Urban Visionary: We Need to Redesign Our Cities

0:00 Most of us. We walk around and we imagine that the physical environment that we're in has sort of always been here. It's just sort of an a Priori kind of idea. Suburbs are super new. Really, suburbs didn't come into fruition until after World War Two, and they were built very much by design Federal Highway Act, Mortgage Intratroduction GI Bill, and then all sorts of other things that racialized them, like redlining. I mean, I am not saying all suburbs are racist, and we please stipulate that. All I'm saying is that the origins of the suburban story were very much about a certain white middle class that government was designing for and our economic system was designing for. In fact, I think a lot of the anger the again in Maga is about the fact that government. It wasn't that people weren't on government welfare. They were, It's just that that welfare served a certain group of people, and there is a desire to go back to that hell.

1:03 Everybody, welcome to this anthe life as always with your host Edam Gambo. Really excited to be here with you today, and we're diving into a topic that I think is both super important and really really interesting for how we might think about what we can do with the future. And this is of course around like the lived and built environment and basically how the spaces that we build will shape what kind of society that we can be here or it could be right. And so I'm really thrilled to be joined today by Vishon Chakrabarti, who's the founder of the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism or Powell. As well as the author of a really awesome new. Book call The Architecture of Robanity, Designing for Culture and Nature and Joy. And it's interesting because, like a lot of the conversations that we see happening online and around folks like about cities like get stuck between these two technical areas. One is kind of on the idea of like do we have the right metrics and the right kind of carbon capture things that we're thinking about and other things about that cities are either just like wastelands or like the problem for climate change because there's so many people, there's a lot of pollution, all these elements kind of coming together, but you approach this problem differently.

1:59 And I think that it's important right that we can actually think about design in a thoughtful way that can kind of help usall some of these biggest challenges that we have coming, you know, from things like social isolation, climate change to I think importantly helping create more joyful in connected communities. So as an apologist that I like this idea and this approach. So let's let's kind of talk about that. Like, the one of the things that really caught my attention early on in your work is this idea of like cities as an area that we can create positive social friction. And I love this idea because oftentimes we think about that friction feels like a bad word or something that we don't want. But then you know, on the other side, I'm like a frictionless experience might be a little bit too slippery, and we might think about that in terms of Amazon's you know cart from product to buying is a little bit too frictionless that I end to buy too many things sometimes. So somewhere in between ite and the right kind of friction, especially social, seems important. So what is this this kind of concept.

2:50 I think it's a really important kind of anchoring piece for us to think about. What is it that cities can do for us in this kind of space of creating this positive social friction. Yeah, well, thanks for having me out, and it's great to be here. So the book is about, you know, what design and the built environment have to do with I think the pressing challenges of our time, and to me, the ones that are the most pressing are climate change and social and political division. Obviously, we just came out of a very very tough election, very divided country, and so this idea of social frictions I think really timely and poignant to talk about, because you know, a frictionless world is sort of one where everyone agrees with you, right, And so a lot of social media algorithms are out there putting us in our silos with other people who agree with us, and so we experienced sort of less and less friction until like the algorithm decides to like tit one of us against the other in some like anger filled you know, social media rage. And so I think collective physical environments. And I'm going to use that kind of wonky terms with the cities because the book is really trying to define urbanity very expansively, not just as big cities, but even small villages, even rural main streets. Right, that what the space of collective environments do is they

4:21 bring us together face to face, and we then have to you know, confront people who look different than us, pray differently differently than us, vote differently than us, and you know, to me, the distinction between community and urbanity is community is often the way with people who are very like minded find common cause together, and there's nothing wrong with that. But urbanity is this idea of being confronted and ultimately celebrating difference. Right that if you see a person in a borca, maybe they are way less scary in person than they are as like this kind of thing to be feared online. Right. And similarly, so like a lot of our work as a firm is in the industrial Midwest, and it's literally like a lot of the cities where the red pixels and the blue pixels meet, and we create a lot of public space in those cities. So I've seen people who are clearly you know, in one political camp and clearly in another political camp, and like I've actually helped create space where they're dancing together. And like that to me is really really important in the times we live in and coming out of the aftermath of this election, and so you know, I was really glad to get this invitation because you know, I don't think the fields outside of design take anthropology

5:52 think that much about correct me if I'm wrong, think that much about design and the built environment is something that's really influential on how people behave. But I think that there is a strong case to be made that in a world of social media and a world of AI, and a world where technology and algorithms are actively sort of messing with our heads and doing things with our sense of solidarity as a people, that the built environment can kind of do the opposite. The built environment can provide a kind of societal glue in terms of again, like you know, we need to rebuild rural main streets in this country. Rural main streets have been decimated, and that's something we can talk about. But even in our big cities, we need better and more public space that feels safe and places where we can really celebrate difference and that that celebration, in turn is an act of joy.

6:50 And I think it's really important to lean into that because I think you're right, a lot of the literature around cities is either kind of technocratic or completely misses the environmental argument by saying, well, they're heat islands and there are lots of people and they're polluted. No, no, no cities, When people especially like live in apartments and use mass transit, we have a way lower carbon footprint per person. They're actually very environmental friendly. Even a small village where people can just walk around more as opposed to getting in a car to get a quarter of milk has substantial environmental benefits. And so there's a lot we could talk about here about what the environment can do. And I just find that most policymakers academics don't really pay attention to this aspect of society at all. Yeah.

7:38 No, it's a good point, and I think you're right that there's kind of a it's just like a there right that literally it's the place in this right where we are, but we don't often kind of reflect on that in terms of how is our activities behavior shaped by like how are we in certain spaces? Right? And it's funny because like a lot of folks might also approach this from the perspective of like, okay, if I'm beginning to think about built the environment in space, like both I can I think about, like how am I about to walk around a sidewalk. Some people might come at it from the like Jane Jacobs, you. Know, neighborhood's eyes on the street kind of perspective of like how can we all be in a neighborhood space together. And build that. Others might come from it from a kind of I guess the consumer oriented lens worth thinking about like Howard Schultz from the former CEO of Starbucks idea of like third space in terms of like what can a coffee shop it be? That's not work, that's not home. But you know, I kind of think also the important way of how you're approaching this too is that we're we're kind of missing things before just going from these these two angles only, and that I love this idea that urbanity doesn't have to be in a city, right, that like it's it is about like when we think about productive frictions too. It is like I think you talk about that it can be in like rural villages, right, it can be in these other much smaller spaces. And so that's something that it's important for us to take seriously.

8:47 And what I appreciate that your work does too, is that you approach this kind of like an anthropologist, right, you are saying, how do we bring all these disparate perspectives and viewpoints of how we approach solving a problem together, because we can't solve them as silos. That's actually part of the that's actually part of the problem, right, we keep siloing our thinking into into one arena. And so in this case, like the question of housing, I think is such an important piece ford of like how we are able to live together? Right? And you know it might be either the masaceust in me or the I don't know, the social scientists, but. I appreciate it. Also how you walk us through in architection of rumanity to think about like a lot of how did we get to some of these challenge points right in terms of like auto focused car culture, the rise of suburbs, right, and like you know, in a lot of practices that were like redlining in terms of like doing racial segregation intentionally in cities to split out split out groups. And so I'm curious, like as you think about like some of these historical trends now for folks that haven't checked out the book yet, like walk us through I guess to some of these, like how we how we have like gotten ourselves to this point of challenge in terms of like how we've been setting up cities since the fifties really, I mean obviously before that too, Yeah, like what took place here?

9:51 And so at the first half of the book is really about how we got here. And I think the important thing to understand is for your listeners especially, you said something that's really critical, which is most of us we walk around and we imagine that the physical environment that we're in has sort of always been here. It's just sort of an a Priori kind of idea. Right. Suburbs are super new. Really, suburbs didn't come into fruition until after World War Two, and they were built very much by design, Federal Highway Act, Mortgage introtroduction GI Bill, and then all sorts of other things that racialized them, like redlining. I mean, and people sometimes get the wrong hear the wrong thing when I say that, I am not saying all suburbs are racists, and we please stipulate that all I'm saying is that the origins of the suburban story were very much about a certain white middle class that government was designing for, and our economic system was designing for. In fact, I think a lot of the anger the again in MAGA is about the fact that government. It wasn't that people weren't on government welfare they heer is just that that welfare served a certain group of people, and there is a desire to go back to that. And then you know, sixties civil rights movement happens, the definition of public expands. It wasn't until nineteen sixty five intol African American women had the right to vote nationwide, and so yeah, yeah, I mean that's

11:22 the year I was born. I mean, I still I find that it's astonishing. And so our definition of public doesn't really include everyone until the late sixties, and by that point they're you know, and so this mentality around government spending. So, you know, a country that only ten years earlier had passed the biggest federal infrastructure bill in the country, the National Highway and Defense Act, that built our interest at highway system. None of that was seen as government waste, none of it was seen as like profligate. And by the time you move into to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, suddenly it's all like we've got to starve the beast. You know, it's all the government waste.

12:08 And so the point is, no matter where you sit with that politically, the important thing to understand is that the physical environment we have today was a consequence of policy and a consequence of design, and there have been lots of failures in terms of that. We created, basically with suburban living, the most carbon intensive, racially, socially and economically segregated form of human habitation in the history of our species. And you know, we actually have this idea that it's about the American dream. That's not true. The American dream was defined in the nineteen thirties had nothing to do with houses and cars. That had to do it equal opportunity. And so what could a new version of the American dream look like? And this is actually important internationally because that old version of a house and a car to cars along set up a definition of success not just for Americans but for people around the world.

13:12 And so like two billion people entered the middle class around the world since the nineteen nineties, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Turkey. Those people, many of them emulated the suburban life as their kind of definition of success, and so the planet is really straining under the resource demands of that, you know, David Wells. Wells talks about the fact that most of the we associate climate change in greenhouse gases with the industrial revolution, most of the most pernicious stuff has happened since the first episode of Fleinfeld Eric, and he talks about this, right that, like, really, this is a pretty recent phenomena in terms of how intensively we started using resources, mainly driven by expanding houses and expands and cars. But the other thing we did is we made all that stuff really unaffordable. We locked in a certain set of benefits for people my age, right and basically made it exclusionary to generations that are younger than me. And so we you know, everywhere we wrote this article. My firm POW wrote this article in the New York Times about how to create more housing across New York City, and it was extraordinary the global response to that article. And what I basically discovered is that there's an affordability crisis of housing everywhere, like in almost everywhere in the world, in almost every size community in America, from small towns

14:46 to villages all the way up to the big cities, and so to me, the important aspect of being able to say we designed for one kind of you know, settlement pattern, it means we can design for another right. And so means we can design for another right. And so if people want to live in multi family housing, they want more walkable environment, aggressive say so, but there's data right like, so you can the most walkable environments in the country are the most popular, and they're increasingly the most expensive. So that's where people want to live.

15:27 It's just more convenient. That's true of red states, it's true of blue states. So how do we produce more of that? How do we make it more affordable? Because we know it's more ecological and I believe it's more joyful. You know, there's a great book called The Good Life that talks about, you know, human health and longevity and basically says that if you control for a bunch of variables, that what really leads to human health and longevity is the strength of one social connections, right, which leads me as an architect to think about, well, what are the kinds of environments that create social connection? And so like, Towards the end of the book, I talk about housing and housing prototypes that could build more neighborliness, basically build more of a sense of community again amongst different people, but that's much more affordable and in a way that, again I think would be joyful and just turn down the political heat that we seem to be experiencing right now, because everyone, regardless of your political camp, are feeling the stresses and strains of this right and so I think we're at a really good moment to reconsider how we've been living, what our definition of success is, whether we need to kind of retool the American dream so that it is more inclusive and more environmentally friendly, less segregated,

17:04 and more joyful. I think that's an interesting conversation to have, and I don't think it's a particularly partisan conversation. I think it's something that most everyone wants to get involved with at some level. Mm. Yeah, I agree, I think that, and I think it's that's I think part of the power of this approach is that we often get caught either in an abstract conversation and or as like a boogeyman thing that we're trying to like, or a straw man we're trying to fight against. Typically, when it comes to you know, political division, but then we think about both what do we share and that can literally be the shared environment, but then also what is it that we are having trouble sharing and how is it related to our belt environment too? You know, because it's like this interesting piece that when we think about like what is like a public space that can actually help foster you know, kind of cultural interaction, like interaction with nature, interaction that's joyful with folks.

17:55 You know, Oftentimes we might think of like a. Park, right, so we can all all kind of like congregate in a space together. But I'm kind of curious like as we think about that, because like that's that's like a super baseline example, right, And so actually I'm glad you brought up that that kind of housing example too, because the kind of the Goldilocks size of density that you kind of talk about towards end the book. Do I think it's really compelling way to have us kind of think about one, Like, I totally agree. I think it's important point for us to recognize like that another world is possible because we built this one, and it like it doesn't mean because we built this one that's it, right, And as we kind of think through that when it comes to things like housing and dwelling as something that like both is it should be afforded to. Everybody as a right. Then on top of that, like to live with dignity at thest like another another key piece here that I've also seen you write about, and that it's important for us to kind of think, you know, we kind of talk about both the home as that kind of place, and like there's there's two angles that are kind of percolating in my head here, and like the one is the kind of public spaces that we share, like parks, sidewalks, uh, you know, maybe a shopping flosy kind of area, and the other one, of course is like the dwelling, like like the home, and how we've set these both up Like one you're kind of pointing towards here too, that like the suburbs is one of those places that like having like the auto automobile focus and like in the single family home or like this radically new experiment in the human story, right that we've like decided we didn't like we haven't had We've not had the suburbs for a long time, right, And so that's like being a built in fracturing of how we lived together separately, and then on top of that, like how are we thinking about public space and in terms of you know, who has access to it? And that's also comes to our

19:26 affordable housing kind of crisis question too. So as you're you're thinking about this and like and maybe we can talk about the kind of the research you did around the how to we like build the homes for for a million a million New New Yorkers As we think about that, like you kind of bring up this idea of the Goldilocks dimensions of a building, right because we kind of think, oh, if I need to have like either you know, affordable housing or new housing, it's like immediately people tend to think of And I did it first too, before I was looking at your work, like you know, seventy five story building, not the top, but just like you know, like a fifteen story building, and like you have this kind of incorrect idea of like what the size actually has to be, and like this Goldilocks you know dimensions you kind of talk about, like is three stories that's not at all crazy to think about.

20:07 You know? Yeah? Yeah, So I mean, look, fifteen stories might be absolutely appropriate in downtown Boston or you know New York and Philadelphia, San Francisco. Most of the countries are much lower scale, and we need to be super sensitive to that. The three story thing, really it's a consequence of the building code. Basically, the building code says you can build a three story building without an elevator as long as the ground floor units are accessible to a wheelchair, and so as soon as you have so it's a step function. As soon as you have four stories, you need an elevator, and that changes everything because you need one elevator, you need two elevators, and then you need fire stairs, and then you're pouring a bunch of concrete. And then the only way the developer can like even break even is building a fifteen story building. And so that's why that Goldilocks module and the Goldilocks reference is something between a single family house and a tower basically, right, So it's wheat spot in between. And the beauty of that and the reason it's important for this idea of social connection positive social friction is you're right, a park is one example of all of that. But the reason this housing lends itself to that it is really two things. One is if you basically just got a single stare that connects all the apartments in a building. It means people run into each other on that stair you know, if there's an elderly neighbor that you haven't seen for a while, you get worried. There's something about it that's much less anonymous.

21:33 And you know, we used to there's a picture of the book of like these really beautiful forms of density we built all over the world, Rome tel Aviv, Mumbai, which was basically, you know, like twenty apartment units wrapped around a staircase and one single elevator that was in a case. All of that's illegal today because of fire code and wheelchair code and for legitimate reasons. But we we you know, we regulated ourselves out of some really beautiful Basically, most of Europe has built in that kind of density, and most of it's illegal today in terms of building code, which is why everything has to revert to skyscrapers when it gets bigger. So this three story thing does build community just by having that single stare.

22:19 The other thing about it is it's a building block, and it's really a prototype. It's not a design, but it's a building block that allows you to organize streets or courtyards or other forms of sort semi public space, which all of our great cities have, right, which is like, you know, you come off a big street, then you're on a small street. Maybe you walk through a little courtyard or a use to get to an apartment. And that hierarchy of public space is very important to people's sense of their community, their neighborhood, what scale they relate to, who they run into at the grocery store, the dry cleaner, all of that stuff really matters. It makes people feel connected.

23:03 We have a loneliness crisis in the country right now, and you know, and I just want to like, we can talk about the suburbs, but to me, the you know, the suburbs that are close into cities, right the Lexington, Massachusetts, and the Montclair, New Jersey, and all those places are fine, and like some of them have some mass transit access. So what worries me much more? Like I just finished my sixth cross country trip and like, again I go back to this election and how disconnected I feel people are on the coast, whether they live in the cities or the suburbs, from what's happened in rural America and why there is the level of anger at both parties.

23:52 At both parties, we've decimated rural America right through policy, through design, you know. And so like most of rural America had main streets, and those main streets were where people, where older people saw each other, where teenagers flirted, all of that kind of stuff. The main streets then got replaced by shopping malls, you know, through the seventies and eighties and into the nineties. So the main streets, all the stores became vacant, right, and so everyone hang out at the shopping mall, but at least there was some kind of societal space in the shopping mall. Then big box e commerce came along and said, oh, we don't have to build all of that social space that's in a shopping mall. We can just have a big box store and a bunch of asphallt.

24:44 Right. Yeah. And so when you go through all of that, which you notice is there is now no social fabric anymore. There's no social glue that's pulling people together. I mean, I'm sure people can still go to church or go to a dance something, but that's a destination. It's not just a place where people hang out. We did this project in Columbus, Indiana, which is just a canopy over an intersection, but it was an invitation for people to use that canopy to close the street to cars and do festivals there. And there have been all sorts of very different ethnic events, you know, Pride Week and Mike Pences Indiana, you know, all of this stuff that happened there just by virtue of trying to create an invitation of some public space on a space that's normally used by a car. And so, you know, this is one of my main takeaways from going cross country that we've ripped away all the physical places there are no there are no parks per se, right. You know, sure some of the bigger cities across the country and parks, but just a regular small town, it'd be hard pressed to find a park, a playground, you know, in some cases even a sidewalk, right. And so what you're then doing is you're relegating people to their basements and glowing screens where they find community. And that, of course is algorithm

26:19 driven in the most dimissive form of finding community. And so I think that like this is now you know, look, obviously I wish the other person had won, because she was talking about three million new housing units, and I think there would have been a really interesting conversation about what kind of housing and for whom and could it form more community fabric. I'm still hopeful that even the things that are flowing out of Biden's infrastructure bill will you know, provide some powder for us to go out and build some of the kind of societal fabric I'm talking about. But that, to me is the physical challenge needs in front of us that would over time, help to seal some of the riffs that we're feeling in our country because there's just no place to go to be together.

27:17 Yeah. No, and that that's like a that's it's it's it's a stark reminder, right that we have to understand where we're looking for one right, And I can kind of see, like where are these stories? I recently I was speaking with Brian Reisinger on the podcast, and he is a he's a fourth generation Wisconsin farmer and and you know, and just wrote a book about like basically his family's story over the past one hundred years, you know, and like basically this to your exact point, that the ultimate decimation of kind of like rural America and how that is on one had led to like, yeah, this is like this deep anger at like both political parties right again, it's not just not just a one off or like one party kind of anger. But recognizing this is this is a really important point too, of like, as like the physical space of towns have changed, right, and that oftentimes if you're in royal community you're more spread out.

28:06 But then where do you come together? Right for these kind of you know, get togethers. And that's an interesting piece I thought about in terms of like a church as a destination space versus necessarily just like you might just happen to be there, right, you know, because it's like it's more and more of a timed event kind of thing. You know. It can be a general public space too, of course, but like that's an important thing for us to recognize. Two of Like, even if we say, well, there's this area people can get together, it's like, but is it what kind of character does it has in terms of. Like how are we getting together? Well? Again, this is the distinction in my mind between community and urbanity. If it's a destination space, you know, if it's a church, it's people who pray together and there's that's great, but it is not gonna bring people of different faiths together, right for the most part. Right it it's it's so you know, like a Mason's lodge, whatever it is. Those are people who are finding common cause and they you know, great. But the thing is what real public space does is it creates places of serendipity, places where you're going to run into people that you didn't plan to run into, and see people you didn't plan to see. And again, especially like you know, the country is much more diverse than people think, you know.

29:18 And so like take this Springfield, Ohio thing, right, Like you know, like the real story is they're legal migrants. People wanted them in the air because they needed workers. Now, how do you create spaces that people can interact so that community understanding can take place between you know, the populations that there and newcomers, right? And that I think is a really American story, right, Like this is kind of like the foundations of this country that we don't just hang out together in tribes, right, but that we actually are a big polyglot nation. And so and I really believe in that. Look, I've I grew up outside of Boston and experienced a tremendous amount of racism. And I've experienced a lot of that kind of stuff on both coasts, and yet in my six cross country cross country drives, have experienced a lot less of it. You know, the country is an amazing place. And even though people may harbor whatever views they harbor, when you're face to face, and this is the whole thing about this positive social friction idea. You know, people can be so repugnant online, but when people are face to face, it's a different interaction.

30:45 And I would argue that good social inhibition depths in and because it's steps in, it's you know, there is organically some sense of like if I was I was in a pretty rural town in Utah and there's a place called New York Pizza. I had a slice of pizza in there, and I said, you know, I got to tell you, the pizza is really good. And I'm from New York City and so you know, I'm talking to the woman behind the counter who has never been to New York City. I assure you, and like that stuff is really important. That's what gives you some definition or idea that you actually share this idea of America and this idea of a country, right, And so I just think that there's a lot of work to do here, you know that, Like there's just so many different you know, where we want this competition to expand the rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and rock and role is kind of like, you know, there's only a few bipartisan things left in the country, you know, it's sort of like pizza, rock and roll and maybe NASA, right, Like there's like, you know, so this again is a space of social interaction, and we were able to create

32:19 this kind of jam space, this lobby that people could come to without having to pay for a ticket, and they can hang out in. Young people can hang out in make music together. And again you'd get a lot of walks of life through that space. And so I think there's just an example after example that you can look to where we could create this very positive sense of urbanity even in very small places. That's a great point. And so part of it too, it makes me think, is like how are we thinking about the built environment spaces and like we can take something as quote unquote small, right, or like individual as a home and thinking about how we're building that in terms of multi family housing or you know, a bigger example that can either be you know, a train station, thinking of like like Pennsylvania Station. I was thinking of the work that y'all have done on planning in that space, and also in like rock role Hall of Fame is a good example too of like there's a paid way to go into the building, but then also like you also have a public space kind of in the in the entry area too, to hang out and have that kind of serendipitous space. And I guess as we think about that too, it's like I love this idea of kind of intentionally designing for serendipity, right, like having these kind of chance encounters with folks that you may have not planned to see. But then that's like where like the magic kind of happens, you know, And it's like I'm also thinking about this from you like the the I guess the other weirder example of like Burning Man that's like designed around serendipitous occasions and just you know, wacky coming together, but it's got its own class issues, right, But like you know, so how

33:50 do we think about that like in terms of if like what does it mean to kind of design for serendipity, if we're kind of thinking about this in a space. Well, so you mentioned Penn Station, and for your listeners who don't know, Penn Station, it's the most horrible place in the United States. It's it's you know, it's this underground train station. It's the busiest transportation hub in the Western hemisphere. Very confusing, right, Well, it was designed for one hundred and twenty thousand people a day. It handles about six hundred thousand, and so it's incredibly congested. There was a beautiful old station there that had been torn down years ago, triggered the nation's landmarks laws, and now we're left with its mess, and a number of us have been trying to fix the mess. But I compare it to Grand Central Station, right, not very far away, glorious, right, And this is the way I'm going to try to answer a question about how you designed for these things.

34:42 You can look at the train stations, right, like, so it's supposed to be functional, to Penn Station was designed to be this functional thing. You get off the subway, you race to your commuter train, and like, if you look at the people at Penn Station, they all look miserable. They're all staring down at the floor. They're not looking at each other eye to eye. There is no real serendipity because you're just like bumping and grinding your way through the thing. Grand Central is a ballet. When you look at Grand Central and there's hundreds of thousands of people moving through there too, but there's big, lofty ceilings, there's natural light coming in. There's almost no signage because the architecture tells you where to go. You don't need the signs. But to me, when I'm always amazed by is I walk from Grand Central Station all the time, and they're always tourists taking pictures from different vantage points, and you know they are observing the ballet, like there's people taking video, and there's this way in which everyone's moving around each other and not bumping and grinding into each other like pland Station. And what that does is it gives everyone the room to kind of exhale, and so you can look up and when you look up again, you see people who think differently than you. That and I know people might think, oh, New Yorkers, like everyone's the same. That's not true at all. I mean, not just in terms of like racial or social diversity, but also political diversity. You know, if you look at the

36:14 numbers that came out of this last election, you know it was much closer than people think. And so you know, to me, the contrast between the two stations kind of tells you all that you need to know about, like what makes for good public space and what makes for terrible public space. And you know, the distinction between those two things in terms of cost is is so deminimous compared to the uplift the sense of positive experience that you get. And again, same thing in small towns where you can have a bus station, you can have a park, you can have just a main street and just a little bit care of that says that there's this idea that we care about ourselves, that we have a sense of society, and that therefore we can get along and can bridge our differences. And I'm just you know, it may sound all very naive, but we can have to.

37:21 We're at a cultural moment in this country where we have to kind of go back to ground zero and say, hang on a second, what is the country about. I mean, to me, the one piece of good news that came out of this election was that it was not close, and that meant that those who lost have to kind of look in the mirror and have to kind of understand that this is the country that they live in and that there needs to be some sense of humility about what we missed. I'm going to say we because I'm just going to include myself in that, right, And to me, a very good starting point is how do we come together with people who think so fundamentally differently than us and find common cause? And I think you need a platform for that. I think you need space for that. I don't think social media is going to do it.

38:18 Yeah, one hundred percent would agree with that too, and that it's we we've been algorithmically driven or drooped or whatever we want to say verb wise of just like what is it that we're paying attention to? Right? Or I guess we're sarah to genergic. What's the words sarrasin energic and the you know, our brains are saying, hey, this is good. I'm not smart enough to know that word. I don't either, so we're so someone knows that word. But you know, again, don't mean hit from like wanting to look at our phones, but realizing that like that's actually a huge fuel of our kind of isolation crisis, right that we looking down versus up, and like it's it's amazing. It's a great great contrast of like Penstation and Grand Central Station to realize like how are we actually physically being in a space and like is it in like does it inspire us to look up? Or like you know, make I want to take pictures of you, like the like the kind of bault of the seedlings and or yeah, it's just like watching how how it's like the flow is happening, right, and there's something that's like really alluring of that too.

39:12 But just seeing that kind that kind of human that human flow piece. This makes me think too that like one of the other contrasts, I really think that's important. And then also I like that you explore is the the idea of like one of the challenges and the something that you put words to the thing that I'd just seen before I hadn't thought too much about, but that like a lot of downtowns just looks the same across the world, right, there's like a very similar skyscrape or architecture that. You can just envisions. Oh that that's what a downtown looks like. And as we think about like being intentional about our built environment how it shapes how we interact with one another, there's this interesting piece of like keeping like local cultural flair, but then also kind of putting you know, what are great standards that we can use across different places, you know, in spaces and kind of globally, and so how do we kind of think about that that idea of like keeping the kind of local cultural flavor of you know, buildings and spaces, but then also like letting us kind of think about different scales of buildings. So it's like we don't have just kind of the similar or saving exact kind of downtown construction, but recognize that like we're e were trying to build a certain space that we can have things that we know work I guess, like whether it's using digenous materials or it's you know, kind of being intentional about it if it's a bigger building, I suppose, you know, don't. I'm kind of back and forth trying to think about about this idea of like what does it mean to do that, Like how do we keep like efficiency requirements and safety regulations in place as well as keeping like local culture as part of our.

40:42 Building The process book talks a great deal about this. I mean, I think we need to sort of step so really, since the advent of commercial air travel and then accelerated by global technology, technological services, communications, and so forth, you know, we obviously went through this period of mass globalization that included the ability to mass produce all sorts of building materials and so and actually the globalization of the real estate industry, and so you had a lot of you still have a lot of big firms that are international firms now that build with a lot of the same materials, to the point where you know, our built environment is indistinguishable, you know, and I hear this all the time. I'm a very pro growth, pro city person, but it's hard to be pro urban growth if the urban growth is so soul crushing. You know, this stuff all looks the same, It's got the same chain store at the bottom of it. It just you know, and you don't even know where you are anymore. I would argue that we've been experiencing for a while now, but with the pandemic and now you've got a president talking about tariffs like we're we're moving to I mean, I don't think globalization is going to completely stop, but we're transforming what it was to be. You know, like NAFTA,

42:14 all of that stuff was a different period of globalization. And I think part of that is coming from a real yearning people have to make sure that local histories and narratives and cultures are somehow bulldozed by this universalist kind of mentality that tries to make everything the same. And architecture is both a mirror and a window into what's going on in society, right and so it you know, it both represents kind of that banala globalization, it's also kind of, I think a window into the potential for a different future. And so like our Domino project in Brooklyn, you know, is very much about being rooted in local history and culture and heritage and also looking forward to a kind of different reality in a different time. And I think that duality of having that bosan kind of liminal condition of being able to say, you can be both of the larger world, but you have to pull people with you alongside you in terms of history and narrative and culture. And I think this is really endemic to our species. I think it's something that's really important to us. And so what I and the book talks about this a lot. What I've just sensed a great deal of in that globalizing of cities is this kind

43:46 of on nui, this tremendous sense of loss, right, where people just feel like their environments are getting bulldozed in favor of something that like is kind of unrecognized and kind of banal and awful. And it just doesn't have to be that way. And so that's meant to be a clarion called in my industry, not just the architects, but the real estate developers and the just all the people who are responsible for this, the government officials to just care more about the environments in which they're building, to build things that are just more materially sensitive, you know. So like in our firm, we have a whole set of criteria that we put any design through to say, you know, is this design connective for people connected to this place? You know, if you can pick up the building and move it somewhere else and it still makes sense, we've failed, yeah, right, And so uh and this is a hard challenge, but it's a good one, and so we do a lot of this. You know, at Princeton we're building a building and it's very contemporary, but we're building it out of materials that will absolutely resonate with the historic fabric of the campus. There are ways of doing this right. It just requires attention and intention, you know, and and so look, this isn't going to solve the world's problems, but I think people feeling more connected to

45:19 their culture and their climate and there you know, they're they're just general environment. I think again lowers the amount of political tension political resentment. Mm hmm. Yeah, I think that's a that's right, and that's it's an important piece that Like again, I love the idea of saying, how do we both provide and bring attention intention too to the building space? Isn't I wanted to like I don't know if I read Path two past, but I want I want to provide a little space to like get a sense from you, like from your six cross country trips, like how I guess what do you what do you think that the the left mist answer like what like what are they not seeing that?

46:01 Like that? That? Like I think and I will say like that being there like showed you like that they can show any of us. Like if you spend time in a place with like attention intension, like what do you what did you see that's like kind of caught your attension of like what should we be thinking about for the world that we want to build? So my son and I pull an airstream and so we're in you know, sometimes we're in national parks. Sometimes we're in trailer parks. And when you're in the trailer parks and you're going through especially the industrial in Midwest, uh, you know, which I've heard is politically kind of important, you really see a lot of pain and desperation, right And and so for the people out there who somehow think that this election was just only driven by racism or misogyny, I think they're just missing something enormous about their fellow citizens. You know, there are many count that voted for Barack Obama twice that went for Trump. And so it's just too easy an explanation. I find. Sure is some of that fueling some of the anger out there, of course, but I just think it's not the line's share of it. I think what the left miss is the extent to which inflation, and let's not forget hyperinflation is what elected Adolf Hitler. I mean, inflation is an insidious thing, particularly for the working class living paycheck to paycheck.

47:29 But I think there's a larger thing that is about this globalization thing. And unfortunately, as an immigrant, you know, I feel this like immigration is too much of the channel for this anger. But this started again with both parties. So in the nineties you had NAFTA, right, which basically did outsource a lot of jobs. Then in the two thousands you had the wars, and you had the subprime mortgage cis. And what I don't think we at all feel on the coasts is the disproportionate impact those things had on the middle of the country, their sons and daughters that went off to war. It's you know, you know, New York City at the depths of the subprime real estate crisis lost about twenty twenty five percent of its real estate value, which bounced back inside of eight or ten months. Whereas people lost their homes, they live in trailer parks because they lost their homes. The trauma of that doesn't go away in a year or two years or four years. So the remaking of the GOP by this man has to do with the fact that George W.

48:48 Bush's GOP failed the middle of the country in ways that are just massive and still unaccounted for. And then of course people didn't feel like the people who created that crisis paid anything for their misdeeds, right, And so the system does feel rigged to people. And then there's one other piece I'd just like to say that's very true of both coasts, which is there's a huge private equity apparatus that went in and then picked the meat off the bones of the carcass. So the last pharmacy, the last family owned store, got you know, consolidated into big box and changed stores and e commerce and just decimated the landscape. And so, you know, there were earlier times when I took my son through some of these towns and he'd say things like it just looked like some sort of bomb had gone off. And this isn't the richest country in the world. People who are very well aware when they watch Seinfeld and Friends and section of the city that there's this whole other life going on in their country that they have no pardon. Yeah, And I just I think that we have really lost touch with that and so and and then gotten you know, involved in a lot of you know, these people are not focused on what pronouns to call people, and so so it's just you know, there's there's it's it's important

50:19 to stand up for equity and lack of bigotry and you know, and be a party of progress. But at the same time, it has to include everyone. And that's I think what we missed. I think we fundamentally missed how much pain people were in, how desperate they are for change, and the fact that anyone who who reeks of establishment is going to be painted with that brush, right, I think that's what we missed. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I think it is. It's it's it's important kind of both because at the same time too, it's like we want to encourage people that just like just to point fingers saying, oh, it's this or that, right, because I think, as you want, if we said to that, like, there's there's a lot of nuance there that we have to recognize, right, and and that like it's not about painting broad strokes of one one group or one story.

51:08 Like we understand that there are elements of that in there, but it's like. When we go back to the topic at hand, the places that I saw that were more physically coherent or more socially coherent. There was less distress in those places, the places that still had an intact main street or intact downtown, right, because again there's just this sense of togetherness and social bond and looking out for each other as opposed to those towns that were just again just kind of decimated. Yeah, that's I think that's a great point too. Is there like a way to help I guess also because when you think of urban design, I guess, well urban if we think of design and architecture, like we tend to then jump to the urban, right, like the actual city space.

51:52 But it's like, how do we how can we help kind of like bring. More design movement to rural spaces too, right 'banity right, the kind of in between, Like how do we do that? Well, we try to do it a lot. We're trying to work in as many of those kinds of places as we can find that where people you know, people, I got to say, people are just astonished when you show up. You know, they just they think of themselves as flyover country. They think that like we're all just out to ignore them, and so showing up is half the battle. Yeah, and not just to canvas for elections, but you know, to really be there in some sort of set, in some sense of solidarity, right. And you know, look, the fact is these places need investment, right, they need jobs back. You know. I do think that a lot of the the infrastructure build the Chips Act, the things that float out of the Biden Harris administration are going to do a lot of good things in the kind of communities that we're discussing, including rebuilding social fabrics and infrastructure.

53:06 I don't think the maiden Harris administrations is gonna end up getting a lot of credit for that stuff, but I do think that is going to be helpful. But a lot of it, beyond money and resources in public policy, is just attention of just feeling like, you know, we're all in this together. And you know, again, a lot of the work we do is trying to do that. It's just you know, a lot of my peers are off, you know, designing crazy spaceships in Saudi Arabia, zero interest in that. You know, there's a lot of work to do here, right, and I think all of us in different disciplines can really think about that, like it is a privilege to be somewhat successful in this country. You know, my parents came here with thirty two dollars and so, you know, I think one way of paying it forward is to just pay attention to a lot of the places.

54:00 By the way, not all these places are in the industrial Midwest. Some of them are in a town, you know, two towns over from you. Yeah, right, And so that's also very important to think about. And so I you know, I'm kind of cautiously optimistic that like, you know, maybe we just got a big wake up call and we need to now pay attention. Mm hmm. Yeah. No, I think that that's a great that's a great place for us to then say, let's let's put our attention there, because I think that's that's. Uh, what is needed. And I think honestly, it's like as we like dilate in and it's like that's what a lot of people want to They want to both be seen, to be heard and to hear others, right like that that is that the sense of connection that we can get in recognizing that like in part it might be some that's a few undred miles away. Other ways it might just be yeah, it's just down the road, right, it's a town or two over. So I think that's that's uh, that's really great. So I appreciate you sharing that. And so you want to say thank you for joining me on the podcast today. It's been it's been actually really fun to talk with you, and I appreciate you sharing your insights and excited to get the book into the hands of listeners.

54:59 So so yeah, I mean, keep doing the great work. I mean is always. I'd love to keep the conversation going in the future because it's it's important to kind of broaden these these pieces. And I appreciate how you connect a lot of the different elements together. And then we kind of we can begin from one discipline, but we have to kind of see social problems require social fabric, and fabric is sewn together, right. I can't just say it's this one one approach. So I appreciate your disciplinary right on. All right, cool, Well, thank you again for joining to me, and it's pleasure great, Thanks very much for