Livable City

What do city budgets, wise infrastructure investments and mom and pop shops have to do with a livable city? Turns out, quite a lot.

If our cities and our towns can’t make wise and measured investments in the right things, then it’s going to struggle to be a place that people can thrive in.

How about progressive change, what does that have to do with livability? Also, quite a lot.

Humans can only build, change and adapt to so many things in a short period of time. Building our cities into a state of “completion” in orderly but dumb prescriptive ways hinders the ability of a place to be identified with, loved and with a strong sense of care and ownership from those who live there.

Chuck Marohn, founder of Strong Towns joins me today. For those not familiar with Strong Towns (you need to be!) is a personal blog turned into a non-profit media organization and member community leading the discussion around these kinds of topics.

Chuck is a former civil engineer from the small town of Brainerd, Minnesota. He’s a friend of mine and someone I have and continue to look to to provide honest and profound perspective on what causes cities to thrive vs those that struggle and are in a state of persistent decline.

Check out Strong Town’s website for a plethora of articles many directly relating to the livability of cities. Also pick up a copy of Chuck’s newest book, Strong Towns - A Bottom-Up Revolution To Rebuild American Prosperity.

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Part II of the conversation with Larry Beasley and Jonathan Barnett.

Why do we even live in cities? There's been a lot of criticism about them during the pandemic which makes this the perfect time to reflect on this very question. Larry and Jonathan discuss this and much more in this second half of the conversation, the first half from two weeks ago.

My two guests today for the part of this series did not have the luxury of doing this in theory. Larry Beasley, former Co-Director of Planning for Vancouver, BC helped bring about a Vancouver that began as a fairly unremarkable place compared to other cities but with a stunning natural backdrop, into a world-leading city consistently ranked in the top 10 most livable cities coexisting with the stunning wilderness that surrounds it.

Jonathan Barnett is the emeritus Professor of Practice in City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania with a heavy focus on practice while being both a professor and advisor to an impressive list of cities on many important livability-enhancing projects.

Both men share a mountain (pun intended!) of wisdom and experience as well as a lot of great stories from their rich and accomplished careers. And they’re not done yet; both have been busy as individuals and co-authors of several significant books including: Ecodesign for Cities and Suburbs, Designing the Megaregion and Vancouverism among many others. These books are highly practical and interesting to think deeply about as you think about your own cities and how things could become more livable and how to get there.

Both are also co-creators of an online course also by the name of Ecodesign for Cities and Suburbs that can be taken by anyone interested in how “ecology can guide urban design to avert environmental disasters and improve people’s lives.” You won’t want to miss the chance to take this course if you’re wondering how properly designed cities really can be a significant part of curbing global climate changes.


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If you were in a position to lead a plan to make your city more livable, how would you do it, what would you do? How would you go about instilling your vision for greater livability but in close collaboration with your fellow city residents, how would you do that?

My two guests today for part one of a two part series did not have the luxury of doing this in theory. Larry Beasley, former Co-Director of Planning for Vancouver, BC helped bring about a Vancouver that began as a fairly unremarkable place compared to other cities but with a stunning natural backdrop, into a world-leading city consistently ranked in the top 10 most livable cities coexisting with the stunning wilderness that surrounds it.

Jonathan Barnett is the emeritus Professor of Practice in City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania with a heavy focus on practice while being both a professor and advisor to an impressive list of cities on many important livability-enhancing projects.

Both men share a mountain (pun intended!) of wisdom and experience as well as a lot of great stories from their rich and accomplished careers. And they’re not done yet; both have been busy as individuals and co-authors of several significant books including: Ecodesign for Cities and Suburbs, Designing the Megaregion and Vancouverism among many others. These books are highly practical and interesting to think deeply about as you think about your own cities and how things could become more livable and how to get there.

Both are also co-creators of an online course also by the name of Ecodesign for Cities and Suburbs that can be taken by anyone interested in how “ecology can guide urban design to avert environmental disasters and improve people’s lives.” You won’t want to miss the chance to take this course if you’re wondering how properly designed cities really can be a significant part of curbing global climate changes.

Don’t miss this episode as well as Part II in 2 weeks.

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As they say, a picture is worth 1000 words. And when something in your neighborhood or your city has been a certain way for decades or even hundreds of years, it’s easy to forget that a physical place or the places where neighbors come together to know one another can, in fact, change for the better.

But this is exactly the power of reimagining what a place could be like using basic and more advanced imagery and renderings. Also, it turns out places shape us as people either positively or negatively.

Sometimes certain neighbors don’t want things to change simply because they can’t envision it being any better and they’ve lost hope. For many places, we’ve internalized and expect that new buildings and new public places are just going to be worse than what’s there now.

So we accept what is based in fear and not understanding each other rather than learning how to hold generous, co-creating conversations together.

But my guest today Jeffery Tompkins will talk about and show you, it doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, many of us get very excited when we see a photorealistic image of something new that’s coming. Whether that’s the latest smartphone model, a shiny new building’s inspiring architecture, or even a new cozy place to sit along your favorite cafe filling up what used to be a parking space for one car, we connect with this kind of vision casting in an emotional way. And positive emotion is a powerful catalyst for change.

In this episode, Jeffery will also begin teaching you how to create these graphical visions so that you can try your hand at it. Getting started is really easy and Jeffery has written a Getting Started Tutorial. And these will be powerful tools in our community conversations to reimagine our neighborhoods into more human, more livable places.

Jeffery has agreed to do a series of these as well, increasingly getting more advanced in tooling but always trying to keep it accessible. So check back on the Livable City website for other tutorials.

Check out Jeffery’s Intro Reimagining Tutorial at the bottom of his episode page.

Jeffery is a student in architecture from Ball State University with a minor in urban design.

Follow Jeffery on Twitter and on Instagram

How do we know if our cities are livable? There are many cities that you’ve visited that have felt much more or much less livable to you compared to the one you call home. And this is no different than how livable other peoples’ homes feel to you compared to your own home. But the difference with cities is that thousands or millions of people call it home, and that makes it more challenging to steer them in a certain direction without creating significant injustices.

So how do we still guide our cities to become more livable while continually trying to eliminate the systemic injustice that occurs?

My guest Kea Wilson, Senior Editor at Streetsblog USA, humbly shares how she thinks about the challenges in doing this, how to expand the conversation so that people of color and other vulnerable but important members of our cities no longer live in perpetual fear, and the importance of good narrative in revealing our own limitations of understanding.

There’s a ton packed into this interview but I’m confident you’ll appreciate Kea’s introspection, energy and willingness to show up and say that she doesn’t have all of the answers.

Follow Kea on Twitter

Follow Kea and her work on Streetsblog, USA

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What’s the role of transportation in the livability foundation of a city? Even more specifically, what’s the role of public transit in making a city more livable? In places where transit has long been neglected, many might even think that public transit might diminish the livability of a place because it becomes correlated with increases in local crime.

But is it transit that diminishes the livability of our cities or might it be much deeper than this? How can not having to own a car to live our daily lives be anything but an incredible characteristic of a livable city?

Steven Higashide, Director of Research for TransitCenter discusses the role of transit in the livability of a city, transit during and as time goes on with COVID-19, the role of the street and the inherent limitations of a transportation system that over-leverages personal automobiles.

Steven wrote a compelling book on the role of buses in our cities, why they’re critical and how we can make bus service so much better. Pick up a copy of Better Buses Better Cities directly from Island Press, an incredible non-profit publisher with a mission of raising the voices talking about environmental and urban issues.

Follow Steven and his work on Twitter

Note: I mention the Live Q&A event with Doug Gordon and Jennifer Keesmaat in the intro to this podcast. I intentionally left it in so I can mention that this event has been postponed, but not canceled. The need to create safe, open streets during COVID-19 or at any time is incredibly important, but it was very important to give the spotlight to #BlackLivesMatter and police brutality against black people and other minority groups.

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In the midst of the unpredictability that has come with the COVID-19 pandemic, at least one thing has become quite true: many of the world’s cities desperately need more space.

What kind of space are we talking about? Not necessarily private space, like a backyard, but a repurposing of existing public space away from only movement through a place and into being in place, safely outdoors. We have a serious deficit of quality, inspiring, safe public space and this has become a huge liability to the health and wellbeing of city residents.

When common private spaces are all closed and you don’t have a park you can easily walk to, where do you go to read a book, get some sun, talk to a friend?

My guest Andre Vasquez, alderman (councilor in other cities) of the 40th ward in Chicago, speaks with me and special guest host Anni Metz about this topic. The 40th ward has a project proposal to convert part of Catalpa street into a pedestrian space, beginning to heal the void left by two big box store car parking lots on either side.

This is the kind of space cities around the world need to create a vision of - bringing enjoyable, safe public space easily walked to for all neighborhoods. Our very lives may depend on these spaces coming into existence immediately.

Follow Andre on Twitter and his alderman-specific Twitter handle

Follow Anni on Twitter and subscribe to her podcast: House Warming Podcast

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One of the most powerful and unpredicted outcomes so far from the Coronavirus pandemic has been the immediate change in how the world’s city streets are used. Pre-pandemic, many cities’ streets were mostly dedicated to moving motor vehicles back and forth in a monotonous rhythm of the daily commute. No longer the case, streets lay mostly empty from traffic replaced mostly by humans walking or cycling or sometimes even sunbathing.

For the first time we’re using our streets for living first instead of moving first.

This is not the same thing as the concept of tactical urbanism, because it wasn’t tactically planned for, but it has had the same effects as what my guest wrote about in his 2015 book titled Tactical Urbanism. Mike Lydon joins me on this episode of Livable City getting highly practical on how we can move forward, reclaiming our cities’ streets for humans to live on, not to just carelessly move through.

Of particular focus, I ask Mike the details of how he brought the Open Streets Miami celebration into existence, a very popular local event where Miami closes down prominent streets to cars and reserves them to be experienced exclusively on foot or by bike.

Mike is a founding principal of StreetPlans, an urban design and planning firm. Mike is also author of the fantastically helpful and practical book to change where you live: Tactical Urbanism. Definitely pick up a copy of this book.

Amazing tactical guides and workshops created by Mike to learn more on making specific livability changes:

• Tactical Urbanist’s Guide
• StreetPlans

You can follow the work of Mike on Twitter - definitely check his Twitter feed out as it has a ton of practical information and examples from cities around the world.

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Do you need to become an urban planning professional in order to make more livable cities? Do you need to study civil engineering in order to help design safer neighborhood streets? The answer is, yes sometimes, but not always.

The story behind today’s guest, Austin Gibble, will help give you a good example of being both a professional and non-professional. Austin is both an urban professional by day and a non-professional advocate by night, pushing for stronger, more livable urban Indianapolis neighborhoods.

Austin is a Project Development Planner at Indianapolis Public Transportation Corporation (IndyGo) and is also co-leader of Strong Indy, a local conversation of Strong Towns and Midwest chapter of Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). He also grew up on a farm just outside of Indianapolis and he shares his story of how he went from farm boy to city dweller.

Austin’s book recommendation: Place Matters - Metropolitics for the 21st Century

Follow Austin on Twitter and on Instagram.

Join the Livable City community conversation. Support Livable City by becoming a member.

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The debate is not a new one and yet it feels like the world wonders for the first time, do dense cities inherently make us more prone to becoming infected with something like a Coronavirus? It turns out, the answer isn’t as simple as it might at first seem to be. I debate this with special guest Yonah Freemark.

But the conversation still focuses almost solely on the inherent dangers of living in dense places. The conversation needs to evolve and mature.

Livable City seeks to call us towards making cities far more livable, more vibrant, more connecting to each other. Connecting in-person has been put on hold during the COVID-19 crisis, however we haven’t stopped connecting to each other and we’ve moved to connecting online in unprecedented levels. And this proves again the fundamental nature of cities that mustn't be forgotten: cities exist first and foremost to fulfill humanity’s social needs, that all of us seek to be seen, known and cared for around where we live by those who live around us.

And it is from this lens that my conversation with Yonah seeks to contribute to the global conversation around this important subject. Yonah is an incredibly well read and thoughtful researcher, professional and urban practitioner at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Follow the work of Yonah on Twitter and definitely check out a mix of his personal and academic work at The Transport Politic.

Come join the conversation around this subject by joining the Livable City community group.

Interesting density and Coronavirus infection figures:

Chicago COVID-19 cases by zip code

Coronavirus pandemic in Hong Kong

New York City area cases by zip code

Coronavirus cases around France

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