On the Park Bench - Author's Forum: Transect Urbanism

we're gonna wait a few minutes and let people uh come in and then we're gonna begin rob um i just discussed a couple of things i just called you well we're live right now okay i wanted to welcome everybody to on the park bench public square conversation you see my screen now uh so on the park bench is cnu's webinar series presenting interactive conversations with thought leaders in the 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 usually about twice a month today we're going to have an authors forum on transect urbanism readings in human ecology with authors andreas duwani and brian fox and a discussion with interviewer charles ball the authors forum is a series within the on the park bench webinar that looks at books and recently published books that are of interest to urbanists so share your thoughts on on the park bench on the park bench at the tinyurl.com slash otpb feedback and please register for our next uh webinars we've got some good ones coming up next tuesday again at 12 noon cnu and aarp enabling better places through zoning reform with danielle aragone fred buzzo and kelly stoddard poor of aarp which is the largest membership organization in the united states along with mallory botches of cnu and then two weeks from today also at 12 noon we're going to have a forum on the book main street how cities heart connects us with author mindy thompson full of love and interviewer kennedy smith go to cnu.org resources on the park bench to register and i wanted to remind everybody about cnu 29 design for change the early bird registration which is a great deal is available through march 7th that's this week and cnu 29 design for change will take place may 19th through 21st and it's going to focus on the intersection of design and power the power that 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 the cnu 29 program is going to break the mold of previous congresses with multiple formats that maximize the benefits of being held virtually and encourage creativity and innovation from participants go to cnu.org cnu29 for more information we've got a great program scheduled today with andreas duane andreas probably needs no introduction uh among this group but he is the co-founder of one of the co-founders of cnu any co-founder of dpz co-design within with elizabeth flater zyberg and a true innovator in the field of urban design and planning over the last 40 years including the concept of the transect and we have brian fox who is the director of this center for applied transect studies he's been a leader in lean urbanism and a keeper of the flame of the transect and the smart code and the interviewer today is charles ball professor and founding director of the graduate program in real estate and urbanism at the university of miami i'm rob studeville senior communications advisor with the congress for the new urbanism and also editor of cnu's online journal public square and the book that we're going to be discussing today is a transect urbanism readings in human ecology and transact urbanism has been a long time in coming it's the most comprehensive book available on the rural to urban transect the transect as as it is conceived today was first presented at cnu uh at the congress for the new urbanism in toronto in 1997. uh it was to a standing room only crowd i had to squeeze my way in and everybody was very excited about the concept of the transect and rightfully so because it became one of the most influential ideas over the last 20 years or so in new urbanism and urbanism in general it's it's forms the basis for many of the codes that are transforming cities and towns across the country and across the world the transect is an old idea almost as old as human settlement itself it's been applied across cultures and time the concept was rediscovered i would say and uh reconceived by andreas and his brother douglas and it forms a theory for how mixed use places are organized and built the book has wonderful images some of which you're going to see today it's not too much to say that the images are an art genre in themselves and the book also has some of the best readings on the transect the webinar is going to be organized as a presentation and a discussion among the panelists first and then we're going to open it up to q a for the audience so use the zoom function of q a you can use the chat function for comments and by the way take a look at the chat function because there is a link to a um to a probably to a lengthy and deep dive into transect urbanism um um a webinar that was pre previously held so check that out as well so we're going to get to those q a function q a questions uh from the audience after the presentation in in short order but but for now i hope everybody enjoys the presentation i'm going to pass this along to the presenters great rob thank you very much for the intro the the series has been really great i haven't seen all of them but i recently saw the one with brian o'looney on his increments of neighborhood book which was excellent and i'm happy to be a part of this one uh this has been a long time in the making as you mentioned i want to congratulate andreas and brian for persevering in assembling and editing and refining the essays and especially the really definitive collection of transect illustrations in this book um so uh this webinar is is for a cmu audience welcome to the audience probably a lot of old friends in the audience as well as some students you're familiar with the transect for the most part and we'll skip the basics and we'll start with a brief overview before delving into our discussion we also expect there's a lot of smart people out there joining us so we'll look to have as many of your questions as possible in the discussion a bit later today's webinar uh can be viewed as a companion to a general introduction and a really more in-depth presentation of the books contents and illustration illustrations that were featured in a books and books webinar last month that featured andreas and brian and i'm going to give you the link to that here so that um not now but uh another time you can go and check that out um i uh was in the audience for that and i thought that was um really excellent uh and and very thorough so um today we're going to start off with just a sampling of the dozens of illustrations featured in the book which brian falk will walk us through so welcome brian and you are able to share the screen and get us started yes thank you very much chuck thank you also to cnu for hosting us today thank you to dear tadani for organizing this as well and to to rob for his help i'm going to share the screen just a moment and get started as chuck said uh i'm going to focus on um the the illustrations the images that are in this book and give you just a quick preview of those but i did want to um also let everyone see the number of excellent essays that are in the book if you look at the uh the right column of this shot from the contents page there you see that there are 14 essays they they cover the gamut from a basic introduction to very uh extensive advanced uh subjects applying the transect so it's a great read as well as uh just to browse through these beautiful images i am going to give just a very brief introduction to the transect not go in depth at all but i do want to make sure that everyone understands what this concept is that we're talking about here you see a diagram of the world or urban transect you see that it has six zones they progress from the natural the uninhabited to the most urban the world to urban transect was adapted from a scientific transect tool that's used primarily in ecological studies and it is a line through a habitat and its purpose is to to analyze to analyze and to document the elements that are found along that line that's cut through the habitat examples might be plants or animals soil or water and if you look at these two images here i'm hoping that that chuck will ask undress about the the personal introduction that he wrote for the book i think it's it's really helpful story that he tells about being in seaside some working there around 1980 and uh his brother douglas dwani was with him and introduced him to the idea of this ecological transect by actually taking him on a walk from the water up across the dunes and it it's it's a really interesting story that he tells um one of the things two of the things that i think are uh particularly interesting is he talks about the transition of course that you can see if you look at the bottom imagine walking from the water across those dunes so you see the transitions that occur in a habitat but then he also talks about the way that all of the elements blended together and also that they work in harmony i'm waiting for my slide to advance there we go uh another part of the story is that years later he uh was in south beach in miami beach which you see there and douglas took him on another walk this time from the ocean to the bay across this neighborhood in the city and it helped him to recognize that this idea could also apply to cities uh as rob said in the introduction it's not a new concept uh the the the a concept of a declension from rural to urban wasn't an invention it's actually as old as human settlements this uh this chinese scroll that's here at the top if you if you follow it from the top left to the bottom right you see that it shows a transition from rural to urban and then to rural again this one was painted in 1736 but we found examples of similar scrolls dating back to the 10th century and down below that you see a medieval transect this one was painted in 1339 it's binary because of the defensive fortifications um but it clearly shows the difference between the town inside the wall and the header land outside the first transect image by the way that we're aware of is the one that we have on the cover that one was done in the 1800s and it was based on alexander von humboldt's exploration of south america we get into the early 1900s and and plans for cities and towns also showed this declension from uh from rural to urban on the left you see one by george mckenzie and on the top right one by raymond unwin the one on the bottom right is the famous valley section by patrick gettys it shows as you can see from the mountains on the left to the shore on the right and it's uh it's important because it incorporates both the natural and the social and it was the first the first transect that we're aware of that placed human activity in appropriate locations so the the concept of the world of urban transect and the diagram that shows it were refined over time the first transect diagram was in 1996 this image on the top is from 1998 or 99 and you see that it was being refined it incorporates uh the edge the general and the center which was a an earlier concept the transect has numerous uses i'll start with what i call the analytical transect and its purpose is to document places and to give examples of uh different types of conditions here you see examples of of transitions transitions in that group on the left for example if you look here at the one from miami you see that there's a smooth transition t3 t4 t5 t6 you compare that to pound berry where you have what we call a radical adjacency which is the t2 agriculture right up against the most urban t6 you'll also notice that the view is both perpendicular and it's from farther away here you see a comparison of transect zones here we're using images of transect zones to to compare zones within cities so if you look across the across the top you see different transect zones within one city and if you look vertically you see the same transect zone compared in different cities you also see that here the view is oblique and a little bit closer compared to this image of or these images of providence rhode island providence rhode island that were taken by sandy sorlene and these are at the pedestrians eye view we also use the transect not only to document and to analyze but also to propose and i have a group of of transect drawings here that i'm not going to linger on but i do want to just give you a glimpse of them and give you an indication of not only how beautiful these are but also to make it clear that there are a lot of firms and a lot of talented designers who have made transect drawings of places over the years and the purpose as i said is not only to document but it's also to propose new designs and in this case it's to compare traditional development to sprawl development and to propose normative settlement patterns another application of the transect is what i call the designers transect a point that i want to emphasize here is that in design the transect is used to create the types of places that communities want this diagram here in the table below shows the types of places and the mixes of t-zones that they typically contain so another interesting point is that the transect can accommodate various theories of community types at the top here you see the urban village by patrick gettys you see leon creer's quarter tods and tnds you see the livable neighborhood from australia and also uh clarence perry's neighborhood unit the cell is from team 10. this drawing is by opticos and it's really great for showing how community types fit into a region and and to some extent also how t-zones fit into those communities it's it's good in large part because of it it represents the scale so well it shows the scale of the region as well as the various communities that fit into them it's also really useful i think as a political tool because it's it's helpful to show people what choices are available it's choices not only of community types within a region but then also types of transect zones within the various communities here's an example of a regulating plan for a new community you see the the three pedestrian sheds up at the top and then the table down below shows the percentage of each transect zone in each pedestrian shed how those are combined in the percentages used to make up the hole when you get down to the level of the transect zone all the elements of urbanism can be allocated and these examples here show private frontages on the left and bike facilities in the middle and even types of trees that you see there on the right there's also what what we call the planners transect another application of it and there's obviously a lot of overlap here with the designers transect when you're applying the transect to make it operational and to create a development code the the best use of that is a smart code smart code's a transect-based code it's also a model code and it's intended to be downloaded for free at transect.org on our website and then calibrated for specific development or municipality this is version 9.2 by the way and version 10 will be coming out soon this diagram uh shows how a smart code should fit into a regional plan at the top you see future land use and then here in the middle you see how the community types fit into the sectors and then down below how the t-zones are mixed to create those communities again when you get down to the level of the transect zone when you go to code the elements of urbanism you start with a synoptic survey and this image is really great it's a simplified example of how you select the best representative t-zones in an area and compile them over here to be measured for these uh for a synoptic survey and you you take each uh each of these areas that you've selected that that you want to emulate and you document the metrics on the left you see the measurements that are taken at the block level in the middle you see the measurements for the public frontage and on the right for the private frontage you take a great deal of measurements you compile all of that information to create the regulating sorry to create the regulations that are in the code so another important point that i want to emphasize about the value of the transect is that it integrates all of the various disciplines of urbanism disciplines that that previously were in silos and not working together the smart code includes roughly 30 modules on various subjects that can be adopted and slided into a smart code you can find those modules on on transect.org as well when you go to download the code i'll give you just a a few quick examples of this integration this image by seth harry shows how retail types can be allocated along the transect and within types of communities these two images the one on the left deals with stormwater management it's by tom lowe from his light imprint toolbox and the one on the right deals with uh transit stations with the locations of transit stations and then also the the design of the areas around them that's it for the presentation i will stop sharing great and hand it back over to chuck thanks brian that was a great um selection of material uh from the illustrations we're going to come back to discuss those in just a minute but i did want to pick up on um uh your reference to andreas personal introduction and i want to bring him to that topic andreas as brian mentioned um and you're quick to point out the transect was pre-existing uh it was rediscovered and applied by dpz and new urbanists and really once someone has been introduced to the framework you begin to look at the places you've lived and traveled to differently and um you know as i was getting ready for this i was thinking back it was 20 years ago this april that we held an early transit seminar at yale where you were teaching a studio a transect studio actually at yale and um when i opened that i talked about having lived across the transect a small hamlet in upstate new york a suburb uh the east village of new york city chapel hill coral gables in it um that really the framework really helped me kind of think about places very differently so i want to start off by talking with having you talk a little bit about your personal introduction and your experience in the rediscovery of the transect particularly experientially as you encountered it in different places tell us about your own introduction your first experiences and um uh your perspectives well um actually i've received some uh feedback on how useful the careful reliving of my introduction as douglas took me up the beaches and into the first you know the first and secondary uh uh dunes uh how um how that experience actually clarified it for them you know how that how how how the aha moment was almost identical to mine you know now i get it i've also done it in a kind of more uh less romantic way in which i was i was over in sarasota meeting some resistance about its power and i was with about a dozen people in the room and i said take your shoes off and put them in the order of the transect you know from uh from leather shoes all the way to sandals and really within two minutes and with everybody agreeing the you know we put all we put uh i don't know eight or nine pairs of shoes in the transect in a transit zone and that was uh that was the great aha moment for that crowd and i said this is an amazing taxonomic engine it puts everything in order now by the way just a little parenthesis but the exception was the running ship which actually works everywhere you know you can run in the country and you can run in the city and so i want to emphasize that there are exceptions you know that this isn't draconian and um the exceptions can either be absolutely justified as the running shoe that's metaphor but also whenever there's a political problem it's usually a transect violation you know and you know it's not that eight-story buildings are intrinsically bad obviously it's just that it's in the wrong transit zone you know it's not that a shop of a certain size you know we all need large stores and the resistance is that it's of of the wrong size a corner store would be a welcome neighbor and then sometimes you get resistance at the level of the syntax of the architecture like i remember going to birmingham mishnah to uh a place in uh in yeah it was birmingham michigan and we were retained because some horror had happened downtown and i looked at the building it was three stories it was up on the sidewalk and the problem was its style it was not you know the building was incompatible and there was a great resistance to it but it was just that in a traditional downtown they had made a glass building a glass-fronted building and so i find that its greatest use is also political you know in which you say when people say we want dark sky or we want a lively downtown you can't tell the person who says i want dark sky that you're wrong you know that people have a right to a nightlife because no american is ever wrong you understand that's so you know there's no no such thing but you can just say look uh we'll find a place where you can live with dark sky and then the young people who are commuting to chicago for a night life you know they're from an outside time says we will actually have a lively main street for you and so what i find a kind of solomonic feeling in uh in the public process in which i never have to say no no i just say we'll find a place for you we find a place for you and again i repeat it's usually the political the political problem is either is usually a transect violation now i have added one more thing that i'm working on now because this is this is a technical crowd this is a cnu crowd i find that there can also be a problem of imbalance uh that that's a second kind of problem and i'd like to bring up that they can also be too much of a good thing like for example we all love affordable housing but if there's too much affordable housing it's a slum right if we all we also love housing that pays taxes you know but if we have too much of that kind of housing it becomes gentrification both are necessary but both need to be balanced so in addition to allocation which we know about we've been working with for 20 years i think we need to add a kind of metric of balance you know again not to balance good things with bad things which is the academic ideal you know we've got to have some real you know grotty stuff we've gotta we gotta make it real we've gotta make it rough gotta have you know we gotta have chain link fences and all this stuff no i'm not talking about good and bad being balanced but pairs of goods which are within transit zones perfectly located you know perfectly located within transit zone a pair of goods that are simply off balance and i think that's a new overlay that needs to be added which you should we should be working on in fact equity you know the the great the great of the great campaign that there is now the cultural campaign towards equity is actually part of the problem you know that what they're getting at is an imbalance a whole series of imbalances and i believe that the transect is a great platform on which to activate that you know and i think that's the next generation okay so like i said i want to come back to the illustrations because i think uh i think every all of us think the illustrations are really fundamental not only to understand the transect but in the application right so back to the basic snaps out of the book there's two major parts the first part contains virtually all the images yeah but they're organized into uh ten different sections and then part two the essays and there's 14 wide ranging essays by various specialists uh and also call what i'd call uh expert observers right like bruce donnelly and sandy sorleen um and you know i joked when we talked about this last week that as one of the contributors of the volume i was struck by how much less interesting my essay was without the illustrations integrated um but it was it was actually the right way to organize because we all used many of the same illustrations to kind of illustrate the points we were making and uh they're all they're all in the book so i think that was the right way to remind me brian how many illustrations there are you're having to know roughly 150. okay so there are 150 illustrations and that's pretty remarkable but the most remarkable thing is that they're probably by 20 or 30 or 40 different firms you know so you can see how comfortable people felt you know with the concept it wasn't like oh that's a dpz brand we can't do it you know it was it was uh and i think we we certainly brian and i certainly made an effort in this book to make certain that people understood that this is a historical phenomenon it's a natural observable phenomena and that people have been drawing it often without textual reference for years now one of the one of the things to do is you can find the illustrations easily enough you can't find texts like many of those illustrations that of the 20th century that brian showed those three there are no accompany texts and you know why because it was so common you know towns that had centers and eight edges and so forth and everything was in its place was so commonplace that it wasn't worth explaining you know you didn't have to polemicize that this is the way things should be it was just a natural way of doing things and people didn't bother to write about it and and that was uh i thought that was kind of charming how the transect as a as a term did not exist until the late 19th century because it was so it was so evident and that's uh we tried very hard to find the historical transects um and to and to include them and this is to actually diffuse the ownership by dpz which i think is an impediment to its use by others i remember one of the first uh arguments i had arriving at uh um school of architecture was with uh a harvard visiting critic who was who was saying there's no such thing as a village um yeah and uh the transect helps kind of restore that framework and language so on that way they're also they're also uh there's also another thing people will tell you well i believe in the transect but it doesn't exist let's say in edinburgh this is a challenge i got yes no that's fine that's a great american concept but it doesn't exist in edinburgh so when we were working over in scotland about eight years ago we took i said well i'll accept the challenge and we gave mike watkins two days to actually calibrate an entire transect for edinboro and he didn't even need two days to do it he just came back it was illustrated he had the metric the metrics and there it was every transit zone existing member what people misunderstand and it's a problem with the diagrams is that it can be a mosaic it's not a fried egg you know with the with t6 at the middle and then everything coming down like a medieval city the transit zones do exist but they're in mosaic patterns all over the cities and that's not a diagram that has yet been done that explains the site it's it's verbally explained throughout the text but it the diagram has not yet been done you know and actually one of the most exciting things are the radical adjacencies you know when you get t6 next to t3 you know and then radical adjacency is very poignant very exciting because i agree i think that's one of the uh one of the most striking things so i mean coral gables is pretty close to that when you go from cheat speed to the downtown right yeah yeah high-rise is next to houses you know uh and it's exciting it's exciting to find in fact the bildmore hotel is particularly which is what 30 stories is particularly exciting because it's actually in a t3 in a t3 zone and it just stands like a monument so it can be exciting to have super adjacencies what isn't exciting is to undermine them with a blend in which people get angry you know at each other because of the incompatibility so i want to throw this one to to brian first so brian deru asked you to pare down the selection of illustrations you know we just heard from andreas and there's like 140 or more in in the book so you had to really choose and consider i wanted to know do you consider any one of them or two of them more essential or quintessential than others i no i think i i look at it more in terms of groups of types of of images so andres mentioned the historical images and and personally it was very it was fascinating to me and very helpful uh after all the years i had been working with the transect to learn about these other earlier conceptions of it but then i think um in terms of another group is those illustrations of the the drawings of the places that so many people have done i just love to look at them not only because they're beautiful but also because they uh they show how places are are the same and different at the same time but then i think um the the other group that stands out to me that that i think is important to emphasize is that the group of images that show how community units fit into regions how different types of communities fit into regions and how transect zones are assembled they're mixed to assemble these uh these communities i think those are really um helpful because it's um i think maybe one of the one of the few most common misunderstandings about the transect people think that a village is a transexo or a neighborhood is a single transect zone and the point is that these are types of communities a neighborhood is a type of community and it needs a mix the proper mix hey one thing i was going to add is uh raw um rob steudeville and i are now working on definitions of the 15 the 15-minute city another 15-minute city has walking bicycling electric vehicles trucks etc and it could be that that's the key to the allocation to the regional allocation of urban types you know that problem we've always had and that people think that a village is a t3 zone you know in a town is a t6 zone you know the scale problem might actually be addressed if we take care of it with the with this so-called 15-minute city because there's a 15-minute city for every transportation mode you know the 15-minute walking is not 15-minute bicycling in fact 15-minute bicycling is enormously larger and then 15 you know which gives you a city you know the 15-minute bicycling gives you a city of uh we even have the numbers quite quite remarkably high you know um and then and then the the 20 minute the 15-minute drive on an electric bicycle is 250 000 residents you know so so this thing about the sheds the 15-minute sheds pedestrian shed bicycle shed vehicle motorized vehicle shed might actually be the key to that confusing confusing problem the thing to do is how do we get them to interlock you know so that they're working in the same system i wanted to remind everybody to use the q a function of zoom to ask your questions and maybe we can get to the questions from the audience uh very shortly yeah there's a couple good questions already in i'm keeping an eye on those um no brian the one thing i was going to say that i missed is uh there's a cultural emphasis on the transect beyond the chinese one but the hawaiian one you know in which we actually had um essentially a shaman a hawaiian shaman explaining to us how the island was to be inhabited how the natives understood it and i said this is a transect and you know we were in a charette we were able to draw it for him and he was an old man and he said he immediately understood the importance of that and how it illustrates his understanding of nature it was a transect he was trying to he was trying to tell the developers this is a transect this is where you put this and this is where you put that and he couldn't get it across and then the transect did and so i think that's one that i would include the cultural transects very important okay so one more uh question i have for you andres on on the illustrations and we'll move on um you know a strength of new urbanism has always been the use of a visual language for for place making it's always been the power and uniqueness that new organism brought back to town planning and the public process and um you both spent a lot of time in these drawings both the historical ones and the contemporary ones but and and brian touched on the specialists applications so the light imprint on the environmental side with tom lowe seth harry on the retail allocation the tod one all great you know specialist applications but i really think you know one of the big uh contributions has been presenting this as a tool in the public process in that dialogue and i was i was with you um for dbz's charette and work in fort myers downtown fort myers and i think that's when james wilsel did the kind of the little cartoons you called them yeah the transect and i thought they were spot on in terms of communicating with just the average person from the community to understand it so maybe you can speak to the importance of that and your perspectives well i think that our uh the credibility the way the new urbanists earn credibility is by explaining phenomena to people who are confused about it like it's not about correcting what they think it's like for example they they dislike something that's happening and you can clarify it for them why not that they're wrong don't try to convince them they're wrong because they know they don't like it you know and they know they like something else but if you can explain why they like it and dislike it and why they love being in a place and not another they'll follow you anywhere they just want clarity you know they'll trust people who are clear like the doctor who explains to you exactly what your blood problem is you know you say that's a great doctor you know and in some ways we are doctors most american communities in some way are ill you know they're having problems that's why they call us in to help and the transect is like one of these charts in the doctor's office that says this is what's wrong with your shoulder you see it actually felt it's not supposed to be attached to your ear you know which is uh etc and uh and they say oh what a great doctor and it's about clarity and so those diagrams what they provide are the clarity that allow people to trust us there's one other thing that i've always thought i've always thought that the work we do has to be beautiful because it's also a token of our professional expertise you know if you're going to do little stick figures like many planners do and say y'all can do this too here get a pencil you do it you actually decrease the professional respect and then it's harder to build it back and so the quality of those drawings they're you know when you see them large they're exceptionally high and that's also part of the trust that you earn in the public process you know because not everybody can draw that well so it's that combination of mystique and i've always said what we need is a combination of technique and mystique not just technique and on the transect those beautiful drawings are part of the mystique great so um like i said i can see the questions coming in and i think i'm going to skip over some some discussion we had or i had laid out this one will lead us into the q a and we'll get into some of the um inside discussion and uh uh friendly arguments so uh the you know there's many there's many applications to the transect uh one of which i wanted to touch on was research and analysis the study of diversity and immersive environments and uh you know one of those uh beyond the um school of architecture was when you were doing the transect studio at yale back in 2001 soon after that 2003 tagliavente's you know great transect analysis of european cities that was presented in brussels at the first ceu and then research at notre dame andrews university umaryland then all the firms right all the and you've heard of gallows tour de gallos in india and china right uh dhiru um uh i saw one of his in brian's slides as well the comparative table and then you know eventually getting into some important publications so an early and perhaps persistent criticism of the transect is that it failed to account for all the variations and exceptions that can be found in different cultures and different historic settlement patterns so you know somebody's going to come up to you and say but not jakarta but not bombay but not lima and uh and this was due in part i think because the majority of the early analysis and applications were were in the us they were happening in the u.s so um let's let's take this up of all um the analytical uses of the transect across different cultures and places are there common threads calibration was raised earlier speak to the uses and abuses maybe of the transect in this respect well i think the greatest abuse is the fried egg you know the fact that you want to keep t6 next to t5 and t5 next to t4 etc you know that is the that causes a great deal of confusion it's almost impossible to dislodge that i actually have a diagram in which i scrambled them which is not included in the book in which i put them in a different order you know just cut it and put a different order by the way the streets are able to do that you know because the streets align you can actually flip them around but the fact is that uh there's a resistance now what's underestimated sandy sorlene is the great calibrator is you really have to calibrate it locally but here's the caveat you do not since you're projecting a better world you don't have to calibrate the lousy parts you know that that's where we get wrong for example you go to mumbai and you see a sweltering slum okay you know that that is that doesn't drain that has mosquitoes that people are dying at a higher than usual rate you don't calibrate that because it's not something you want to project you know you're always calibrating the ideal so what you would do is you look for a place where people live densely and are also poor but is that are actually already building up a new life and i think that that distorts it that we only calibrate the ideal situations we are not recording the ones that we're trying in fact to eliminate or ameliorate and that causes confusion uh i do think that there's less pickup on it in other countries but that's natural because um well because you know the cnu actually in the end in the end it has actually remained north american more than anything you know we do yeah we've worked all over the world but but we're in places that want american stuff like you know when when cal thorpe and or we or somebody gets a project in russia it's because they want the americans in this you know we're tired of russia you know we want to be like orange county california or something and so yeah i think there's a north american bias that's enormous enormous actually i should say i think it works very well in england as well you know in canada obviously and australia you know it's the english-speaking world really that is is pretty coherent this way and other people have different patterns so now we'll pick up on on some of the questions that have come in and uh i'm going to try to get the name right i may not but this is from ketz dharmi uh and this relates to we're just talking about the question is how do you think the transect concept can be replicated in more heterogeneous contexts where the densities are mixed at the zone level well there is uh actually there's a technical answer there are six transect zones three of which are stable and rather pure and three of which are what are called an environmentalist uh and three of which are are mixed and impure we can say transitional now remember that that in the natural transect when environmentalists do it they talk about echo zones and echo tones right there's echo zones you know the pure mature woodland and then the the the grassland and in the middle at the edge is all this richness that's complex right that's called an echo tone and some people say that that's where nature is best where it's in transition where it has two you know um two places in conflict so t1 which is natural is best when it remains wild okay t2 is in transition it's in transition to human habitation it's in transition to farming which can be done better or worse t3 which is basically suburban wants to be pure these are people want to be left alone they like their houses t4 is exciting it's got houses townhouses corner stores right t5 is a shopping street and you know those are pretty delicate organisms that don't are very highly disrupted when it's when the shops are disrupted and then t6 is the growing metropolis like new york city and san francisco that is just exploding and unstable so i think uh to answer this question there are stable zones and unstable zones and whatever city you're working with there are zones that have reached a kind of climax condition and you have to identify them you know they're at their best now and any change any further chain is going to screw them up and then there are others that actually should be changing and want to be changing and so look at look at look at t2 t4 and t6 if you look at the definition they're parametric those two overlap the two transition zones and they're complex by the way this is something else that's not understood either that actually t4 if you made a city of t4 just t4 it would be quite diverse so um and i'll continue to be a little bit preoccupied because we have uh we have the examples in our backyard um this heterogeneity you can see in pearl gables so it's you know classic 1920s uh supper but you have multi-family modest multi-family in the midst of single-family neighborhoods you've built more um but there's there's a recognizable transect of the gables as well of the city of colgate so there's variation within this right well at the edges of downtown you know where they're now introducing where they've actually made town houses legal and and single-family houses are becoming you know that area god my mother lives there forget the name of the street it's got high rises town houses it's got shops um i don't know whether it's it's not built more we may be built more way i don't know but it's very interesting yes we do have that and it's very much in transition it's where teofilo is doing all his uh townhouses and i guess see there's a certain amount of succession taking place yeah all right yeah that's another thing succession each t-zone is attempting to become the next higher t-zone or organically t3 wants to become t4 so you get people are asking for spot zoning so we've got a question uh from bob chapman hello bob out there um and um you know this this is another one we were gonna dig into and uh you know i'll i'll do a lead into bob's question so the book includes a variety of essays on applications of the regulation of the built environment so particularly in planning and um you know back to that two decades ago discussion in in yale at the seminar my my perspective was up until that point the new urbanism within planning had kind of been a cottage industry that if a community said oh those new urbanists we need we need a tnd overlay so we'll give them a call and we'll bring them in to do a little tnd overlay for for the zoning code the transect in contrast provided an entire framework um to replace the the existing framework and bob's question is can the transact replace use-based zoning so my perspective at the time was this is this is it this is the opportunity and that planning would i could see being being more receptive i think your perspective was it's it's maybe it's fallen short so what's your response mine um well remember the transect is is a concept the operational system uh the operational system is a smart code and the smart code assumes that current use-based zoning continues to exist okay just assumes first of all it exists already so you have to map it together with transect-based planning and by the way that's why their colors are different you know the the yellow orange red of use based zoning it exists and the translate uses the the purples of the old british empire you know the old imperial colors that which are blues and purples and they both coexist on the same on the same uh and that's actually to be seen in the smart code if you look at the smart code it actually makes it has a constant uh what i would call exits for suburban sprawl you know so at the regional level you can exit and do suburban sprawl at the at the even down to the level of the street you can have an a and b street and the a street which is a perfect pedestrian environment may be adjacent to a b street which actually has drive-throughs so for example you don't need to ban a mcdonald's a mcdonald's can have an urban face on the a street and a drive-through on the b street what you can't have is a drive-through on the a street so down to the very fine grain this smart code which is the operational system continues to allow existing typologies to exist and the reason is that 30 to 60 percent of americans still love that stuff and my great aha moment was when uh when a mother came up to me and she says you obviously haven't had children have you ever unstrapped a child's seat to get out to get your coffee she says i need a drive-thru and i and i got it i said they're all necessary in fact my my my uh understanding of why many if not most transect codes of smart codes have failed implementation is that people whom i ungraciously called ayatollahs which are the true believers of new urbanism want to ban sprawl completely and of course it explodes because you can't buy it i mean the devil exists okay even the bible has to accommodate it so how is it up to us that we're going to make a perfect world of only pedestrian urbanism that always blows up so the transit zone is actually for people who want to live this way and in so far as you level the playing field so that both can exist you will get political ascent but the minute you want to ban the other stuff you're going to you're not going to make it you're going to be attacked i think correctly the word the one min and one hour point and uh i wanted to say that we'll continue this conversation we have more questions and try to get to all of them uh everybody uh who is out there can continue to watch or you can um if you need to sign off you can watch the video that is posted tomorrow and possibly your question will be answered so chuck you can continue going he took your advice and checked out i think he's still there but uh maybe i can ask a question um go ahead uh so we have a question is there a minimum area to qualify as a transect zone what is the difference between heterogeneous heterogeneity and spot zoning or transect zoning adjacency for example when when is a high rise in a rural area which i've seen a transect violation versus high rises next to central park rob did you know that's a doug keller question okay um a couple of things about that um one of the things that destroys any theory is the ten percent on either edge you know on either side in which you say for example if you want to if you want to write a sign ordinance that's perfectly acceptable you can do it in two pages until somebody brings up an incredibly peculiar sign that forces you to write six more pages to accommodate it and then from the other side so the first thing you do when you write a code is you clip off the anomaly so you're only coding 80 now the the the smart code always allows exceptions but it's not built into the system it's built into the variance system and it's got a very sophisticated set of variances some of which are justified and can be done administratively and some of which are not justified and require a public process if for example you have a high rise that is going to look like coral gables biltmore hotel which is absolutely gorgeous and you make a case that there's a precedent for that that could be an administrative variance that the kind that is given in england that's called a warrant which is to say a warranted virus a warranted viral variance so we actually use humans we don't pretend that humans aren't present in the administration of the codes you know which is just a it's a fiction they're always present and they're there precisely to analyze the the your a special situation but a very special situation does not have to be does not have to be uh coded now remember that civic buildings are always uncoded okay they're not they're not in the transit zone the churches the colleges the you know the the city halls and so forth they always come in uh with the aspirations of their institutions and i think the aspirations of their architects and they're not in the in the smart code they're actually uh they're actually negotiated and so that's another one of the exits that the smart code has um but i think it's a it's it's very important to conceptualize something to not focus on the one very rare exception especially since the world can very easily live without that exception you know we are not we're not coding for that for for genius we're actually we almost always code under the assumption that the default setting is kitsch you understand like in america if you don't code you don't get steve hall you don't get doug kelball either you don't get dan solomon if you don't code you get kitsch and that's something that's never never acknowledged in schools is that the default set setting in america is perfect garbage so of course we have to code assuming that it's not rem cool but assuming that it's joe blow down the street i also think the you know we were talking about the impact on planning i also wanted to focus a little more on the impact on on real estate um but as opposed to the wholesale adoption of a transect based smart code like miami 21 and some others i think the influence really is there and coming from the city planning academia environment where new urbanism was really rejected right it was pushed off the transect was not the transect was embraced and the same way so the influence in planning was there regardless of whether somebody adopted a smart code i think the same thing in real estate development you know we used to wait for rob studiville's new urban news and the list of tnds you know to come on a piece of paper and we were all excited about it the only place we could see projects um embracing new urbanism but then you know five ten years later it was urban land magazine it's like well this is all you know urbanist and and then we're calling it new organism but i think kind of the diffusion of innovation is there whether or not it's formally called out or not but it's funny that you say uh you know set uh stefaulizoides which is one of the great enthusiastic publishers of new urbanism he always wanted to say we the cnu must have a magazine and i would say why why don't you just buy urban land you know the uli magazine because it's become almost fully new urbanist now of course there's something that's following which i think is very dangerous which is landscape urbanism and now uli is an instrument of landscape urbanism not new urbanism there's actually a counter theory of great appeal and our job is and the transect can definitely do it in fact if you look at tom lowe's book okay it preceded all that work at harvard all of it by substantial number of years and it's much better presented than at harvard in fact when i sent that book to waldheim he went into a kind of psychological crisis he almost sort of turned into a crisp and uh by the way he's in a bit of a crisp about this book too which we we sent them and it's there's this there's this funeral silence you know coming out of harvard when this is happening well i know we're working on the the books we hate as well so we'll think more about that yeah so here's two topics which i'm sure you uh love this question combines both politics and environmental advocacy so thomas collins writes president biden has set an ambitious goal to permanently conserve 30 percent of american land by 2030. how can transect urbanism inform environmental advocacy to help conserve natural and rural areas so in the t1 and t zone t2 zones okay wait he's talking about thirty percent of government land or to thirty percent of all american land only american land last i saw we've only we've only urbanized five percent of the land of the continental united states this country this is an empty continent just fly and look down in fact if you're a fan urbanist like i am and i get on a window uh on the western window to fly up the east coast i am disappointed at the num at the amount of open space and woods there are i say where are the cities that i'm sorry that i would love to see this is still an empty continent and i don't think that 30 percent is a is is a goal at all i think it should be 80 85 you know and uh you know that would be ambitious because there is 15 percent that's vulnerable but boy preserving 30 is nothing it's still an empty continent so but to the questions point and in a place like south florida where you're constrained by the ocean the everglades and um you know you have increasingly a smaller supply of uh developable land unless you're going to march off further into everglades can transect urbanism be used to help conserve those t one and two oh yeah yeah yeah that's actually in chapter one of the smart code it actually establishes see this is this is actually uh uh misunderstood do you know this gis gis was supposed to be the great solution to everything because you map all the situations i remember when gis first came out there were about 30 variables you know the confetti and then they improved and it was 50 variables and then it's 80 variables and they think that increasing precision is going to save the world it isn't they don't have a mechanism to make it operational if you look at that diagram that um the regional diagram that uh brian showed which is from the smart code remember the one that shows towns villages etc you know the full page one that diagram those are gis categories if you feed those categories that confetti into the and it comes out it will automatically do a regional plan for you it'll tell you where the open space is where the where the uh towns and villages can be and where the cities can be and that's actually never fully presented that's an automatic protocol to turn gis into transit-based planning and actually myself i forget to present it that way but gis is a great tool that is not available by the way the other thing that's happened is i think the planners misunderstand or don't don't don't don't uh don't fully exploit the incredible gift that cheap aerial photography represents you know the incredible gift it used to be when i started practicing that that flying flying an area was 20 25 000 to get aerial photographs now you google them we should be teaching our planners how to read those aerial photographs almost like military people in the second world war able to read aerial photography you know people tell where the tanks were where the trenches were and so forth it's all there aerial photography is the great underutilized gift there should be a course in every in fact chuck in your in your course for developers you know just you say you can stay on your computer screens which i know you prefer to do and just learn how to search the world for dying shopping centers show them just say here this is what a cratering subdivision from 1955 look like you can buy it this is what an under maintained golf course looks like perfect you see what i'm saying it's all in aerial photography but we are not taught how to how to read it and that would be an incredible course in fact i'd love to teach it at least a seminar i'll take it i'll take you up on it rob is my safety net he'll keep us going if if i get locked up uh it does look like um we lost check you're back um yeah so rob rob's my safety net if uh if i get locked up here so next question brian hamilton uh my question okay i'll ask that question um what is the relationship between property values and the individual sections of the transect he notes that the subtext for most planning is the raising of property values that is to say gentrification to what extent can government through its tax policies implement these planning principles i think that's a challenge that is not a module that i brian is that a module somebody's worked on i think somebody's wanted to some people do you remember people bringing that up yes but no it hasn't been done yeah yeah uh i believe there are people who perhaps all they need to do is is to be told go ahead this is a really good idea so officially right brian we should say yeah please you know yeah it'd be very interesting to have that matrix and probably not that difficult to uh to to figure out you know yes so then you can turn it into into planning you know it's a variable that needs to be considered when a decision is made you know uh without actually a fifty thousand dollar consultation the other thing about the smart code please understand this that actually planning was very very expensive it and the smart code is the famous five dollar cigar you know a good five dollar cigar that's what the world needs like you can actually get this freeware and it's a very it's a first-rate matrix for inexpensive planning by local people so i'm going to continue with uh questions um i think five cents ago though uh we have a question uh with regard to specifically to atlanta because it's made up mainly of pockets the questionnaire points out and it doesn't function all that well and can atlanta be improved upon or is it too far gone using the transect model okay um a peach tree one of our illustrations is peach tree street in which i was staying in a hotel and i realized that i was in a high-rise corridor and half a block away were townhouses and another block away were houses and beyond that was this was a nolan plan and beyond that or maybe an olmstead plan and beyond that was a parkway within three blocks in atlanta were all six transact zones i've never seen it more comp more more compact than that in atlanta and i could actually find it for you where that occurs and it was a beautiful transect zone that is just to say that atlanta actually in many ways is a wonderful city now i'm going to be off the topic a little bit but the reason for that atlanta keeps getting bad is that it is that it looks good because it's rolling forested hills you don't see the extent of your sprawl the way we do in florida in florida it's perfectly evident you know how awful it is in atlanta you're because of the of the high number of tall trees and the hills that hide the sprawl you think you're better off than you are in fact that the you know and atlanta is very sprawly but the hills hiding in any case look at that peach street street corridor you know i could in you you know i can look up the aerial photograph it's quite a remarkable transect there so chuck do you want to continue to ask questions you seem to be um back let me try to do this one this is from nelson moraga nelson's an m red student also in the search okay he's cut off and governments prioritize in order to address health related and environmental bottlenecks did you catch that andreas no i missed the keywords how should go how should city governments prioritize in order to address health related and environmental bottlenecks um you know using i assume the transect and place types okay once you decide i don't know what the solutions are you know the specific local solutions but once you know what the solutions are what helps what ameliorates this what makes the place healthier you should permit it as of right the great reward in you know permitting is so difficult now in america that all you have to do to get a developer to do the right thing is give them the permit faster you know instead of torturing them and a good master plan shows what the preferred alternative is this is healthier you know this is more this has this is this is more equitable therefore if you do this you can get your permit in two weeks now if you don't want to do this we're not gonna change the code but you know try why don't you plan on two years before you get the permit and that is all they need to hear the problem is in the current system is that we torture the developers exactly as much for a good project as a bad project they all have to do the analysis for themselves they all have to resolve the incoherent codes they all have to do it so they said i might as well do a bad project and make more money because there's no advantage unless you incentivize and by the way rescinding time giving an early permit is free it doesn't require subsidy you don't have to do a public private permission you just have to give them a permit instead of torturing them and that is also built into the code the smart code has if you follow the smart code you're permitted administratively as of right and by the way that's one of the things that's eliminated in most implementations because the politicians want the power of of actually of being able to grant favors in public when in fact if you follow the smart code exactly it's it's what it says it's it's it's it's a it's it's uh it's granted as of right administratively it's only when you want a variance that you have to go through the process by the way this is the way planning was in the 30s there was no public process unless you needed a variance so andres you mentioned the english-speaking countries and how this has kind of taken hold what is stopping uh countries in say south america uh for from following the new urbanism example and is it lost in translation or is there a lack of political backing and economic funding okay planning in south america looks like this it's a one sentence code the code shall be what the president from time to time shall decide it to be you get it okay now that has disadvantages but it has the advantage of being very efficient you know it's honestly everything you know the power structure in latin america is is and in most countries that are not parliamentarian that don't have codes is actually what the powerful people decided to be with the elected officials and that's why you know they're not that interested in a code you know you say like it's happened to me even in france like i wanted to do something there was a piece of dead land next to a a place in france in a in a place that liz and i own and i said let's get up let's make let's file an appeal and get this it was a piece of land that was owned by nobody that was being used by uh school children to pee you know it's just a garbage place next to my house and i said i'll buy it from the city and i said let's begin a process in which we go to the city council and the lawyer told me didn't understand what i'm saying what do you mean a process he says go talk to the mayor what just talk to the mayor tell him what your problem is he'll he'll solve it so you have to go process you have to go to the top in those countries essentially yeah you go to the pro you go to the top and you get a yes or no by the way in the end in this country it often ends up that way as well but we go through the kabuki theater that somehow other things matter yes but in those countries in some ways they're more honest you know they just decide and it's strange it's strangely efficient also in latin america you either work at the top or you work at the bottom underneath underneath the radar that's right excellent point yes those are both very efficient don't alert yeah don't alert in fact one of the if you've ever worked in a hispanic area in uh in the united states you will see that the hispanics don't show up to the public charrette because it's because government is trouble you don't want to alert government that you're doing something so you go to their houses you know to their private houses to get the to get the thing and yes in many places in this country there is not a process there's not a sunshine process where planning takes place and i think that's actually a very honest answer to the question so um kit mccullough asks is there a minimum area to qualify as a transaction can can my lot be a transexo no well well in a baroque kind of way and let me explain i'm not i'm not kidding if there's a very large block such as in berlin which is a 900 foot block 900 foot deep block if you go to berlin there's an office there's a building on the street which is eight stories and then there's an archway and if you penetrate through that archway behind it is a courtyard and another courtyard that is smaller and finally at the center there's the farmhouse from the 18th century with chickens and you get a transit that goes from center to edge now kit for me the ideal transect is something that colin wrote that colin rowe once said he said the ideal city is london out the front door and los angeles out the back door you know so you get the street life and you get the pool and for me that is an ideal transect there's also another transect that howard blackson is fascinated by which is in a in a mid-rise building you can actually do a very urban first floor you know with shops and then offices and then have apartments that are progressively progressively more green and then a single family house on top you know so that actually the transit flows vertically there are buildings in rome that are like that you know when you go when you stand up in one of the hills like the the uh you know uh in one of the hills and you look there's this strange rural rome that you can see that's the rooftops of the buildings in rome where people have tiled roof houses with trees on top so to answer her questions seriously i think it would be a delightful city that has an in which you have large blocks that have an urban crust and then inside progressively you actually go into a rural center a soft center so you can go from let's say t5 to t3 or even t2 i don't know uh brian do we have that illustration or is that in that's in the agrarian okay that is illustrated in the agrarian urbanism book that exactly that phenomena and by the way that phenomena was brought up by douglas at the first cnu in what he called the rural weave and he said the urban fabric should consist of large blocks with a rural weave within each block it's perfectly diagrammable to do that yeah so the transect it's a baroque i mean it's it's a self-indulgence really but it can happen at the level of one block if you if you want that to be coded we're getting uh toward the end of our questions but uh this one perhaps can be connected to the transect and that is you know the new urbanism has been criticized often as uh tone deaf to the consequences of gentrification what sort of planning or design interventions would you point to as being effective to encourage housing affordability okay i'm gonna give a serious answer you won't like and then a light-hearted answer you won't like either okay there's no answer that's true that you will like if you want something to not gentrify you can use a very bad architect that makes lousy apartment plans that are dark and dingy don't worry that won't gentrify for example in miami beach every one of those buildings that we love that have art deco apartments in the front you know that our deco frontages the only good apartments are the four in front that have sunlight those deep buildings as they go back on the corridors the back apartments have only a 10-foot setback from the building next door there's no view there's noise from your neighbor and they're very unattractive those buildings do not gentrify only the four apartments in front gentrify one of the things to realize about the the urban typologies of europe like for example france is notoriously mixed mixed income uh liz has a uh liz has a uh an aunt of very you know a refugee from poland and she lives right in the center of paris but she lives in one of the courtyards in an inner corner in a very dark apartment that nobody else will pay for but she lives in paris now at the front and at the top you have the wealthy people and add back in the courtyards where the sun never gets it's inexpensive the interesting thing about traditional urban uh traditional building typologies is that they create automatically better and worse apartments that retain their lower value the problem with modernism you know with the perfect slabs and the perfect towers is that everything is optimized every apartment is excellent every house is excellent every townhouse is excellent and so you get monocultures that naturally rise in prices but if we were to go back to the authentic typologies of the 19th century they have places that are not so nice to live in and believe me they don't gentrify so that's one answer the second answer is a more is a kind of more brutal one but it's also true carol coletta who's i think one of the greatest i think thinkers in urbanism gave a uh a lecture at the cnu probably five years ago and people don't remember it but she said there are five to ten american cities that have a problem with gentrification there's another 90 that could use nothing better than gentrification did they need to be gentrified they need to have people there who actually pay taxes and so remember we're focusing too much on the very successful cities the key is not gentrification or not it's having the diversity in close proximity the balance of richer and poorer people in in quite close adjacency if you look at the at the t zones in the smart code what they actually administer is complexity every t-zone is complex if you look at the at the at all the all the variables and you realize what is being shoved together in ht zone it's diversity as opposed to zoning that actually decreases diversity that's one of the great unstated things about the smart code is that it is administered a diversity that does not naturally happen now the problem that we get blamed with is that oh well it all gentrifies well yes i know our stuff does gentrify the original buyers at seaside with a bunch of school teachers and architects and now the damn place rents for you know one room for 400 a night we couldn't help it you know it was good oh by the way here's the joke the only thing that hasn't gentrified in seaside is the building by steve hall you can still buy an apartment for four hundred thousand dollars or three hundred thousand it hasn't gone up in price because it's hard to live in and so yes that's a big joke but it's also true so i think my wi-fi is stable enough i can come on and help uh wrap up we're getting a nudge that it's the good thing about this answer uh rob is you can cut it because it's at the end of the presentation well in just an add-on to that um because there's a couple questions on this on this topic and one of them is from one of my students at um so i think another part of the response relates to the lean urbanism pink zones you know finding ways to make it easier and less costly to build more affordably yeah that's the initiative that is uh that's brian's particular initiative at this moment in cats if you want to learn about lean urbanism which is a way of enabling younger smaller developers to do less expensive housing look up lean urbanism right what's the what's the leanurbainism.org and chuck i was going to to bring up lean urbanism as it regards gentrification i think it's very relevant leon urbanism can be helpful to the places that that are in danger of gentrifying as well as the ones that need gentrification the the one of the big problems it addresses is that almost all projects are big now because it's become so difficult and in an area that is in danger of gentrification when all you get is big projects then you're almost guaranteed the gentrification it's because the people who already live and work in that neighborhood can't participate in the redevelopment of it so if it's an area that's in danger of gentrification and you open up redevelopment to more people to smaller increments of development and people who already live there then it can it can be one type of a bulwark against it but then also for the places that need the gentrification it it one of the main reasons it doesn't happen is because we have only big projects now and big projects aren't going to go into these places that need it but if you make it so that the people who live and work there already can take part in it then they actually bring the redevelopment that is needed and they um they influence the character of it as well the character of the redevelopment and they also benefit from it rather than seeing just a big developer big development project coming and change things quickly and all the money the wealth from the development extracted from the community you know an important element that we often overlook when a big project is done you can't use local subcontractors you can't use the local electrician the local plumber or the local carpenter it has to be the big firm from australia that comes in and do it so it does create local jobs the small projects you can use the local subs you know and so yes the money stays in place it's not only small developers which can be local it's local subs that have a chance well i'm gonna uh thank everybody for being part of the rob hold on nope moderator's prerogative i get one last question um so uh uh final question and this could go to both of you brian uh made the point in our o in our discussion last week and he brought it up again today um that transect zones are intended to support and create different types of communities support different lifestyles and these immersive communities evolve naturally throughout history but today we produce much more of our urban settlements wholesale so let's look forward do you see our suburban nation inevitably morphing into a 21st century rural to urban transect over time and what might that post-suburban rural urban transect look like in a post-sea level rise driverless ev minority majority more dogs than kids america okay i'll start i'll leave the the answer about the future to andres he's much better at that than i am um i am optimistic and pessimistic about the about our ability to redevelop and and convert sprawl into something that is better i think i i'm optimistic for the places that are well located um that uh maybe already have the type of of structure infrastructure and and settlement patterns that can be converted more easily um i think we have a lot of techniques already that can be applied to those and the transect is is perfect for that for for adding the proper mix of transect zones where they don't exist but i think that i i'm much i'm i'm i i'm pessimistic about the places that are farther out and more isolated and don't have those patterns and that infrastructure in place you know we also had that part of this discussion was the millennials the millennials are all moving to the suburbs they're going to have families and that's where they're going that's what they want but our discussion was they don't want the last suburban model they don't want the golf course community so what's the future look like do you think well um i'm just thinking very hard on how to give a simple answer but the simplest answer is to say that and this was taught to us by uh by uh people as like uh um for a long time we've known that there are different kinds of people different market segments you know even today people would really like to live in london and some other people really like to live in charleston and in key west okay even right now so there's no single answer there are there are there are five to ten market segments okay market segments and i think that if you analyze the market segments of the future among which uh are a whole bunch of old people and retiring that's you know that's they're they're a certain way and then there are young people who are who they've been told they're going to have no money okay that's another market segment and then there are a whole bunch of clueless people we know about those okay they they've always existed those are different market segments i think what the new urbanism needs to do is to see fully the array of and this is um this is todd and lori you know who've done the marketing studies for us we need to identify the market segments and identify the three out of five or the four out of seven that actually want to live in let's say intelligent resilient pleasurable ways and and provide for them and not try to do it for everybody in so far as we spend all our energy trying to convince denialists let's say you know climate denialists and in so far as we uh as we try to convince people who really really really love their big trucks you know we're not going to convince them and it's not our job they don't even want what we have to offer but there are others that if we focus on them they will just come in and they're a huge percentage so 30 to 40 percent people want exactly what we want my fear is that we're kind of megalomaniacs about converting everybody you know and that's where we fail and the smart code as i said they have many exits that allow people who don't even want what we offer even if it were less expensive they don't want to know their neighbor have you ever met people like that i have real innocents who come up to me in israel and say why would i want to know my neighbor it was they weren't being ironic they just don't what are you talking about meeting my neighbor those people exist it's not our job to convert them focus on the ones that want what we do and then deliver the two or three or four ways that they want to live i think that nomadism is going to be not only necessary but attractive you know people that can work from anywhere and can go move away from trouble towards opportunity and for that we're designing tiny houses and wheels etc i think nomadism is a huge market segment listen more people attend this a tiny house conference than a new urbanist conference there's one coming up in sarasota they're going to be 2 000 people there okay there's something happening that we have to address and then the old folk are very interesting many of them the fastest growing community now in the united states by far is called margaritaville and these are people who only want to have fun well maybe that's not our market segment let's leave them alone don't try to convert those people you know they're they're riding the train to oblivion and having fun doing it fine i mean you and i may prefer that chuck but we don't the new urbanism doesn't deliver to them and so we need to know who wants us first and when we do our mission will be a lot more clear great answer thank you guys i'm going to thank um uh thank andres thank brian and charles for a great discussion once again the book is transect urbanism readings in human ecology you can buy it online wherever books are sold and i highly recommend it uh and uh everybody have a great day and we'll get together again soon great thank you all [Music] great