REDESIGNING CITIES: The Speedwell Foundation Talks @ Georgia Tech

Redesigning Suburbs

How and where are North American suburbs being redesigned to address dramatically changing demographics, technology, market preferences, and climates? The pandemic and Work-From-Home accelerated earlier trends of the urbanization of dead malls and office parks. But they also renewed leapfrog exurban development. Join this conversation between academic host Ellen Dunham-Jones who researches suburban retrofits, and David Dixon FAIA, an award-winning professional who designs and documents them. Vice President and Urban Places Fellow with Stantec, David co-edited Suburban Remix: Creating the Next Generation of Urban Places (2018) and co-authored Design for an Urban Century (Wiley, 2015). Residential Architecture Magazine named David to their Hall of Fame as “the person we call to ask about cities.”

Redesigning Cities for the 2nd Global Urban Revolution

What does it mean for humanity that we are transitioning from a rural to an urban species? This is the fundamental question that Professor Robert Fishman is exploring. Professor Emeritus from the University of Michigan, he was trained as an urban historian at Stanford and Harvard, and is the author of the highly influential books Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier and Bourgeois Utopias: the Rise and Fall of Suburbia.

What Transit Modes Where?

New modes of getting around are exploding. Now, in addition to fixed rail, bus, and streetcar, smartphones and algorithms have expanded on-demand mobility such as microtransit vans, scooters, and e-bike rentals. Some of our streets already have robotaxis and AV shuttles. Will the skies soon include podcars and UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles)? What kind of city, social equity, and neighborhood form do these different modes shape? In Atlanta, the Beltline is a 22-mile trail loop that has proven the popularity of walkability and bike-oriented development but promised to include future transit. Should that transit continue the city’s historic but troubled investment in streetcars or bet on emerging technologies like AV shuttles? How should such decisions be made about what transit goes where and what kind of city we want? Features Tejas Santanam, Eric Kronberg, and Rebecca Serna.  

How do we think about the boundaries between land and water? Dilip da Cunha argues that those boundaries have always been much more fluid—literally. And he argues that the history of how we’ve organized cities is one of ever-increasing efforts to control, subjugate, and manage water while colonizing the land into administered parcels of private property. Dilip and his late partner, Anuradha Mathur, argue that climate change is actually helping us recognize how uncertain it is that there’s no such thing as "dry land". It all gets rained on to some degree, and climate change is erasing those lines. We need to better prepare ourselves and our cities for how to design for conditions of ubiquitous wetness. 

Kai-Uwe Bergmann, partner at BIG, the Bjarke Ingels Group, and host, Ellen Dunham-Jones, discuss the how, what, and why of designing joyful social functions into practical infrastructure at all scales. How did their ideas of hedonistic sustainability embolden them to convince clients to build a ski slope on top of a power plant in Copenhagen, build a concert hall on a highway intersection, turn storm surge fortifications around lower Manhattan into public parks and gardens – let alone design new cities in the desert, on the ocean, and on the moon?

Dan Parolek and his team at Opticos Design coined the term and wrote the book on Missing Middle Housing to describe house-sized buildings with multiple units. These duplexes, quadplexes, cottage courts, etc. are essential tools in creating equitable walkable urbanism. In this episode, Ellen Dunham-Jones talks with Dan about their implementation at Culdesac, Tempe, the country’s first and largest carfree and mobility rich community built from scratch. For those interested in images, the podcast is a companion to the video of Dan’s hour-long lecture given the same day and also available at the Redesigning Cities website.

Whether heroic commemorative bronze statues, contemplative experiences of transformed materials, or vibrant activist murals, public artworks give cities cultural and economic value and provide meaningful identity to communities. But how do different kinds of public spaces and community identities influence public artwork? Stephanie Dockery, manager of Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge and Tristan Al-Haddad, architect and founder of Formations Studio will present and discuss public art projects they have each worked on and their impact on cities and different kinds of public spaces.

Change the house, change the city? The American Dream of ownership of a detached single-family house is increasingly under attack. It has a racist history and ongoing legacy of segregation, a high environmental footprint, fosters sprawl and loneliness in ever-smaller households, and is increasingly unaffordable. Diana Lind, of the Penn Institute for Urban Research and author of Brave New Home: Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing, Ellen Dunham-Jones and Andrew Bruno of Georgia Tech will discuss the impact on cities and neighborhoods of both exclusive single-family house zoning and alternative forms of houses/housing. 

What if developers thought of themselves as farmers, reviving their neighborhood’s abandoned buildings, planting locally symbiotic uses, and growing small business entrepreneurs? And what if they wanted to teach you how to do the same in your neighborhood? Monte Anderson of the Incremental Development Alliance and Options Real Estate in South Dallas, TX and Bernice Radle of Buffalove Development in Buffalo, NY will discuss each of their work and its impacts as Season 5 of Redesigning Cities starts digging!

How are younger cities leveraging the renewed importance of urban parks in the pandemic? Adrian Benepe of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Trust for Public Land, Clyde Higgs of the Atlanta Beltline, and Tim Keane from the City of Atlanta will discuss how Atlanta’s investments in new parks and greenways are building on its Olmsted legacy while radically transforming development patterns, trip modes, and local ecology.