Michael Natelli's Hope in Cities newsletter brings a unique perspective to the urbanist movement and Michael has a talent for storytelling and weaving universal truths, emotions, and insights into his urban observations.  I highly recommend it.  In our discussion here, we cover everything from liquid death water and its parallels in marketing urbanist ideas, to a break down of the Nashville metro, to applying spiritual and Christian principles to city building. Enjoy.  

Read the Hope in Cities newsletter here.

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Show Notes:

• Liquid death and urbanism
• Looking cool while drinking water - power of  storytelling 
• Make urbanism cool at a party
• Branding 
• People love downtowns 
• Franklin, TN
• We think that walkable neighborhoods are inaccessible due to price
• Using urbanism ideas to convey how incrementally we can start to make places more like that 
• Consumer walkability vs dwelling livability (drive and walk)
• Missed opportunities with Nashville area’s growth
• History of Nashville’s growth
• Auto industry expanding to southeast US + auto dependency 
• Tons of opportunity in the Southeast for urbanist prinicples to spread
• Engaging with urbanists from the suburbs  
• Going from college campus to the suburbs made the issues stark
• Seeing opportunity where its hard to see
• Make the most of undeveloped land
• Weirdly walkable suburbs in Nashville metro
• Cul de Sac in Tempe, AZ  — not transforming the entire city of  Tempe,  but it gets us closer
• If all the suburbs  started getting a heck of a lot closer,  you move the needle in the  right direction
• Out with purity tests, in with incrementalism
• Believes in the possibilities that exist  in the suburbs 
• Gentrification problem - public and private solutions
• Zip code restrictions vs only letting the “right people in”
• Spiritual/religious aspect to urbanism
• Applying Christian faith and concepts to urbanism
• Sense of rooted and existential purpose 
• Coalition building, breaking down perceived barriers
• Build the offense for the team you have
• Everyday charity 
• The good Samaritan 
• Designing cities for serendipity 
• Cities as the most stable, consistent political unit we have

Today I’m speaking with Iden Petraj, a citizen cycling advocate in Albania who was the named the Bike Mayor of Tirana for her grassroots organizing work to make the capital city safer for cyclists.  She launched a bike donation campaign that served over 200 kids, helped advocate for the installation of kilometers of protected bike lanes, and even taught a complete stranger how to ride.  Iden's energy for making her city a better place is contagious and even got some international attention from Albania's European neighbors. 

Follow Iden on Instagram: @iden.petraj and on Twitter: @IPetraj

Join the olmsted Slack community here and check out our website

Show notes:

• Started with community bike rides and bike donations
• Started organizing in the bike community in Tirana
• Works with different departments of the city gov't
• Cyclists of irana (Stories of everyday bike riders in Tirana)
• Most people she interviewed started during the pandemic
• She taught a stranger how to ride a bike
• Transport is difficult in Tirana
• 6 years ago - no bike infra in Tirana (only 30-40 cyclists)
• Now, 38 km of bike infra
• Becoming more safe everyday, children now ride on streets
• Cycling school for kids 
• Day with no cars (every Sunday in the center of the city)
• Childrens bike donation system
• 200 hundred bikes donated last year
• Dutch cycling embassy visited Tirana
• Traffic a major problem in Tirana
• Mayor was important in making changes to bike infra
• “Voice of the cyclists”
• Ask the cyclists what they need
• What Iden loves about cycling
• She’s starting a bike helmet awareness campaign, cycling to school
• No bike sharing system in Tirana anymore, trying to start a new one

Jonathan Berk joins Olmsted to talk about Patronicity, the Kickstarter for community placemaking projects.  Plus: tactical urbanism, pedestrinization trends post-pandemic, protesting in front of Pac Sun, Victor Gruen, and the housing crisis. 

Check out Patronicity.

Follow Jonathan on Twitter.

Join the olmsted Slack community here.

Show Notes:

• Patronicity overview
• Origins of Patronicity, (Detroit, Kickstarter)
• Starlight Square in Cambridge, MA - PAtronicity project, used to be parking space, became outdoor theatre space for community events
• Tactical placemaking 
• Pedestrianizing trends - gained more traction during pandemic 
• We took a few parking spaces and the world didn’t end
• Low dollar, low cost but a lot of community engagement 
• Cherry on top projects
• Definition of placemaking - community led projects
• Protesting between Pac Sun and Spencers
• Victor Gerrin’s lament
• Demand for walkable urbanism lifestyle 
• Abundant Housing MA
• Need for all different types of new housing
• Every community needs to contribute
• 400k+ housing units needed
• Housing market is stunted
• Jonathan’s unique path to urbanism 

Big steel boxes hurtling around cities at high speeds, spewing toxic gases and killing thousands every year... what could go wrong?  Daniel Knowles (Midwest correspondant at The Economist) sits down with me to discuss his upcoming book Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It.  He's not saying we should ban cars cold turkey, but it might be time we start cutting back. 

Carmageddon will be available in March 2023. Pre-order it here. 

Follow Daniel on Twitter.

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Show Notes:

• The problem with cars in cities 
• Disney presents: the driver and the walker 
• Rise of the auto centric  era - US to them
• How the bike industry birthed its greatest foe (the car)
• 1920s anti-car protests in Baltimore, Cinncinati, NYC,  etc
• Jaywalking laws
• British used to cycle 18 billion miles a year
• The car can arrive and take over quicky
• Yossarian problem of cars
• Cars are sexy
• American transport consultants go globe trotting
• Speculative streetcar developers vs suburban sprawl developers
• People don’t like having their houses knocked down
• Detroit’s decline
• A parking lot the size of West Virginia
• A lot of our problems have autos at the root
• Roads as racial barriers
• We have way too many cars and we drive too far
• Cars and social trust
• Atomized existences 
• Oh yeah, cars kill millions of people every year
• When a road is taken away there’s no outpouring of anger
•  Paris’ rapid transformation to a cycling city
• Tokyo has no street parking

What's old is new.  Lauren Mayer, communications manager for the Congress for the New Urbanism, joins the pod to talk sprawl, burning streetcars, urban "renewal" and highway removal, Albany, OKC, and Tulsa, and why New Urbanism is for everyone. 

www.cnu.org
Twitter: @NewUrbanism

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Show notes:

• CNU background and history, reaction to 20th century sprawl
• Problems with suburban sprawl, bad for community building
  • No sidewalks, unsafe for kids
  • No parks nearby
  • Unsafe for walking, not getting around in a car
• Last street car burning in St. Paul minnesota
• What’s a streetcar suburb
• Suburbs themselves are not bad ideas, it’s how they’re constructed and how car-centric they are
• CNU in OKC
• Current zoning doesn’t allow you to build the communities you love
• Urban renewal - urban highway construction - red-lining and discrimination
• Albany interstate 787: cuts the city apart, highway removal movement  
• Using federal infra dollars to start healing process
• There’s still  highway expansion projects across the country
• Can’t just be about highway removal, need the whole urbanist package to solve our problems
• Tulsa parking lot activation - CNU project
• “New urbanism has an impact at every scale”
• Listening to and getting buy-in from the community
• Getting community support for highway removal
• Biden admiistration - momentum for freeway removals, studies and funding
• The engineering profession - focus on “grey” infrastructure, “this road needs to move people faster”
• Department of Transportation looking to the future
• Reconnecting communities grant - still highway expansions being proposed to get this grant funding
• Why urbanism?
• New urbanism is for everyone

Google Glass, Snap Spectacles, Facebook/Meta Oculus. Augmented reality is coming whether we like it or not. But is there a good way to take on AR? Can it help with making our cities more democratically engaged and create meaninful places in the real world? Software engineer Justin Copenhaver founded Urality to solve the problem of digital placemaking in our cities. He joins the Olmsted Podcast to discuss the intersection of augmented reality and urbanism.

Links:
Check out Urality here: https://www.urality.com/

Follow Justin on Twitter: @copeonarope

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Notes:

• Urality, digital placemaking and way finding + community storytelling app that Justin is building;
• Good AR vs Bad AR (billboard effect, attention economy);
• AR and placemaking + urban planning + gaining political support for something like a bike lane by projecting it in AR;
• Digital democracy, technocracy, tyranny of a vocal minority;
• Strong towns, density, land value tax, fiscally sound cities;
• DENSITY!;
• How to bring a tangent full circle 101;
• Pandemic and people spending time in their communities for the first time;
• Lack of shame on facebook;
• Social media! But good;
• Is tourism a dirty word?;
• Problems with EVs;
• Justin’s opinion on the trajectory of the urbanism movement - incrementalism;
• Tactical urbanism;

Lies, damned lies, and logistics.  Dhruv Gupta, co-founder of trucking data optimization start-up Axle joins the Olmsted Podcast to talk about the intersection  of hardware and software, micromobility and 18-wheelers, trucking regulations and autonomous speculations, and more.  

Links:

Axle, a universal data platform for trucking: https://www.axleapi.com/

Check out Dhruv's podcast How Tech Becomes Law

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Notes:

• Micromobility 
  • Definition; Rebalancing and how software / optimization comes into solve hard problems 
  • What’s holding US cities back from taking advantage  of mobility tech
• Axle
  • US trucking regulation history
  • All the data gathered around trucking and what you can build with it
  • Similarities between micromobility optimization and trucking optimization
• Fragmentation in the trucking industr; Game of Trucks; Trucker turnover
• Dhruv’s Wolvervine-based vision of autonomous trucking
• Different types of automated trucking
• Dhruv’s first principles as an entrepreneur 

And here’s ep #3  featuring Michael Sussman, CEO of Strategic Rail Finance and founder of the non-profit On Track North America.  So, yeah, we walk trains.  But also urban freight rail, collaboration versus competition, labor versus automation, and industrial policy.

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Notes:

• Picnic test
• Why we don’t have urban freight anymore 
• Industry moving out of the cities
• Externalities that trucks have to (not) pay vs what freight rail has to pay
• He's not anti truck
• Railroads and trucks can go side by side 
• I unload my pet peeves about urban trucks
• Industrial policy  
• EVs and their problems  
• Using urban rail lines for both freight and passenger 
• The recent (almost) labor strike on the freight rails 
• Some men and women just like driving heavy machinary 
• Humans vs machine driving trains