CitySpeak

Marwa Al-Sabouni is an architect born, raised, and presently living in Syria. Despite the outbreak of the civil war in 2011, Al-Sabouni chose to remain in her home country, a decision which has shaped her philosophy as an architect.Al-Sabouni explains how architecture can influence whether a society lives in peace or teeters toward conflict.

Living with roommates is no longer a lifestyle reserved for college students.In the last five years, as many as one in five individuals aged 40 and above lives with roommates, depending on the location.Capitalizing on this trend are companies like Common, a real estate developer and operator of so-called “co-living apartments.” Instead of renting out entire apartment units, co-living companies rent out individual rooms and allow tenants to share apartment common spaces such as living rooms and kitchens.Brad Hargreaves is the founder and erstwhile CEO of Common and joins to discuss this growing trend.

Inclusionary zoning is a policy born of good intentions.On its face, inclusionary zoning policies mandate that real estate developers allocate a certain percentage of new residential units to affordable housing. But do these policies achieve their intended aim?Emily Hamilton, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, argues that inclusionary zoning may not be so effective after all.

Famed urbanist Jane Jacobs once compared the city sidewalk to a ballet, calling it a "complex order...always replete with new improvisations." Soon, this ballet will feature a new dancer: robots.Viggy Ganapathy is the head of government relations at Serve Robotics, a company designing small, four-wheeled robots that deliver food from local restaurants right to people's homes.

Alex Israel is the CEO and founder of Metropolis, a mobility technology company that has set its sights on the one of the largest, but frequently overlooked fixtures of the modern city: parking.

What does one do when cities stop permitting housing? Sue them. Dylan Casey is the Executive Director of the California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund, an organization that has set out to compel cities through legal action to permit new housing in California.

Any parent knows that it is during a child's earliest years that one ought to be the most careful. What they eat, what they watch, even what they listen to are all factors known to have an effect on a child's development. Now, according to a new study, there is yet another factor to add to the list: where a child grows up. Anne-Claire Binter, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, explains the impact of city living on child cognitive health.

The rise of e-commerce and on-demand delivery has jammed up the curbside with delivery vehicles. Frequently, these vehicles are left double-parked as their drivers race to drop off everything from large packages to personal-size pizzas. Jordan Justus is the founder and CEO of Automotus, a company that is helping cities to eliminate curbside congestion through the power of parking cameras and computer vision.

How to solve as stubborn a problem as housing affordability? Perhaps start by putting an entrepreneur, a technologist, and a world-famous architect in the same room. Bjarke Ingels, Roni Bahar, and Nick Chim talk about their latest venture Nabr, a startup on a mission to put more people on a path to homeownership.

The design of school buses in the U.S. has remained mostly unchanged for decades, yet school buses make up the largest public transportation system in the country, moving 27 million children every day. Hear from Ritu Narayan, the founder and CEO of Zūm, a startup that has set out to give the yellow school bus a full system upgrade.

Joel Klein graduated from public high school in Queens in 1963. Nearly 40 years later, he was appointed Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. Tune in for the former Chancellor's views on public education in the nation's biggest cities.

Bert Kaufman is the head of corporate and regulatory affairs at Zoox, the autonomous vehicle arm of Amazon. He discusses what's in store for cities when self-driving cars eventually roam the earth.

U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana was part of a coterie of ten Senators largely responsible for getting the $1 trillion infrastructure package to the President's desk. In this special edition of Cityspeak, he discusses the importance of infrastructure spending for U.S. cities and towns and the unique relationship between the federal, state, and local governments in building it.

Professor Sheila Foster is the Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Urban Law and Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, where she researches and lectures on environmental law and justice, urban land use law and policy, and state and local government. In her upcoming book, Co-Cities, she proposes a new framework for how cities can and should be governed.

Will Butler-Adams is the CEO of Brompton Bicycle, the manufacturer of the world-renowned Brompton folding bike. The Brompton is beloved by urban cyclists around the world and is for many the embodiment of city living.

In the season finale of CitySpeak, Los Angeles City Planning Director Vince Bertoni shares some of the joys and challenges of running one of the largest urban planning organizations in the nation.

With nearly 600 gas stations dotting the Los Angeles landscape, the rise of the electric vehicle presents an opportunity for the city to repurpose a significant portion of its urban fabric. Yan Krymsky, a design director at Perkins&Will, discusses some of his ideas for what L.A.—and other car-centric cities like it—should do with its gas stations.

Eric Jaffe is the Editorial Director at Sidewalk Labs, an urban innovation company with a plan to tackle sustainability and affordability in cities around the world. Eric joins Max to highlight some of the company’s revolutionary technologies.

Ken Steif is a data scientist, city planner, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, where he leads the school’s Master of Urban Spatial Analytics program. In his new book Public Policy Analytics, he explains how the public sector can catch up to private industry in adopting data science to make wiser, more efficient decisions.

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University where she researches globalization and migration in the context of global cities, a term which she coined in her 1991 book of the same name. Professor Sassen looks back on the three decades since the publication of her seminal study and offers her predictions on what’s in store for cities in the decades still to come.

Tyler Duvall is the CEO of Cavnue, a company that is designing and building roads optimized for autonomous vehicles. He joins Max to answer a central question: What will the infrastructure of the future look like?

In the season premiere of CitySpeak, Max Masuda-Farkas is joined by engineer, architect, and inventor Carlo Ratti. Ratti is the head of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, where he leads a team of researchers designing technologies for the cities of tomorrow.

Karin Liljegren is the founder and principal of Omgivning, an architecture and interior design firm that specializes in taking old buildings and giving them a new life. This practice is known as adaptive reuse architecture, and a quick glance at Omgivning’s portfolio will reveal that it is at the forefront of this practice. Karin and Max discuss the special responsibility that the adaptive reuse architect holds as the chief conservator of a city’s architectural history.

Jonathan Lee is a Principal and Managing Director of George Smith Partners, a national provider of capital market services to the commercial real estate industry. Jonathan joins Max to discuss the impacts that the pandemic has had on real estate lending and the changes he foresees for the wider market as we emerge out of the pandemic.

Samantha Millman is the President of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, the central forum for members of the public to voice their opinions on the real estate development projects under consideration in their city. Tensions run high at the Commission—the casual observer could easily mistake the virulence and vitriol for what you might hear at the British House of Commons. As President, Samantha acts as both mediator and adjudicator, so Max sits down with her to learn more about what it’s like to try to facilitate meaningful dialogue between two groups that rarely play nice.

Doane Liu is the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Department of Convention and Tourism Development. His sole mission—to raise up Los Angeles’ status as a convention and tourism destination—has been dealt a serious setback ever since the coronavirus spread across the Southland. Max and Doane dig into the numbers and forecast just how long the decline in tourism might last.

Jim Arnone is in his thirtieth year as a partner at international law firm Latham & Watkins. As the firm’s Global Chair of the Environment, Land & Resources Department, Jim has helped his clients navigate the uncertain and treacherous terrain that is California land use law. Over the course of his long career, Jim has seen this body of law grow to become the behemoth it is today, garnering praise from some and opprobrium from others. Listen in as Jim chats with Max about housing, the California Environmental Quality Act, and his outlook on the future of land use regulation in the state.

In the season premiere of CitySpeak, Max Masuda-Farkas is joined over Zoom by Bruce Katz, co-author of The New Localism and Executive Director of the Nowak Metro Finance Lab. Bruce has spent his career churning out new ideas for how cities can maintain their preeminence as the engines of economic growth in America. Since the coronavirus pandemic began, Bruce’s work has taken on a whole new urgency.

CitySpeak is back. In the season premiere of CitySpeak Season 2, Max is joined by Bruce Katz, co-author of The New Localism and Executive Director of the Nowak Metro Finance Lab. Tune in June 9.

Eric Owen Moss is the principal and lead designer of his eponymously named architecture firm Eric Owen Moss Architects. Alongside his formidable portfolio of international projects, Mr. Moss is widely known for almost single-handedly designing the Culver City neighborhood known as the Hayden Tract, a fantasy world of experimental architecture developed in collaboration with Mr. Moss’s longtime partners and friends, Frederick and Laurie Samitaur-Smith. Tune in to the final episode of CitySpeak Season 1 for a conversation that reaches far beyond the bounds of architecture, from the effect of the Vietnam War on the young architects of that decade to how Mr. Moss’s design philosophy was born out of Homer’s Odyssey.

Carolina Miranda is an arts and architecture writer for the Los Angeles Times and has had her work featured in a wide range of national and international publications. Ms. Miranda’s writing embodies what art historian Barry Bergdoll defined as the purpose of architecture criticism to be “a bridge between the professional activity of the designing architect and the role of the citizenry.” In this episode of CitySpeak, Ms. Miranda dons her critic hat to talk urbanism, local history vs. history writ large, and the role of architecture criticism within the ever-changing narrative of urban development.

William Witte is the Chairman and CEO of Related California, the West Coast arm of the Related Companies and one of the largest real estate developers in the state. Mr. Witte’s profile defies easy classification—his over 30 years leading Related California’s extensive development portfolio of over 16,000 residential units followed after a long career in the public sector, serving as Deputy Mayor and Director of Housing under then San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, working for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and even training as an urban planner at the University of Pennsylvania. In this episode, Max interviews Mr. Witte about NIMBYism, his work with Frank Gehry on The Grand, and several other Related matters.

Frances Anderton is the host of the popular radio program DnA: Design and Architecture, a weekly show on KCRW public radio. Born and raised in the ancient, historic city of Bath, England, Ms. Anderton chose her decidedly less ancient home of Los Angeles after visiting LA in 1987 on a story for the Architectural Review magazine about the city’s young architectural vanguard. Since then, she has become one of the most prominent voices (figuratively and aurally) in defining LA’s unique brand of urbanism. The Rodney King Riots, how LA compares to the UK, and the perils of too much historic preservation—tune in to hear Ms. Anderton discuss these topics and more in this second episode of CitySpeak.

In the debut episode of CitySpeak, Max Masuda-Farkas interviews the 41st Mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa. Dubbed by LA Weekly as “the Subway Mayor,” Mayor Villaraigosa was mayor from 2005-2013, promoting a new vision for Los Angeles as “a city of smart growth,” the fruits of which are just beginning to bear today. Listen in as Mayor Villaraigosa chats with Max Masuda-Farkas about everything from why cities are becoming more powerful than nations and how he wrangled the federal government to actually put its money where its mouth is on transportation.