Speaker 1: Most of us. We walk around and we imagine that
Speaker 1: the physical environment that we're in has sort of always
Speaker 1: been here. It's just sort of an a Priori kind
Speaker 1: of idea. Suburbs are super new. Really, suburbs didn't come
Speaker 1: into fruition until after World War Two, and they were
Speaker 1: built very much by design Federal Highway Act, Mortgage Intratroduction
Speaker 1: GI Bill, and then all sorts of other things that
Speaker 1: racialized them, like redlining. I mean, I am not saying
Speaker 1: all suburbs are racist, and we please stipulate that. All
Speaker 1: I'm saying is that the origins of the suburban story
Speaker 1: were very much about a certain white middle class that
Speaker 1: government was designing for and our economic system was designing for.
Speaker 1: In fact, I think a lot of the anger the
Speaker 1: again in Maga is about the fact that government. It
Speaker 1: wasn't that people weren't on government welfare. They were, It's
Speaker 1: just that that welfare served a certain group of people,
Speaker 1: and there is a desire to go back to that hell.
Speaker 2: Everybody, welcome to this anthe life as always with your
Speaker 2: host Edam Gambo. Really excited to be here with you today,
Speaker 2: and we're diving into a topic that I think is
Speaker 2: both super important and really really interesting for how we
Speaker 2: might think about what we can do with the future.
Speaker 2: And this is of course around like the lived and
Speaker 2: built environment and basically how the spaces that we build
Speaker 2: will shape what kind of society that we can be
Speaker 2: here or it could be right. And so I'm really
Speaker 2: thrilled to be joined today by Vishon Chakrabarti, who's the
Speaker 2: founder of the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism or Powell.
Speaker 3: As well as the author of a really awesome new.
Speaker 2: Book call The Architecture of Robanity, Designing for Culture and
Speaker 2: Nature and Joy. And it's interesting because, like a lot
Speaker 2: of the conversations that we see happening online and around
Speaker 2: folks like about cities like get stuck between these two
Speaker 2: technical areas. One is kind of on the idea of
Speaker 2: like do we have the right metrics and the right
Speaker 2: kind of carbon capture things that we're thinking about and
Speaker 2: other things about that cities are either just like wastelands
Speaker 2: or like the problem for climate change because there's so
Speaker 2: many people, there's a lot of pollution, all these elements
Speaker 2: kind of coming together, but you approach this problem differently.
Speaker 2: And I think that it's important right that we can
Speaker 2: actually think about design in a thoughtful way that can
Speaker 2: kind of help usall some of these biggest challenges that
Speaker 2: we have coming, you know, from things like social isolation,
Speaker 2: climate change to I think importantly helping create more joyful
Speaker 2: in connected communities. So as an apologist that I like
Speaker 2: this idea and this approach.
Speaker 3: So let's let's kind of talk about that.
Speaker 2: Like, the one of the things that really caught my
Speaker 2: attention early on in your work is this idea of
Speaker 2: like cities as an area that we can create positive
Speaker 2: social friction. And I love this idea because oftentimes we
Speaker 2: think about that friction feels like a bad word or
Speaker 2: something that we don't want. But then you know, on
Speaker 2: the other side, I'm like a frictionless experience might be
Speaker 2: a little bit too slippery, and we might think about
Speaker 2: that in terms of Amazon's you know cart from product
Speaker 2: to buying is a little bit too frictionless that I
Speaker 2: end to buy too many things sometimes. So somewhere in
Speaker 2: between ite and the right kind of friction, especially social,
Speaker 2: seems important. So what is this this kind of concept.
Speaker 2: I think it's a really important kind of anchoring piece
Speaker 2: for us to think about. What is it that cities
Speaker 2: can do for us in this kind of space of
Speaker 2: creating this positive social friction.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, thanks for having me out, and it's great
Speaker 1: to be here. So the book is about, you know,
Speaker 1: what design and the built environment have to do with
Speaker 1: I think the pressing challenges of our time, and to me,
Speaker 1: the ones that are the most pressing are climate change
Speaker 1: and social and political division. Obviously, we just came out
Speaker 1: of a very very tough election, very divided country, and
Speaker 1: so this idea of social frictions I think really timely
Speaker 1: and poignant to talk about, because you know, a frictionless
Speaker 1: world is sort of one where everyone agrees with you, right,
Speaker 1: And so a lot of social media algorithms are out
Speaker 1: there putting us in our silos with other people who
Speaker 1: agree with us, and so we experienced sort of less
Speaker 1: and less friction until like the algorithm decides to like
Speaker 1: tit one of us against the other in some like
Speaker 1: anger filled you know, social media rage. And so I
Speaker 1: think collective physical environments. And I'm going to use that
Speaker 1: kind of wonky terms with the cities because the book
Speaker 1: is really trying to define urbanity very expansively, not just
Speaker 1: as big cities, but even small villages, even rural main streets. Right,
Speaker 1: that what the space of collective environments do is they
Speaker 1: bring us together face to face, and we then have
Speaker 1: to you know, confront people who look different than us,
Speaker 1: pray differently differently than us, vote differently than us, and
Speaker 1: you know, to me, the distinction between community and urbanity
Speaker 1: is community is often the way with people who are
Speaker 1: very like minded find common cause together, and there's nothing
Speaker 1: wrong with that. But urbanity is this idea of being
Speaker 1: confronted and ultimately celebrating difference. Right that if you see
Speaker 1: a person in a borca, maybe they are way less
Speaker 1: scary in person than they are as like this kind
Speaker 1: of thing to be feared online. Right. And similarly, so
Speaker 1: like a lot of our work as a firm is
Speaker 1: in the industrial Midwest, and it's literally like a lot
Speaker 1: of the cities where the red pixels and the blue
Speaker 1: pixels meet, and we create a lot of public space
Speaker 1: in those cities. So I've seen people who are clearly
Speaker 1: you know, in one political camp and clearly in another
Speaker 1: political camp, and like I've actually helped create space where
Speaker 1: they're dancing together. And like that to me is really
Speaker 1: really important in the times we live in and coming
Speaker 1: out of the aftermath of this election, and so you know,
Speaker 1: I was really glad to get this invitation because you know,
Speaker 1: I don't think the fields outside of design take anthropology
Speaker 1: think that much about correct me if I'm wrong, think
Speaker 1: that much about design and the built environment is something
Speaker 1: that's really influential on how people behave. But I think
Speaker 1: that there is a strong case to be made that
Speaker 1: in a world of social media and a world of AI,
Speaker 1: and a world where technology and algorithms are actively sort
Speaker 1: of messing with our heads and doing things with our
Speaker 1: sense of solidarity as a people, that the built environment
Speaker 1: can kind of do the opposite. The built environment can
Speaker 1: provide a kind of societal glue in terms of again,
Speaker 1: like you know, we need to rebuild rural main streets
Speaker 1: in this country. Rural main streets have been decimated, and
Speaker 1: that's something we can talk about. But even in our
Speaker 1: big cities, we need better and more public space that
Speaker 1: feels safe and places where we can really celebrate difference
Speaker 1: and that that celebration, in turn is an act of joy.
Speaker 1: And I think it's really important to lean into that
Speaker 1: because I think you're right, a lot of the literature
Speaker 1: around cities is either kind of technocratic or completely misses
Speaker 1: the environmental argument by saying, well, they're heat islands and
Speaker 1: there are lots of people and they're polluted. No, no, no cities,
Speaker 1: When people especially like live in apartments and use mass transit,
Speaker 1: we have a way lower carbon footprint per person. They're
Speaker 1: actually very environmental friendly. Even a small village where people
Speaker 1: can just walk around more as opposed to getting in
Speaker 1: a car to get a quarter of milk has substantial
Speaker 1: environmental benefits. And so there's a lot we could talk
Speaker 1: about here about what the environment can do. And I
Speaker 1: just find that most policymakers academics don't really pay attention
Speaker 1: to this aspect of society at all. Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, it's a good point, and I think you're right
Speaker 2: that there's kind of a it's just like a there
Speaker 2: right that literally it's the place in this right where
Speaker 2: we are, but we don't often kind of reflect on
Speaker 2: that in terms of how is our activities behavior shaped
Speaker 2: by like how are we in certain spaces?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: And it's funny because like a lot of folks might
Speaker 2: also approach this from the perspective of like, okay, if
Speaker 2: I'm beginning to think about built the environment in space,
Speaker 2: like both I can I think about, like how am
Speaker 2: I about to walk around a sidewalk.
Speaker 3: Some people might come at it from the like Jane Jacobs, you.
Speaker 2: Know, neighborhood's eyes on the street kind of perspective of
Speaker 2: like how can we all be in a neighborhood space together.
Speaker 3: And build that.
Speaker 2: Others might come from it from a kind of I
Speaker 2: guess the consumer oriented lens worth thinking about like Howard
Speaker 2: Schultz from the former CEO of Starbucks idea of like
Speaker 2: third space in terms of like what can a coffee
Speaker 2: shop it be? That's not work, that's not home. But
Speaker 2: you know, I kind of think also the important way
Speaker 2: of how you're approaching this too is that we're we're
Speaker 2: kind of missing things before just going from these these
Speaker 2: two angles only, and that I love this idea that
Speaker 2: urbanity doesn't have to be in a city, right, that
Speaker 2: like it's it is about like when we think about
Speaker 2: productive frictions too. It is like I think you talk
Speaker 2: about that it can be in like rural villages, right,
Speaker 2: it can be in these other much smaller spaces. And
Speaker 2: so that's something that it's important for us to take seriously.
Speaker 2: And what I appreciate that your work does too, is
Speaker 2: that you approach this kind of like an anthropologist, right,
Speaker 2: you are saying, how do we bring all these disparate
Speaker 2: perspectives and viewpoints of how we approach solving a problem together,
Speaker 2: because we can't solve them as silos. That's actually part
Speaker 2: of the that's actually part of the problem, right, we
Speaker 2: keep siloing our thinking into into one arena. And so
Speaker 2: in this case, like the question of housing, I think
Speaker 2: is such an important piece ford of like how we
Speaker 2: are able to live together?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: And you know it might be either the masaceust in
Speaker 2: me or the I don't know, the social scientists, but.
Speaker 3: I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Also how you walk us through in architection of rumanity
Speaker 2: to think about like a lot of how did we
Speaker 2: get to some of these challenge points right in terms
Speaker 2: of like auto focused car culture, the rise of suburbs, right,
Speaker 2: and like you know, in a lot of practices that
Speaker 2: were like redlining in terms of like doing racial segregation
Speaker 2: intentionally in cities to split out split out groups. And
Speaker 2: so I'm curious, like as you think about like some
Speaker 2: of these historical trends now for folks that haven't checked
Speaker 2: out the book yet, like walk us through I guess
Speaker 2: to some of these, like how we how we have
Speaker 2: like gotten ourselves to this point of challenge in terms
Speaker 2: of like how we've been setting up cities since the
Speaker 2: fifties really, I mean obviously before that too, Yeah, like
Speaker 2: what took place here?
Speaker 1: And so at the first half of the book is
Speaker 1: really about how we got here. And I think the
Speaker 1: important thing to understand is for your listeners especially, you
Speaker 1: said something that's really critical, which is most of us
Speaker 1: we walk around and we imagine that the physical environment
Speaker 1: that we're in has sort of always been here. It's
Speaker 1: just sort of an a Priori kind of idea. Right.
Speaker 1: Suburbs are super new. Really, suburbs didn't come into fruition
Speaker 1: until after World War Two, and they were built very
Speaker 1: much by design, Federal Highway Act, Mortgage introtroduction GI Bill,
Speaker 1: and then all sorts of other things that racialized them,
Speaker 1: like redlining. I mean, and people sometimes get the wrong
Speaker 1: hear the wrong thing when I say that, I am
Speaker 1: not saying all suburbs are racists, and we please stipulate
Speaker 1: that all I'm saying is that the origins of the
Speaker 1: suburban story were very much about a certain white middle
Speaker 1: class that government was designing for, and our economic system
Speaker 1: was designing for. In fact, I think a lot of
Speaker 1: the anger the again in MAGA is about the fact
Speaker 1: that government. It wasn't that people weren't on government welfare
Speaker 1: they heer is just that that welfare served a certain
Speaker 1: group of people, and there is a desire to go
Speaker 1: back to that. And then you know, sixties civil rights
Speaker 1: movement happens, the definition of public expands. It wasn't until
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five intol African American women had the right
Speaker 1: to vote nationwide, and so yeah, yeah, I mean that's
Speaker 1: the year I was born. I mean, I still I
Speaker 1: find that it's astonishing. And so our definition of public
Speaker 1: doesn't really include everyone until the late sixties, and by
Speaker 1: that point they're you know, and so this mentality around
Speaker 1: government spending. So, you know, a country that only ten
Speaker 1: years earlier had passed the biggest federal infrastructure bill in
Speaker 1: the country, the National Highway and Defense Act, that built
Speaker 1: our interest at highway system. None of that was seen
Speaker 1: as government waste, none of it was seen as like profligate.
Speaker 1: And by the time you move into to Lyndon Johnson's
Speaker 1: Great Society programs, suddenly it's all like we've got to
Speaker 1: starve the beast. You know, it's all the government waste.
Speaker 1: And so the point is, no matter where you sit
Speaker 1: with that politically, the important thing to understand is that
Speaker 1: the physical environment we have today was a consequence of
Speaker 1: policy and a consequence of design, and there have been
Speaker 1: lots of failures in terms of that. We created, basically
Speaker 1: with suburban living, the most carbon intensive, racially, socially and
Speaker 1: economically segregated form of human habitation in the history of
Speaker 1: our species. And you know, we actually have this idea
Speaker 1: that it's about the American dream. That's not true. The
Speaker 1: American dream was defined in the nineteen thirties had nothing
Speaker 1: to do with houses and cars. That had to do
Speaker 1: it equal opportunity. And so what could a new version
Speaker 1: of the American dream look like? And this is actually
Speaker 1: important internationally because that old version of a house and
Speaker 1: a car to cars along set up a definition of
Speaker 1: success not just for Americans but for people around the world.
Speaker 1: And so like two billion people entered the middle class
Speaker 1: around the world since the nineteen nineties, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Turkey.
Speaker 1: Those people, many of them emulated the suburban life as
Speaker 1: their kind of definition of success, and so the planet
Speaker 1: is really straining under the resource demands of that, you know,
Speaker 1: David Wells. Wells talks about the fact that most of
Speaker 1: the we associate climate change in greenhouse gases with the
Speaker 1: industrial revolution, most of the most pernicious stuff has happened
Speaker 1: since the first episode of Fleinfeld Eric, and he talks
Speaker 1: about this, right that, like, really, this is a pretty
Speaker 1: recent phenomena in terms of how intensively we started using resources,
Speaker 1: mainly driven by expanding houses and expands and cars. But
Speaker 1: the other thing we did is we made all that
Speaker 1: stuff really unaffordable. We locked in a certain set of
Speaker 1: benefits for people my age, right and basically made it
Speaker 1: exclusionary to generations that are younger than me. And so
Speaker 1: we you know, everywhere we wrote this article. My firm
Speaker 1: POW wrote this article in the New York Times about
Speaker 1: how to create more housing across New York City, and
Speaker 1: it was extraordinary the global response to that article. And
Speaker 1: what I basically discovered is that there's an affordability crisis
Speaker 1: of housing everywhere, like in almost everywhere in the world,
Speaker 1: in almost every size community in America, from small towns
Speaker 1: to villages all the way up to the big cities,
Speaker 1: and so to me, the important aspect of being able
Speaker 1: to say we designed for one kind of you know,
Speaker 1: settlement pattern, it means we can design for another right.
Speaker 1: And so means we can design for another right. And
Speaker 1: so if people want to live in multi family housing,
Speaker 1: they want more walkable environment, aggressive say so, but there's
Speaker 1: data right like, so you can the most walkable environments
Speaker 1: in the country are the most popular, and they're increasingly
Speaker 1: the most expensive. So that's where people want to live.
Speaker 1: It's just more convenient. That's true of red states, it's
Speaker 1: true of blue states. So how do we produce more
Speaker 1: of that? How do we make it more affordable? Because
Speaker 1: we know it's more ecological and I believe it's more joyful.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a great book called The Good Life
Speaker 1: that talks about, you know, human health and longevity and
Speaker 1: basically says that if you control for a bunch of variables,
Speaker 1: that what really leads to human health and longevity is
Speaker 1: the strength of one social connections, right, which leads me
Speaker 1: as an architect to think about, well, what are the
Speaker 1: kinds of environments that create social connection? And so like,
Speaker 1: Towards the end of the book, I talk about housing
Speaker 1: and housing prototypes that could build more neighborliness, basically build
Speaker 1: more of a sense of community again amongst different people,
Speaker 1: but that's much more affordable and in a way that,
Speaker 1: again I think would be joyful and just turn down
Speaker 1: the political heat that we seem to be experiencing right now,
Speaker 1: because everyone, regardless of your political camp, are feeling the
Speaker 1: stresses and strains of this right and so I think
Speaker 1: we're at a really good moment to reconsider how we've
Speaker 1: been living, what our definition of success is, whether we
Speaker 1: need to kind of retool the American dream so that
Speaker 1: it is more inclusive and more environmentally friendly, less segregated,
Speaker 1: and more joyful. I think that's an interesting conversation to have,
Speaker 1: and I don't think it's a particularly partisan conversation. I
Speaker 1: think it's something that most everyone wants to get involved
Speaker 1: with at some level. Mm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree, I think that, and I think it's
Speaker 2: that's I think part of the power of this approach
Speaker 2: is that we often get caught either in an abstract
Speaker 2: conversation and or as like a boogeyman thing that we're
Speaker 2: trying to like, or a straw man we're trying to
Speaker 2: fight against. Typically, when it comes to you know, political division,
Speaker 2: but then we think about both what do we share
Speaker 2: and that can literally be the shared environment, but then
Speaker 2: also what is it that we are having trouble sharing
Speaker 2: and how is it related to our belt environment too?
Speaker 2: You know, because it's like this interesting piece that when
Speaker 2: we think about like what is like a public space
Speaker 2: that can actually help foster you know, kind of cultural interaction,
Speaker 2: like interaction with nature, interaction that's joyful with folks.
Speaker 3: You know, Oftentimes we might think of like a.
Speaker 2: Park, right, so we can all all kind of like
Speaker 2: congregate in a space together. But I'm kind of curious
Speaker 2: like as we think about that, because like that's that's
Speaker 2: like a super baseline example, right, And so actually I'm
Speaker 2: glad you brought up that that kind of housing example too,
Speaker 2: because the kind of the Goldilocks size of density that
Speaker 2: you kind of talk about towards end the book. Do
Speaker 2: I think it's really compelling way to have us kind
Speaker 2: of think about one, Like, I totally agree. I think
Speaker 2: it's important point for us to recognize like that another
Speaker 2: world is possible because we built this one, and it
Speaker 2: like it doesn't mean because we built this one that's it, right,
Speaker 2: And as we kind of think through that when it
Speaker 2: comes to things like housing and dwelling as something that
Speaker 2: like both is it should be afforded to.
Speaker 3: Everybody as a right.
Speaker 2: Then on top of that, like to live with dignity
Speaker 2: at thest like another another key piece here that I've
Speaker 2: also seen you write about, and that it's important for
Speaker 2: us to kind of think, you know, we kind of
Speaker 2: talk about both the home as that kind of place,
Speaker 2: and like there's there's two angles that are kind of
Speaker 2: percolating in my head here, and like the one is
Speaker 2: the kind of public spaces that we share, like parks, sidewalks, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe a shopping flosy kind of area, and
Speaker 2: the other one, of course is like the dwelling, like
Speaker 2: like the home, and how we've set these both up
Speaker 2: Like one you're kind of pointing towards here too, that
Speaker 2: like the suburbs is one of those places that like
Speaker 2: having like the auto automobile focus and like in the
Speaker 2: single family home or like this radically new experiment in
Speaker 2: the human story, right that we've like decided we didn't
Speaker 2: like we haven't had We've not had the suburbs for
Speaker 2: a long time, right, And so that's like being a
Speaker 2: built in fracturing of how we lived together separately, and
Speaker 2: then on top of that, like how are we thinking
Speaker 2: about public space and in terms of you know, who
Speaker 2: has access to it? And that's also comes to our
Speaker 2: affordable housing kind of crisis question too. So as you're
Speaker 2: you're thinking about this and like and maybe we can
Speaker 2: talk about the kind of the research you did around
Speaker 2: the how to we like build the homes for for
Speaker 2: a million a million New New Yorkers As we think
Speaker 2: about that, like you kind of bring up this idea
Speaker 2: of the Goldilocks dimensions of a building, right because we
Speaker 2: kind of think, oh, if I need to have like
Speaker 2: either you know, affordable housing or new housing, it's like
Speaker 2: immediately people tend to think of And I did it
Speaker 2: first too, before I was looking at your work, like
Speaker 2: you know, seventy five story building, not the top, but
Speaker 2: just like you know, like a fifteen story building, and
Speaker 2: like you have this kind of incorrect idea of like
Speaker 2: what the size actually has to be, and like this
Speaker 2: Goldilocks you know dimensions you kind of talk about, like
Speaker 2: is three stories that's not at all crazy to think about.
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, So I mean, look, fifteen stories might be
Speaker 1: absolutely appropriate in downtown Boston or you know New York
Speaker 1: and Philadelphia, San Francisco. Most of the countries are much
Speaker 1: lower scale, and we need to be super sensitive to that.
Speaker 1: The three story thing, really it's a consequence of the
Speaker 1: building code. Basically, the building code says you can build
Speaker 1: a three story building without an elevator as long as
Speaker 1: the ground floor units are accessible to a wheelchair, and
Speaker 1: so as soon as you have so it's a step function.
Speaker 1: As soon as you have four stories, you need an elevator,
Speaker 1: and that changes everything because you need one elevator, you
Speaker 1: need two elevators, and then you need fire stairs, and
Speaker 1: then you're pouring a bunch of concrete. And then the
Speaker 1: only way the developer can like even break even is
Speaker 1: building a fifteen story building. And so that's why that
Speaker 1: Goldilocks module and the Goldilocks reference is something between a
Speaker 1: single family house and a tower basically, right, So it's
Speaker 1: wheat spot in between. And the beauty of that and
Speaker 1: the reason it's important for this idea of social connection
Speaker 1: positive social friction is you're right, a park is one
Speaker 1: example of all of that. But the reason this housing
Speaker 1: lends itself to that it is really two things. One
Speaker 1: is if you basically just got a single stare that
Speaker 1: connects all the apartments in a building. It means people
Speaker 1: run into each other on that stair you know, if
Speaker 1: there's an elderly neighbor that you haven't seen for a while,
Speaker 1: you get worried. There's something about it that's much less anonymous.
Speaker 1: And you know, we used to there's a picture of
Speaker 1: the book of like these really beautiful forms of density
Speaker 1: we built all over the world, Rome tel Aviv, Mumbai,
Speaker 1: which was basically, you know, like twenty apartment units wrapped
Speaker 1: around a staircase and one single elevator that was in
Speaker 1: a case. All of that's illegal today because of fire
Speaker 1: code and wheelchair code and for legitimate reasons. But we
Speaker 1: we you know, we regulated ourselves out of some really
Speaker 1: beautiful Basically, most of Europe has built in that kind
Speaker 1: of density, and most of it's illegal today in terms
Speaker 1: of building code, which is why everything has to revert
Speaker 1: to skyscrapers when it gets bigger. So this three story
Speaker 1: thing does build community just by having that single stare.
Speaker 1: The other thing about it is it's a building block,
Speaker 1: and it's really a prototype. It's not a design, but
Speaker 1: it's a building block that allows you to organize streets
Speaker 1: or courtyards or other forms of sort semi public space,
Speaker 1: which all of our great cities have, right, which is like,
Speaker 1: you know, you come off a big street, then you're
Speaker 1: on a small street. Maybe you walk through a little
Speaker 1: courtyard or a use to get to an apartment. And
Speaker 1: that hierarchy of public space is very important to people's
Speaker 1: sense of their community, their neighborhood, what scale they relate to,
Speaker 1: who they run into at the grocery store, the dry cleaner,
Speaker 1: all of that stuff really matters. It makes people feel connected.
Speaker 1: We have a loneliness crisis in the country right now,
Speaker 1: and you know, and I just want to like, we
Speaker 1: can talk about the suburbs, but to me, the you know,
Speaker 1: the suburbs that are close into cities, right the Lexington, Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: and the Montclair, New Jersey, and all those places are fine,
Speaker 1: and like some of them have some mass transit access.
Speaker 1: So what worries me much more? Like I just finished
Speaker 1: my sixth cross country trip and like, again I go
Speaker 1: back to this election and how disconnected I feel people
Speaker 1: are on the coast, whether they live in the cities
Speaker 1: or the suburbs, from what's happened in rural America and
Speaker 1: why there is the level of anger at both parties.
Speaker 1: At both parties, we've decimated rural America right through policy,
Speaker 1: through design, you know. And so like most of rural
Speaker 1: America had main streets, and those main streets were where people,
Speaker 1: where older people saw each other, where teenagers flirted, all
Speaker 1: of that kind of stuff. The main streets then got
Speaker 1: replaced by shopping malls, you know, through the seventies and
Speaker 1: eighties and into the nineties. So the main streets, all
Speaker 1: the stores became vacant, right, and so everyone hang out
Speaker 1: at the shopping mall, but at least there was some
Speaker 1: kind of societal space in the shopping mall. Then big
Speaker 1: box e commerce came along and said, oh, we don't
Speaker 1: have to build all of that social space that's in
Speaker 1: a shopping mall. We can just have a big box
Speaker 1: store and a bunch of asphallt.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And so when you go through all of that,
Speaker 1: which you notice is there is now no social fabric anymore.
Speaker 1: There's no social glue that's pulling people together. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm sure people can still go to church or go
Speaker 1: to a dance something, but that's a destination. It's not
Speaker 1: just a place where people hang out. We did this
Speaker 1: project in Columbus, Indiana, which is just a canopy over
Speaker 1: an intersection, but it was an invitation for people to
Speaker 1: use that canopy to close the street to cars and
Speaker 1: do festivals there. And there have been all sorts of
Speaker 1: very different ethnic events, you know, Pride Week and Mike
Speaker 1: Pences Indiana, you know, all of this stuff that happened
Speaker 1: there just by virtue of trying to create an invitation
Speaker 1: of some public space on a space that's normally used
Speaker 1: by a car. And so, you know, this is one
Speaker 1: of my main takeaways from going cross country that we've
Speaker 1: ripped away all the physical places there are no there
Speaker 1: are no parks per se, right. You know, sure some
Speaker 1: of the bigger cities across the country and parks, but
Speaker 1: just a regular small town, it'd be hard pressed to
Speaker 1: find a park, a playground, you know, in some cases
Speaker 1: even a sidewalk, right. And so what you're then doing
Speaker 1: is you're relegating people to their basements and glowing screens
Speaker 1: where they find community. And that, of course is algorithm
Speaker 1: driven in the most dimissive form of finding community. And
Speaker 1: so I think that like this is now you know, look,
Speaker 1: obviously I wish the other person had won, because she
Speaker 1: was talking about three million new housing units, and I
Speaker 1: think there would have been a really interesting conversation about
Speaker 1: what kind of housing and for whom and could it
Speaker 1: form more community fabric. I'm still hopeful that even the
Speaker 1: things that are flowing out of Biden's infrastructure bill will
Speaker 1: you know, provide some powder for us to go out
Speaker 1: and build some of the kind of societal fabric I'm
Speaker 1: talking about. But that, to me is the physical challenge
Speaker 1: needs in front of us that would over time, help
Speaker 1: to seal some of the riffs that we're feeling in
Speaker 1: our country because there's just no place to go to
Speaker 1: be together.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, and that that's like a that's it's it's it's
Speaker 2: a stark reminder, right that we have to understand where
Speaker 2: we're looking for one right, And I can kind of see,
Speaker 2: like where are these stories? I recently I was speaking
Speaker 2: with Brian Reisinger on the podcast, and he is a
Speaker 2: he's a fourth generation Wisconsin farmer and and you know,
Speaker 2: and just wrote a book about like basically his family's
Speaker 2: story over the past one hundred years, you know, and
Speaker 2: like basically this to your exact point, that the ultimate
Speaker 2: decimation of kind of like rural America and how that
Speaker 2: is on one had led to like, yeah, this is
Speaker 2: like this deep anger at like both political parties right again,
Speaker 2: it's not just not just a one off or like
Speaker 2: one party kind of anger. But recognizing this is this
Speaker 2: is a really important point too, of like, as like
Speaker 2: the physical space of towns have changed, right, and that
Speaker 2: oftentimes if you're in royal community you're more spread out.
Speaker 2: But then where do you come together? Right for these
Speaker 2: kind of you know, get togethers. And that's an interesting
Speaker 2: piece I thought about in terms of like a church
Speaker 2: as a destination space versus necessarily just like you might
Speaker 2: just happen to be there, right, you know, because it's
Speaker 2: like it's more and more of a timed event kind
Speaker 2: of thing.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: It can be a general public space too, of course,
Speaker 2: but like that's an important thing for us to recognize.
Speaker 2: Two of Like, even if we say, well, there's this
Speaker 2: area people can get together, it's like, but is it
Speaker 2: what kind of character does it has in terms of.
Speaker 3: Like how are we getting together?
Speaker 1: Well? Again, this is the distinction in my mind between
Speaker 1: community and urbanity. If it's a destination space, you know,
Speaker 1: if it's a church, it's people who pray together and
Speaker 1: there's that's great, but it is not gonna bring people
Speaker 1: of different faiths together, right for the most part. Right
Speaker 1: it it's it's so you know, like a Mason's lodge,
Speaker 1: whatever it is. Those are people who are finding common
Speaker 1: cause and they you know, great. But the thing is
Speaker 1: what real public space does is it creates places of serendipity,
Speaker 1: places where you're going to run into people that you
Speaker 1: didn't plan to run into, and see people you didn't
Speaker 1: plan to see. And again, especially like you know, the
Speaker 1: country is much more diverse than people think, you know.
Speaker 1: And so like take this Springfield, Ohio thing, right, Like
Speaker 1: you know, like the real story is they're legal migrants.
Speaker 1: People wanted them in the air because they needed workers. Now,
Speaker 1: how do you create spaces that people can interact so
Speaker 1: that community understanding can take place between you know, the
Speaker 1: populations that there and newcomers, right? And that I think
Speaker 1: is a really American story, right, Like this is kind
Speaker 1: of like the foundations of this country that we don't
Speaker 1: just hang out together in tribes, right, but that we
Speaker 1: actually are a big polyglot nation. And so and I
Speaker 1: really believe in that. Look, I've I grew up outside
Speaker 1: of Boston and experienced a tremendous amount of racism. And
Speaker 1: I've experienced a lot of that kind of stuff on
Speaker 1: both coasts, and yet in my six cross country cross
Speaker 1: country drives, have experienced a lot less of it. You know,
Speaker 1: the country is an amazing place. And even though people
Speaker 1: may harbor whatever views they harbor, when you're face to face,
Speaker 1: and this is the whole thing about this positive social
Speaker 1: friction idea. You know, people can be so repugnant online,
Speaker 1: but when people are face to face, it's a different interaction.
Speaker 1: And I would argue that good social inhibition depths in
Speaker 1: and because it's steps in, it's you know, there is
Speaker 1: organically some sense of like if I was I was
Speaker 1: in a pretty rural town in Utah and there's a
Speaker 1: place called New York Pizza. I had a slice of
Speaker 1: pizza in there, and I said, you know, I got
Speaker 1: to tell you, the pizza is really good. And I'm
Speaker 1: from New York City and so you know, I'm talking
Speaker 1: to the woman behind the counter who has never been
Speaker 1: to New York City. I assure you, and like that
Speaker 1: stuff is really important. That's what gives you some definition
Speaker 1: or idea that you actually share this idea of America
Speaker 1: and this idea of a country, right, And so I
Speaker 1: just think that there's a lot of work to do here,
Speaker 1: you know that, Like there's just so many different you know,
Speaker 1: where we want this competition to expand the rock and
Speaker 1: Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and rock and role
Speaker 1: is kind of like, you know, there's only a few
Speaker 1: bipartisan things left in the country, you know, it's sort
Speaker 1: of like pizza, rock and roll and maybe NASA, right,
Speaker 1: Like there's like, you know, so this again is a
Speaker 1: space of social interaction, and we were able to create
Speaker 1: this kind of jam space, this lobby that people could
Speaker 1: come to without having to pay for a ticket, and they
Speaker 1: can hang out in. Young people can hang out in
Speaker 1: make music together. And again you'd get a lot of
Speaker 1: walks of life through that space. And so I think
Speaker 1: there's just an example after example that you can look
Speaker 1: to where we could create this very positive sense of
Speaker 1: urbanity even in very small places.
Speaker 3: That's a great point.
Speaker 2: And so part of it too, it makes me think,
Speaker 2: is like how are we thinking about the built environment
Speaker 2: spaces and like we can take something as quote unquote small, right,
Speaker 2: or like individual as a home and thinking about how
Speaker 2: we're building that in terms of multi family housing or
Speaker 2: you know, a bigger example that can either be you know,
Speaker 2: a train station, thinking of like like Pennsylvania Station. I
Speaker 2: was thinking of the work that y'all have done on
Speaker 2: planning in that space, and also in like rock role
Speaker 2: Hall of Fame is a good example too of like
Speaker 2: there's a paid way to go into the building, but
Speaker 2: then also like you also have a public space kind
Speaker 2: of in the in the entry area too, to hang
Speaker 2: out and have that kind of serendipitous space. And I
Speaker 2: guess as we think about that too, it's like I
Speaker 2: love this idea of kind of intentionally designing for serendipity, right,
Speaker 2: like having these kind of chance encounters with folks that
Speaker 2: you may have not planned to see. But then that's
Speaker 2: like where like the magic kind of happens, you know,
Speaker 2: And it's like I'm also thinking about this from you
Speaker 2: like the the I guess the other weirder example of
Speaker 2: like Burning Man that's like designed around serendipitous occasions and
Speaker 2: just you know, wacky coming together, but it's got its
Speaker 2: own class issues, right, But like you know, so how
Speaker 2: do we think about that like in terms of if
Speaker 2: like what does it mean to kind of design for serendipity,
Speaker 2: if we're kind of thinking about this in a space.
Speaker 1: Well, so you mentioned Penn Station, and for your listeners
Speaker 1: who don't know, Penn Station, it's the most horrible place
Speaker 1: in the United States. It's it's you know, it's this
Speaker 1: underground train station. It's the busiest transportation hub in the
Speaker 1: Western hemisphere. Very confusing, right, Well, it was designed for
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty thousand people a day. It handles
Speaker 1: about six hundred thousand, and so it's incredibly congested. There
Speaker 1: was a beautiful old station there that had been torn
Speaker 1: down years ago, triggered the nation's landmarks laws, and now
Speaker 1: we're left with its mess, and a number of us
Speaker 1: have been trying to fix the mess. But I compare
Speaker 1: it to Grand Central Station, right, not very far away, glorious, right,
Speaker 1: And this is the way I'm going to try to
Speaker 1: answer a question about how you designed for these things.
Speaker 1: You can look at the train stations, right, like, so
Speaker 1: it's supposed to be functional, to Penn Station was designed
Speaker 1: to be this functional thing. You get off the subway,
Speaker 1: you race to your commuter train, and like, if you
Speaker 1: look at the people at Penn Station, they all look miserable.
Speaker 1: They're all staring down at the floor. They're not looking
Speaker 1: at each other eye to eye. There is no real
Speaker 1: serendipity because you're just like bumping and grinding your way
Speaker 1: through the thing. Grand Central is a ballet. When you
Speaker 1: look at Grand Central and there's hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: people moving through there too, but there's big, lofty ceilings,
Speaker 1: there's natural light coming in. There's almost no signage because
Speaker 1: the architecture tells you where to go. You don't need
Speaker 1: the signs. But to me, when I'm always amazed by
Speaker 1: is I walk from Grand Central Station all the time,
Speaker 1: and they're always tourists taking pictures from different vantage points,
Speaker 1: and you know they are observing the ballet, like there's
Speaker 1: people taking video, and there's this way in which everyone's
Speaker 1: moving around each other and not bumping and grinding into
Speaker 1: each other like pland Station. And what that does is
Speaker 1: it gives everyone the room to kind of exhale, and
Speaker 1: so you can look up and when you look up again,
Speaker 1: you see people who think differently than you. That and
Speaker 1: I know people might think, oh, New Yorkers, like everyone's
Speaker 1: the same. That's not true at all. I mean, not
Speaker 1: just in terms of like racial or social diversity, but
Speaker 1: also political diversity. You know, if you look at the
Speaker 1: numbers that came out of this last election, you know
Speaker 1: it was much closer than people think. And so you know,
Speaker 1: to me, the contrast between the two stations kind of
Speaker 1: tells you all that you need to know about, like
Speaker 1: what makes for good public space and what makes for
Speaker 1: terrible public space. And you know, the distinction between those
Speaker 1: two things in terms of cost is is so deminimous
Speaker 1: compared to the uplift the sense of positive experience that
Speaker 1: you get. And again, same thing in small towns where
Speaker 1: you can have a bus station, you can have a park,
Speaker 1: you can have just a main street and just a
Speaker 1: little bit care of that says that there's this idea
Speaker 1: that we care about ourselves, that we have a sense
Speaker 1: of society, and that therefore we can get along and
Speaker 1: can bridge our differences. And I'm just you know, it
Speaker 1: may sound all very naive, but we can have to.
Speaker 1: We're at a cultural moment in this country where we
Speaker 1: have to kind of go back to ground zero and say,
Speaker 1: hang on a second, what is the country about. I mean,
Speaker 1: to me, the one piece of good news that came
Speaker 1: out of this election was that it was not close,
Speaker 1: and that meant that those who lost have to kind
Speaker 1: of look in the mirror and have to kind of
Speaker 1: understand that this is the country that they live in
Speaker 1: and that there needs to be some sense of humility
Speaker 1: about what we missed. I'm going to say we because
Speaker 1: I'm just going to include myself in that, right, And
Speaker 1: to me, a very good starting point is how do
Speaker 1: we come together with people who think so fundamentally differently
Speaker 1: than us and find common cause? And I think you
Speaker 1: need a platform for that. I think you need space
Speaker 1: for that. I don't think social media is going to
Speaker 1: do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one hundred percent would agree with that too, and
Speaker 2: that it's we we've been algorithmically driven or drooped or
Speaker 2: whatever we want to say verb wise of just like
Speaker 2: what is it that we're paying attention to?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Or I guess we're sarah to genergic. What's the words
Speaker 2: sarrasin energic and the you know, our brains are saying, hey,
Speaker 2: this is good.
Speaker 1: I'm not smart enough to know that word.
Speaker 3: I don't either, so we're so someone knows that word.
Speaker 2: But you know, again, don't mean hit from like wanting
Speaker 2: to look at our phones, but realizing that like that's
Speaker 2: actually a huge fuel of our kind of isolation crisis,
Speaker 2: right that we looking down versus up, and like it's
Speaker 2: it's amazing. It's a great great contrast of like Penstation
Speaker 2: and Grand Central Station to realize like how are we
Speaker 2: actually physically being in a space and like is it
Speaker 2: in like does it inspire us to look up? Or
Speaker 2: like you know, make I want to take pictures of you,
Speaker 2: like the like the kind of bault of the seedlings
Speaker 2: and or yeah, it's just like watching how how it's
Speaker 2: like the flow is happening, right, and there's something that's
Speaker 2: like really alluring of that too.
Speaker 3: But just seeing that kind that kind of human that
Speaker 3: human flow piece.
Speaker 2: This makes me think too that like one of the
Speaker 2: other contrasts, I really think that's important. And then also
Speaker 2: I like that you explore is the the idea of
Speaker 2: like one of the challenges and the something that you
Speaker 2: put words to the thing that I'd just seen before
Speaker 2: I hadn't thought too much about, but that like a
Speaker 2: lot of downtowns just looks the same across the world, right,
Speaker 2: there's like a very similar skyscrape or architecture that.
Speaker 3: You can just envisions. Oh that that's what a downtown
Speaker 3: looks like.
Speaker 2: And as we think about like being intentional about our
Speaker 2: built environment how it shapes how we interact with one another,
Speaker 2: there's this interesting piece of like keeping like local cultural flair,
Speaker 2: but then also kind of putting you know, what are
Speaker 2: great standards that we can use across different places, you know,
Speaker 2: in spaces and kind of globally, and so how do
Speaker 2: we kind of think about that that idea of like
Speaker 2: keeping the kind of local cultural flavor of you know,
Speaker 2: buildings and spaces, but then also like letting us kind
Speaker 2: of think about different scales of buildings. So it's like
Speaker 2: we don't have just kind of the similar or saving
Speaker 2: exact kind of downtown construction, but recognize that like we're
Speaker 2: e were trying to build a certain space that we
Speaker 2: can have things that we know work I guess, like
Speaker 2: whether it's using digenous materials or it's you know, kind
Speaker 2: of being intentional about it if it's a bigger building,
Speaker 2: I suppose, you know, don't. I'm kind of back and
Speaker 2: forth trying to think about about this idea of like
Speaker 2: what does it mean to do that, Like how do
Speaker 2: we keep like efficiency requirements and safety regulations in place
Speaker 2: as well as keeping like local culture as part of our.
Speaker 1: Building The process book talks a great deal about this.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think we need to sort of step
Speaker 1: so really, since the advent of commercial air travel and
Speaker 1: then accelerated by global technology, technological services, communications, and so forth,
Speaker 1: you know, we obviously went through this period of mass
Speaker 1: globalization that included the ability to mass produce all sorts
Speaker 1: of building materials and so and actually the globalization of
Speaker 1: the real estate industry, and so you had a lot
Speaker 1: of you still have a lot of big firms that
Speaker 1: are international firms now that build with a lot of
Speaker 1: the same materials, to the point where you know, our
Speaker 1: built environment is indistinguishable, you know, and I hear this
Speaker 1: all the time. I'm a very pro growth, pro city person,
Speaker 1: but it's hard to be pro urban growth if the
Speaker 1: urban growth is so soul crushing. You know, this stuff
Speaker 1: all looks the same, It's got the same chain store
Speaker 1: at the bottom of it. It just you know, and
Speaker 1: you don't even know where you are anymore. I would
Speaker 1: argue that we've been experiencing for a while now, but
Speaker 1: with the pandemic and now you've got a president talking
Speaker 1: about tariffs like we're we're moving to I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't think globalization is going to completely stop, but we're
Speaker 1: transforming what it was to be. You know, like NAFTA,
Speaker 1: all of that stuff was a different period of globalization.
Speaker 1: And I think part of that is coming from a
Speaker 1: real yearning people have to make sure that local histories
Speaker 1: and narratives and cultures are somehow bulldozed by this universalist
Speaker 1: kind of mentality that tries to make everything the same.
Speaker 1: And architecture is both a mirror and a window into
Speaker 1: what's going on in society, right and so it you know,
Speaker 1: it both represents kind of that banala globalization, it's also
Speaker 1: kind of, I think a window into the potential for
Speaker 1: a different future. And so like our Domino project in Brooklyn,
Speaker 1: you know, is very much about being rooted in local
Speaker 1: history and culture and heritage and also looking forward to
Speaker 1: a kind of different reality in a different time. And
Speaker 1: I think that duality of having that bosan kind of
Speaker 1: liminal condition of being able to say, you can be
Speaker 1: both of the larger world, but you have to pull
Speaker 1: people with you alongside you in terms of history and
Speaker 1: narrative and culture. And I think this is really endemic
Speaker 1: to our species. I think it's something that's really important
Speaker 1: to us. And so what I and the book talks
Speaker 1: about this a lot. What I've just sensed a great
Speaker 1: deal of in that globalizing of cities is this kind
Speaker 1: of on nui, this tremendous sense of loss, right, where
Speaker 1: people just feel like their environments are getting bulldozed in
Speaker 1: favor of something that like is kind of unrecognized and
Speaker 1: kind of banal and awful. And it just doesn't have
Speaker 1: to be that way. And so that's meant to be
Speaker 1: a clarion called in my industry, not just the architects,
Speaker 1: but the real estate developers and the just all the
Speaker 1: people who are responsible for this, the government officials to
Speaker 1: just care more about the environments in which they're building,
Speaker 1: to build things that are just more materially sensitive, you know.
Speaker 1: So like in our firm, we have a whole set
Speaker 1: of criteria that we put any design through to say,
Speaker 1: you know, is this design connective for people connected to
Speaker 1: this place? You know, if you can pick up the
Speaker 1: building and move it somewhere else and it still makes sense,
Speaker 1: we've failed, yeah, right, And so uh and this is
Speaker 1: a hard challenge, but it's a good one, and so
Speaker 1: we do a lot of this. You know, at Princeton
Speaker 1: we're building a building and it's very contemporary, but we're
Speaker 1: building it out of materials that will absolutely resonate with
Speaker 1: the historic fabric of the campus. There are ways of
Speaker 1: doing this right. It just requires attention and intention, you know,
Speaker 1: and and so look, this isn't going to solve the
Speaker 1: world's problems, but I think people feeling more connected to
Speaker 1: their culture and their climate and there you know, they're
Speaker 1: they're just general environment. I think again lowers the amount
Speaker 1: of political tension political resentment. Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a that's right, and that's it's
Speaker 2: an important piece that Like again, I love the idea
Speaker 2: of saying, how do we both provide and bring attention
Speaker 2: intention too to the building space? Isn't I wanted to
Speaker 2: like I don't know if I read Path two past,
Speaker 2: but I want I want to provide a little space
Speaker 2: to like get a sense from you, like from your
Speaker 2: six cross country trips, like how I guess what do
Speaker 2: you what do you think that the the left mist
Speaker 2: answer like what like what are they not seeing that?
Speaker 3: Like that?
Speaker 1: That?
Speaker 2: Like I think and I will say like that being
Speaker 2: there like showed you like that they can show any
Speaker 2: of us. Like if you spend time in a place
Speaker 2: with like attention intension, like what do you what did
Speaker 2: you see that's like kind of caught your attension of
Speaker 2: like what should we be thinking about for the world
Speaker 2: that we want to build?
Speaker 1: So my son and I pull an airstream and so
Speaker 1: we're in you know, sometimes we're in national parks. Sometimes
Speaker 1: we're in trailer parks. And when you're in the trailer
Speaker 1: parks and you're going through especially the industrial in Midwest, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, which I've heard is politically kind of important,
Speaker 1: you really see a lot of pain and desperation, right
Speaker 1: And and so for the people out there who somehow
Speaker 1: think that this election was just only driven by racism
Speaker 1: or misogyny, I think they're just missing something enormous about
Speaker 1: their fellow citizens. You know, there are many count that
Speaker 1: voted for Barack Obama twice that went for Trump. And
Speaker 1: so it's just too easy an explanation. I find. Sure
Speaker 1: is some of that fueling some of the anger out there,
Speaker 1: of course, but I just think it's not the line's
Speaker 1: share of it. I think what the left miss is
Speaker 1: the extent to which inflation, and let's not forget hyperinflation
Speaker 1: is what elected Adolf Hitler. I mean, inflation is an
Speaker 1: insidious thing, particularly for the working class living paycheck to paycheck.
Speaker 1: But I think there's a larger thing that is about
Speaker 1: this globalization thing. And unfortunately, as an immigrant, you know,
Speaker 1: I feel this like immigration is too much of the
Speaker 1: channel for this anger. But this started again with both parties.
Speaker 1: So in the nineties you had NAFTA, right, which basically
Speaker 1: did outsource a lot of jobs. Then in the two
Speaker 1: thousands you had the wars, and you had the subprime
Speaker 1: mortgage cis. And what I don't think we at all
Speaker 1: feel on the coasts is the disproportionate impact those things
Speaker 1: had on the middle of the country, their sons and
Speaker 1: daughters that went off to war. It's you know, you know,
Speaker 1: New York City at the depths of the subprime real
Speaker 1: estate crisis lost about twenty twenty five percent of its
Speaker 1: real estate value, which bounced back inside of eight or
Speaker 1: ten months. Whereas people lost their homes, they live in
Speaker 1: trailer parks because they lost their homes. The trauma of
Speaker 1: that doesn't go away in a year or two years
Speaker 1: or four years. So the remaking of the GOP by
Speaker 1: this man has to do with the fact that George W.
Speaker 1: Bush's GOP failed the middle of the country in ways
Speaker 1: that are just massive and still unaccounted for. And then
Speaker 1: of course people didn't feel like the people who created
Speaker 1: that crisis paid anything for their misdeeds, right, And so
Speaker 1: the system does feel rigged to people. And then there's
Speaker 1: one other piece I'd just like to say that's very
Speaker 1: true of both coasts, which is there's a huge private
Speaker 1: equity apparatus that went in and then picked the meat
Speaker 1: off the bones of the carcass. So the last pharmacy,
Speaker 1: the last family owned store, got you know, consolidated into
Speaker 1: big box and changed stores and e commerce and just
Speaker 1: decimated the landscape. And so, you know, there were earlier
Speaker 1: times when I took my son through some of these
Speaker 1: towns and he'd say things like it just looked like
Speaker 1: some sort of bomb had gone off. And this isn't
Speaker 1: the richest country in the world. People who are very
Speaker 1: well aware when they watch Seinfeld and Friends and section
Speaker 1: of the city that there's this whole other life going
Speaker 1: on in their country that they have no pardon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I just I think that we have really lost
Speaker 1: touch with that and so and and then gotten you know,
Speaker 1: involved in a lot of you know, these people are
Speaker 1: not focused on what pronouns to call people, and so
Speaker 1: so it's just you know, there's there's it's it's important
Speaker 1: to stand up for equity and lack of bigotry and
Speaker 1: you know, and be a party of progress. But at
Speaker 1: the same time, it has to include everyone. And that's
Speaker 1: I think what we missed. I think we fundamentally missed
Speaker 1: how much pain people were in, how desperate they are
Speaker 1: for change, and the fact that anyone who who reeks
Speaker 1: of establishment is going to be painted with that brush, right,
Speaker 1: I think that's what we missed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I think it is.
Speaker 2: It's it's it's important kind of both because at the
Speaker 2: same time too, it's like we want to encourage people
Speaker 2: that just like just to point fingers saying, oh, it's
Speaker 2: this or that, right, because I think, as you want,
Speaker 2: if we said to that, like, there's there's a lot
Speaker 2: of nuance there that we have to recognize, right, and
Speaker 2: and that like it's not about painting broad strokes of
Speaker 2: one one group or one story.
Speaker 3: Like we understand that there are elements of that in there,
Speaker 3: but it's like.
Speaker 1: When we go back to the topic at hand, the
Speaker 1: places that I saw that were more physically coherent or
Speaker 1: more socially coherent. There was less distress in those places,
Speaker 1: the places that still had an intact main street or
Speaker 1: intact downtown, right, because again there's just this sense of
Speaker 1: togetherness and social bond and looking out for each other
Speaker 1: as opposed to those towns that were just again just
Speaker 1: kind of decimated.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's I think that's a great point too.
Speaker 2: Is there like a way to help I guess also
Speaker 2: because when you think of urban design, I guess, well
Speaker 2: urban if we think of design and architecture, like we
Speaker 2: tend to then jump to the urban, right, like the
Speaker 2: actual city space.
Speaker 3: But it's like, how do we how can we help
Speaker 3: kind of like bring.
Speaker 2: More design movement to rural spaces too, right 'banity right,
Speaker 2: the kind of in between, Like how do we do that?
Speaker 1: Well, we try to do it a lot. We're trying
Speaker 1: to work in as many of those kinds of places
Speaker 1: as we can find that where people you know, people,
Speaker 1: I got to say, people are just astonished when you
Speaker 1: show up. You know, they just they think of themselves
Speaker 1: as flyover country. They think that like we're all just
Speaker 1: out to ignore them, and so showing up is half
Speaker 1: the battle. Yeah, and not just to canvas for elections,
Speaker 1: but you know, to really be there in some sort
Speaker 1: of set, in some sense of solidarity, right. And you know, look,
Speaker 1: the fact is these places need investment, right, they need
Speaker 1: jobs back. You know. I do think that a lot
Speaker 1: of the the infrastructure build the Chips Act, the things
Speaker 1: that float out of the Biden Harris administration are going
Speaker 1: to do a lot of good things in the kind
Speaker 1: of communities that we're discussing, including rebuilding social fabrics and infrastructure.
Speaker 1: I don't think the maiden Harris administrations is gonna end
Speaker 1: up getting a lot of credit for that stuff, but
Speaker 1: I do think that is going to be helpful. But
Speaker 1: a lot of it, beyond money and resources in public policy,
Speaker 1: is just attention of just feeling like, you know, we're
Speaker 1: all in this together. And you know, again, a lot
Speaker 1: of the work we do is trying to do that.
Speaker 1: It's just you know, a lot of my peers are off,
Speaker 1: you know, designing crazy spaceships in Saudi Arabia, zero interest
Speaker 1: in that. You know, there's a lot of work to
Speaker 1: do here, right, and I think all of us in
Speaker 1: different disciplines can really think about that, like it is
Speaker 1: a privilege to be somewhat successful in this country. You know,
Speaker 1: my parents came here with thirty two dollars and so,
Speaker 1: you know, I think one way of paying it forward
Speaker 1: is to just pay attention to a lot of the places.
Speaker 1: By the way, not all these places are in the
Speaker 1: industrial Midwest. Some of them are in a town, you know,
Speaker 1: two towns over from you. Yeah, right, And so that's
Speaker 1: also very important to think about. And so I you know,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of cautiously optimistic that like, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: we just got a big wake up call and we
Speaker 1: need to now pay attention. Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, I think that that's a great that's a great
Speaker 2: place for us to then say, let's let's put our
Speaker 2: attention there, because I think that's that's.
Speaker 3: Uh, what is needed.
Speaker 2: And I think honestly, it's like as we like dilate
Speaker 2: in and it's like that's what a lot of people
Speaker 2: want to They want to both be seen, to be
Speaker 2: heard and to hear others, right like that that is
Speaker 2: that the sense of connection that we can get in
Speaker 2: recognizing that like in part it might be some that's
Speaker 2: a few undred miles away. Other ways it might just
Speaker 2: be yeah, it's just down the road, right, it's a
Speaker 2: town or two over. So I think that's that's uh,
Speaker 2: that's really great. So I appreciate you sharing that. And
Speaker 2: so you want to say thank you for joining me
Speaker 2: on the podcast today. It's been it's been actually really
Speaker 2: fun to talk with you, and I appreciate you sharing
Speaker 2: your insights and excited to get the book into the
Speaker 2: hands of listeners.
Speaker 3: So so yeah, I mean, keep doing the great work.
Speaker 3: I mean is always.
Speaker 2: I'd love to keep the conversation going in the future
Speaker 2: because it's it's important to kind of broaden these these pieces.
Speaker 2: And I appreciate how you connect a lot of the
Speaker 2: different elements together. And then we kind of we can
Speaker 2: begin from one discipline, but we have to kind of
Speaker 2: see social problems require social fabric, and fabric is sewn together, right.
Speaker 2: I can't just say it's this one one approach.
Speaker 1: So I appreciate your disciplinary right on.
Speaker 3: All right, cool, Well, thank you again for joining to me,
Speaker 3: and it's pleasure great, Thanks very much for