REDESIGNING CITIES: The Speedwell Foundation Talks @ Georgia Tech

Kai-Uwe Bergmann, partner at BIG, the Bjarke Ingels Group, and host, Ellen Dunham-Jones, discuss the how, what, and why of designing joyful social functions into practical infrastructure at all scales. How did their ideas of hedonistic sustainability embolden them to convince clients to build a ski slope on top of a power plant in Copenhagen, build a concert hall on a highway intersection, turn storm surge fortifications around lower Manhattan into public parks and gardens – let alone design new cities in the desert, on the ocean, and on the moon?

Dan Parolek and his team at Opticos Design coined the term and wrote the book on Missing Middle Housing to describe house-sized buildings with multiple units. These duplexes, quadplexes, cottage courts, etc. are essential tools in creating equitable walkable urbanism. In this episode, Ellen Dunham-Jones talks with Dan about their implementation at Culdesac, Tempe, the country's first and largest carfree and mobility rich community built from scratch. For those interested in images, the podcast is a companion to the video of Dan's hour-long lecture given the same day and also available at the Redesigning Cities website.

Whether heroic commemorative bronze statues, contemplative experiences of transformed materials, or vibrant activist murals, public artworks give cities cultural and economic value and provide meaningful identity to communities. But how do different kinds of public spaces and community identities influence public artwork? Stephanie Dockery, manager of Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge and Tristan Al-Haddad, architect and founder of Formations Studio will present and discuss public art projects they have each worked on and their impact on cities and different kinds of public spaces.

Change the house, change the city? The American Dream of ownership of a detached single-family house is increasingly under attack. It has a racist history and ongoing legacy of segregation, a high environmental footprint, fosters sprawl and loneliness in ever-smaller households, and is increasingly unaffordable. Diana Lind, of the Penn Institute for Urban Research and author of Brave New Home: Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing, Ellen Dunham-Jones and Andrew Bruno of Georgia Tech will discuss the impact on cities and neighborhoods of both exclusive single-family house zoning and alternative forms of houses/housing. 

What if developers thought of themselves as farmers, reviving their neighborhood's abandoned buildings, planting locally symbiotic uses, and growing small business entrepreneurs? And what if they wanted to teach you how to do the same in your neighborhood? Monte Anderson of the Incremental Development Alliance and Options Real Estate in South Dallas, TX and Bernice Radle of Buffalove Development in Buffalo, NY will discuss each of their work and its impacts as Season 5 of Redesigning Cities starts digging!

How are younger cities leveraging the renewed importance of urban parks in the pandemic? Adrian Benepe of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Trust for Public Land, Clyde Higgs of the Atlanta Beltline, and Tim Keane from the City of Atlanta will discuss how Atlanta's investments in new parks and greenways are building on its Olmsted legacy while radically transforming development patterns, trip modes, and local ecology.

Today, a minimum-wage earner can afford a one-bedroom apartment in only 145 out of 3,143 counties in America. Andrew Ross of NYU and author of Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing (2021) and Shelley Poticha of the NRDC and former Director of Sustainable Housing and Communities at HUD will discuss how ineffective government planning, property market speculation, and poverty wages have created this housing crisis -- and the policy and design measures needed to pull us out of it.

Dr. Richard Jackson, emeritus professor of public health at UCLA and former Director of the CDC National Center for Environmental Health and has argued that architects and planners can have more impact on the health of the next generation of kids than all the physicians in the world. His words are best proven correct through the work of renowned architect Michael Murphy of MASS Design Group, dedicated to the construction of dignity and rooted in healthcare design. Listen in on their conversation reinvigorating what it means today to design for health, safety, and welfare.

Lock-downs, work from home, and fears of crowded indoor space during the pandemic have shifted how many of us use streets. From “streateries” and street racing, to drive-by birthday parades and outdoor schools, our streets have become significantly more social. Will these shifts last if and when the pandemic eases – and what do they mean for public space, transit, and mode-splits? Professor Vikas Mehta of the architecture and urban design programs at the University of Cincinnati, Tony Garcia of Street Plans Collaborative and Tactical Urbanism fame, and Professor Kari Watkins, civil engineering at Georgia Tech will help us figure it out.

How can we undo the ways economic policies have contributed to structural racism? And how should we redesign cities to reflect and advance equitable economies? Raphael Bostic, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and Catherine Ross, Regents Professor of City Planning and Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology will discuss solutions to these and other questions.

What can urbanists learn from how Sci-Fi authors have reimagined cities? GT Regents Professor in Science Fiction Lisa Yaszek discusses with host Ellen Dunham-Jones how diverse voices from around the world have challenged racial and gender norms in science and technology while proposing alternative kinds of cities, spaces, and social justice. Yaszek is the author of Galactic Suburbia and co-editor of Literary Afro-futurism in the Twenty-First Century. Shaunitra Wisdom, GT School of Architecture Academic Advisor, author, and Periplus Fellow shares her insights and moderates Q&A.

 Post-pandemic, how might we leverage tele-work-medicine-education-everything to even the playing field between rich and poor places instead of exacerbating the digital divide? University of Arizona Professor Arthur C. Nelson and Debra Lam, Executive Director of Georgia Tech's Partnership for Inclusive Innovation will help me, Redesigning Cities host Ellen Dunham-Jones, think through this question. 

Josiah Cain, Director of Innovation at Sherwood Design Engineers presents the firm’s advanced techniques for regenerative site design before Mike Messner, Professor in Practice at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business, leads their conversation on the implementation, financing, and future prospects of these high-performing sustainable strategies.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen, critic and author of the award-winning Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives, Sonit Bafna, associate professor and director of the Georgia Tech SoA Ph.D. program, and Harrison Fraker, Dean Emeritus at UC Berkeley and author of Minding The City: Field Notes on the Poetics of Sustainable Public Space present their research on how spatial design impacts meaning, emotions and behavior, before discussing the implications for redesigning cities.

As climate change and urban heat islands compound the impacts of non-climatic events such as pandemics and blackouts, critical infrastructure too often fails just when it is needed most. How do we rethink and redesign critical infrastructure at the city, neighborhood, and microclimate scales? Brian Stone presents new research findings from the Urban Climate Lab at Georgia Tech in discussion with Doug Kelbaugh, author of The Urban Fix: Resilient Cities in the War Against Climate Change.

Dolores Hayden, professor emerita of Yale, kicks off this episode with her seminal research on the history of feminist architecture and urbanism and how it contrasts to suburbia’s construction of women’s roles. Eva Kail then presents how she has implemented gender mainstreaming in the design of parks, housing, transit and neighborhoods while working for the city of Vienna, Austria for over thirty years. The rich conversation that follows, led by Julie Kim and Ellen Dunham-Jones of Georgia Tech, discusses why the US hasn’t followed Austria’s lead, hopes for future feminists, and more.

What is the Green New Deal and what might its advancing of equity, jobs, and justice in relation to climate change mean for redesigning cities? Billy Fleming of the University of Pennsylvania and Nancy Levinson of Places Journal inform, interrogate, and invite designers to figure it out in this co-hosted Places Event.

Marcel Wilson, founder of the San Francisco-based landscape architecture firm Bionic, presents his work in the REDESIGNING CITIES video, extracted from his presentation of the 2020 Doug Allen lecture. In the podcast, he and host Ellen Dunham-Jones discuss shifts in how we’re redesigning the integration of nature as amenity, performative ecology and infrastructural technology into cities and landscapes.

Alan Organschi, partner in Gray Organschi Architecture and on the faculty at Yale University, and Scott Marble, Chair of the School of Architecture and partner in Marble Fairbanks, discuss Organischi’s research on the potential of timber construction combined with forest management to turn cities into massive carbon sinks.

Carol Coletta, President and CEO of the nonprofit Memphis River Parks Partnership, and Ellen Dunham-Jones, Director of the Master of Science in Urban Design degree at Georgia Tech and Co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia, discuss the utilization of philanthropy to improve the public realm with an emphasis on parks.

Majora Carter, a revitalization entrepreneur, presents her decade-long work on 'self-gentrification' and incremental development as a means to stem the stigmatization and brain drain out of low-status communities.

Listen to award winners, Reuben Abraham and Carlo Ratti, discuss their initiatives for smart mobility and inclusive innovation as they relate to cities.

Listen to award winners, Deputy Consul Juan Tellez, Janette Sadik-Khan, Jan Gehl, and Seleta Reynolds, discuss their initiatives for smart mobility and inclusive innovation as they relate to cities.

Chuch Marohn, President and Founder of Strong Towns, is a civil engineer and city planner who addresses a growing movement that questions the fiscal responsibility of sprawl development patterns.

A conversation about carbon pricing and how it relates to the built environment through offset marketing strategies.

Episode 6 is a discussion between Jess Zimbabwe, Principal of Plot Strategies, and Joseph P. Riley, former Mayor of Charleston (for 40 years) and founder of the Mayors Institute on City Design. The focus is on the approaches and resources for addressing and preventing gentrification and displacement as well as associated racial and class concerns.

Episode 4: Redesigning Cities for the Collaborative Economy features Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar and author of Peers Inc., and Gabe Klein, author of Start-Up City and former Commissioner of Transportation for both Washington DC and Chicago. Together they draw on their broad expertise to discuss both the role of cities in shaping entrepreneurial, collaborative economies and in being shaped by them.

Episode 5: Redesigning Cities Against Climate Change is a conversation between Peter Calthorpe, author of Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, planner, and developer of Urban Footprint, and Rob Kunzig, Senior Environment Editor at National Geographic and author of Fixing Climate. This podcast features a candid and sobering discussion on climate change and human nature.

Episode 3: Redesigning Cities' Parks as Social Infrastructure is a discussion between Mitch Silver, Parks and Recreation Commissioner of New York City, and Maurice Cox, Planning Commissioner of Detroit, on building social equity through the development of parks. For more information visit: https://arch.gatech.edu/redesigning-cities-speedwell-foundation-talks-georgia-tech-0

Episode 2: Retrofitting Suburbia Too explores the redesign of outdated, suburban infrastructure and associated aging malls, office parks, and other auto-oriented property types with June Williamson, Associate Professor of Architecture at The City College of New York and author of Designing Suburban Futures and co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia, and Allison Arieff, Executive Director of SPUR in San Francisco. For more information visit: https://arch.gatech.edu/redesigning-cities-speedwell-foundation-talks-georgia-tech-0

Episode 1: Redesigning Cities with Autonomous Vehicles is a conversation between Jeff Tumlin, Principal and Director of Strategy at Nelson Nygaard, and Harriett Tregoning, immediate past Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of CPD at HUD, on the convergence of mobility, technology, and design. For more information visit: https://arch.gatech.edu/redesigning-cities-speedwell-foundation-talks-georgia-tech-0