Journey With Purpose

In this episode we speak with parking expert Graham Rossmore, who helped Los Angeles shift their temporary outdoor dining program to a permanent feature, allowing a greater use of curb and parking space than just car storage. His work found that areas with Al Fresco dining generated an increase of $12 million in gross sales in 2022 compared to 2019. We also speak about new ways to use the city, which just so happens to be how we used to use the city before cars became the dominant form of transportation.

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My key research findings on the alfresco program found that the alfresco program was not only successful in keeping more than 80% of businesses open during the pandemic, but it also saw an impressive increase of 12 million dollars in gross sales in the treatment corridors, which again were the five areas with high levels of alfresco. What we saw was the parking meters lost around 210,000 dollars annually. But, this was more than compensated for with the 12 million dollar increase in sales. We found no perceived impacts to parking demand, both from business owners and customers alike.

• Graham Rossmore on Linkedin

rewilding the

suburbs

Architecture professor Karen Kubey speaks about housing justice, how we need to design for abundance, we don’t live in policy, and how housing supply is part of a larger toolbox to provide housing for all.

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One thing that I focus on in my work as a designer is I think we have a collective failure of imagination. I think that ending the housing crisis And producing and renovating as much green social housing as we need is extremely achievable.it’s very hard for people to imagine what that would look like. And that it is possible. And… I think the reason is that we have been subject to propaganda for many, many years, for decades, since the Cold War, basically, that says, Ah, no, social housing doesn’t work in the United States. It’s only for somewhere like Sweden. Forget about it. It’ll never work.

• Karen Kubey

rewilding the

suburbs

Cities are sites of aspirations and identities, and ‘play’ can be a means for fostering community engagement. Architect and urbanist Joanne Cheung critiques the prevailing forms of community engagement, suggesting that they are often paternalistic and fail to adequately consider the agency of individuals and communities. Joanne further discuss the implications of power imbalances, the need for co-creation, and how play can act as a ‘scaffolding’ for discussing democratic representation. Play has often become commodified causing an unequal power dynamics in society. Joanne suggests the Cities for Play is but a scaffold in tackling very hard problems democratically, and calls for meaningful engagement through more community-oriented spaces for collective action and creativity.

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“Why would you want to be engaged for engagement’s sake? It makes no sense. You can only be engaged when you’re doing something meaningful.”

• Joanne Cheung & New Economy Workshop

Graphic designer and artist Tom Badley shares with us his journey practicing as both a designer and artist, banknote design, digital art, his design of Offline Cash, and his book, Art & Money.

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“Everything must be destroyed before we start over.”

• Tom Badley’s website, buy the Art & Money book

Tom Badley: [00:00:00] My name is Tom. I’m a artist and graphic designer, and now published author, and, I’m talking from Central Europe. 

The journey to, actually designing bank notes, was not straight. Bank notes is always something , that has interested me, when I was a kid and I already forgot about ’em when I was in, in art college. but I remember immediately graduating in 2008, um, when the markets were crashing. My interest really peaked on, what is money? And I started asking those questions for the first time and went down a rabbit hole. It was just this natural thing. I started making banknote designs, on an amateur basis really. And they got more and more sophisticated and more and more evolved. Eventually I had a portfolio of this design that looked something like banknote Design, but wasn’t really. Sort of based on anything, technically correct, but was my amateur attempts at it. [00:01:00] And that went on for a number of years whilst I was doing also all sorts of other things. Eventually I had this portfolio that, that led me to being hired by the banknote industry.

When I came out of the industry to be an artist, I started using those techniques that I’d learned in, my work as an artist. That has turned into art on the one hand. And, design projects on the other. 

The notes that you hold, I designed those as a design project. They’re artistic, but they can’t really be called art. They are a tool. They’re a product. So there’s really two aspects to, I do two hats that I wear. There’s the art side and then there’s the design side. And I’m still engaged in both.

Before you do a degree in art, this is in England anyway, before you go to art school, you usually do one year of prep, it’s called Foundation course. It’s usually one year course. And that’s just so you have this portfolio that you then take to the universities to, to show around, and get, whatever interviews you can. And I remember there was a moment [00:02:00]where you had to specialize in either the design side or the art side.

And, all my friends were in the design side, so I was split from my, all my friends and I was stuck with the artists. I chose art because that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to go to art school. That was the direction I just assumed was the, the way to go.

But the people in design have a kind of practical flavor to them. The artists generally don’t, that appeals to me because, all the philosophizing and stuff. But art, it never really, never really sat well with me. I always thought there was a sort of inherent fraud to it , I’m not the first to say that. Know, it’s not a very controversial thing to say. Many even artists say, that the , art , is a trick. , it’s a confidence trick. At the end of the day. Whilst design, you’re actually meant to be held to account because you are, you’re designing something that must work in the real world.

And so I admire the freedom of art. I admire the [00:03:00] untetheredness of art. But at the same time, I have expectations of myself that what I do should be able to perform in the real world. And I have that expectations of artists as well, which is why I don’t, really like much art. 

The contemporary art is a minefield , of stuff which is left, , unaccountable, and so design has this great accountability to it because it must perform in the real world. And I like both of those, those worlds. I can’t resolve those two worlds. I’ve tried, you know, tried to be an artist or a designer, but I can never really fit into either, as they have their own politics, their own ideologies. And I just, I take what I want from both and that’s how I’m, living my life, running my business.

Do I feel like an outsider? Yeah. Yeah. The world of digital art that, has taken off in, in recent years that really, didn’t make me feel like an outsider. That made me feel like I’m in the center of something [00:04:00] because I was quite early, I was 2019, I was tokenizing stuff on the blockchain. No matter what happens, , if it’s on the blockchain, it’s immutable. You know, I was there, , almost the ground floor. And that felt really special. But in terms of the grand scheme of things, , I’m not really anything to do with the art world at all.

In the world of design, I’m specialist in one specific type of design, and that is the design of money. And I never applied to do a generic design jobs that I, I’m not taking that away from anyone who’s in graphic design, but I can’t really do any other type of designs. It just doesn’t interest me..

Tom Badley: Banknotes are, so complicated and, involving that, it just, it pulls me in and, and I I haven’t left. All other types of design to me are quite bare, quite flat. Out of the world of design, I occupy this , very small niche. it’s a, in a really important niche and it’s an amazing [00:05:00] niche, but it’s nonetheless, it’s a very small niche that not many people know about.

Banknotes they involve everything. They involve typography, linear design, pattern creation, very, quite exotic means of pattern creation that don’t exist in the commercial design space. If I ask the average designer to make me a pattern on, in Vector, in, in Illustrator, then the idea is that with Bang Notes, they’re not, they’re not meant to be copied, right?

So you need to have bespoke software that can create patterns that you couldn’t be able to create in Illustrator involving all sorts of exotic, algebra and, functions. That’s a big part of it, having, creating a design that if you photocopy it, deforms for instance. There’s all the techniques, of printing are committed to this one product. Creation of holograms, foils, hot stamping. It’s all with one purpose, and that’s so that it [00:06:00] cannot be copied. Or it dissuades anyone from attempting to copers. Obviously, where there’s a will, there’s a way, and counterfeiters will, I suppose make a best attempt that will fool people who aren’t looking very closely. So you’ve so not only does it have to be very difficult and costly to copy, but it just has to dissuade anyone from attempting to do so. There’s a level of rigor to design and, , an artistry that can’t really find anywhere else. It’s a very special, it’s a very special industry.

The offline cash notes that you held up before? I was approached to do all the artwork and really, coordinate the design of the project. I was liaising with the printer in the US that eventually, took on the printing of the bills. My role was all design. It wasn’t just to come up with something to look good. I consulted with the team. How we got to those designs was actually quite a few iterations. At the time the banknote industry was [00:07:00] making their own equivalent of that. So it, it felt like, we were competing a little bit. So they had to be very distinctive and also engaging because Bitcoin people tend not to like bank notes because bank notes are the old world and Bitcoin is the new world. 

You mentioned the difference between trust and trustless. The technology of Bitcoin is trustless. It’s called trustless because it’s based on encryption, which means that you don’t have to trust an intermediary like you do with the Legacy financial system.

Bank notes are a trusted product and we trust the central bank and we trust the governments to enforce, fiat or decree that makes sure this money is worth something, right? So everything on every level of our financial system is based on trust. The idea of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency is that it’s trustless.

It’s based on encryption. There’s no intermediary, there’s no one that you have to trust. But that is the case with the [00:08:00] technology. That is not the case with humans. Human beings work on trust. A human needs 17 touchpoints of anything, to gain all the information that they need to arrive at a decision, whether or not to trust them.

We’re doing this constantly in our environment. Whether it’s other people, brands, products, everything. And we are constantly pinging our environment to see what we can trust and what we can’t. Bitcoin, another cryptocurrency. They have this stumbling block where they are trustless. It’s an amazing technology, but we need to be able to trust something. That’s how we humans work. And the thing about the banknote is that it takes the visual science, the visual design, which is a science in a way, of trust. And it perfects it because the bank note is the one thing in our world that we absolutely need to trust. If we can’t do that, then we haven’t got a financial [00:09:00] system and everything falls apart in that sense. The Banknote is really this place where this need to trust has been visually perfected. And this science that h...

Urbanist and activist Josh Junker (twitter) talks with us about the destruction of Cincinnati’s West End.

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• Read Joshua Junker’s twitter feed @JoshJunker2

Journey with purpose also comes in handy pamphlet format. Pickup one, or many copies, below!

Cincinnati was incredibly crowded, outside of New York we had the most densely populated urban core in the country. 

What was historically called the West End was anywhere east of Mill Creek west of Central Parkway and Central Avenue. And then south of Harrison Avenue and then the Ohio River on the south. It took up about half of the urban basin of Cincinnati and it grew to be a really prosperous and dense neighborhood. By 1890 it had 84,000 people living in it. 

Cincinnati through its history till around 1835 was growing very slowly, it was the largest city west of the Appalachians, but it wasn’t anywhere near prominence. Around the 1840s West End started developing and then it was annex to the city. It wasn’t even in the city until the 1840’s. Around 1840s through the 1870s, the entire urban basin area of Cincinnati which includes downtown Pendleton over the Rhine and West End, just exploded in population [00:01:00] because so many people were coming to Cincinnati.  

Both sides of my family has lived here since the mid 18 hundreds. My dad’s side has been here since 1870s and my mom’s side has been here since the 1850s. They have been here for a while. And that’s how I get to hear all of these stories about Cincinnati. I heard stories about how crowded it used to be back then. My Aunt Marie, her mother told her stories that they didn’t have any sanitation or anything. They had to find a pot to do their business in. They would have a one room apartment for a family of five. 

At that point Cincinnati was incredibly crowded, outside of New York we had the most densely populated urban core in the country- because it was built that way, they had to build where they could because the terrain surrounding was almost impossible to get up to the hilltops very easily. Cincinnati developed really unique compared to other cities, cuz they had only a four or five square mile area to really develop. 

That’s what led to [00:02:00] population concentrated in a small area. Then after around the 1880s or 1890s, it started declining of bit population as people were moving up to the hilltops. 

We were one of the first boom towns – the economic prospects with the river is what allowed Cincinnati to grow. It used to be is downtown had a lot of people Over the Rhine was the most dense part of the urban basin, but the West End was the area where if you still wanted to live downtown be close by, but live in a nice little mansion. That’s where you lived at.

There’s a row on Dayton Street that still exists. It used to be called Millionaires Row because a lot of Cincinnati rich people decided to live there. The Upper West End was pretty well off. But if you go down to the lower West End, it was like a lower middle class neighborhood that, that started changing around the [00:03:00] 1870s, 1880s, when a lot of the immigration would mostly go to before then that was over the Rhine. 

If you’re in the west end, in the late 19th century I can’t even imagine what the smell would be like in the west end of Cincinnati. Not only did you have a lot of overcrowding because of how dense it was, we also had slaughterhouses, which is how we became known as Porkopolis. We had so much slaughtering of pigs around that time. I believe we were the top meat producer in the United States at that point. So you would smell a lot of byproducts that come with slaughterhouses, not good smells.  

This all starts to shift a little bit – in 1918, there was a organization founded by progressives called the Better Housing Organization that looked at the conditions of housing in the urban basin in Cincinnati, said this all needs to change. A lot of them had good intentions. But if you read more and more into it, [00:04:00] the more and more you question the validity and the meaning behind their intentions. Especially when you consider a lot of ’em had the policy of we don’t want you moving out to the suburbs. We still want you to live here. Even if someone wanted to move out to the suburbs, they’d be like, no, you can’t do that. You still have to live here. If you were an African American coming up from the south, as the Great migration was starting , the only place you could really go to was the West End. You couldn’t go anywhere else.  

They built the first federal housing project in 1937 was Laurel Holmes. Here’s the interesting thing. They don’t tell you unless you research into public housing. It was not integrated at all until the late forties and fifties. Laurel Court wasn’t built for the African-Americans that primarily lived on that neighborhood. It was built for whites only, even though it was in that neighborhood that housing wasn’t available to the black Cincinnatians that lived there. They eventually built after [00:05:00] that Lincoln Court, which was the early forties housing project, just south of where Laurel Homes was. 

From the thirties, it became clear from the city and how they acted, that they saw the West end as a slum, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They don’t really do much to repair it. The Better Housing League does some stuff, but they don’t really do enough. And again, their intentions weren’t entirely crystal good. 

Post World War if you look at what happened there, the entire urban city of Cincinnati had a 1% vacancy rate In 1950 there was almost nothing for rent, or for sale in the city. They desperately needed to build housing, but Cincinnati had been trudging along since around the thirties thinking, oh, we’re just gonna stagnate a little bit. And All of a sudden they got this great big amount of people where we went from 450,000 to 500,000 in one decade. And If you look at the statistics of the neighborhoods, all the urban core neighborhoods, which is [00:06:00] predominantly where people migrating into Cincinnati first get their starts – all those urban neighborhoods had significant growth.  

The West End grew significantly in population. In the mid fifties, the entire city says, okay, we had the interstates coming through. We just need to combine all these projects and we need to get rid of the neighborhood because we need an industrial area.  

The city says we need a huge bond issue and we’re gonna create a better neighborhood for West End. We’re going to destroy the slum so people have better living conditions and so that we can create more jobs within an industrial sector right next to downtown. All the suburbs read through the lines, and they voted against it because they knew what the city was gonna do. They knew that all the people in the West End are gonna be displaced and they’re all gonna come up into the neighborhoods that we live in. So they voted against it because they saw that as a problem for [00:07:00] us . 

Ironically it was the West End that got the bond issue to pass in the first place because they overwhelmingly voted for it. Which is crazy to think of, but if you look at the campaign and what the mayor was saying, and what the city leaders were saying, you would think, okay, they had a plan for relocation. They were gonna build a lot of residential units around the West end to give them better living conditions. I can actually have a shower and a tub and everything. I can get a nice job while I’m at it too. That’ll be great. That’s where a lot of the mentality of West End residents came in. That’s why they voted overwhelmingly for it.  

That bond issue is what started the Kenyan Bar Renewal project. It runs into some hurdles almost immediately. They were gonna destroy about 10, 600 housing units. They were gonna displace all existing persons that lived in that area. 26,900 people. 97% of that population was [00:08:00] black. The city said we will help them with relocation assistance. We will compensate them for what they’re going through. Now, some of the property owners might have gotten them, but the vast majority of those who lived in the West end, I’d say 95%...