Placemakers

Imagine a place where you can stroll down the sidewalk, wave to your

neighbors on their porch, then pick up your dry cleaning or have lunch at the café.

That’s the kind of walkable, compact, mixed-use community envisioned by the

founders of New Urbanism—including Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. But some people say

there’s a reason one of Plater-Zyberk’s developments played a starring role in a

memorable Hollywood film about overly constructed reality.

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Seattle’s Yesler Terrace was the first racially integrated housing project in the U.S. Today, it remains a multicultural nexus for the city. The Seattle Housing Authority and its partners at JPMorgan Chase have been hard at work rebuilding and rejuvenating this historic community’s infrastructure and investing in its economic sustainability. Join Brian Babylon as he explores how the city has tackled such an enormous revitalization project. 

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George Leonidas Leslie was perhaps the most sensational—and successful!—criminal in American history. An architect by training, he planned and pulled off a series of record-breaking bank robberies throughout the late 1800s and arguably ushered in the modern heist. On this episode of Placemakers, producer Mike Vuolo explores the unholy relationship between burglary and the built environment.

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Long before the Black Lives Matter movement swept the U.S., Dallas’ police

chief tried to diffuse the anger and mistrust between minority communities and

police. His reforms made an impact. The number of people killed in confrontations

with police fell, just as crime fell. But Dallas was still torn apart by racial hate last

summer, leaving five officers dead and the city in shock. It fell on the police chief to

bring people back together in the aftermath.

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How does a small group of people change politics? The Free State Project

wants libertarians to concentrate themselves in New Hampshire and promote

libertarian causes. Thousands have already moved, and thousands more are on the

way. But not everyone is happy to see them coming.

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How do you solve a problem like the suburbs? For one man in Arizona, it

means creating an agricultural utopia, replete with picket fences and a community

garden. He was inspired by one of our era's  most scathing critics of suburban

sprawl: James Howard Kunstler. We'll hear from both about what happens when

you try to remedy what Kunstler calls “the greatest misallocation of resources in the

history of the world.”

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Three stories from St. Louis highlight different ways to combat urban blight,

from fighting urban decay on MLK Jr. Drive, to turning vacant lots into lush corner

gardens. Whether it’s one street, one garden or one tree, it gets easier to imagine

change when you literally see it take root.

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In the 1950s and ‘60s, Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard was a thriving commercial district beloved by New Orleans’ African-American community. After decades of disinvestment, the boulevard has turned a corner and is starting to blossom, once again, into a lively center for commerce and the arts. Down in the Big Easy, we explore how local businesspeople, JPMorgan Chase philanthropists, and creative community thinkers have brought the boulevard back to life.

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Washington, D.C., may be the political center of the free world, but its

670,000 residents don’t have a say in the national legislature. What they do have is a

“non-voting delegate” in the House of Representatives. Eleanor Holmes Norton can

introduce legislation and vote in committee, but she can’t vote on the House floor.

Over the course of 13 terms, the so-called “Warrior on the Hill” been fighting to

change that.

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Philadelphia has made a mission of making bike share attractive to low-

income and minority residents, trying to buck the national trend of bike-share users

being white, rich, educated, and male. The city has moved bike stations into

nonwhite neighborhoods. It’s used ambassadors. It’s hired a multiracial team to run

the bike-share program. And it’s tried and abandoned other ideas, in an attempt to

break the social stigma of riding a bike in poor neighborhoods.

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