threesixtyCITY

For nearly thirty years, Peter Rees steered the unstoppable growth of the City of the London — the historic Square Mile at the heart of both the city and global finance. In his capacity as chief planner, he personally approved such iconic skyscrapers as the Gherkin, the Cheesegrater, and the Walkie-Talkie. But as firms and their employees debate whether and when to return to the office — if ever — has the need for central business districts come and gone? If so, how will cities ever replace them? Rees makes the case for why a center of commerce for nearly two thousand years isn’t finished yet.

First, a call to defund the police that gained traction during the social justice protests of 2020 and now President Biden's proposed investment in the modernization of streets leads us to reimagine how we design our streetscapes.

In her 2019 book, Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom, Columbia law professor Sarah Seo explores how the rise of the automobile led Americans to accept and expect pervasive police power in the form of traffic stops — power that has disproportionately led to the deaths of Black Americans such as Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, and Daunte Wright, among so many others. It is this power that has led Black activists to broadly criticize the urbanist movement as pointless at best, racist at worst — what good are slow streets and cycling lanes if they lead to more encounters of the kind that murdered George Floyd? Sarah joins us now to explains how a combination of design, decriminalization and disarming police might lead to safer streets for all.

There are now more Americans over the age of 80 than under the age of two. This burgeoning “elder boom” has stretched the nation’s caregivers to their limits, while the spiraling costs of care mean 80% of Americans can no longer afford it. That’s why President Biden has earmarked $400 billion for caregiving as part of his infrastructure plan, arguing care is essential to productivity. But given that 40% of U.S. deaths in the first wave of the pandemic (and 80% of Canadian deaths) were situated in senior care facilities, something in the current model has to give. MIT artist and filmmaker Marisa Morán Jahn is developing an alternative named “Carehaus” in which caregivers and their charges live side-by-side. She joins us to discuss how new models of care can solve the precarity of all involved.

Between President Biden’s $2.25 trillion infrastructure plan and the new-and-improved $1 trillion Green New Deal for Cities, America is poised to make a once-in-a-generation investment in housing, transportation, and the grid. Blueprint Power CEO Robyn Beavers has worked for everyone from the Department of Energy to America’s largest homebuilder to Google to the largest manufacturer of wind turbines in the world. She joins us to discuss her startup’s plans to trade energy between buildings, what New York City’s carbon tax means for cities, and how best to put a trillion dollars to work.

For more than a decade, Reinier de Graaf has lampooned thirsty starchitects chasing commissions from boomtown to boomtown across the Global North and South — including the ambitions of his own firm, OMA, where he is a partner alongside Rem Koolhaas. In his new novel The Masterplan, de Graaf chronicles the rise and fall of a young architect tasked with designing the capital of a young African republic, and who is instantly caught in a crossfire of colonialism, Chinese ambitions on the continent, and the long arm of late capitalism. Is there a way out for either his protagonist or the profession?

They go by many names: ojeks; boda bodas; trikes; tuktuks; matatus; jeepneys — the two-, three-, and four-wheeled vehicles that ferry millions of people across the Global South daily. A decade ago, they were villainized as a scourged to be stamped out; today, they’re being monetized by billion-dollar startups such as Grab and Ojek. But the larger task remains — elevating so-called “informal” transport to a full-partner in urban mobility, and making these modes clean, safe, and sustainable.

Agile City Partners’ Andrea San Gil Leon joins us to discuss her work advising the government of Costa Rica and others on recognizing the power of pop transport.

Amazon has remade the United States in its image — an American cloud of warehouses, data centers, and urban headquarters controlling the commanding heights of the U.S. economy, reinforced during a pandemic year.

Fulfillment author and ProPublica reporter Alec Macgillis joins us to discuss us how, where, and why Amazon has been able to express such leverage — and what it means for the future of American cities, and the world’s.

The future of cities is the future of sub-Saharan Africa — a broad swath of the world with a bulging youth bracket and the world’s fastest urbanization rates. TRUE Africa’s Claude Grunitzky has been chronicling the region’s rise for two decades through his company’s media arm and now its online education platform, TRUE Africa University, created in conjunction with MIT.

He joins us to discuss how the pandemic has shuttered many of the continent’s best universities, how he hopes to help meet the need of a new generation of students, and how TAU is also an opportunity to teach the world about pan-African achievements as well.

On March 11, President Biden signed into law the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, a $1.9 trillion stimulus package including cash, child care and health care assistance, and other benefits for the large majority of Americans. Hailed at the largest expansion of the U.S. social safety net since LBJ’s Great Society, the act was not without its critics, with some arguing that its measures are not permanent and do not go far enough, while others warned of the risks of an overheating economy.

Joining us this week to rebut those critics is former Federal Reserve and White House Council of Economic Advisors economist Claudia Sahm, who makes the case that even stronger measures are necessary to prevent deepening post-pandemic economic inequality.

Two years ago, Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs launched a pilot program to distribute monthly $500 checks to 125 randomly selected individuals earning less than the city’s median income. Now, the results are in, and while they’re shocking they shouldn’t be surprising: Recipients were healthier, happier, and less anxious than their counterparts in the control group. Today, Tubbs is the founder of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income — a national coalition including many of America’s most prominent Black mayors.

With these results in hand, and with a new round of stimulus checks on their way to Americans, what would it take to make such programs permanent? Why are mayors best-positioned to oversee such programs? And what does it mean to see guaranteed incomes through the lens of social justice rather than a technocratic solution?