, no, everybody is welcome. It starts to become a question of like, do I feel comfortable in this space? And turns out that there are certain demographics that do feel comfortable because they can afford to buy a ten dollar latte and sort of sit there and feel like they’re not breaking any rules. But there are people who will just walk on by because they don’t feel like that’s a place for them. I mean, that’s the sort of insidiousness of it, too, right? Is that even if it’s a known law that you can occupy that space, how other people are occupying that space, how that space is designed, can all contribute to whether or not you feel welcome there or not.

Lily Linke:

Yeah, in practice, where we decide to put ourselves in public space I think has a lot more to do with the people around us and how we feel. True or not, we’re being perceived by them and a lot less to do with what the technical laws are. And I think also that leaking of the private sphere into what really is meant to be a public space is another very sneaky and insidious theme that I see generally when I think about walkability and enriching the public sphere. A lot of times, like the most walkable places in most cities and towns, are commercial districts — they’re shopping districts. And there are so many examples in every city I’ve ever been to where that’s the case. And the message that we’re sending consciously or not, is if you want to be here and sit on this bench and walk around this plaza, like you better have a shopping bag in your hand because that’s what this space is for.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

I grew up in Minneapolis which has the dubious honor of being like the home to the first big suburban shopping mall and the Mall of America. I mean, the weather makes indoor things more appealing here. I remember when I was young and the Mall of America engaged some rule that you couldn’t be in there unaccompanied by an adult if you were under 16 at certain hours. And I remember having this sort of visceral reaction like, wait a second, they can’t do that, because we’re kind of conditioned to think, well, this is like a public space. Right? But it’s like, no, it’s it’s not. It might feel like you can walk around and do whatever you want, whenever you want, but it’s different. And that has a lot of implications. As we have more privatized space like that feels public, that has a lot of implications for who feels comfortable where and who can do what, where. And the kinds of profiling that can go on in those spaces based on whatever essentially this private entity wants to profile about.

Lily Linke:

Yeah. I mean, I grew up in Los Angeles and the big hang out in my teen days was the Third Street Promenade, which is maybe half a mile long that’s closed to cars. It’s an outdoor mall, kind of Main Street Frankenstein. I don’t even know to compare it to because I haven’t really found other stuff like that on the East Coast. And that’s where we would hang out on a Friday night when I was 14 and I didn’t have anything else to do because that was the public space. But it was entirely built around — there really wasn’t anything to do there but go into stores or sit on the benches and like watch the buskers.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Yeah, there’s both a like this larger tendency towards having more privatized space than public space and this blurring of the lines, where it’s like, that trend is only continued where people just are increasingly unsure of are they really in public space? What are they allowed to do in this space? And then sort of bringing it back to parklets, I think about the first example or what’s sort of considered the first example, it’s like, the cops actually drove by and basically asked, what are you doing here? And for whatever reason, I have theories, but for whatever reason, didn’t kick those people out. They were convinced that, oh, no, this is OK. But I think it’s like, what do you look like? What do you appear to be doing? I mean, it becomes very subjective, even in public space, who decides to enforce what based on whatever subjective criteria they may have.

Lily Linke:

Yeah, and I mean, I think all of this sort of bringing us into now and what cities might look like going forward. The pandemic has reshaped public space in so many ways. There’s been a proliferation of outdoor seating, you know, going back to — essentially, it’s in many ways kind of the same idea of the parklet, but, a private entity. Yes, we’re giving up parking spaces towards a more social use. I’m all about that. But for the most part, they are restaurants and stores extending themselves into the street. So it is still an expansion of the private sphere into the public sphere.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Yeah, and like any good urbanist, I’m all for less parking in general. But it’s also, when it happens in this way, this kind of unplanned, uncoordinated, ad hoc way, I least think about what are the secondary effects of this. I would love for them to strip most parking out of most downtowns. But then you have to ask, well, is there good alternative transit options for people who can’t afford to live in the city? Is there good public transportation such that people who don’t live in the immediate area have access to get to these spaces or even get through these spaces? If we turned downtown Oakland into an entirely walkable community, there are people who need to drive to get there for work. There’s people who need to drive through there to get to other places. So all of these things — I kind of love seeing all this pop-up experimentation this past year, but I also very kind of cautious about what the unexpected consequences can be of of these kinds of actions, right? It’s like, it bears analysis before we go too far towards just saying, well, it’s good because there’s less parking, which is true, but it’s sort of one layer of the onion.

Lily Linke:

Yeah. And I think even like the idea that these outcomes, these very racially disparate outcomes are unexpected is a very white-centric idea, because if we have black planners in the room leading the charge, their lived experience will tell them that certain things are going to be experienced in a particular way. And so, yeah, I think oftentimes as white urbanists, as white walkability advocates, white urban planners, et cetera, we’re like, oh, well, I didn’t think about this unintended outcome because it’s like, well, you’re not you’re clearly not talking to the right people. Or maybe you heard it, but you chose to ignore it because you liked your idea and you didn’t want to give it up, even though you knew that the outcome would be racialized.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Yeah, I mean, that gets to — and I know you’ve got a lot of work and thought into this, but I think that gets to this kind of core issue of just like, who gets to have a say, who feels comfortable having a say, who feels welcome to have a say…how do these mechanisms even work? Most people don’t know. Like I have a background in this and even I find it hard to sometimes figure out, so, as a member of the public like, how do I gain access and talk to the right people who are making these decisions? It’s a very daunting world out there. And so getting all of these voices heard is to me like the biggest project of an urbanist, of a planner, of a designer is, how do you get all the people to the table? And how do you talk to communities? And in that sense too — this is why I’m really skeptical of like one size fits all approaches – some places, complete streets or shared streets might work, but not every place. And so this kind of localization and talking to communities to me is like a really big part of figuring out place-specific solutions too.

Lily Linke:

Yeah. And I think something I love about using stories as a tool for educating and organizing and the fact that in 99 Percent Invisible, the podcast and the book, you really do focus down on these individual stories of people in a moment in time making a decision based off of whatever they knew or whatever they were dealing with at the time, and I always really appreciate when we can kind of scale back and think about the city at the scale of one — at the scale of one person’s individual experience.

Because I think ultimately, in terms of how we interact with cities, when we get into this high level urban planning sphere, whether it’s in academia or in practice, it’s easy to forget that when most people step out the door each day, they’re not making their decisions based off of like all this empirical research and and process and bureaucracy and like what things should be — that’s not how people make decisions. They make decisions based off of their lived experience, based off of their immediate needs, based off of the people around them. And so I think when I think about those decisions through the lens of a story, I find it very illuminating. It’s a good reminder to be like, no, but this is let’s think about how people actually experience cities.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Yeah. I mean, I always come back to William H. White. I mean, it’s very dated now, but I just it was really compelling to me when I sort of first saw his work where he basically was just going around New York City looking at how people actually use parks. Instead of speculating and sort of some grand way or using theory to try to analyze the nature of the park. He just was like, well, where do people sit? Do they sit there if there’s sun, or shade? Where do people cross the park? What kinds of parks do people like to sit in? And that kind of empirical research is often lacking from a lot of design disciplines, urban design, architecture.

This idea that we’re going to have, you know, a fully formed idea that springs from the brain of some genius planner or designer is a bit flawed. And I think the most important part of the design process really is that first level of research and analysis and site analysis and talking to people who are passing through the area and trying to figure out how is this actually used and what would actually benefit somebody here? Rather than I have this great idea for a thing. I know people are going to love it. In a way maybe some people see it as tedious or complex. But to me, that’s where it gets really human, right, is when you’re when you’re out in the street and you’re doing that kind of site analysis. And city analysis and like trying to figure out what is the problem we’re trying to solve before putting down a proposed solution.

Lily Linke:

Oh boy, you really just opened up a can of worms —  this is like one of my favorite things to talk about. So I’m going to reek myself in. Looking at the time, I have one more question and then we can open it up to the group. We talked a little bit about covid-19, but I think I would love to hear from you if there are any specific examples you’ve seen in your work of ways that you think the design of cities is going to change based off of this past year plus.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Yeah, I mean, I think some of the things are accelerations of things we’re already seeing. I think parklets and that kind of thing – that’s going to have to be discussed. Like how much of that change has been good long term versus good is just an ad hoc measure when we need the social distance. And again, I recommend taking a very careful approach towards that, not just saying, well, it’s necessarily good because it means less parking and more public space. Well, is it truly public? Who is it less parking for? I mean, I think I’m optimistic about it and I like that trajectory. But I also want to make sure that we’re being really careful about who’s benefitting from that. And the other thing that — this is like a side obsession that I’m just really curious to see how it pans out — I think this work from home thing is an acceleration of a trend that existed. And I think that we will see some bounce back as people want to go back to offices — and offices need to have people back for various reasons.

But at the moment at least, we have this really strange phenomenon where housing, which was already expensive going into this, is even more expensive now. And business real estate — these big companies are vacating these entire floors of these downtown buildings. And I’m a big fan of “How Buildings Learn,” by Stewart Brand. It’s kind of a classic and one of his main points is that, a building when it’s built, that’s just a fraction of what it will become. It’s going to change over time. It’s going to change uses, it’s going to get redesigned, it’s going to get remodeled. So this idea of the building was like this permanent object is a very limited way of viewing it.

And I’m really curious to see what kind of adaptive reuse we will or won’t get out of this process. And maybe there’s a huge opportunity to turn some of this commercial real estate into residential real estate, bring down housing prices, which is good for everybody, bring more people back into cities, which is good for walkability. And I mean, maybe I’m pipe dreaming here. I like speculative fiction, but I like to think about what could happen. And so I’m not predicting that this will happen, but to anybody out there who’s in a position to to think about this or analyze that, if I was working in the field, that’s what I would be really curious about and trying to see if there are ways to make that work. Because we have this confluence of problems, but maybe there’s a way to fit them together to make it actually be a solution.

Lily Linke:

Yeah, I mean, I love the idea of reusing office buildings for housing. Especially in a city like Boston where it’s so anchored around downtown Boston and it’s so heavily commercial in like a very certain urban core. And I think a redistribution and almost a decentralization of cities that are so downtown focused could be very interesting.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Yeah, I mean, I look  at cities like San Francisco and Oakland. It’s like there are people who are commuting an hour and a half to two hours every day to get into their jobs. And it’s like, to some extent — I’m not trying to promote sprawl, but sometimes that we need more centers so that not everybody has to make that journey. For economic reasons, for environmental reasons. It will be very interesting to see if any of this really changes or if these sort of uneven dynamics out there remain. But that’s one thing I hope maybe will be a good outcome eventually. But we’ll see.

Lily Linke:

Well, that’s my alarm to remind it’s time to open up to questions from the group. Becky, do you want me to take the questions or…

Becky Eidelman:

I’m happy to raise them if that just makes your lives easier?

Lily Linke:

I see one from the colloquium watch party that I’m interested to dig into. Should we start there?

Becky Eidelman:

Yeah. So the colloquium watch part asks, what does the growth in the Amazon culture mean for city’s design and walkability? Hdave the possibilities changed with the pandemic and remote shopping patterns.

Lily Linke:

We actually kind of talked about this the other day.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Yeah, we did a bit. It’s funny I mean, whenever I think of Amazon, the first thing I think of is Seattle, where I lived for a long time. And about the not all positive effect that Seattle’s headquarters have had there. I know that’s sort of not the nature of the question, but that’s just kind of where my mind goes is to like the central district of Seattle. I mean, yeah, we were just we were just talking about this. Turns out Lily has done some, to me, fascinating research about how we move goods within cities and how maybe those systems aren’t as efficient. Do you want to answer this one Lily? I’m really curious. I like this stuff. I’m a nerd.

Lily Linke:

So the summer between, at UEP, we do a fellowship-internship. And so I did mine with the Boston New Urban Mechanics in the mayor’s office. And my summer project was looking at urban freight and specifically the outsized impact that urban freight has on walkability and biking safety. Because while vehicles over ten thousand pounds represent like three percent of vehicles on the road, they represent something like 12 percent of fatalities. And that’s averaged across the whole country. When you get into really dense places like New York City, I’m going to have to fact check myself on this, but I believe it’s in the like thirty plus percent in New York City of fatalities are caused by large vehicles rather than your typical passenger vehicle.

And so it poses a huge challenge because, yes, especially these days with more and more remote shopping, I mean, everywhere you go, you see these massive — whether it’s an Amazon truck or anything, our entire tracking system is deeply, deeply flawed and not geared towards the urban environment. Especially in cities like Boston, where we have all these narrow little streets that twist and turn and we have these massive vehicles trying to fit down them. It just causes an indescribable amount of danger and other problems.

So to turn to solutions. One thing that I came across in my research is in London, Transport For London has developed the CLOCS system, which stands for like Construction Logistics and Community Safety. And there’s many components to it from driver training and having drivers use augmented reality, to put them in different driving scenarios and let them practice. So they’re hitting many different points. And drivers have to get recertified every couple of years and there’s are whole new standards. But a big part of it — and I think something that is going to be critical for the future of cities and walkability is, again, a redistribution and sort of decentralization of how we do trucking in this country, particularly when it comes to urban environments. So a big key piece of that is rather than having one massive distribution center outside a city and having these huge 18,000 plus trucks going through urban cores, having many smaller distribution centers. And so you could have, whether it’s a van, or you can have carpool bikes — you can have people using sort of micro mobility, last mile options for deliveries.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

One of the things I really like about this, too, is that, again, it dovetails with something we’re seeing accelerating since covid. It’s like, they’re have been more people shopping from home. And already there’s been this movement to change stores that used to be like walk-in stores designed for customers to be basically like these micro distribution centers in cities. And so I feel like as good an idea as that was a year ago, it’s even more relevant now because our habits have changed. But also because there’s already movement to take these smaller stores and say, well, we could treat this like an urban distribution center. It’s not a big leap. We’re already doing it, right? We already have these shoppers going around buying things, putting them into carts, bringing people out there. This seems to me like a next logical step.

Lily Linke:

Yeah. And I think it sort of fits into what I see is very much the trend of urban planning over the past one hundred and fifty years has been from segmentation — cutting everything up, and like, OK, we put the white people over here, we put the black people over here, we put the industrial stuff over here, everything’s separated. And now I think urban planning has become much more of a process of, how do we bring these things back?

And I think covid, in the same way that covid has sort of — I’m in the process of moving to a new house, and as we’re thinking about how we want to set up our house, I sort of realized, what are rooms anymore? What’s the dining room, what’s a living room? It’s all become — we work out in the living room and I do my work at the dining room table. Even the lines of our own homes are becoming more and more blurry. And so I think I would love to see a future in which we take that same idea into cities. Can a store be more than a store? You know, my local reliable market, which is my favorite place in the world, they have an amazing selection of Asian food and really good beer — they’re are also a UPS drop off. And just things like that where it’s like, I can take care of many of my tasks. I could walk there and take care of multiple things in one go. I would love to see more multi-use like that.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Yeah, absolutely. So I just saw a question in the chat, which is, well, I’m curious to see what you have to say about this too, but somebody asks: podcasting is an auditory medium, but we’re talking about design. And I think it’s a fascinating question. And I what I like about talking about design without having pictures is that it really forces you to get to the meat of the thing that you’re talking about. There’s two ways to basically talk about design in a podcast. One is to go overboard and really describe the thing in great detail. And one is to take the one or two key details that are relevant to what you’re talking about with respect to that design.

The example that comes to mind is the kidney bean shaped pool. I think just from saying that you probably know what I’m talking about. Or I could describe it as being shaped a little like a boomerang. We did a whole story on this, but that was really all the language you needed to get an idea of what this design object was like. And the rest, it’s like, you fill in with your imagination. It’s like, you know, skateboarders skate through these things and you think like mid century California and the rest of it. You can focus more on painting a picture with words than with images can actually become a distraction because you get focused on the details of the image rather than the one or two relevant things about that design. I’m curious Lily, you too produced about just about sort of visual, interactive things, cities, big things. How did you think about that?

Lily Linke:

Yeah, going back to what we talked about earlier and the focus on stories and the experience of the individual. I mean, I really ultimately, like I said, it took me forever, took me twice as long to do as I had budgeted. But what I really ultimately honed in on is a set of individuals and telling their stories and how they experience the city. And so, I mean, I think also ultimately, it depends on your goal. I mean, if your goal is to get people to understand the technical aspects of like a raised crosswalk or, you know, understand how different traffic light patterns — if you want people to get into the nitty gritty of like, what does the grade have to be on a curb cut? Maybe a podcast isn’t the best medium. Maybe you didn’t just need an info graphic. But I think my goal was really to help people kind of put themselves in the shoes of like, what is the experience for these people of being in an urban environment and walking?

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Yeah, and that’s how I feel about 99 Percent Invisible too. It’s like, yeah, it depends on what your focus is. I’m not going to teach you the technical ins and outs of this or the stylistic characteristics of Brutalist that, I’m here to tell you a story. And and if you want to get more into it later, you can always Google around. There’s Google for that. If you want just the facts, there’s Google and Google image search. But if you want the stories, which are more personal and I think in a lot of cases more compelling, audio is a really great medium for that.

Lily Linke:

Yeah. I see another question in the chat from Elizabeth Hammond, what are some of the ways we can encourage/retain walkability in our communities, especially as you get out of urban centers?

Kurt Kohlstedt:

I mean, that’s such a – I feel like ever since New Urbanism became a thing, this has been the biggest tension. I don’t know the answer. I’ll say that up front. I do not know the answer. I’ve seen good examples, but very few of them in America. I’ve seen very few places in America solve this well. And so I don’t know. And I’ve seen great examples of it solved horribly — I’m thinking of you, Bellevue, Washington. But it’s just a hard question. I think it’s it’s very contextual. They just added, “no one has great answers.” I mean, I think that that’s the thing. And I don’t either. I’m one of everyone, I’m sorry. What do you think Lily?

Lily Linke:

Well, I think a lot of things. For one, I saw a tweet the other day that I was like, yeah, that wa,s basically I’m going to paraphrase it, that in the transportation advocacy world, we talk a lot about car free and getting people to go car less. And that that is probably too radical of a goal for most Americans, especially right now. And so to really kind of think more realistically, an attainable goal, that would still have a huge impact on the environment and on cities is just to get people to go down to one car per household.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Yeah, it’s really doable. People do not realize how doable that is. I mean, it depends, right? Sometimes you’ve got jobs in opposite directions and there’s no public transport. But I swear, most families could do with one car and it would be a huge step in the right direction. No walkability pun intended.

Lily Linke:

That could be the title — I love puns, so that can be the title of my next podcast. Yeah, and I mean, I think — and this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about, like how to to kind of package and sell to people because it’s not appealing. But the truth is, I think that we need to sacrifice what we think we have the right to be able to do. I mean, that wasn’t very well said, but essentially, so my partner and I went from being a two car household to a one car household, and that was something that, I recognize that we live in Somervill, everyday activities are very walkable and we weren’t using our cars. But,once we made that decision, there was a limiting factor. When I was applying for jobs in the fall after grad school, I was only applying to places I knew I could get by public transport or walking or biking. And so that was a choice I made. There were plenty of jobs I saw — city planning jobs out in neighboring suburbs — that I didn’t apply for because I was committed to not having a car commute for work.

So I recognize that that’s not a choice everyone’s going to make and is a privilege that I have that I could be picky in that way. But I think something that covid has given me, that I hope we can find a way to expand this, is stepping outside of the capitalistic grind that just expects you to squeeze the maximum efficiency out of every single possible day and accept the idea that maybe taking a little bit longer to get somewhere is OK and that there are other benefits to be gained from it. I mean, also, in my experience, driving, you know, at least on the bus you can read a book. But as you can tell, I’m still really finding the words for this. But I think we need to have a conversation about like, generally if we want to hit our climate goals, we all need to scale our lives back. We need to consume less and travel less. And I don’t know how we’re going to get people to do that, but we need some sort of serious national campaign of getting people to recognize that the lives we’re used to living are not sustainable.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Yeah, I mean, the best examples I can think of in the U.S. Are places like Chicago where I’ve spent some time, my brother lived there for a long time. And, especially for a U.S. city, but even in general, it has a really good public transit system. The buses are pretty good, trains are great. And thinking about this question of like walkable neighborhoods outside of cities, well, technically they’re not all outside of the city, right? But if you think about it, it takes a long time to get between neighborhoods in Chicago by car. And the fact that you can get there faster by train and not have to worry about parking a car if you go by train…I’m thinking about like little places, you know, it’s like, around these stops have grown up these little kind of town centers. And so as cliche as it is, it’s like to me the most obvious answer is alternative transit. Having ways to get to these places that aren’t cars. And then you can get there and you can walk around and enjoy a hot dog, go to the indie record store, floats your boat. And the places where I’ve seen that best materialize, in this country at least, has been around public transportation stops. Especially train stops, because people love trains. What can I say?

Lily Linke:

And I think I’ll say one more thing, a little stop, which is just that I want to point to — Ali and Jessica shared something in the chat. I’m guessing this came from Ali, about building infrastructure, pedestrian infrastructure between residential areas and grocery stores. So I think that’s a great — thinking about, it’s unreasonable to expect everyone en masse to just give up their cars and give up driving forever. But can we make people’s day to day basic tasks of life accessible without a car? Because we know that in the state of Massachusetts, a quarter of driving trips are under half a mile. And, for an able-bodied person, that is a walkable distance. So, I think that’s where we really need to focus, is getting rid of all those millions and billions of short trips that people take every day.

Kurt Kohlstedt:

Yeah, I mean, I won’t go too far down this path, but, food deserts are just a thing that I’m obsessed with. I’m obsessed with the problem, I’m obsessed with various proposed solutions. But, yeah, just making it so that everybody has access to the basic things of life, like food within walking distance. I mean, it’s it’s not a simple project to solve, but solving that would dramatically reduce our reliance on cars. Anyway, I could do a whole podcast on that, but I’ll stop there.

Lily Linke:

Maybe we’ll do something on that. All right Becky, you better start talking or we’re not going to shut up.

Becky Eidelman:

No, No. And I and I hate to interrupt because it is such an amazing, fascinating topic and conversation. But that does provide me with some good transition fodder, which is, we will have a new colloquium series, format TBD, next year. And so topics like these about walkability, about food deserts, about the number of vehicles per household are all excellent central topics. If people have ideas, you can always contact Julian. And if you want to get involved with organizations like the Student Planning and Policy Association, we had the honor this year of organizing two different sessions, one in the fall that was on housing access and this one today. So that is a great opportunity to help drive conversations that are interesting to you. And I will turn it back over to Julian for last words. Thank you, everybody.

Julian Agyeman:

Thanks, Becky. Thanks, Kurt. Thanks, Lily, for a fantastic interactive presentation that was so good. And as Becky said, Perri and I will be running the Cities@Tufts colloquium next year. And we’re looking for ideas, we’ll use some of our ideas, but feed in any possible topics that you want covered and just let either Perri or I know. Thanks for coming and we’ll see you in the fall. Thank you.