(upbeat music) - Hello, Reza, how are you? - Good, Shae, how are you doing? - I am doing well today. We're back for another episode of Future Forward. - Yeah, you've been really excited about this episode, Shae, because you've been reading that book about Tokyo, and you wanted to really talk about urban planning and some of the concepts there, which seems so important that we haven't yet talked about urban planning, even though we're talking about cities. - Yeah. - So I'm excited to dive into it, but before we do, let's tell our listeners what this is about. So this is the Future Forward podcast. Thank you for our frequent listeners, and then for our new listeners. Future Forward is about a conversation that Shae and I have been having about cities and sustainability and thriving communities for many, many years, and we're bringing you into this conversation. It's really an exploration of historical context or a particular topic that we talk about. We bring you to the present to share what's going on today with it, and then provide some strategic foresight for the future. All of this from a perspective of curiosity. We're not experts, but we're here learning with you. We're always asking our listeners to share their perspectives and their expertise, but it's a way for us to understand what cities can be in the future and how communities can thrive. And welcome. Thank you for listening and excited about talking about this topic today, Shae. - Yes, me too. And as you just alluded to, it is about the future of urban planning in cities. And yes, the book that's really got me thinking a lot more deeply about this is a book called "Emergent Tokyo," which is a fantastic book. I encourage our listeners to pick it up if they have any interest in just learning how the organic and the planned can work hand-in-hand to create what most people agree is one of the most fascinating cities in the world. So excited to dive into how cities like that come about. - Yeah. So should we start with sort of the historical perspective on urban planning? - Absolutely, absolutely. So we have to talk about when urban planning back in ancient days was less about how it is today, obviously. Back then, it was focused on the order, symmetry and hierarchy, mainly the hierarchy in a city or a town. The leaders of a city designed or planned the city to serve their purpose. And so back then, if you think about just the ancient cities in China, even India, African cities and towns that can be referenced today as having been planned in the past, they had orderly street systems that sort of led to a central place in the city. So sometimes rectilinear and then or radial layouts that would center your attention in the city towards these functional or governmental or leadership. Or in some cases, purely aesthetic structures in the city that the leaders wanted to draw your attention to. And it's the point where we had palaces or temples or civic buildings that were essentially the center of the town and everything else was planned around it. And that also included sort of the fortification of the city. Ancient Jericho, for example, is a good example of this. You had the wall of Jericho and everything. It was almost the case of the poorer you were, the further or the closer you were to the wall. And as you went into the city, which was sort of circular in its layout, you ended up with the most important people at the center of the town of the city. And that stayed the case till like the early 19th century where urban planning became more around the movements or the approaches of a group of people who were in charge of planning the city. So this was really the point when the form determining the function of the city, in my opinion, anyway, became a thing where we can point to around 1898, the Garden City Movement by Ebenezer Howard. And the idea was self-contained communities with nature playing a big part and natural areas that separated urban centers. And interestingly, Garden City slash nature and beauty movement is still a big part of how cities like Tokyo continue to be planned. But in the early 19th century, you had self-contained communities, green belts surrounding them. And this was in response to what we were seeing in cities like London where the industrial nature of the city was leading to unhealthy lives for the residents. So as I mentioned, the poor lived close to the bounds of the city, which is where manufacturing and all the hard labor was done in these cities and consequently without the necessary infrastructure for waste disposal, water, the people suffered. And so Ebenezer Howard and his cohorts were super keen on changing that to bring a better life for the residents of the city. And along with this, we started to get people like Daniel Burnham in Chicago around 1909 where the idea was to make the city's iconic. Hey, how can we build structures? Yes, we can be an industrial city, but how can we build structures that make our city aspirational in that sense? So around this point was the Montgomery Ward building in Chicago, which is on the river and just huge majestic, but it was industrial at that point, but it was this form that still recognized the desire to make the city as grand as it could possibly be. And then it continued some of the work of Ebenezer Howard with greenery, parks for the people. And if I remember correctly, it was around the same time the parks in New York were starting to come to be as well. I remember correctly. And so this period was more what was called like the civic pride period of urban planning. The first one I mentioned was more the Garden City movement, which is around nature and beauty. But then we hit the nighties and these, which is the modernism era. Le Kuboisier, Edward Moses, and Eil, who felt cities where the phrase was machines for living. Essentially, there was forget all this beauty. Let's make it as utilitarian as possible. Orderly efficient and rationalized the design. Forget all these flimsy, flimsy additions in their minds. Things like parks and stuff with flimsy additions to cities in their minds. And it was all about infrastructure and interventions that would solve urban blights, which is people don't have jobs, build factories, so they can work. It was very utilitarian in that sense. And then I'll touch on the last one so I can get your comments here is in the past is when we reach the era of the shining light of that era was Jane Jacobs. She was, I guess, anti-modernist, the small community-based movement towards urban planning. And it was the precursor to new modernism. This idea that as much as the buildings are important, the people matter as well. And their well-being and belonging and community and community vitality is almost as important. And we should plan our cities with that at the forefront of our considerations. And she also recognized the organic, spontaneous nature of cities. And so I'll pause there, but that really just runs through, quickly runs through some of the main movements we've seen in urban planning over the last couple centuries here. - Yeah, so it's interesting, like, you know, starting in sort of ancient times, the problems that they were solving for were very contained to sort of, you know, these city-states, you know, fortifications, the church to emphasize is sort of a focal point of that, you know, of that city. And then we went into this, you know, this last couple hundred years of, try to solve problems as they came up and not always taking it successfully. Like the Garden City movement, very commendable to try to bring nature into the city because cities were becoming so far away from nature. We were losing some that bucolic feel, which a very good way to solve that problem. And then you had this part about civic pride, which wasn't about the people in the city, but about the city itself and making it iconic, which in some ways does give those citizens a sense of pride, but maybe doesn't solve all the problems for the citizens in it. - Yeah. - Of course, the modernist movement that completely forgot that people and just thought about the structures and so that lost with this pendulum swinging back to Jane Jacobs where she tried to bring the community aspect back into it. - Yeah. - And so it seems like we've gone through these cycles of trying to solve different problems in the era that we're in. And I'm so curious about like, where are we today? In what cycle are we, what problems are we solving? Where are we trying to solve today? - Yes, I love how you framed it because it is sort of cycles on the one end, we go a little bit more brutal and utilitarian and then we swing back to a, the people should matter and then we swing back to, oh, no, we need to make our cities work. And then where we've landed today, I'd suggest there's a little bit more in the middle, thankfully, with this in the late 20th century, Jane Jacobs was sort of the post-new urbanism type era and new urbanism era with this promotion of walkable neighborhoods, mixed use development, diverse housing options for people in the city. That was what Jane Jacobs was preaching and she birthed a whole just sort of generation of urban planners who took that to different cities across the world. The name of this urban planner, I'm blanking on it right now, but he wrote the book, Ordering Cities and I believe French, French, if I remember correctly. And he, again, like a lot of the people who came after Jane Jacobs were all about new urbanism. A, the people matter, but we can create and build two cater to the people while still building. So there was no, oh, let's not build, it was more. A, we're building to help the people in the city and consistently bringing that voice into the conversation for the people. And really closely related to that and as we started to see more climate issues across the world, a lot of these same urban planners have started to move towards this more. Can we build more sustainably? Can we build cities that are climate resilient? Even as we still maintain this recognition that it is for the people, let us make sure we don't forget them, but hey, we have, we took decisions in the past that made our cities, frankly, in some cases inhospitable for people, but also damaging to the planet. How can we blend those things? And so the most significant shift over the last few years in urban planning, in my opinion, has been just this focus on climate resilience. As evidenced by this movement, there was a point, and I'm blanking on when they started, was C40 cities where males started selecting chief resilience officers. And this was all over the world. And the resilience plans started to come up. And the focus was on livable cities in harmony with the natural world, green spaces, improving public transportation. You were sharing an example of public transportation before we started recording. Walkable cities, as opposed to car travel, to reduce the emissions we put out there. And the goal being to reduce pollution, promote health, and make cities more resilient to impacts of climate change. That being said, there's been this, and clearly to me, surprising sort of backlash against what you and I and a lot of experts in the space would call the 10 minute city, where everything you need is within a 10 minute radius, 10 minute radius, walkable radius from where you live, where you work, where your kids go to school. I thought, became this wild conspiracy during the pandemic, if I remember correctly, where everyone who was opposed to 10 minute cities was and the planning that was going into trying to make some of our cities more walkable in that sense. It felt that the idea was that, oh, you are trying to control our lives by confining us in these small areas. And I believe this was more of a problem in the U.S. 'cause of our love for the suburbs and cars and driving. But that doesn't change that that is where urban planning seems to be a lot more focused nowadays. And as is the case with everything, there will be opposition, obviously. - Yeah, yeah. It's interesting that, you know, we, like you said, we've landed in this middle and we're trying to sort of find this balance between, you know, the structure of cities and the communities and cities. Obviously, the, you know, the zeitgeist is about, you know, climate change and how can cities be more resilient within it. It made me think about the book that I'm reading right now. It's called Buildings and Dwellings, Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett. Really good book that tries to make this distinction between what he calls the cite French word. Cite and Ville borrows these terms of French to explore the different dimensions of urban life. And I think it maybe brings a little focus to what I was trying to say before. And so he says the Ville refers to the physical city, the build environment and the urban infrastructure, encompasses the tangible aspects of a city, the building streets, parks, the other structures that define the layout and the material reality of the urban spaces. And then we have the cite, which represents the social city, emphasizing the relationships, the interactions and the communities that inhabit and animate the Ville. And it reflects the lived experiences, cultures, the ethical dynamics of people in urban settings. And I think it's this balance that urban planners are trying to deal with between those two. And you had sent me an article just yesterday, one of our favorite writers, Michael Kimmelman, who writes with the New York Times, and he was talking about historical preservation and how historical preservation is a tension between are you trying to preserve the structure or are you trying to preserve the feeling of what that structure had? - Yeah, yeah. - And so he gives an example of this here in Brooklyn that was going to be demolished. But they, you know, but they preserved it, but they didn't preserve it in the historical preservation senses and they tried to use the same wood or retain the same pure beams. What they tried to preserve was the feeling of people being out on that pier and smelling the sea and fish. And seeing the city of New York from that pier. And that's what they were trying to preserve. And I think that's this tension between structures and people that are always in conflict. - But no, that's such a good point. And I will have to also read that book. I just downloaded it before we jumped on the recording. And he touched on, I love how you connected both the article and the book you're reading, because this idea of how much the intangible should matter and how much it does matter is one that I think in a different sense, the book I was talking about and the author I was talking about was Alain Bertour, I believe it's pronounced. And the book was called Order Without Design, How Markets Shape Cities. And his old premise was that there's this dynamic between market forces also intangible in that sense and urban planning. And what the article and the book you're talking about are suggesting is there are also these social forces that are intangible, amazingly important in how we plan cities. I feel this is where non-urban planners, those of us who just live in cities and have what we experience, what we experience and have the desires we have about cities. This is where we blame urban planners because we feel like they do not recognize or acknowledge or factor as much as they should. These social or market are intangible forces when a lot of the talk and a lot of the approach is around buildings, infrastructure, utilities and the intangibles be damned. And I know that's not the case, but it does feel that way from the outside looking in when we think about urban planning and urban planners. I want to dive a little bit into the Order Without Design book because it touches on a lot of the things that we've been touching on. And it's this recognition that urban planners who tend to be in government positions. They work for the city or the working government or they're taking directives from the people who run the cities. It feels like there's not as much of an understanding of just the business of cities in their planning of cities. And this was sort of Alan Butler's point in his book that urban planners absolutely have to become a little bit more versed in the world of markets and business because then they will start to factor things early in the design that go along the lines of housing affordability, how mobility and transportation in cities should factor in to your example before we jumped on the call. The host of being able to get from point A to point B in a city depending on your socioeconomic class instead of just, oh, it's transportation, flat price or whatever it is and everybody. And in the book, he makes a case for because we don't factor markets as much. I urban planners, you know, factor markets as much. We see some of these unintended consequences of inequity and exclusion in cities and stuff. And I just wanted to make sure I touched on that because of this point you raised about the intangible and I forget how you pronounced it, but not the city, the-- - Yeah, the city and the village. - And Villa, yeah, yeah. I'd love your comments on that. - Yeah, I think that's a really good point to say that urban planners need to understand these market dynamics because like we live in a world with, you know, economics driving a lot of, you know, a lot of decisions or policies or like how our cities evolve and thrive. And so understanding that I think is a really good point. You know, we, in the 21 laws that we have come up with, we touch on two laws that I think are applicable here. - Yes, yeah, yeah. - So before we jump into sort of looking at the strategic foresight future, I'm gonna touch on the two laws. So the first one is urban form shapes social interactions. So the physical layout and design of cities significantly and influence social interactions, community formation, quality of life. And this is from research by Gail, who demonstrated how urban design impacts social life in his book that he wrote, "Cities for People," just like we're touching on, like how urban communities are as part of a city. And, you know, he talked about how poor urban design can lead to social isolation, reduce community cohesion and decrease the quality of life. And you gave the example of transportation. If it's unaffordable, it's going to lead to isolation or lower quality of life for those people who can't afford to get where they're going. You know, I brought up the point before this episode of like when I was in Los Angeles this past week, I did a little experiment. I walked to a place that was really far because it's not a walkable city. It took me 45 minutes to get from my hotel to this little neighborhood where there was a bookstore 'cause I always liked to go to or whichever city. And then I was like, I didn't want walking there, just didn't feel super comfortable. The streets were not walkable. So I decided to take a scooter back like one of those line scooters, which I've never done before. And I took it back and it got me there in 10 minutes. It's exactly the time that I thought which would make connect those two places together. But it cost 10 and I was so shocked that it cost 10 bucks. Like that doesn't seem that would be accessible to most socioeconomic classes below a certain threshold. - Yeah. - So I think the urban form of LA is not conducive if you don't have a car, which is sort of critical 'cause we drove in a car everywhere. The second one, which I think is really interesting. I love this one. We haven't brought this up before. This is one of my favorite laws that we have. It's called urban metabolism requires circular thinking. And then we say here, cities should be viewed as metabolic systems with flows of resources, energy and waste. And adopting circular economic principles can help optimize these flows. And this is researched by Kennedy and others that apply the concept of metabolism to urban systems emphasizing the need for circular resource flows. And if it's not considered, then linear thinking take, make, dispose model leads to resource depletion, increased waste and environmental degradation. And you brought up this in talking about how urban planning is trying to deal with climate resilience. And I think this laws touches on it, but it touches on it in a really unique way. I think it's really interesting to think and we've brought this up before. And I think of a city as a system and how the system can, you know, enable a better outcome for the dwellers in a city. - Absolutely, the relevance of the laws, whenever we have these conversations and we find the laws that matter or are related, always on me in how just clearly they are encompassing of the things that we're trying to talk about. So I'm pretty excited that we added these laws to the discussions we have here. And I'll touch on the first law, the Urban Form Shave Social Interactions. The Young Girls book, which is titled Cities for People, and it lays it out so well, the point you just made about LA. Cities have been now for the last few years anyway, decades being planned for cars. It's like car scale, not human scale. And that's what you experienced. The 45-minute walk shouldn't be how you experience a city. LA seems to have totally been designed for cars and continues to perpetrate that. And the hope and desire, I guess, we have is those approaches start to be reconsidered. In light of all we know, bringing in the second law as well, about resource management, sustainability, and just the climate consequences we are trying to avoid here. - Yeah. - So let's jump to the next section, Shave, where we're gonna talk about the future of urban planning, you know, how do we navigate this future? And I think we actually want to start with one of the other laws, which I think is also super interesting laws. So let's go there. - Yeah, no, I think we added this law shortly before the conversation we started recording here, because one of the big takeaways that I think both of us agree on for the future of urban planning is this need to think more about the VA, the intangible, the human scale, social, market forces. Those should really be sized and included in the future of urban planning, at a scale that they haven't been before. And consequently, law 21 is the one we pulled up here. It's that emergence and entropy are required to build thriving and sustainable cities. And I'd love you to just riff on that as much as you want. - Yeah, I think this is the part, like even taking it back to where you were talking about urban planners and understanding those intangible market dynamics, understanding dynamics is a way to enable emergence, is a way to allow a little bit of entropy, like planning in the sense of creating ways for something to come up with, that would be better than maybe being too rigid about the way we're trying to go about today, where we're building for the car, we're not building for the people, and building for people means you allow for emergence. And we talked a little bit about this, like in the future of architecture episode as well, like how design is really critical, just on the scale of a building, but in this case, on the scale of cities. And so I think this one is like a super interesting law. I can't wait for us to continue to pull the thread on this one in future episodes. - Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe we should consider a full episode on law 21, actually, where it applies. And, but yes, I think that is one of the really important and none of this ones for how I think the future of our own planning should go. And the other, a couple other ones here that I'll touch on, but we won't dive into, 'cause we've touched on in other episodes. So technology, obviously will play a bigger part in urban planning. What information, data, analytical methods, can we use to assess traffic flow, energy use? Definitely as much as we can utilize those things, but keeping the people at the center. We believe that should be critical. We've already mentioned the climate resilience movement that is ongoing, but in the future, adaptability. And in some cases, as much as we'd like to plan for resilience, in some cases, we just need to start to figure out adaptation in some places now. Maybe that's a bigger part of the future of urban planning. And then another one, which we've touched on in a specific episode, I believe the equity one, is just the need for inclusivity in planning. Instead of just complying with current standards, how do we bring the voices of more people to the table in how we plan the future? And I know you had some comments about this one, so I'd love to share. - Yeah, I think these are worthy, we've talked about them before, but they seem less interesting than the next one, which we have on here, which is about flexibility, which I thought I liked that you included this part, and you talked about how during COVID, we saw streets being changed, transformed into outdoor dining. Parks were repurposed or became places where socially distance gatherings could occur. Public spaces were reimagined for different types of functions. And I think urban planners in the future will likely try to prioritize these flexible, multifunctional spaces that can quickly be adapted to meet the evolving needs. Like there's so many sort of uncertainties that we have in the future with the climate, with pandemics, with the world just so rapidly changing, how we work and where we work, all that is changing. And so I think lessons from the COVID times of flexibility are ones to keep in mind. And I think it also relates to this emergence and entropy, like things can emerge because it is flexible. - Absolutely, yeah, no, I agree. I'm glad you're emphasizing that one because we've spoken about the rest at some point. And this is one that was a lesson we learned at the worst of times that ideally we don't lose as we face the future, so 100% agree. The final idea here is it ties back to one of the laws where you shared Reza and it's about the circular economy. And just how can we reduce waste? 'Cause our current city design and the way we, there's just a lot of waste. We're driving too much, we're consuming too much of our resources. We are utilizing too much of what we're finding out. We don't have infinite amounts of and consequently, how can we want reduce how much we use generally, the distances we drive, increase the utility of public spaces, not just for parking and cars, but to bring the green spaces back in and just keep it circular in that sense. How can we ensure our buildings even as they get demolished? The materials can be reused instead of just becoming waste. So it's things along those lines of the circular economy that I think should be part of the planning future. Yeah, I love that. I love that you bring this in and how it ties together, this idea of resilience, the idea of the climate, the idea of making things sort of more human for us and more sustainable for us in the future. And with that, Reza, I think that is coverage of the future of our planning. We're excited about what the future holds, honestly, because we're just at the cost of a new way of thinking about our planning as a result of the last few years as we came out of COVID. So there's a lot to look forward to. Yeah, yeah. And as we always do, we have our call to action. This time's call to action is a request for observing what you're doing in your city, what seems human-scale, what seems working, what doesn't seem to be working. I gave that example of LA and what seemed to work, but didn't seem to work. And share those examples with us, reply back to our newsletter and share those examples or as we post things on social. Share examples of what you think in your city has been planned well at human-scale that brings a community together as opposed to things that don't. And we'd love to share those back with our audience in our mailbag segment. And again, as we always ask, please like, subscribe if you are just listening without having subscribed and find one person to share this with, someone you think will enjoy this, someone who lives in cities and cares about their city. I think that's enough of criteria for you to share with a friend. And as we always say, thanks so much for listening and we look forward to hearing from you. All right, thanks everyone, bye. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) You
