REDESIGNING CITIES: The Speedwell Foundation Talks @ Georgia Tech

Today, a minimum-wage earner can afford a one-bedroom apartment in only 145 out of 3,143 counties in America. Andrew Ross of NYU and author of Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing (2021) and Shelley Poticha of the NRDC and former Director of Sustainable Housing and Communities at HUD will discuss how ineffective government planning, property market speculation, and poverty wages have created this housing crisis -- and the policy and design measures needed to pull us out of it.

Dr. Richard Jackson, emeritus professor of public health at UCLA and former Director of the CDC National Center for Environmental Health and has argued that architects and planners can have more impact on the health of the next generation of kids than all the physicians in the world. His words are best proven correct through the work of renowned architect Michael Murphy of MASS Design Group, dedicated to the construction of dignity and rooted in healthcare design. Listen in on their conversation reinvigorating what it means today to design for health, safety, and welfare.

Lock-downs, work from home, and fears of crowded indoor space during the pandemic have shifted how many of us use streets. From “streateries” and street racing, to drive-by birthday parades and outdoor schools, our streets have become significantly more social. Will these shifts last if and when the pandemic eases – and what do they mean for public space, transit, and mode-splits? Professor Vikas Mehta of the architecture and urban design programs at the University of Cincinnati, Tony Garcia of Street Plans Collaborative and Tactical Urbanism fame, and Professor Kari Watkins, civil engineering at Georgia Tech will help us figure it out.

How can we undo the ways economic policies have contributed to structural racism? And how should we redesign cities to reflect and advance equitable economies? Raphael Bostic, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and Catherine Ross, Regents Professor of City Planning and Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology will discuss solutions to these and other questions.

What can urbanists learn from how Sci-Fi authors have reimagined cities? GT Regents Professor in Science Fiction Lisa Yaszek discusses with host Ellen Dunham-Jones how diverse voices from around the world have challenged racial and gender norms in science and technology while proposing alternative kinds of cities, spaces, and social justice. Yaszek is the author of Galactic Suburbia and co-editor of Literary Afro-futurism in the Twenty-First Century. Shaunitra Wisdom, GT School of Architecture Academic Advisor, author, and Periplus Fellow shares her insights and moderates Q&A.

 Post-pandemic, how might we leverage tele-work-medicine-education-everything to even the playing field between rich and poor places instead of exacerbating the digital divide? University of Arizona Professor Arthur C. Nelson and Debra Lam, Executive Director of Georgia Tech’s Partnership for Inclusive Innovation will help me, Redesigning Cities host Ellen Dunham-Jones, think through this question.