On the Park Bench - Author's Forum on Urbanism: Main Street – How a City’s Heart Connects Us

i'm going to give people a minute or so to come in before we begin still letting people come in you all can see my screen so welcome everybody to on the park bench a public square conversation put on by the congress for the new urbanism on the park bench is a webinar series that presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and allied industries and trends providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time on the park bench generally takes place at 12 noon on tuesdays not every tuesday but um a couple of times a month and the webinar series is intended to be a platform for cnu members to engage debate and collaborate on the pressing issues we're all facing in cities and towns are facing now and let us know if you'd like to hear about something or from somebody and we'll try to line it up today we have an author's form which is a webinar series within the series and it discusses uh books that have really recently been published that are of interest to urbanists or by urbanist and the author's form is is produced by dura tadani an architect and urbanist who works behind the scenes to put these together today we're going to have we're going to talk about main street how city's heart connects us all with author mindy thompson fully loved and the discussion with interviewer kennedy smith so share your thoughts on hashtag on the park bench www.tinyurl.com otpb feedback and register for our next webinar which is also at 12 noon next tuesday march 23rd columbus downtown development corporation parks proving their worth join us as a panel discussion discusses the role parks will play in the future of wellness development and community in our cities go to cnu.org resources on the park bench to register and find out more and i wanted to remind everybody that we have an upcoming congress cnu 29 design for change our 29th annual congress for the new urbanism that's going to take place may 19th through 21st and it's going to focus on the interaction intersection of design and power the power design holds to influence the way we live to physically change and adapt the spaces we inhabit as well as how we can use it to achieve the change we want to see in neighborhoods towns cities and across regions cnu 29 is going to be another virtual congress you're going to be able to see it out of the comfort of your home without having to rent a motel room or book a hotel book a flight and the the program is going to be every bit as good or better than any of the previous congresses and that is really saying something uh it's going to feature multiple formats that maximize the benefits of being held virtually and encourage creativity and innovation from participants learn more at cnu.org cnu29 we have a great program today um with a mindy fully love author md lf apa honorable aia who is a social psychiatrist and professor of urban policy and health at the new school in new york city she's published more than a hundred scientific papers and eight books incredibly prolific author among the books root shock how tearing up city neighborhoods hurts america and what we can do about it an urban alchemy restoring joy in america's sorted out cities she's co-author of from enforcers to guardians of public health primer on ending police violence kennedy smith very familiar to the cnu audience is one of the nation's foremost experts on downtown economic development she served as director of the national main street center for 14 years and she launched um in 2004 the community land use and economics group a specialized downtown development consulting firm that she's still a leader of and she's now senior researcher with the institute for local self-reliance i'm rob studiville senior communications advisor with the congress for the new urbanism and editor of cnu's online journal public square and today we're going to be talking about main street how city's heart connects us all that traverses the central thoroughfares of our cities to uncover the ways they bring together our communities and uh this was the result of an 11-year study of main streets in 178 cities in 14 countries uh incredible research project with whereby fully loved discovered the power of city centers to help us name and solve our problems the book was published by new village press in september 2020. now i'm just going to talk a little bit about the format today there's going to be a brief presentation by mindy and kennedy and then a discussion between those two and then we're going to open it up to q a from the audience so use the q a function of zoom to ask questions uh as they occur to you uh we'll get to those questions as soon as that discussion is over and the first people to ask questions will no doubt be the first ones to have their questions answered so ask them as they occur to you and now i am going to stop sharing my see screen and pass this along to kennedy great thank you rob um hi everybody glad to be here today and i i can't tell you how happy i am to be uh talking with mindy today i read her book and i began reading it and thinking you know anything that's called main street i'm gonna love it but i got i kept reading it faster and faster and then slower and slower i just loved it um and there are many things i loved about it it stimulated so many ideas all at the same time and i think that's what i maybe like best in the end is that it synthesizes so many different pieces of what really make a main street and a city and a place in the general sense uh really wonderful or really bad um or something in between on the sort of healing and dying scale um and it reminded me of of lots of books uh that i've read and i'm sure many of the people listening in today have read like the image of the city by kevin lynch which is um you know sort of a nice little descriptor of the different physical components of the city lines of advantage and we'll talk about mindy's typology for cities in a second but i like her spin on it what do people do downtown written by a project from public spaces back in the 1980s which was literally just sort of an inventory of okay 427 people have walked by here and here's what they did after that um mindy brings some some soul to that experience um consequential strangers a great book about the the sort of uh sort of low low-key casual interactions that we have with people the person who serves us coffee at the coffee shop in the morning and the guy who parks the car uh who end up becoming really important in our lives even though we don't know them that well we know them through familiarity um changes in the land if you guys haven't read this book pick it up it's fabulous uh there's a wonderful part in mindy's book where she talks about how earthworms are not indigenous to north america who knew i had no idea um and completely changed the the ecology and you can sort of follow that up the food chain into uh you know earthworms emit greenhouse gases and now we're not getting the snowpack we used to get in vermont and so ticks aren't freezing in the winter and so we have more lyme disease and um anyway this book also kind of delves into a bit of that and finally um uh mindy had a line in the book that just slayed me which is about a game called alternate orange in which people imagined what orange new jersey would have been like if the highway had not been built took me back to italo calvino's invisible cities and the wonderful chapter that he talks about uh the city named fedora that has a museum in the middle of the of the town square where everyone in the town has created a glass globe with their vision of what the city might be in the future and of course as soon as they put it in the museum that future's already passed and can't be achieved um i just i just love loved loved this book it brings so many pieces together um it's you know most of the people who are listening in today are probably architects or landscape architects planners uh maybe some urban designers uh people who photograph cities um uh people who deal with policy uh with cities i've always dealt sort of with the economics of this and so i've always looked at the design components of cities in terms of how do they make the economics work well and we'll talk about that a little bit a little bit later um i want to just i i think turn things over to to mindy at this point to talk about her book a little bit and then we'll come back and chat a little bit later after mindy uh uh talks for a few minutes um i'm going to i've pulled together 15 or so slides of interesting things i've seen in my travels through main streets across the country and around the world some of them are are good some of them are scary some of them are interesting just to get her reactions because her uh her reactions to seeing the places that she's traveled are so multi-layered and so rich and so expansive um that i'd like to to hear her thoughts and i'd encourage any of you if you have uh photos of interesting places that you've seen uh that you're kind of wondering what the heck is going on and what might a social psychiatrist think of this um get them out and post them in the uh in the chat and we'll um we'll talk about those at the end too so mindy with that i'm gonna turn things over to you thank you ah you really made my day kennedy thank you so much who could have anticipated such enthusiasm so bowled over um i thought i would start two things that in in this moment uh we are facing what the poor people's campaign calls five injustices racism poverty the war economy ecological devastation and distorted morality and and then present president biden in his inaugural address talked about six crises coveted pandemic climate change growing inequality racism america's global standing and the attack on truth and democracy obviously a lot of overlap however you want to make the list this is a time of a lot of trouble and part of the challenge of this study was how to how to fit main streets which are these very particular and kind of little places into this big picture so i want to talk a little bit today about about method because i am a researcher and this is all about method a lot of people said to me um things about uh because i went to 178 cities you know the the sort of how did i measure things you know did i stand on the street and count how many people went by or count anything and the only thing i counted was how many cities i went to my method had to do with finding a friend if possible um and going to lunch that was my method and just hanging out trying to buy something lunch a book a muffin trying to participate in the main street at least as a consumer and taking photos so the way this is is organized the way i think about it is from the framework offered by roger barker who invented ecological psychology and he said that there's such a thing as that our behavior is appropriate to the behavior setting and he did a study of how children behaved in different behavior settings you can see here the setting of the second grade academic class the playground and the music class and it changes the children in class are are little change in position slow tempo serious mood on the playground it's unorganized and they're running around they're playing games the music class is is sort of in the middle so the behavior patterns that we exhibit fit the setting and one of the settings he talked about is is roads and streets so i had used this way of saying so main streets when we talk about main streets as a civic commercial social amalgam a center are a behavioral setting it's open 24 7. everybody knows where it is it has what it has and when we go to main street we behave the way we're supposed to behave on main street which is pretty wide array of public behaviors and that fundamentally is what makes main street great and special so so how did i get to see these behaviors and study this is by going to see the way barker's team went to see what were the children doing so this this study in which i went and had lunch or you know went to the toy store had to do with going to see what people were doing in this milia and you may know that that milias are are very important in psychiatry that for people who are seriously mentally ill we put them in hospitals or in in clinics or day treatment centers and the milia the place in which we're doing the treatment is a very important part of the treatment and i was trained at new york hospital westchester division which at that time was headed by a group of very prominent psychoanalysts and it was a hospital where people had long stays and so there's a lot of focus on how is it that the demeanor all the ways in which we work together are restorative for people so i'm very grounded in milia and so this was a a wonderful time to to use those uh that awareness and that training that i'd had these are some of the behavior centers that behavior settings that barker encountered in the town where he did his uh groundbreaking work so but the second influence so i'm going to go visit these things how am i going to do that the second influence on me besides roger barker was hirofumi minami who in the photo at the top right right over here that's a japanese environmental psychologist fascinated by psychoanalysis and he had the idea that we could do a psych analysis of the city that one could and then and then in that way you would get to look at the hidden stories of the city and he was very interested in the hidden stories of hiroshima his hometown because in the in the um aftermath of world war ii and the dropping of the bomb on hiroshima the narrative became very much about peace but with a suppression of japanese militarism and imperialism that had preceded the war so how does how does that history get left out and and the psychoanalysis is to excavate the history uh so he said what we have to do is to stroll we go see the place and then we scroll and by scroll he you know scroll in the japanese tradition is literally a manuscript that's written on a very long piece of paper and read from right to left as it's unrolled so it rolls from one roller to the other so the this this what you see is a broadway stroll this is david chapin uh the other colleague who helped us with this and so we set up a series of walks along broadway five walks on five different days pretty cold and then after we did the walks we met at david chapin's office at cuny graduate center to do the scroll and the scroll was really bringing things forward that helped us make associations to what we had seen and these are some of the associations to broadway you may know the book here is new york children's book which talks about wall street and how wall street was built against the native people to keep them out um this was some drawings that david made on a chalkboard in his office this was um there was a whole thing in times square around people who dress up as cartoon characters and were bothering the tourists so the people who were in charge of the public space decided that they would paint blocks on the ground and then the cartoon characters could stay only in those blocks uh of course um as i saw it the you know go-to solution in america is always segregation sadly um and then down here you see the brave girl who was a statue erected in the face of the wall street bull at this particular moment all the tourists were looking at the bull and not the brave girl and all of these and then also michael kimmelman had done an article in the new york times just as we were walking about this building which is an athletic center for columbia university but which does nothing to support the street at that point so these are the kinds of things that we were assembling to help us understand what we had seen on broadway or sort of our walk our meals our time together our chats the weather all those things that we were trying to piece together all of this was added so these are four of the many scrolls that i made these are four of those that are in the book one in cleveland one in kyoto one in shakht and one in vermont various places in vermont uh and the idea was that there was a photo a map where the photo was and some text and where these were one journey it sort of they're all connected you could see how i traveled the idea of this is that i'm saying what i saw and but you could go take the same walk and see what you saw or you could take a different walk which might be even more fun and what's nice is that um then people say to me big fun oh i love to go to that toy store and they point out by the way now it's closed so one of the things that happens is if you were to take the same walk i took you wouldn't see the same things i saw in some instances because they're gone or or whatever things happen so um so so this is my method and one of the things that's happened is that my colleagues at the university of orange which is a three people school in orange new jersey became very interested in this at u of o we practice restoration urbanism and we like to walk cities and so they thought they would teach people how to do this stroll and scroll and you can find the instructions on the university of orange website so this is the sort of basic model that kennedy said i had um developed that those that the the what we call main street this civic commercial social amalgam is is the box it's set in a circle of urban tissue and it's transected by a line so that's the basic way in which i came to see main streets and to think about them but what's also important is at the next level of scale over of our region in this case essex county you can see that there are a lot of streets what i came to call the tangle and the main streets in the tangle are in different kinds of shapes some of them are are have fallen apart been disinvested some places in the suburbs never built a main street so there's no main street at all or a little vestigial main street some main streets are are fabulous and we were so interested to find this series of main streets through the middle of the county one outlier great main street no great main streets really in the suburbs in in the deep suburbs um and then a lot in the sort of area of newark where they've been tremendous disinvestment had been great main streets and had fallen apart but this set of main streets were old enough to have built been built as great main streets and had enough investment to still be prospering so the tangle i think is actually where the action is when you think about society and how all of this works together for our mental health and one of the things about behavior in a segregated society is that people go where they're supposed to go and they don't go where they're not supposed to go and if they go where they're not supposed to go they get chased out one way or another so highly problematic that in our society the tangle isn't the fluid set of exchange points that would be the most supportive of a functioning democracy so um ufo said so go see this go see go see the box circle line or go see the tangle and then they gave people in in the trainings this template which works really well and then people filled it out so molly rose kaufman who's one of the directors of the university of orange went to see newark avenue uh which is near where she lives in jersey city shows some photos and listed all the things that she saw a lot of things um when we were doing this class at the university of orange it was a big snowstorm so i just limited my walk from my back porch to my bird feeder i thought that was the main street of the birds the main street i needed to see some other colleagues talked about downtown fort myers doug ferrand took a transect walk so he walked eight miles from maplewood to montclair uh really uh and saw a lot of things these photos are particularly about what he saw as he went through orange new jersey and then holly bars went to see springfield avenue in maplewood which is trying to so they're trying to have these flags and identify it springfield maplewood um it's it's a little saggy and i think they're trying to give it spirit and connection so i think the most important thing is that the strolling scroll is a way to take to to give continuity and coherence to observations of these of this particular behavior sending the main street so that we can see what's there we can think about the contents we can think about the larger circle in which it's embedded how the line runs through and then the tangle of which it's a part so that's the a little bit about the method and then some of the findings and you know i think we always have to keep in mind that this local work this very local work on a main street is in the context of a nation in crisis and so can we use the work on main street to also help us solve these larger problems is i think the great question in front of us so that's what i wanted to share kennedy over to you thank you so much um you you do a great job at describing sort of the physical form of what you know what uh what the setup is that can make things work that show people what kind of setting they're in and what behaviors one might expect there but there's so much more in your book that you pack in here that is uh that that is the connective tissue that really holds it together um uh and there's uh just so many things that i that that i um i just loved um one of them is uh you talked about uh on one of these uh lines you and your daughter hop scotching uh from one bit of intact fabric to another um and that's so it's so sad and you also talk in another part about how do you fix a broken box um and you had a great photo in the uh in your uh book of a broken box i've tried to find one in my own collection let me pop this up here and show which isn't exactly as broken as the one that you showed but i wonder what your thoughts were on how you do fix a broken box and how you can reconnect not just in terms of physical you know infrastructure and building but how can you re-knit pieces of a city that have come apart yeah i i mean it's really the fundamental question and i got to really think through a lot of the re-knitting process process in my in my previous book urban alchemy which is restoring joy in america's sorted out cities where looking at the work of restoration urbanists around the country identified what i called nine elements of urban restoration and so that's really where you want to start but if we just take this picture thank you for this i don't know if people can see my cursor uh i can see my cursor can you see my cursor move kennedy no okay well but let's see the the first thing obviously is this is the street so it looks wide and barren and there are no trees i mean the first thing you want to do just because you just want to do it is plant some trees just widen these sidewalks the street is why the sidewalks are too narrow widen the sidewalks and put in a layer of trees which would harmonize and humanize this whole whole landscape and and give it coherence you know and that's what we're looking for we want to make it more more friendly more personable and and that's one of the things trees do in a landscape um then you know the issue is that these this is not very friendly and this is not very friendly there's nothing friendly about it but there are a lot of things that people do to make something more friendly and they're not necessarily very expensive so that that's really becomes the first step is to do the simple friendly things that make you feel like oh okay i could walk down that street i think that's where you start it doesn't have to cost a lot it's it's just the wanting to be friendly which is but jake eisenberg and i talk about as as main street as is the main street hospitable does it invite people to come and socialize yeah i like to think that we're making some some progress uh in a lot of communities uh people like mike lydon who are talking about tactical urbanism you know low-cost uh perhaps temporary interventions that can begin to make a place look more lively and feel more inviting so that then there becomes more of an umph or more critical mass of activity uh that might lead to economic revitalization um another issue that i that i grapple with some and you touched on in in a light way in a couple of places in your books and i'd like your thoughts on it this is something that uh that comes into my work quite often is is a main street a main street if it has mostly national chains um what's the importance of locally owned businesses to making to help to helping shape a community's uh personality so here are a few places you know old places and new places that have a high propensity of chains um what do you think i i think that that's an important and useful question there's no argument i i don't think there's any argument that having local stores is more fun and more interesting but a main street isn't just commerce and i and i think that's really one of the things this word amalgam just came to me a lot as i was visiting that commerce is one part of the amalgam i i mean i'm somebody who had a bad dentist as a child so i have a lot of amalgam in my mouth so maybe why it's so vital to me um and uh and many people my age had a bad dentist so it was like there was bad dentistry at that time so amalgam is very important to my being able to eat anyway this is an amalgam so there's the public space there's commerce and then there's civic stuff that's going on whatever it is you know for example street signs that's part of the civic the electric boxes it's part of the civic there may be a library or a police station or city hall so we can get carried away if we think we have to control the commerce or what we have to control is making the public public and the civic civil and the commerce is going to come and go what's going to happen to all these big box stores i was invited to write a paper for a special issue on store fronts because these scholars think that all the storefronts are going all these commerce is going to close maybe not the cvs but a lot of it is going to all these big box stores william sonoma going to have big box stores after the pandemic probably not as many if they have any so so i i think commerce comes and goes it's always important and you want to support it but you can't get it's not the only thing on main street so you want to decenter it a bit that's my real thought about that does that make sense to you kennedy yeah it it does it's um i mean it's certainly changing right now the nature of what commerce is in the us and the world one of the things that i've been spending a lot of time on lately is it's gonna sound odd but is uh third party third-party restaurant meal delivery apps which are typically charging they typically charge 30 or more uh to the restaurant of the cost of a meal which is during this pandemic is gutting restaurants it used to not be so significant before the pandemic because it was sort of a loss leader to bring in new customers for restaurants and they um and they could absorb it but now it's absolutely killing them um and there are a number of places 50 or 60 communities and states uh around the u.s um have uh enacted temporary fee caps uh to charge that but the point is that at the same time that this is all happening and restaurants are in such distress um there are i've found probably 80 or 100 local delivery services that have popped up around the country and they've done it uh because they know they can operate charging restaurants between zero and five percent um and passing on more costs to the customer or making it function as a co-op uh so that there isn't that and the point of it is that it's sort of a profit motivation that is driving these third-party apps to charge these astronomical fees and we're essentially shifting wealth from main street to wall street it's the venture it's the venture capitalists and the equity investors that we're that we're feeding um by doing that so it's it's a it's a broken system that's sort of accelerating and that's playing through in many different parts of commerce right now and one of the things that i i loved about your book was that you talk in many different ways and in many different chapters about wealth and um you know how how one helen builds wealth in a community and what's happening to the country um that that wealth is sort of you know dissipating from here and going someplace else you talk about it a great line said at some point the inconsiderate rush for money the needs of people will be lost needs like blue sky that can be seen from the coffee shop window um that that's you know so true um and then when you talked about you know why did trump win um i loved your response the answer was that president obama and the democrats had not turned around the growing inequality in wealth the terrible job situation facing former industrial workers and a constant sorting of communities by race and class that that transfer of wealth is really disturbing to me and i wondered if you had a little bit more you could say about that i have so much i could say about that um one of my assignments at the new school is to teach political economy of the city so i get to blab about that for at great length um but in the new york times today there was an article saying the democrats have become self-critical around those programs hence the large relief act that they've passed which may lead to more substantial uh programs that help poor and working people so i i think that's a a great shift i mean we had 40 years of growing inequality where wages of working people have been flat and wealth has become concentrated in the hands of very small number of people around the globe and that's an intolerable situation um but but the second part so there's a second part there's two other layers to that that make it very problematic one is that people get wealthy by taking and to some extent by taking from things we hold in common so your point about the delivery services taking the profits of the restaurants i think is part of that and and so government should be protecting in a famine or situation which is a parallel to a pandemic government caps food prices so that people can't you know really exploit the starving and in this situation government could cap food delivery prices because their people are being exploited of the of the desperate needs of all of us who are sheltering in place but we failed to do that and we act only on behalf of the corporations helping to concentrate the wealth so the wealth is all flowing into the hands of these few people so the tech giants jeff bezos his fortune went up by a billion dollars whereas a lot of people are maybe permanently unemployed because of this situation and and that's fuels this pandemic and the next one so this is very bad for the survival of our species um but the next thing is that these processes they maintain power by dividing people and we are so divided and so fractured at this point and and that democracy can't work if you're divided because then you just want to fight with each other and argue with each other whereas democracy requires conversation so those are are things that trouble me a lot and as a physician i see them as inimical with population health it'll be interesting to see what uh changes in cities uh linger after the pandemic what kinds of things we decide to hang on to what kinds of things we have realized we've we've done wrong and might decide to do differently um i don't know what that's going to be do you have any sense of what might stick and what might go um i i think that um one of the things is that they'll be dancing in the streets do you ever listen to the song by martha and the vandellas they'll be dancing in the streets all around the world right right yeah every guy grab a girl um i think this summer there's going to be and there should be dancing in the streets and i but i don't know what's going to happen after that but but i think just everybody needs to dance it's been very very hard well i think what's what's clear is it's going to be on main street and not just shopping mall so you can't dance you can't have a big dancing party at the shopping mall that's public space you could go dance there you could dance right in front of the cvs pharmacy you could see that you know the jitterbuggers jumping over that little fence that literally right i loved what one of your airlines was open to the weather main street is also open to panhandlers parades murder and blooming trees and it's so far it's the one place where all your civic rights are in place so i'm gonna just show you some pictures and um i used to do this thing in presentations when i like talk to people in person where i would have just a crazy mix of slides and i would have people yell out the top of their lungs as fast as they could is this cool or not cool and uh the point being that no one knew what it was but sort of like the definition of uh pornography i know it when i see it um so i'm not going to go that fast but just as i go through just tell me if there's anything about the picture that evokes um an idea for you or a thought about uh the physical space and uh how people that was my cue for wealth for um for what what what the space means and how people might act there yeah yeah yeah this is that same problem of the the wide street in the skinny sidewalk where are the people supposed to go can we make some room for them so um i i i mean i grew up in the 50s so 50s and 60s store signs feel like home to me uh but because they're also you know obviously a lot of disinvestment just a lot of rust coming down from that eagle um you know and the eagle photo has moved you know it what's going on here and you know one thing is that cities that this was taught to me by my urbanism teacher michelle cantel dupar who's a renowned french architect and urbanism urbanist he said you know cities want to put in these bricks and things to make things cute so-called cute but that's not really the issue the issue is is more structural it's deeper have you connected things have you widened sidewalks have you put in trees have you done the kinds of things that make flow and these bricks don't do anything for flow and that and that you know one of the measure did your urbanism help is the business should be booming and it's not so not not good no and here we got booming so this is good so cute how beautiful right since 1910 um that's beautiful one of the things i think you address so eloquently in your book is the issue of time in fact you make it a a another dimension of the physical manifestation of the street um and that's something i'm obviously my work has been in has centered around historic downtowns forever and so i can't imagine a downtown that doesn't have history something historic in it as a as a touchstone and a reference point i can't help but walk by a building like this and not blur my eyes and try to envision what it looked like in 1910 how happy the people were when they first opened the store and all of that how happy they are to see it now yeah so this is i actually mentioned this to you the other day i was i was wondering yeah i was in bucharest a few years ago and every inch of every surface was covered with graffiti just everywhere and at first i was a little taken aback by it but our romanian friends who were with us were saying isn't it glorious people have taken back the city after the long regime of chauchesku and the communists and they're making it their own now and writing their names and writing their messages everywhere i you know so i worked in harlem and the south bronx in the 90s when there was lots of graffiti and you know graffiti is uh it's a very special moment and it's both about power and powerlessness very complicated some of the graffiti that was most touching to us is as public health people was the graffiti for people who had been murdered um there were a lot of a lot of murder going on a lot of violence at that time and so various murals had been erected to loved ones so it's it's this sort of power and powerlessness right coming out of a dictatorship and then how do you start to express yourself it's it's sort of how do you how do you voice what's going on in your world so it becomes very important to say to people what's the graffiti about as you did as you did it's it's that listening to graffiti if i may invent a book title i've seen i've seen the face of rob suitable appear which means that we need to move on to q a uh from our attendance but they're they're one i'm gonna fast forward through some of these uh i just love that when i said that it's great it's really great um but i wanted you to tell this story because i just love this from uh about the uh the strolling of the heifer trolling of the heifers yeah um so every year on the first saturday in june a my group which is city life is moving bodies has a party in northern manhattan parks called hike the heights where we hike to a party place it's to advocate for investment in these upper manhattan parks which have gotten a lot of investment we are very grateful to say um at this but the same day in brattleboro vermont there's the strolling of the heifers my best friend from medical school martha stillman lives right near brattleboro and it has been my guide to the the small towns and cities of vermont and so she had always said you know come up for it but but i had to like get i had to get like permission to miss class from hike the heights go to the strolling of that first and so you know you can see the crowds there are sitting on the sidewalk so it's just you just sit there and then people walk by with their heifers and then there's like old-fashioned farm equipment and the year that i went bernie sanders went by he was just becoming a presidential candidate and he was you know it was very exciting because that was the home crowd so it's a it's a festival that they started to have solidarity with dairy farmers and with farming in vermont which is obviously very threatened and the combination of the farm in the city here i think as a model in there's an essay in a book that i used to teach from which said that how do you know you're a city and they had 10 criteria but one of them was you know where your food comes from and i think and by that measure all of our cities are failing we don't know where our food comes from but this is about knowing where your food comes from great event first saturday in june um there's one more picture i wanted to show this one and i to ask you a very specific question um one of the um this is an example this is candy chang great uh public artist who uh this was after katrina and she put these i wish the i wish this was stickers outside of vacant storefront people could slap on what they wanted to to crowdsource some ideas for new businesses but one of the things that i have noticed in my work with communities that are doing new urban planning uh activities uh new comprehensive plans new uh specific plans whatever it might be is that they tend to have a big charette and people can come and participate wander around and talk to the designers but it always seems to me that the people who come to events like that are people who are inclined to come to events like that and that there are a lot of people in the community who don't and they aren't reached uh in these public planning processes one of the things i liked about this uh candy chang thing was that it's just a very sort of casual thing that anybody walking by can pick up a tag slap it on the building and not feel intimidated by having to come into a room with people that they don't that they don't know or feel comfortable with and i wondered in all your travels with these communities and talking to people who are helping shape them and make them better um if you've come across any any uh ideas or thoughts about how to engage the entire community in a more comprehensive and holistic way that we may typically do in our daily work it's a great question you know churchill says we shape our buildings and then they shape us so the question of so how are we going to shape our buildings is is the question if they're going to shape us however we think about redlining and how it has shaped us all the research that's emerging around that these are profound choices so the how ought to be a lot bigger one of the people that i've worked with julie erickson who's a consultant here in the oranges has an incredible way of doing strategic planning where you can have hundreds of people come to a visioning and so the and and then work together so at the university of orange we did a huge visioning with all the community people to develop our strategic plan but your point is how do you get the people to the visioning you could have hundreds but can you get them in the room and that's really about lines of connection and in a in a highly fractured highly segregated society it it's not simply that they might feel a little uncomfortable it's that the lines of connection actually don't exist your point about um the the casual connections the guy who sells us our coffee the guy who's the parking valet the all the people who have who are these weak ties that we have in communities holding us together these suffer very badly under the kinds of processes that we've had over the past 40 years in the united states they just don't exist so it's it's we're up against the way to solve our problems we have to solve the problem to solve the problem we have a prior step which is we don't have the connectors so we have to go do the basic shoe leather organizing of finding connectors to get the people in the room once you get the people in the room you can make the right plan you can answer the how i think the important thing is to make the how very big how are we going to shape this and are we going to shape it for equity are we going to shape it for inclusion are we going to shape it for survival not only of our species but of our ecosystem if we're not we're going to be in really big trouble bigger trouble than we're in now so the how the how becomes an imperative yeah um there are a bunch of questions that people have are typing in let me um go through some of them um janice bloomgart says uh yes what about the trend for gated communities and people who want to feel safe corporate takeover of our whole lifestyle um yeah those are mostly people who didn't have to read edgar allan poe in high school uh they should be forced to read the mask of the red death it will get in there the white house has super spreader events you know right there's no gated community yeah uh stephanie bothwell says you mentioned making a place more friendly as a first step would you continue to bring us along in that line of thinking how do we create public space management that encourages diversity and openness and not over manage or clean up what might the role of business improvement districts be in that equation well one of the things is policing i i work closely with psychiatrist jake eisenberg and on on some pieces of this and we were both very intrigued by the very aggressive policing in south orange new jersey i live in west orange and south orange new jersey has an attractive downtown and black kids from newark like to come there there's a movie theater there's other things because like it's it's a comfortable place but the south orange which is ritzier and whiter doesn't like them so they the police push them out so policing is just is you know business improvement districts like policing and so one of the things is back off on policing let people come and figure out how you give social cues for what the kind of behavior the range of behaviors that you want in your amelia you control the amelia you use the milieu as the control not the police i think business improvement districts have a great role there in that they can sort of casually you know help people on the streets without policing without policing absolutely there are a million ways to tell people about behavior without a single sign without a single policeman and that's where the fun is then it gets to be fun we we want people to not litter well how do you do that that's cool any ideas without trash cans right you have to ask them why'd you litter usually they're mad so what are they mad about bad dentistry whatever it might be god don't get me started uh conrad kickart says how do we maintain our main streets as a relevant commons and political arena in an era in uh in an era that its commercial function is changing and declining we've talked about the changing uh sort of changing commerce a little bit but not so much about how do we keep it like let's assume that we're going to have higher vacancy rates um or the the type of uses that we have in downtowns and main streets is really going to change a bit um how do we make sure that we're keeping it as relevant comments in political arena yeah it's a really good question because a lot of things like say churches take over a storefront a church isn't um the same kind of third space that a coffee shop is or even a department store people don't go in and out just the church people go in and out and at fairly limited hours so the sort of jane jacobs keep people moving 24 7 becomes a different uh kettle of fish if all of a sudden your main street is filled with churches if the church is occupied the storefronts which they will because churches there's always a lot of churches and they're always looking for space so which isn't to say you should keep the churches out but it becomes a challenge how do you keep the flow on the main street so i i think the issue is um is is that there are all kinds of forms that people invent so for example a student of mine has been working in the bronx and has noticed that large stores have inside of them many small stores and uh so sort of the idea that you could have a large store which is a food court and has a lot of small stores so that people just invented that for themselves so the idea is to look around for one of the inventions and organize the kinds of organizations that you've led and worked with and the kind of ideas you share with people very important in this period is that everybody's got to be thinking about what are the resolutions of this empty storefront issue so there's a lot of empty storefronts but the but if you focus on the storefronts as all that's going on you could get confused so it's also the the sidewalks the streets the trees have a tree planting event have dancing in the street use the social aspect of it to make it useful for people people go to main street because it's useful what do they need people need a lot of healing america is very battered from this period of time wherever you want to start it one report said 4 years 40 years and 400 years so we want to start at 400 years ago or four years ago or four days ago we're battered and we need to dance in the streets what does that mean in your neighborhood so make main street useful it's not just commerce and it's not just storefronts it's other things yeah i can't wait for those parties i'm really looking forward to them yeah um andrea vergara says we've touched again on some of these things she says thanks for a great presentation mindy i found what you said about main streets telling a city's history very interesting nowadays with kovid several main streets have added parklets and outdoor areas for patrons that speak about our current situation do you have any thoughts about other changes main streets will experience with this pandemic or changes in human behavior post-pandemic besides dancing in the street i added that last part did you besides yeah yeah um i think that that is really the question i think it's an open question and that everybody's thinking about it and i mean i really want to emphasize the tangle that main streets are in a tangle here and that the the least resourced ones will plummet the most that that's what's happening given the inequality a stressor on an unequal system is going to hurt the least resource pieces most so it doesn't land equally covet affects everybody but it's not the same weight on different sectors so the least resource main streets are going to fall apart the most if you're working on a well-resourced main street you have options but that doesn't mean that you're not going to be injured in the larger sense of the we by the collapse of the poor resource main streets so the real issue is is there an organization that gets all the main streets in your region thinking together and working together on this problem solving that would be the thing that would create the deepest and strongest improvement in health and all the public health people say that this isn't the only bug out there and that some of the bugs out there are much worse than this one we have bungled our management of this pandemic very badly but if we have a pandemic where the death rate is 10 or 25 or 50 percent imagine bungling that well how are we going to not bungle it we have to be able to talk to each other listen to each other pay attention to science it's a lot of changes in our social behavior that are urgently needed and so can we take our approach to what happens to main streets post pandemic and use it to fix society so that we're ready for the very grave difficulties that await us in the future climate change is not going to be friendly you know what if the gulf stream veers off what happens then did you see that movie where the temperature plummeted to absolute kelvin yeah yeah yeah terrifying i i asked my my colleague rod wallace whose physicist if that was going to happen he said no not that he said not that something terrible the gulf stream moving is terrible it's terrible so let's use our main streets to take care of the gulf stream yeah um a few more i think we have time for a couple more questions uh lynn ellsworth asks who's supposed to do the work of animating main street who represents the citizens of a place as opposed to say just the businesses i think um uh that is a the big question that and that's the how right how how does this all affect us and uh the processes of the past 40 years have been processes of disempowering people how do you accumulate wealth in the hands of very small number of people you have to disempower everybody across the board so there are very few people left standing who who have a strong voice very few um and that that was purposeful public policy but i think it has to start with as everybody agrees to have a dance party all you need is a dj and a flyer and i could hire a dj and make a flyer by myself so and i have 10 friends who come kennedy will come so absolutely i think you know the old saying we're the ones we've been waiting for is uh we're the ones we've been waiting for but we have to acknowledge that we're disempowered we're very battered and we're in very dangerous position and if we if we start from that okay it's a little heavy it's a little hard i got to push this rock up a big hill if we start from there we can do a lot um it reminds me of one of the things that buckminster fuller said which i'm paraphrasing here because i don't have it in front of me but basically he said if you see something that needs to be done and no one's doing it it's your job there you go yeah as people say um the the question that we each have to ask ourselves is what is mine to do in this moment right right um ian saltzman asked an interesting question he says with the dying of local journalism what are some alternative ways that urban residents can tell the story of their cities past present and future i love that question um and at the university of orange we created a website called hidden treasures of orange and and we did an initial kind of a posting of stories it's a gorgeous website um but uh then we sort of didn't really have a way to keep adding to it we wanted to keep adding to but we didn't have a way so we decided that we would create an october term which we're calling och term which will have an octopus as its mascot and octer will be when we collect and post new stories not everybody has a free people's university in their city but everybody could because it's free so i i think uh you know we have a lot to learn i think it's very essential that we know our local history yeah i do too um leona adams writes in uh couldn't churches take on a responsibility to be more engaging with the community to help make the place more dynamic it's interesting the role of churches in in all of this we have some urban congregations closing some reviving i wonder what your observations have been in your travels about the role of churches and making this happen well as i write about in the book my congregation which is a unitarian universalist church in orange new jersey um has been thinking about this a lot how can we be helpful to the city but i think it's really a very turning outward kind of process it didn't happen instantly that we said oh let's be a better church let's turn outward um and so we were really helped by connecting with a church in indianapolis that had turned outward and was using asset-based community development and that came and met with us and taught us so i think it's in each one teach one and the congregations that are doing this you you know you can call them up and say how did you do that i i think i think it's fundamental it's in the sense churches are one of the churches are not as strong as they used to be but they're an existing organization in in some black communities that i visited they're like the last man standing all the restaurants are gone everything banks are gone everything is gone but the church is still there so how does the church become turn outward and help the community it's it's essential and important and ask a church that you see doing something you admire is my it's what we did and it worked for us yeah um a few comments in the chat not in the q a that i think are worth mentioning uh richard glaser inspired by what you've said it says right on mo um a motivated agitators activists need to go forth and initiate change their vision when it emerges can pull others along like a pied piper in my city rochester severalists have done an immense amount to open the public's eyes i love rochester and it's one of the great plans of my life to go there in lilac season i keep getting invented in like march no lilacs in march um in rochester so yay well uh yeah richard blazer i think you should invite uh mindy to come there in lilac season thanks kennedy okay well we are at one o'clock i'm mindful of the time uh rob i think i'll turn it back over to you um yes so um uh this has been a great discussion and uh uh we're we are at one hour point i don't know if we have if there are any more questions that uh that could be answered i haven't um are there are there more there kennedy that you've seen or are we pretty much done i think we've i think we've covered um uh most of the questions people have asked it sort of came up in our discussion as it was um if we have a second i'd like to show one more thing to uh mindy and tell a story that i love from her book do we have time for that we do absolutely and and i'll just say that uh for those who have to leave now that uh there will be a video posted in a day or two you can see the last part um but sure go right ahead kenny great recognize this place mindy coogans ah i love the story in your book i thought it said so much about what makes a community a community and i wondered if you could uh share the story quickly with people who haven't read the book yet yeah um coogans is a irish pub uh restaurant on broadway at between 168th 169th street and it has had three owners and they were just people devoted to community they really understood and believed in community and they wanted to make their restaurant a place where all the communities of washington heights could come together and just enjoy themselves um and they so they did they did make that in many many many ways um so you know part of it was that they you walked in the door and you were just welcomed and they just chatted with you and they had a lot of great things to say they were great hosts um so the building the restaurant was in was owned by presbyterian hospital presbyterian hospital decided they would raise the rent and basically the community rose up in fewer and there was a petition that got 15 000 signatures in 48 hours and people were just calling in from around the world saying you can't close coogans so the hospital was forced to back down and give them a reasonable rent and that was a great a great victory for a place that really understood how to build community sadly uh they decided to close in the face of the pandemic but um i am certainly grateful for all the wonderful moments they created in my life and how sustaining and generous and local businesses that help the local community in that generative kind of way that we all know is so important great people great job i really love it when communities come together to to uh to save to save businesses in particular but also to um really express their um what they love about a community they're really telling a story in doing that coming together really telling a story that was important um things keep coming popping up here one quick one uh do you have any comments on the soho noho upzoning particularly in light of my belief that new york city's big real estate control of our planning i think it does more harm than good we need a major correction um i i'm not a big fan of up zoning this upzoning has been and i and i think the communities that have fought it have fought it are fighting the good fight um and you know the the whole turning manhattan into this place of of wealth and power and driving everybody who's poor working class driving all the industry out these these were bad these are bad decisions and they start with bad decisions the regional plan association forcing all manufacturing out of new york this is not a way to make a vibrant successful stable city so i think it's bad fight it um rob i think we're kind of there there are a couple of questions people have asked about how to make uh their main streets beautiful as well as welcoming but i have a feeling that you have some upcoming um uh sessions that might answer some of those questions well we're we're always coming back to main street i think main street is is a topic that that uh you know is so central to urbanism and towns and cities and of course design is this is the significant uh factor next week we're going to be talking about parks and and landscaping in in the downtown so um that will no doubt touch on it from that angle i wanted to uh thank uh mindy thompson fully love and kenny smith for a great discussion today and everybody who participated and asked great questions um and uh once again you know uh come back we've got more uh on the park benches uh coming up that uh that will have similar discussions and so thank you everybody and have a great day thanks rob i just want to say richard i'm coming over to your beautiful downtown victorian in rochester to see the lilac maybe not this year but next year