City Road Podcast

Everyone is talking about design thinking! But what, exactly, is design thinking? And how do these ideas relate to city making? 

Design thinking is an increasingly valued skillset across a wide range of industries, with high demand for design-based skills in the workplace. Organisations are increasingly looking to theories of design to improve their businesses and the services and products they offer. But can these ideas also be applied to city making?

Dr Martin Tomitsch is Associate Professor of Design and the Head of Design Lab at the University of Sydney. His research looks at how design thinking can be used to make better cities. Martin talks us through the design thinking process, within which the user-experience is central.

"Design. Think. Make. Break." Martin Tomitsch

In a world in which more than half of the population lives in cities, Martin is looking at new ways to engage with the smart city with design thinking. We’re talking to Martin about his new book Making Cities Smarter - Designing Interactive Urban Applications.

The Sydney Bachelor of Architecture degree has a lively history. It was open to men and women from its first offering in 1918, but the inclusion of women was controversial. In 1972 a student strike shut down the school for two weeks; students demanded the degree be remade.

"In 1926... the University of Sydney put forward Marjorie [Holroyde nee] Hudson, a female student, for the award; and this really set the cat amongst the pigons. And the document we have from the Board of Architects minutes effectively gives every single battle that women had to fight in terms of equality in the profession." Daniel Ryan

You might think that university degrees are fairly static cultural products, that change slowly and in line with the often-lethargic institutions they’re created within. But university degrees perhaps reflect the world back to us, just as much as their purpose is to shape the world around us. In this sense, university degrees are firmly located in society. They’re a cultural product of society. They ebb and flow with the times. They adapt and change to suit the current social and political mood; and they should always be on the frontiers of the latest ideas. But sometimes these ideas need to be challenged.

“When we look at the history of the school - the history of any institution - we can recover the motivations behind the decision that have been taken over time”. Professor Andrew Leach

This episode of City Road is not your usual fare. We're talking with Professor Andrew Leach, Associate Professor Lee Stickells, Daniel Ryan and Catherine Lassen about a book on the history of the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. The book is edited by Andrew and Lee, and our four guests have all written chapters. We’ve pulled four excerpts out of the book to tell you about the secret life of the Architecture Degree at the University of Sydney. And it’s a story that goes in some strange directions.

From the way the 1960s and 70s counter-culture movements and the ideas around free speech, civil rights, feminism, and anti-war dissent radically reshaped what was happening inside the university;

"Architecture schools around the world are also impacted by this broader dissent, they're often part of it." Lee Stickells

To the way the ideas within the academy of architecture more broadly shaped the degree program. Writing about the work of Professor Jennifer Taylor (1935-2015) and her 1972 book Australian Identity: Houses for Sydney 1953-63, Catherine Lassen says;

"In good architecture, absolutely, there's an internalising of the questions, and those things are up for grabs". Catherine Lassen

Imagine building a life size (1:1 scale) model of your urban design right there on the street to communicate and test your design ideas with local communities.

This is exactly what Evelina Ozola and her Fine Young Urbanists colleague Toms Kokins did in Latvia with the tools of tactical urbanism. Evelina wants architects, urbanists and designers to be more proactive in their practice, and to engage more directly with issues concerning the spatial environment and communities in cities.

"We should stand up for what we regard as valuable and vulnerable. To do this effectively, we must develop a broader skillset that includes inventive ways of communicating with governments, developers and organisations, and the general public." Evelina Ozola

Evelina has been rethinking her relationships to radical urban theory through her practice. In this episode, we talk to Evelina about a Fine Young Urbanists tactical urbanism project called Mierīgi! — a project that explores the use of a life-size mock-up as a tool for testing urban design and discussing it with the public.

Guest

Evelina Ozola is a practicing architect and urban designer from Riga, Latvia. She has completed architecture studies at Riga Technical University and holds a master’s degree in urbanism from TU Delft in the Netherlands. She has worked at “MADE arhitekti” in Riga and “SVESMI” in Rotterdam, and is co–founder of Fine Young Urbanists, a practice that mainly operates in the field of tactical urbanism. Next to design work, Evelina frequently contributes to online and printed press on issues concerning the built environment. In 2013, she founded FOLD, an online magazine for creative industries in Latvia.

Evelina’s academic work includes working as a lecturer, design studio tutor and leading workshops at RISEBA Faculty of Architecture and Design in Latvia, Umeå School of Architecture and KTF Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. Since 2012, she has served as Programme Director of Riga Technical University International Summer School in Latvia.

Evelina is part of the curatorial team of Together and Apart, the Latvian Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.

The utopian visions of architects, planners, philosophers and sociologists are important speculative projects. We take a deep dive into the idea of utopia with Professor Danilo Palazzo, who calls on us to become utopians.

“We are all utopians, as soon as we wish for something different and stop playing the part of the faithful performer or watchdog”, argued Henri Lefebvre.

Cities have often been used as the laboratory for the imaginations of better futures. Such thinking recognises that the built and natural environments are complex systems of competing relationships; spanning the social, economic, physical, political, and environmental.

As Robert Fishman pointed out in 1982, these ideal cities “were convenient and attractive intellectual tools that enabled each planner to bring together his many innovations in design, and to show them as part of a coherent whole, a total redefinition of the idea of the city”.

We ask Professor Danilo Palazzo about the role of utopia today. Can we study the past utopias in search of new ways to face the huge environmental, ecological, social, and urban problems of our times? Is there space for Utopia in our university programs?

Professor Danilo Palazzo was born in 1962 in Milano, Italy where he grew up. He completed his Master in Architecture at Politecnico di Milano in 1987 and his PhD in Urban and Regional Planning at Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia in 1993. From 1997 to 2012, he has taught at Politecnico di Milano as Assistant Professor and later as Associate Professor of urbanism, urban planning and urban design.

In 2012 he moved to United States as Director of the School of Planning, College of DAAP, University of Cincinnati. His articles have appeared in Landscape and Urban Planning, Landscape Journal, Oikos, Urbanistica, Territorio, among others, and his books include Urban Ecological Design. A Process for Regenerative Places, Island Press, Washington D.C., 2011 (with Frederick Steiner); Urban Design. Un processo di progettazione urbana, Mondadori Università, Milano, 2008; Sulle spalle di Giganti. Le matrici della pianificazione ambientale negli Stati Uniti, Franco Angeli, Milano, 1997. He resides in Cincinnati.

What role does the government play in  facilitating displacement through transit-led development?

We often hear about the role of the private sector, private landlords, and the purchasing power of individual real estate buyers in urban renewal, gentrification and displacement debates. The planning of new transit systems and overheating housing markets has renewed interest in understanding the role of government in neighbourhood change, specifically in the context of gentrification and displacement.

“Many people conflate gentrification and displacement.” Professor Karen Chapple

Karen Chapple and her team developed an online “neighbourhood early warning system;” a set of interactive maps that shows the current and future transformations that are underway in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the United States.

“The city is always undergoing a process of renewal in some form.” Associate Professor Kristian Ruming

The neighbourhood early warning system is a part of The Urban Displacement Project, which characterises Bay Area neighbourhoods (via census tracts) according to their experience of gentrification and risk of displacement.  The early warning system - which is used by tens of thousands of unique visitors each year - develops a gentrification index that characterises places that historically housed vulnerable populations but have since experienced significant demographic shifts alongside real estate investment.

“I think we should look at world’s best practice, which is almost the opposite of what we do in Australia” Professor Peter Phibbs

We're talking to Professor Karen Chapple, Associate Professor Kristian Ruming and Professor Peter Phibbs about what urban renewal, gentrification and displacement look like in San Francisco with rent control and Sydney without it.

In New York, where anything’s possible, the privatisation of Manhattan's Central Park is even stranger than fiction.

I imagine that few people would choose to travel back in time to visit the run down and quite frankly often dangerous Central Park of 1970s Manhattan. But many people don't realise that a casual and relatively safe stroll through Central Park today has come at significant cost to the park’s maintenance workers.

"My dream is to have the park system privatised and run entirely for profit by corporations". Ron Swanson, fictional Parks Department Director, American Television sitcom Parks and Recreation.

We’re talking to John Krinsky about his new book with Maud Simonet, Who Cleans the Park? and their research about parks management in New York. John and Maud bring the often-invisible work of the park’s maintenance workers into view. What’s exposed is much more that than an underpaid and unvalued workforce, but a set of questions that go to the heart of urban management today.

In America, hundreds of millions of dollars of both public and private funds are dedicated to the upkeep of public assets like Central Park. Keeping a park in order requires not just money, but labour - the not so glamorous and often invisible jobs that are associated with picking up the garbage, painting benches, maintaining equipment, cleaning toilets, raking leaves and removing homeless people.

“Parks have been absolutely critical to the maintenance and argumentation of real estate value.” Professor John Krinsky.

John talks about how wealthy individuals and corporate actors have directed significant philanthropic funding into the Central Park Conservancy, which holds considerable sway over this public space. He questions the idea that public parks, and the public domain more generally, are best served by allowing the people who have the money to fund and maintain the public domain have their way with these public assets. And what's in it for the wealthy? Well, in the end, the public space rewards the park-side property owners with a financial return on their real estate holdings.

John Krinsky is professor of political science, with an interest in labor and community organising in New York. He specialises in urban politics, the politics of social movements, and the politics of work, welfare and labor. He is a co-editor of the online peer-reviewed journal Metro-politics and a co-editor of the journal Social Movement Studies. He co-coordinates the Politics and Protest Workshop at the CUNY Graduate Centre and is a founding board member of the New York City Community Land Initiative.

Read more in John Krinsky and Maud Simonet's new book, 'Who Cleans the Park?'

Additional Audio:

NBC Parks and Recreation: https://www.nbc.com/parks-and-recreation

Australian cities are awash with construction activity. From Collingwood to Kogarah, Marrickville to Newstead, every passing month seems to bring with it a new, sold-off-the-plan high-rise apartment tower. Real estate, it seems, is the true national sport.

Australia now hosts the world’s most active market for securitised home loans and has the world’s second highest, and rising, levels of household debt. There are reportedly more cranes in the east coast capital cities than all of North America. And with the cranes and high-rise towers, come social problems and no respite from affordability crises: overcrowded schools, longer working hours to pay off mortgages, and worsening homelessness. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that in recent polls, densification and housing affordability are among the issues of most concern to Australian voters.

In this City Road episode, Alistair, Dallas and Chris revisit Maurice Daly’s classic 1982 book, Sydney Boom, Sydney Bust. Daly’s insights remain highly relevant to Australian cities today; cities that are marked by poorly planned densification, inflated property markets, land speculation, global capital and housing poverty. They agree with Daly that it is the property and finance system itself, rather than any ruptures to it, that reproduce housing booms, bubbles and busts in our cities.

Alistair Sisson and Dallas Rogers from the University of Sydney talk to these issues by narrating their 2018 Thinking Space essay, which was written with Chris Gibson from the University of Wollongong for the 100th anniversary of the journal Australian Geographer. An abridged version of this audio essay was produced and broadcast by The Conversation for their Essays on Air podcast, but we bring you the full, unabridged audio essay at City Road.

Alistair Sisson is a PhD candidate in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney.

Dallas Rogers is the Program Director of the Master of Urbanism, School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney, and host of City Road.

Chris Gibson is Professor of Human Geography and Executive Director UOW Global Challenges Program at the University of Wollongong.

Essay Credit

Alistair Sisson and Dallas Rogers narrate their 2018 Thinking Space essay titled Property speculation, global capital, urban planning and financialisation: Sydney Boom, Sydney Bust redux. The essay was written with Chris Gibson and it was commissioned for the 100th anniversary of the journal Australian Geographer.

Voice Credits

Narrator: Dallas Rogers

Acknowledgment of Country and old voices: Alistair Sisson

Introduction: Cheyne Anderson, Executive Producer of Think: Digital Futures

Voice of Maurice Daly: Roderick Chambers, Executive Producer of The Wire

Voice of Manual Aalbers: Kevin Suarez, 2SER Newsreader

Audio Credits

Strange Dog by Blue Dot Sessions

Atlantic State of Mind (A Long Winter) by McGee

Gnossienne No3 by Trans Alp

Soundscape audio sourced from: freesound.org

Pop-up, Guerrilla, DIY or Tactical Urbanism; whatever the name, temporary urban interventions are increasingly popular in contemporary cities.

 

From community gardens and pop-up cinemas to outdoor art installations and mobile libraries, pop-up urbanism can take many forms. Much of the discussion about pop-up urbanism is celebratory in tone, highlighting the ways in which these transient practices are putting on display alternative lifestyles, reoccupying urban space with new uses, or reinventing daily life from the bottom up. Many claim that pop-up urbanism is a political activity that can be undertaken in pursuit of a more just or sustainable city.

Various levels of government are latching on to the idea of pop-up urbanism, and even borrowing some of the ideas that are associated with the more radical notion of tactical urbanism as they design and plan the city. Some governments even think that pop-up urbanism might be a quick, and cheap, solution to fostering participatory, bottom-up city-making. And the private sector has moved into this space too. But as these perviously guerrilla activities becoming more mainstream and corporate are they losing their way as political projects that seek more socially justice and sustainable cities?

Amelia Thorpe and Lee Stickells move us beyond the celebratory notion of the pop-up city. Lee takes us back to the 60s counter-culture to show that DYI urbanism has a long history. He talks about experimental architecture and his NSW State Library Nancy Keesing Fellowship research, titled Aquarian Green: Building new ways of living in the 1970s counterculture. Amelia discusses the different people, places and relationships that are involved in temporary urban interventions. Taken together, they consider the actual ways in which various pop-up practices might connect to questions of justice and sustainability in the city.

Amelia Thorpe is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Environmental Law Programs at UNSW. Her research is at the intersection of law, urban planning and geography, drawing on degrees in Architecture and City Policy as well as professional experience in the planning, transport and housing departments in Western Australia. Amelia’s current research examines the ways in which understandings of law, ownership and belonging shape – and are in turn shaped by – practices of participation in planning. Prior to joining UNSW in 2012, Amelia was a director at the Environmental Defenders Office, Australia’s largest and oldest public interest environmental law organisation. Amelia studied law at the University of Oxford and at Harvard Law School, and is a member of the New York Bar.

Lee Stickells is Associate Professor in Architecture at the University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning. Lee’s research is characterised by an interest in the potential for architecture to shape other ways of living, particularly its projection as a means to reconsider the terms of social life – of how we live together. It is focused on developing histories that connect experimental architectural and design strategies with environmental, political, technological and social transformations. Lee co-edited The Right to the City (2011) and has contributed to anthologies including The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design (2013), Beyond Utopia (2012),Trash Culture (2010), and Heterotopia and the City (2009). His essays have appeared in journals such as ARQ: Architectural Research Quarterly and Fabrications. Lee is currently an editorial committee member of the journal Architectural Theory Review and a SAHANZ Editorial Board member.

Read more about their work: “Pop-up Justice? Reflecting on Relationships in the Temporary City”, in John Henneberry (Ed), Transience and Permanence in Urban Development (London, Wiley-Blackwell: 2017)

What are the possibilities for community action that hold powerful urban actors to account? Strategic antagonism and the spaces that community alliances are opening up themselves to engage with urban development might hold the answer.

It is not only urban planners and the formal planning system that shape the way residents contribute to the planning of their city. In Sydney, local resident action groups and other urban alliances are working beyond the market-centred urban planning system to achieve their urban development goals. Under market-centred urban planning paradigms, urban development is increasingly valued as an economic process and as a driver of the economy, rather than a social process that might create a more equitable city.

We talk to Cameron McAuliffe about the work of the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe, and the way her ideas are being applied to urban planning in Australia. Talking about research conducted with the host of City Road, Dallas Rogers, Cameron says resident action groups are dissatisfied with contemporary urban planning engagement mechanisms in Sydney. Many groups viewed community participation as tokenistic and an end in itself. This was particularly the case in local government planning where community engagement mechanisms were routinely seen as tick-a-box processes, with contributions from the community simply passing ‘into a void’. Community activists spoke of their frustration with these participatory planning mechanisms and recognised their market-centred nature even if they did not use this term. Yet many continued to participate in order to remain in the politics of urban development. They recognised the limitations of formal participatory planning processes and this led many groups to take their political campaigns outside of the formal urban planning system, in what Cameron describes as a form of strategic antagonism.

Following Mouffe, Cameron argues that participatory planning needs to move beyond consensus-seeking models of planning consultation. He uses Mouffe’s critique of Habermasian communicative theory and consensus politics, and her theory of agonistic pluralism,  to outline three ways in which the people of Sydney are working beyond the market-centered urban planning system.

Cameron McAuliffe is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography and Urban Studies in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology and part of the Geography and Urban Studies academic group. Cameron is an urban, social and cultural geography and a member of the Urban Research Program, where his research engages with the regulation of difference and the way cities govern ‘marginal’ bodies. His research includes projects on urban governance and resident action groups; the negotiation of national and religious identities among Iranian migrant communities; policy research on graffiti management; and the geographies of kerbside waste.

This is a story about how the financial industry and governments turned a housing foreclosure crisis for everyday Americans into a financial opportunity for institutional real estate investors. And like all good stories, it involves the management of the new post-GFC housing asset class with digital technologies and algorithms. Say hello to The Automated Landlord.

We talk to Desiree Fields about a new housing asset class that emerged from other side of the GFC in the United States. The period leading up to the GFC saw the banks reducing their lending standards for home loans in the United States. The financial industry bundled up these loans into mortgages backed securities and sold them off to investors around the world. And in a now familiar tale, this eventually lead to the subprime mortgage crisis and the GFC.

When people could no longer afford to pay their mortgages, a lot of these properties wound their way through the process of foreclosure and finally settled on the balance sheets of the banks. The United States government famously bailed out some of the banks by buying up their so-called ‘toxic debt’. But according to Desiree, what emerged on the other side of the GFC was a new housing asset class that was underwritten by two opposing forces.

On the one side, the banks were sitting on a lot of property and financial institutional don’t like to own or manage physical assets, like family homes. On the other side, Americans were having a hard time getting mortgages after the crisis because of tighter mortgage lending standards, and many were turning to renting. This created the ideal conditions for property investors, who thought, “ah ha… we can buy these properties for a low price, we can rent them out to people, who are kind of locked out of the homeownership market”, says Desiree.

But before the institutional investors could bundle these houses up to create the new housing asset class, the government and the financial institutions needed to sell the idea of the single family rental to the public. Today, the management of this new post-GFC housing asset class is increasingly undertaken with digital technologies and algorithms.

Desiree Fields is an urban geographer who theorises the rise of financial markets, actors and imperatives as a contemporary process of global urban change. With a particular focus on housing, Desiree is interested in how the link between real estate and finance is being reconstructed since the 2007-2008 global financial crisis, how residents experience this process, and its implications for housing policy and advocacy.