“So do you sell your work on Etsy?” Howard Blackson is probably best described as a placemaker. A what? For you planners or engineers out there, that’s a familiar term. Have you looked around LinkedIn recently? Even place-destroyers are using placemaking as part of their professional experience to get attention. Howard starts off our conversation describing […]

Steps to designing great places, with Howard Blackson

Society & Culture

Personal Journals

History

Philosophy

Places & Travel

More than street photography. Chuck’s latest book is Seeing the Better City: How to Explore, Observe, and Improve Urban Space [pre-order on Amazon]. He loves street photography, but Chuck’s not interested in persuading us to amass a digital photo album just because it’s fun. He’s trying to motivate us to get beyond observation for observation’s sake. […]

Seeing better cities through your urban diary, with Chuck Wolfe

Bike Detroit? If we’re playing word association, you say Detroit, I’m gonna say cars. David Sands joins the podcast to talk about transportation advocacy – basically how to get people motivated to improve their communities. He’s a journalist who’s been working with Mode Shift, an online hub for people ready to make Michigan communities more walkable, bikeable, […]

Persuading people to embrace multimodal systems, with David Sands

The relationship between cities and hinterlands Katrina likes to figure out what makes people tick. More specifically, she’s intrigued by how people interact with the built and natural environment. How do we translate the old hunter/gatherer habits into modern contexts? Americans are congregating in metropolitan areas more than ever. There’s a growing debate in professional […]

Anthropology (the fine art of people watching), with Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman

Street design didn’t give me the flu, but it does contribute to my health. It impacts all of us, whether or not we realize it.   Active Living – it’s not just for health nuts I enjoy walking and riding bikes, but I wouldn’t consider myself a health nut. I never count calories and I […]

Connection between street design and public health

Warning: Don shares my bias for streets that are safe and comfortable for people of all ages. In other words, he’s not part of the modern infrastructure cult that is so good at destroying communities across America. Like so many other guests of Urbanism Speakeasy, we met online. (Twitter, not Tinder.) Don has excellent taste […]

Steps to designing great places, with Howard Blackson

Download our free app to listen on your phone