Podcasts about calthorpe associates

Cars are loud, dangerous, and take up tons of space. What would happen if they just disappeared one day? I talk to Peter Calthorpe, founder of award-winning urban design firm Calthorpe Associates. Strauss: [00:00:00] All right. So I have to share a secret with you, and you're probably gonna lose respect for me because of it, but I've already recorded this episode. So it's too late. My respect is gone. I hate cars. I hate driving them. I hate writing in them. I am constantly afraid. They're going to run me over. Or if I'm driving, I'm going to run someone else over. I hate how they take up every piece of space outside. Everything is just cars, cars, cars, once you leave your door. So for this episode, I'm going to find out what would happen. If one day all the cars just disappeared. I found a guy who might know. Calthorpe: [00:00:48] Now, my name is Peter Calthorpe. I'm an urban designer. I've been doing it for maybe 40 years. Strauss: [00:00:56] So I'm assuming he's just going to tell me something like, well, we need cars. It would be a disaster. If they all disappeared, the world is the way it is for a good reason. I could not have been more wrong. This is flipped. The show that turns the world upside down to see what falls out. I'm Alana Strauss. I would love it. If you humored me with a thought experiment. If one day cars just disappeared. What would we do? How would the world have to change? Calthorpe: [00:01:41] Well, there'd be a huge run on bicycles. I mean, the button, you know, there'd be sold out immediately. You know, it depends on where you are. If, if you took cars, private automobiles out of Manhattan, it wouldn't be a problem at all. It'd be a better place. There are many great European cities. Don't forget cars only came to dominate our cities. After world war two, we used to build beautiful cities that were walkable and had transit. We had streetcars suburbs that were served by these trolleys. You would take the trolley out to your neighborhood center and walk to your house. I mean, even small towns existed pretty happily without cars all the time. Elm street, wasn't that far from main street. You have to always remind yourself what your perspective is and what you consider normal. What would happen if you took away cars? They would all of a sudden realize that they have a massive reconstruction project in front of them, which is to reuse the roads and, uh, redevelop the parking lots and turn their communities into healthy walkable places. Strauss: [00:02:50] So why did that change after world war II? Why did we start just investing so heavily in cars? Calthorpe: [00:02:58] It was an industrial policy, the federal highway act of 1953. Eisenhower putting in place was a project to kind of take all the capacity that we put into world war II and turn it into industrial activity. You know, without that investment in roads, you wouldn't have had the explosion. Listen for more.

This week on the podcast we’re joined by Joe DiStefano of Urban Footprint.  We talk about Joe’s work with Calthorpe Associates doing regional planning as well as creating digital tools for big planning ideas.  Joe also talks about the importance of planners having information at their fingertips in order to make decisions as well as being the ones in the room to remind everyone plans are about people.

Since about 2008, the planning world has been experiencing a paradigm shift that began in places like California and Oregon that have adopted legislation requiring the linking of land use and transportation plans to outcomes, specifically to the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHGs). In response to this need, Calthorpe Associates has developed a new planning tool, called UrbanFootprint, on a fully Open Source platform (i.e. Ubuntu Linux, PostGIS, PostGreSQL, etc.). As a powerful and dynamic web and mobile-enabled geo-spatial scenario creation and modeling tool with full co-benefits analysis capacity, UrbanFootprint has great utility for urban planning and research at multiple scales, from general plans, to project assessments, to regional and state-wide scenario development and analysis. Scenario outcomes measurement modules include: a powerful ‘sketch’ transportation model that produces travel and emissions impacts; a public health analysis engine that measures land use impacts on respiratory disease, obesity, and related impacts and costs; climate-sensitive building energy and water modeling; fiscal impacts analysis; and greenhouse gas and other emissions modeling.

Saltworks and Beyond Peter Calthorpe, Principal Architect, Peter Calthorpe Associates David Lewis, Executive Director, Save the Bay Jack Matthews, Mayor, San Mateo The debate over Saltworks, a proposal to build 12,000 homes on former salt ponds in Redwood City, is a harbinger of coming development fights in the age of climate change. In this October 18 Climate One debate, architect Peter Calthorpe argues that the need for housing in the San Francisco Bay Area is so great that infill development alone can’t meet demand; conservationist David Lewis counters that developing one of the region’s last unprotected wetlands is not worth the cost. “This is not a site for housing,” says Lewis, Executive Director, Save the Bay. “This one area in Redwood City was held onto by the Cargill Salt Company because they wanted to develop it,” he says. “They have no entitlement to develop it. The city’s general plan says it should remain as open space. It’s a priority area for acquisition by the federal wildlife refuge.” “I do have some concerns about it,” says Jack Matthews, He concedes that the development, as planned, seems isolated. Peter Calthorpe, Principal Architect, Calthorpe Associates, argues that Saltworks needs to be assessed not as a stand-alone development project but as a response to regional pressures. “The larger context is that for a very long time we’ve been building more jobs than housing—particularly in the west side of the Bay, in Silicon Valley and the Peninsula. The jobs housing balance has been so askew that we have people commuting from outside the nine-county Bay Area. We’ve been pushing housing way to the periphery.” Citing the Association of Bay Area Governments, Calthorpe says the region will need 72,000 new housing units to keep up with expected demand. There is no way to satisfy demand by only building transit-oriented development along El Camino Real, the region’s main north-south artery, he says. Calthorpe challenges David Lewis to answer how the region can reach a jobs-housing balance without employees moving to sprawling developments in Tracy or Livermore or Gilroy, if projects such as Saltworks aren’t built. “When you push housing farther and farther to the periphery because you don’t want to face up to the challenge in these jobs-rich areas, the environmental footprint, carbon emissions, VMT [vehicle miles traveled], energy consumption, and land consumption—because we all know it’s lower density once it gets out there – all of that, in many cases, is on pristine habitat or farmland.”We do it by building on already developed land and re-configuring our cities, Lewis answers. Saltworks “should have been dead on arrival in the beginning because it’s not the right place,” he says. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 18, 2011

Peter Calthorpe, Founder, Calthorpe Associates; Author, Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change It’s a love story gone horribly wrong. Big cars, ever-bigger homes, distant suburbs – all of it kept afloat by cheap oil. If this American arrangement ever made sense, it certainly doesn’t now, Peter Calthorpe says. Tragically, we’re perpetuating this failed system in much of the country, ignoring a cheaper, greener alternative: urbanism. “It’s better than free,” says Calthorpe, founder of Calthorpe Associates and author of Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change. “It costs less money to build smart, walkable, transit-oriented communities than it does to build sprawl. It takes up less land, it uses less energy, it uses less infrastructure, less roads … less of everything.” For Calthorpe, the ruptured housing bubble revealed a broken system but offers a chance to rethink how we build. “The real estate recession was a sign not just of perverse bank financing,” he says, “it was also a manifestation that we’d been building too much of the wrong stuff for too long, specifically large-lot, single-family subdivisions.” Why did we overbuild? “Habit and inertia,” Calthorpe says. “There’s tremendous institutional inertia” – banks, homebuilders, and zoning. “We have land-use maps that dictate low density in many areas and single use in most areas.” Calthorpe dismisses the notion that every American yearns for a piece of suburbia. Households with kids represent just 24 percent of the total, he says. The rest – singles, empty nesters, young couples – have different needs. “There are a whole range of needs out there and lifestyles that the one-size-fits-all subdivision just doesn’t satisfy,” he says. Calthorpe gives an example from his firm’s work, Stapleton, the nation’s largest redevelopment project. There, 12,000 units are going up on 4,500 acres – four times the density of the typical suburb – at the site of Denver’s old airport. “People spend more dollars per square foot for a smaller house and a smaller lot,” Calthorpe says, “but it’s in a walkable community; they’re willing to make that trade.”Change will require hard choices. Calthorpe challenges environmentalists to accept that infill alone won’t be able to meet the demand for housing; in some areas, projects cited near transit, for instance, building on greenfields may be necessary. We must also be willing to partner with developers. Development can help pay for a lot of the things we need, Calthorpe says: levees, transit extensions, flood control projects, parks, open space, and schools. “Quite frankly, the Bay Area should be thankful that we have the growth to deal with because it’s what we can use to repair so much of what we’ve misdesigned,” he says. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco on May 25th, 2011