Podcast

This week we’re bringing you our recording from the last weekend in October at the Rail~Volution conference, where we interviewed Catherine Cuellar, director of Entrepreneurs for North Texas and former executive director of the Dallas Arts District, and Dave Unsworth, the director of capital projects at TriMet in Portland, Oregon.

How do the places we inhabit lead to systemic public health problems?

This week we talk to Mike Lydon of The Street Plans Collaborative and co-author of the recent book Tactical Urbanism. Based on his experience with tactical urbanism, Mike says you know an idea has "made it" when it gets co-opted for things that don’t fit the actual definition. We also discuss how to take a small planning idea and make it bigger, and whether urbanism goes through cycles like fashion, with ideas from the past coming back into style.

Dr. Kevin Gurney is a carbon cycle scientist at Arizona State University. I recently came across an article in Nature about his work measuring carbon emissions from mobile sources at street level, and I wanted to find out more.

This week I chat with author and city planner Tim Sullivan about his new book, Ways to the West. The book documents his attempt to take a three week road trip without a car, and his encounters with various planners, city officials, and other characters along the way.

This week's guest is Branden Klayko, founder of Streetsblog Network member site Broken Sidewalk, which covers transportation and urbanist issues in Louisville, Kentucky. Louisville is one of the oldest American cities west of the Appalachians, and we discuss the history of the city and its urban heritage. (Is it southern? Is it in the Midwest?)  While many may know Louisville for bourbon, the Kentucky Derby, or college basketball rivalries, Branden gives us another view of the arts and culture that make the city great.

Shin-pei Tsay of Transit Center joins me this week to delve into her new report, A People’s History of Recent Urban Transportation Innovation, which examines how advocacy and political leadership have combined in several American cities to produce a more multi-modal transportation network.

Antonia Malchik’s recent piece in Aeon Magazine, The End of Walking, went viral in urbanist circles, touching on several themes related to our "right to walk."

This week my guest is Miriam Zuk of UC Berkeley's Center for Community Innovation, who discusses how the team at the Urban Displacement Project has studied and mapped out gentrification and displacement risk in the Bay Area. We talk about the relationship between transit and rising property values, as well as the widespread portrayal of gentrification in the media as a rapidly occurring short-term process.