On the Park Bench: Sustaining a City’s Culture and Character – Principles and Best Practices

we're going to give a mind or two and let people come in and we're letting some people come in we'll start in a minute so welcome to on the park bench a public square conversation on the park bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in the new urbanism and allied industries providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time the webinar series is a platform for cnu members to engage debate and collaborate on pressing issues of the day the authors form is a series within on the park bench that looks at books that are of interest uh or by urbanists um in recent publications usually and uh um the author's forum is produced by durotadani architect and urbanist who works behind the scenes to put these together today's webinar is going to cover the book sustaining a city's culture and character principles and best practices with author charles wolfe co-author tigran haas in a discussion with interviewer jennifer hurley so you can share your thoughts um at hashtag on the park bench www.tinyurl.com otpb feedback and i wanted to remind everybody to save the dates for uh cmu 30 in oklahoma city which is going to take place march 23rd through 26 2022 and it's going to be cnu's first in-person congress since 2019 looking forward to that and learn how a clear commitment to urbanism careful financing and resident engagement can spark a city's renaissance learn more at cnu.org cmu30 i've got a great program today uh with charles wolfe author of sustaining the city's culture and character principles and best practices he is a london based multinational urbanism consultant and long time american environmental and land use lawyer he holds graduate a graduate degree in regional planning and has 34 years of experience in environmental land use and real estate law he has held legal leadership positions in both the legal and planning professions and he has represented public and private clients and property redevelopment regulatory entitlements and brownfield remediation in washington state and other locations he is founding of he is founder of seeing better cities group has practiced at several law firms and has served as a longtime affiliate associate professor in the college of the built environments at the university of washington in seattle he is written regularly for many publications including the atlantic atlantic city city lab governing city metric plant edison the huffington post here at public square and other publications he blogs at sustainingplace.com he is the author of seeing the better city 2017 in urbanism without effort revised issue edition 2019 both from island press and tigran haas is co-author and associate professor of urban planning and urban design former director of civitas at the name laboratory current director of the center for the future of places and the director of the graduate program in urbanism at the school of architecture in the built environment at kth royal institute of technology in sweden hoss holds advanced degrees in architecture urban planning and design environmental science and regional planning and he has written more than 50 scholarly articles 35 conference papers 5 books 4 research anthologies he's prolific jennifer hurley is president and ceo of hurley franks and associates and teaches in the growth and structure of cities department at bryn mawr college she's going to be our interviewer today and drawing on her background in conflict resolution miss furley has over 25 years of professional expertise facilitating public involvement in planning and development issues she's been a new urbanist for more than 20 years working on numerous charities for regional planning downtown revitalization traditional neighborhood development and form-based zoning i'm rob studeville at cnu i'm editor of cnu's public square their online journal sustaining a city's culture and character was recently published by roman in littlefield and it provides a comprehensive method for assessing how and why successful places come to be with an explicit emphasis on context this beautiful full-color book illustrates how we can understand or unlock a public place a neighborhood or city based on comparative experiences around the world and the listeners can save 30 on this book by going to www.roman and using the promo code 4s21 city that's the best deal you're going to get on this book and today we're going to have a presentation with with charles and t graham and followed by a discussion with jennifer and after that goes on for a while we're going to get to q a from the audience so i urge everybody to use the q a function of zoom and ask your questions as they occur to you with that i'm going to pass this along to charles rob thanks so very much and thanks to you and dear roof for putting this together thank you tigran thank you jennifer tigruns at uh about let's see ten after six in stockholm and i am at ten after five in newbury england and i am going to enable my powerpoint and after that introduction i simply feel old so here we go um we're going to tell you a bit we're gonna take about 15 minutes and tell you about the book and um this book ends with the adage that a checklist is not a dream now what what do we mean by that we mean that this book is an invitation to immerse to borrow a term from indigenous populations to deeply listen to urban environments and to think about space place and human association within the city in some very expansive ways that maybe we don't always do as professionals and certainly when i was a practicing lawyer i didn't get enough time to do so this is a book that benefits from a sort of pracademic perspective that merges i exposed my previous writing and my career and t runs input and tigran's kind stewardship with not only this book but a re-enabling of urbanism without effort which we'll tell you about in a moment so this book provides menus it provides ways suggested ways to think issues to consider it doesn't always provide solutions although there's many pages of solutions for those who like tools it is a purposeful attempt to in a way frustrate the reader and open doors and um and expand thinking perhaps um in ways that many people don't get the chance to do now um we've got a bizarre montage of tigran and myself looking as my wife pointed out happier in a virtual place on zoom a few weeks ago than we did in london a couple of years ago and this makes a point that i start out with in the book that is that place may be something that is simply imagined and it need not be the stuff of architecture or brick and mortar or um other common manifestations of a physical environment now certainly the pandemic has reminded us of that and on the right the book starts out in the introduction with some of you who've been to london know that spot 221 b baker street sherlock holmes residence right except it's the sherlock holmes museum um it it exists except sherlock holmes never really existed nor did 221b baker street until it was built in his memory we have similar parallels around the world but in london also a platform nine and three quarters at king's cross from whence harry potter departed to hogwarts it it's an effort to help understand that place isn't always what it seems and then a bonus not from the book dead center i rode my bike 10 miles the other day to a roman ruin um in cilchester not too far from where we live it's a reminder of the transcendent element of urban environments and how they change over time being fortunate enough to live in the united kingdom now that is something that has just profoundly impacted me way more than it did when i was just an itinerant traveler so this book again with tigran's support is a sense it is in a sense the conclusion of a trilogy which began as a lawyer writing on the side about cities in 2009 it led to what was initially an ebook called urbanism without effort about fundamental relationships between people and place and an argument that before we go forward we should think about those relationships uh the simple uh everyday aspects of urban life it was not a prescriptive book the current book is a lot more prescriptive but still not a prescriptive book the prescriptive book was perhaps my second book seeing the better city which is probably the best known of the three in that it attempted to instruct people how to understand the world around them driven through i know dear is in the audience not through his um faith in sketching and uh uh that process but through photography which some people think is a is a is a shortfall to really understanding a place but seeing the better city has all sorts of menus and rules but is drawn on quite extensively in the new book and that's how this book came to be i began to realize somewhere along the way maybe i'm the son of a planning professor and maybe it's when i traveled a lot as a as a youngster that places where places are somewhat the same they have common elements around the world but they present themselves differently and um the hero of the current book is a guy named plum and the handyman a bulgarian who came to our flat in london and painted a ceiling and he said you know everywhere's the same there's home there's work there's transport there's food but just in some places these things are better than the others and i i really appreciate that simple form of looking at urban places here we see arusha tanzania on the top and seattle washington on the bottom i argue in seeing the better city not this book but that these really are the same places in that there are commercial venues with urban infrastructure climate [Music] people walking on the street and lo and behold women in front of the commercial establishment with their smartphones now this is another one of these non-prescriptive open your mind to thinking about how we relate to cities kinds of things now in seeing the better city and going to stockholm with tigran and being a visiting scholar at kth and now a guest affiliate scholar i began to realize perhaps the shortfalls of a two-dimensional view and i was also fortunate enough to have a fulbright in australia in far north queensland in and around the principles of seeing the better city and i was immersed into perspectives of indigenous populations that opened the door to a much more than two-dimensional view of the city and this speaks for itself this is um a very nice square some of you know it was wrong within stockholm a piece of public art people out for the evening and less than um you know 100 meters away um a homeless person something we see around the world and opening the door to all of the discussions that transcend the two dimensions of who owns the city social justice issues and so on similarly i became open to the difference between what we see and what is behind what we see and how it all depends on what i now champion with the context word but it all depends doesn't it on who's looking at what and from which angle my former street in seattle which i left four years ago as rob implied had a six plex to the left which had snuck in through a variance process in the late 70s under former seattle zoning and a single-family home next door seattle as many of you know is one of the cities that is now severely re-examining the role of single-family zoning and championing structures on the left rather than the one on the right but even a few years ago there was a big irony here that was a six plex that looked like a single family dwelling obviously or arguably the house on the left a storage place for plumbing parts by a local landlord wasn't even lived in there's something to those stories behind what we see similarly i in seattle i often evoked at the dawn of what is now seattle portland and on the west coast as you all know well know a severe analysis of how we best solve the homeless crisis i began to open the door to arguments about homeless tents in public places who deserves a view who doesn't deserve a view who has a right to of you and this is again a matter of perspective and context but these are the more than two-dimensional aspects that i began to move into with the third book by a look at notions of change layers continuity immersion blends whatever kind of um whatever kind of um word you want to choose to point out excuse me that the city is not a simple place we move and settle we sense the city we rebuild things and we travel it's a blend and these two photos evoke the change in east london they evoke issues of over tourism in venice which have temporarily gone away but you know they'll be back soon along the way i also began to look at um solutions that some would argue are placed champions of the place making movement places where people want to be places that invigorate urban life and of course uh melbourne is champion for a place that uh 50 years ago took on its commercial alleys laneways in australia and parlance and transitioned them into something really cool and vibrant to use an overused word which is the real melvin lameway in this photo well in australia i asked that question and many people said both and the answer is the one on the left the one on the right is in seattle within the chop house row project by a former client and friend current still friend liz dunn which he took in the course of a small-scale development on seattle's capitol hill um something that looks an awful lot like a melbourne language she was heavily influenced by the concept now contextually was this even a right-of-way before and the answer is no not really is it therefore something we shouldn't do no it really depends on the place and this may be a very successful solution drawing on a credible and important example from elsewhere but the new book argues for a contextual analysis before this type of approach is undertaken and one thing i talked about early on is the umbrella sky project out of portugal which has been replicated many of you have probably seen these umbrellas around the world ranging from on the left of the hilltown of dolce aqua near the french border in italy to a gallery in paris to terminal 5 at heathrow to a beach in tanzania to vienna to you name it now these are magical why they bring life to a place they bring attention to a place they make a place perhaps an enjoyable place to partake of on the left does an artisan street in an already interesting italian hilltown need these umbrellas an artisan commercial street maybe on the right is a epic parisian gallery need these umbrellas it's not so much a question of yes or no it's a question for me about musing about what makes these types of interventions special and whether they do belong everywhere open question open question without a prescription and um this is the type of um dialogue i love to uh i love to to start similarly in the era of climate change and a sensitivity to greening urban environments we have pre-existing environments such as the uh urban national park of norway garden in stockholm and here we see a variety of aspects and different environments within the park and then we see although some would argue i should be comparing this with um jardin luxembourg in paris um i'm choosing not to and i'm choosing to compare it with the nascent attempts at greening up paris here along the de martier villa mar de la mar martra excuse me this is one of the nascent efforts along with the 15-minute city of mara hidalgo but it shows it's designed to show that greening presents differently in different places the issues are in common but in order to decide how to do them best perhaps we look at local conditions and vet those conditions and the local population through co-creation processes before we impose the absolute solution and there we go co-creation ranging from a wonderful effort of volunteers in melbourne on the left to incite uh within a neighborhood that was already pretty successful as a co-created place uh showing um to technology companies and the government what had worked so far again that's a bottom-up type approach a sort of latent uh in in portugal a sort of latent environment moving towards london the the storefront we know storefronts are important to retain in cities but the question is what should they look like now again this is a matter of local taste perhaps and local conditions and finally to the book at the beginning of the book i'm probably most proud of of this passage because i wrote it before the pandemic but it i think turns out to be um a watchword paragraph for the pandemic over and above the principles that i've pointed to so far imagine that the world around you disappear the urban world around you and the paths upon which you're used to walking the homework relationships everything just sort of goes away and that's that's in a way what happened to us over the last year and some how would you reimagine your urban place and here i make the strong point that you wouldn't necessarily go back to these romantic notions of what a particular city is however sometimes we bring those romantic notions as tourists when we visit these places again a provocation the book spends a lot of time taking apart words that we are prone to take for granted such as authenticity and character and there's an awful lot in the book on this that i don't have time to go into but what's important is to just as with the city itself to acknowledge the multifaceted nature of these words and that they can be inherently vague or they can be ambi ambiguous what do we what do we mean when we talk about an authentic place authentic whom authentic to what time um is this a place of character this is isilworth within the borough of hanslow in london sure we see some medieval character with the classic 12th century church we also see a 1970s edition that some would say interferes with the character of the previous eras but it's also the character of its time and we need to cross reference this i think when we talk about these places speaking of pandemics you know here in this part of the world i was fortunate to be on on the radio the bbc in london you know talked about my fascination with searching out plague pits from the 16th century just to get that profound sense that we would get through this and similarly where we live now in newport they're in newbury i'm sorry the structure behind is actually our house this is in 1918 it looks fairly similar to today if you look closely everyone in that photograph has a bandana or a mask 1918 the last pandemic there's something about the time and timelessness associated with cities that is very very important more on the ambiguity ambiguity of character these are various people who've spoken to this issue rob cowan mr guys here in the united kingdom uh a gentleman who authored a study guide for what we would call in american parliament's high school students taking their a levels kim davey the australian academic daria octave turkish academic character is a sum of attributes it's an assemblage of all the things i've been alluding to over and above the architecture it's culture it's social issues it's climate it's greening um i think you get the idea and when i was writing the book and talking about it with keyground sort of this is a simulation but i sort of had this page popped up in front of me and it is a page in the existing book in the town center of richmond upon towns and london borough where i looked at all the aspects of this physical place and took it apart took it apart in terms of what the assemblage was and that text which i will not reread you can scan it quickly again evokes the complexity of what we're dealing with came up with a method it's an idealistic method it doesn't work in all cases it's expensive if it's fully applied we have some examples in the book about how a learn-like process has been applied but learn is an extension of the method that i used in seeing the better city it stands for look engage assess review and negotiate and it perhaps emphasizes negotiate more than any other letter because negotiate means co-creation and the importance of hearing from those who are impacted by a project or urban change those who know or have experienced the um elements of an urban area the most those who live there and then we've got this other focus running through what we call context keys of familiarity congruity and integrity these are high-minded words this is more the academic part of the book but it's a construct that everyone can work with even on small projects i think to focus thinking and in chapter in chapter five of the book there's some graphs that you know map out how this might work um we can come back to this later if you like and then the book has been um perhaps not surprisingly embraced a bit already within academic circles although some pragmatists have had some great things to say about it as well in the advanced reviews but um a friend and colleague um at deakin university in australia at a recent conference assembled this and team grant do you want to take off on this a little bit because this is in a sense what you called out as hoping we could do i think when we started on this i i think yeah it was one of the contextual backgrounds for the book was to see that it becomes an inspirational uh sort of a open source for academic students and professionals alike maybe that they can go into the city and study the interaction between city space city life in order to acquire more knowledge about the complex culture heritage of the city its urban place and authentic elements and we did test your things from seeing the better city in our studios in the urbanism program which really was sort of we called it the neo young neogenian program of studying public life for public spaces so uh we really wanted in this context to sort of uh look at the tools or methods that are offered as inspiration is always a challenge so this is something that should be developed further it's not definitely something that which is a closed uh close thing on the contrary and contributes to something which rob uh i think uh uh uh uh phrased it as observational urbanism some years back in the better cities uh design for a new urbanism that we are in an in a dire need of maybe a a a structured methodology how to study places and spaces sort of like an observational urbanism that would be based on not just empirical science but also in observational methods you know going back from william white to christopher alexander jane jacobs kevin lynch that sort of bringing the empirical science together with the observational methods some something that i think for bain so yeah yeah thanks um and yeah go ahead is it good chuck we're starting to see some raised hands so let's get into some of our questions yeah let's do that yeah so you know early in the book you you spend a lot of time um kind of explaining how people can understand and learn about a particular place's kind of individual character and identity and you know most of my colleagues and clients are kind of buried in details all day long of drafting that new zoning code or trying to get their subdivision adopted or how do i make this pro forma work so i want you to make the case for me why why is this important why should we care so much about really understanding and using urban identity in our work as planners and developers and elected officials and citizens well that's that's a fair question and i think um i was one of those people i watched for many years projects you know advocating for projects advocating against projects and before too long one sees what the people impacted by the projects care about and the reason that in identity is important dating back to not only the identity codes that that were the basis in a sense for form based codes but also those who've written about it point out again that the two dimensions of place what we see is not enough there's also the response of both individuals and the collective within a neighborhood or city and all of these things fused together create the identity of a place and if one can arrive at a middle ground a blend it's not easy it's a hegelian dialectic sometimes pushing together but a balance then then i think places are going to be more uh successful so identity is a result of all of these factors coming together now the other thing that um that i learned in the research for this book is um certainly i'm not the only one who says that and that come it comes not only from urban design or other academics who are looking at the multiple forces or the multivalent viewpoints as paul sanders points out about the city but it comes from people in the economic development business and the tourism business who are trying to help small towns survive to know their strengths and again identity comes from the slow food movement the you know regional um um agricultural traditions building materials and so on and so forth although we're all too busy to do this i think we need to take time away from that traditional form of a busyness to do the same one more story i spoke to a group of young uli urban land institute uh portfolio managers a few years ago and they um they said they were there at a lunch presentation to hear me speak not for their work but because they in their work had to visit a lot of cities and they wanted to learn how to understand cities better and i said what do you mean you're not here for work aren't you here to enhance the value of your portfolios because this is the stuff people care about and so i would also argue that there is a bottom line return upon a more complete understanding of a place now this kind of focus on identity and and really understanding it as this multi-layered you know assemblage of all sorts of different things it's not really the obvious perspective from a lifetime as a lawyer so how did you come to this um perspective on on these topics thank you for asking well i think that um others have asked that and um i always point out to me for me it was by a bit of osmosis family story uh my father as i mentioned was an urban planning professor one of the really one of the early urban design academics um he was more known internationally than than domestically in the united states but he was a contemporary of kevin lynch and and and the others who are commonly referenced in that era um i got to travel a lot not because i we were wealthy but because his interests and studies took him overseas on grants and fulbrights and so on and i think i was just exposed at a very early age to the multiplicity of urban places and you know the excitement that i experienced riding my bike to the roman town the other day was exactly that form of osmosis i went to law school because it was the right thing to do i became i was in an allied field in land use and environmental law i was a brownfield specialist i worked on a lot of big projects bringing them back to um to to market and i think my choice of sub discipline within the law was very related to the things we're talking about today and also really informed this um reinvented career perspective now in the book you're you're really very critical of what you call the over prescription of formulaic solutions consultant imposed indiscriminate toolkits things like that but you're you're quite polite you don't you don't really name names much but i i'd like to explore this criticism a little bit um in part because i have been so enriched in my career by my engagement with the congress for new urbanism and the the principles that i've learned from that movement has helped me really see places in a different way and understand places in a different way and um i think i i mentioned you know when we talked earlier you know my context growing up in the united states is almost entirely one of sprawl and so trying to figure out how to make places better isn't just a matter of of responding to the context because the context in a lot of cases needs some repair so what do you see as the relationship between these kind of maybe more universal principles of good urbanism versus localism and local context and and identity and character right there's there's a few questions and comments embedded within there first of all um i think you i think you know um that i am incredibly kind to seeing you in this book um and there are a lot of examples of um the good things cnu has done and i don't want anyone in this audience to think that this book is in any way a critique of cnu um maybe it's a little bit of a critique of indiscriminate simple place making tools maybe just maybe but it's not a critique of um tactical urbanism nor the cnu approach i've been involved in some of that i've taught um form-based code institute classes um you know and and um i really championed the report of you know the lynn richards era cnu that brought the importance of people to the forefront of what cnu does so let's get that out of the way because i think anyone who reads the book will will have a very very positive view and including um how the principles um came came over here to prince charles um and through a couple of americans who were very involved in cnu plus andres being everywhere so okay now number two um blank slate i've been asked that question many times and i think there's a there's a passage in the book which you may remember jennifer or maybe you maybe you missed it um i talked about the 19 uh the 2019 pritzker prize award winner from japan and how he grew up in post-atomic bomb hiroshima and for him architecture was nothing i talk about um our collaborator in the book kadee navarro who did um some spectacular art pieces and how she envisages cities based on what happened after the kobe earthquake um oftentimes a blank slate is an opportunity for universal principles such as those espoused by cnu or other movements sometimes they're just as with form-based codes they end up in um they end up as hybrids in say the commercial center of a town or something like that it's going to depend on the context but one thing that's very important especially in this era of climate change is and i don't mean to be sound preachy about this but i've really learned this and i've seen many urban designers such as the um the urban design scholar matthew carmona here in the united kingdom come around to the point that you know what if there is no built environment we start with a natural environment and that can be a spur to the context and identity of a place and as tigran knows because we've collaborated in another session and um there's a landscape architecture firm in seattle and elsewhere i mean there's many many people who do this but in particular i'm thinking of shannon nicol at guthrie gustafs and nicole who as an element of an initial project assessment go to um the historic antecedents of the bil of the natural environment to understand the landforms that may have been lost um this is very much an indigenous way of thinking there's examples in the book about planners indigenous planners in australia who begin with this notion so i think that just because there is no pre-existing western european or other long-term settlement pattern to draw from that's not that's not the end of the road and indeed of course um um ellen and june and others with the idea of of retrofitting suburbs and bringing new urbanist and other good urbanist principles to to heretofore suburban environments is is critical and key and as you may recall in the book we or i flip things around talking about uh you know amazon um warehouses going in former big box stores uh uh you know how a texas town dealt with the loss of its walmart flip things around because the walmart was the equivalent to the downtown um i've got plenty of sort of counterintuitive examples in the book and although i don't talk about them in a generic presentation doesn't mean they're not there oh sorry yeah come in in just a moment we have a question from monica about identity of place is identity of place only subjective and does it change from time to time and maybe t ground and yeah that kind of uh falls uh exactly in my lab because jennifer you posed an extremely elegant question which i need to listen to again when i look at the recorded session uh because it ties with this urbanite emcee and chuck and i we we discussed this during the project's evolution because the book is only just the final maybe chapter but not the final verse and it's part of the long process we have had and when it comes to urban identity and city identities we looked at it i mean the city shaped with all geographical characteristics it's cultural level architectural uh uh character aesthetics tradition and customs and lifestyle so even if we kind of uh maybe we felt that we were critical of the prescriptions we weren't really but we wanted to say how complex a city is and then of course then you have of course the intangible one the phenomenological whole notion of the sense of place which is so so complex and it goes down from each and every individual because chuck and i can look at his background in a very very different way the combination of cultural heritage the context the new buildings the people uh you know they create and shape the identity so uh and what we thought about also that we really were concerned with the physical and cultural characteristics of each space and each of these spaces evolve and this is why i get very upset when i hear now the new prescriptions of one one-minute city three-minute city five-minute city 15-minute city i mean one minute city i can't even get out of my apartment in one minute i'm not sure what i'm supposed to do and how i'm supposed to evolve and and really get enriched in the city so it's very difficult because that the quality that contributes to the identity of place and enables distinguishing one place to another is such a complex uh uh beast so i think each place is very different but as you said jennifer they're timeless principles of urbanism and cnu has been one of the organization has really put him back on the agenda as michael zorkin has said once there is not a single principle of congress of new urbanism i wouldn't sign on because they are almost like declaration of dependents but then again when you come to a specific culture and context and as the question was there about urban identity right it's very much to each and every one of us that's why we were also critical chuck but we didn't manage to write that much and i think it's me culpa my problem about the indicators of livability you know everything from mercer consulting to to all these you know how do you measure the quality uh what is a better which cities are better to live in you know how do we do it right the rankings yeah the the stats and all that it's also very very difficult yeah so so i you know of course um tiger and i agree implicitly on this stuff identity changes of course it does look at this photo i mean um and these are the tools that we might analyze how identity has changed nothing is static in the city um and that's as tiran has articulated in different words um you know this is what the beast where you know we're we're faced with um um so do you want i'm i'd just like to get to through the case studies in the book and then we can keep talking uh yeah i did want to kind of highlight you know i think the best explanation in your book of the method is the persona borough story um it brings it to you know it really brings the method to life and that was that was the place in the book where i felt like oh i now i really understand what you're talking about and how i would do this except i kept thinking you know in my entire 25 year career i think i've only worked on one or two projects that had enough resources to do anything remotely like that so how do we bring these ideas in how do we use these ideas when we can't talk to 500 people and spend six months immersed in a place right right and no thanks for putting that out that's in chapter five and i i have a i would argue it's a fairly simplistic or over simplistic reference to an imaginary citizen in an imaginary borough here in the united kingdom and he does all the stuff that that or he does many of the things that are set out in this slide and i was fortunate in my legal career to work for um some very well-heeled people who might have had the budgets to do these kinds of things but they didn't necessarily do them either i think that um i think you do the best you can in the context you're dealing with now that's not a cop-out answer that's a reality and what we were trying to do as tigran has said is an almost open source invitation to say look this is a perfect world this is how we might get to closure about the best way to deal with urban change in this particular context at this particular time but it's going to be a mix and match and what what at least i wanted to do was get on the table as i think we do in chapters chapter three and a bit of chapter two the range of techniques including charades um including you know bill leonard's life's work with the charade institute and many things that cnu already does to look at the laundry list of what we could do and that's why i want to get to um the examples um because i think that partially it partially answers your question jennifer here we see a blend this is a cold drops yard at king's cross london all sorts of things going on with past present and future and this is an invitation to evaluate a more modern attempt to meld the many forces of a modern redevelopment project i did want to mention quickly we all have our phenomenological personal stories this happens to be a structure that no longer exists in new report massachusetts where my mom grew up and her parents ran a store and this um the structure is gone it's now condominium but this whole family story is lost to history as are so many and this can make a big difference when we go forward in a place because sometimes we do want to recreate and remember some of these essences now here's where i wanted to end up jennifer the best example is an ideal example that answers your question and the upper left-hand photo is one of the six case studies in the book um of a of a mining town in northern sweden in lapland called kiruna and kiruna needs is in the process of moving most of its core because it's a mining town and the mine has caused just like in the epic american land use live case of pennsylvania coal subsidence and the town is caving in on itself so they're creating a new town and this is a piece of the new town the town the new town hall on the left and the house of culture meaning big community center on the right and there's lots of housing and lots of whatever but what's really important here is they had the luxury partially because the mining company is funding the move for a retired colleague of tigrans yar and karsh to go north and move to kiruna and suss out how the town the new what the new town should look like and what the experience should be and you know what they did a mixture of things kiruna has one of the um most outstanding rural churches in sweden it's being moved in its entirety but then the questions begin is the cemetery to be moved are the grove of trees around it to be moved what about the park bench in the urocurrent urban center where the a couple met 40 years ago what about the build traditional building materials should they face the modern buildings in the new town the answer is yes and a variety of really deep thinking uh analyses of what to do with creating the new town now i will say that the town hall on the left looks nothing like the old town hall but internally the architects have duplicated the spatial relationships and the residents go in that new town hall and they feel like they're in the old town hall why there's a stairway there's relationships that remind them of the former place very surgical and you're saying so where's the answer my question chuck well partially it was done by listening listening not just public meetings but sitting down for cups of coffee with long time residents working you know mixing in the architects and the anthropologists and so on now they had the luxury to do that but what i argue is that we can all pick up pieces of that of that ideal laboratory and running around the examples in chapter 6 that i chose a group of talented young irish architects who put together the irish pavilion at the venice biennale of architecture in 2019 not the current one looking at six regional market towns in ireland and how to bring them back in a very gentle co-created way how to work with the towns to to return the dn you know we vote the overused term of the dna of place the central uh below kiruna is the bloomberg european headquarters in london high-end another high budget project but um as michael jones from foster and uh the architects said to me we had the luxury not only to to do what we should do not just what we could do and bloomberg after being mayor of new york brought a profound contextual reality to this um to this site in ways that we talk about in the book relocating a roman ruin re-enabling a street with local with funding local businesses at the base between the two sides of the building um another example with the role of business improvement districts both here in the united kingdom and the us and then going up to two examples that didn't work apple stores in stockholm in the middle and melbourne at the top why apple did not do its homework and apple did not do what it should have to understand the dynamic changing identities of two very central public spaces over time so i want to answer your question again by saying that yes no way most people or projects are going to be able to pull all of this off but they can learn from pieces of these examples so i have a follow-up to your a follow-up question to your exhortation for us to listen but i want to make sure we get our questions from our attendees yeah please uh before we hit the one o'clock hour and marcus has asked us about how do we think about places whose quote character tends towards exclusion who who's being observed or consulted on place well i would say um the book not only to the degree the book adopts a preachy tone about um about some of the things you've alluded to the book also really speaks to the importance of listening to those who are impacted and affected and the social justice and exclusionary concerns in the current reality of a place are very much what um this learn method if you will also focuses on and um we joked in our prep session jennifer that the last thing i want this to be seen as is an old i started out saying i feel old after rob's kind the rendition of the of of of our bios but hey this is not an old white guy's heritage book this is about taking in the multiplicity of a current location and um so i would say that if if the character is exclusionary we need to call that out i have examples of um uh both in this book and my last book of maybe an indiscriminate application of subdivision controls to a given city without regard to traditional gathering places in the street of black community and how an intern in a planning department who was from that neighborhood brought out the fact that really the standard approach being used by the city needed to be entirely rethought in the context of that uh neighborhood in order to spur reinvestment by the locals so i'm very much on board with that notion my experience is that all places are complex and diverse to some in in some way shape or form and if we're only hearing from one set of people that that's not because those are the only people in that place it's because we're we're not listening in the right places and in the right ways to hear from the full range of people right we're coming up on the hour and uh uh this video will be posted uh online um on the cnu website uh in a day or so uh so folks that need to leave at an hour point can leave it's up to the panelists but how long they want to go on uh so um well let's get let's keep going thank you rob i know it's also trying to get a word in yeah but yeah i know but i i will answer your question i can type it jennifer i'll i'll type it because the question was no i don't know how to type it yeah no no no that's fine i mean i just wanted to say that um look i say many times exactly what you've just said that the loudest voice in the room should not and must not control um these these processes and um again there are many techniques that are um that are set out in chapter three including the traditional cnu charette approach that um attempt to avoid that and that's exactly what a deep listening approach or a a personal um consultation approach um can accomplish i uh allude to the work of someone who's fairly well known in this warren logan in oakland and um and others as well in terms of how to empower uh people whose stories might not otherwise be told t grand was there something you wanted to comment on uh yeah because i mean it's a great question and of course the way we move around the cities and look at the cities it might seem it's very natural and neutral but it's very cities are often designed and programmed and managed in a way that actually controls where you can go where you can access certain places and who does it and the question is who is excluded unfortunately we have seen poor people people of color different ethnicities minorities they're excluded but that means what do we how do we tackle that urban politics urban economics some kind of an urban brave regeneration that's sort of maybe the important thing that that discrimination fear of the other and the retaining status quo is not possible but as cities are such a fantastic salad bowl this is what basically they inherently need they cannot have that theater so so in a way it's possible to do it but then again it comes down to the city districts that the mayor's to the to the sensibility of the architects and planners working in a specific city and not just maybe doing a yappy 15-minute city tactical urbanism thing there's much much much more complex things to do now you mentioned that your your legal career you did a lot of work on brownfields and one of the questions that i came to my mind when i was reading your book you know this emphasis on storytelling and negotiating it really depends on residents and other stakeholders donating their time and attention to the conversation that you're trying to have with them and there's kind of two questions i have about that one is how how do you do this method how do you do this kind of immersion in a place that has been largely abandoned or is largely vacant and the people aren't there anymore well um there's there's american examples there's um examples in europe in the recent year one of the recent european cities of culture plovdiv in bulgaria where an area that was once essentially the the the uh residents of of um what you know short term shorthand or called gypsies populations uh roman populations and they've left um how how to revision i mean sometimes the stakeholders are gone and it becomes a more um a more city-wide re-revisioning approach um but i think that as professionals and you know you've commented already jennifer that it is so hard sometimes to engage people no matter how hard we try but i think it is um our inherent this is preaching to the choir and maybe saying the same old thing but it's it it is the responsibility of those involved to seek out through appropriate means and if if it means translation if it means new and different forms of communication it that's one benefit of the pandemic although it does demand some technology that consultation does not necessarily need to be a traditional in person meeting um it's a mix and match depending on context there are many as i've said there's many different approaches that that i've recited that um talk about ways ranging from you know knocking on doors to coffee to zoom to um traditional forms of meeting but that doesn't get away from the fact that public engagement is sometimes um as you well know a very difficult process it has been for years it it will continue to be and i would say that this this book is not the last word on public engagement it attempts to provide a menu of ways to expose the multiplicity of forces at play in a given urban place but i won't pretend to be a public involvement expert as a lawyer sure we had um we had our regulatory processes sometimes with indigenous peoples involved we had required federal consultation with native american populations i worked for usually developer types when i was working for developers that wanted to hear from everyone and they funded their own processes they funded their own meetings and they funded their own community involvement specialists to get people to the table you know what comes across very clearly in your book is this idea of identity being complex and having many different layers and trying to take many different perspectives different methods you know you talk about both objective and subjective methods being important comparing different places that sort of layering of things as being so important i'd say you could say all the same things about public engagement too that right you know the ways that it works to engage people in one place are different than the ways it works to engage people in a different place and so that yeah those methods you're talking about for understanding identity are also some of the methods you have to use to find the people right and and you know i i mean i um poor plum in the handyman he probably doesn't know he's he's my hero but i can talk about um the one thing that i've experienced here moving to a smaller city you know just outside london is the wealth of knowledge that is within people who have been here for many years or whose families have been here for many many years and i can tell you that um the you know the plumber the electrician you know they they all have a very superior understanding about what's needed to make a better place and we need to we certainly need to remember that and maybe i i'm i'm you know it's this is what joran did in in karuna i mean he he infiltrated the um pre-existing social network of the place in order to um well we use the word immersed many many times in the book but um i think that it's not this is why the book ends with a checklist is not a dream it's a very um sincere attempt to call upon the human element and call upon also our tendency just to check the boxes of legal requirements or um you know the requirements of an application and so on and so forth and to say hey it's not that simple and now now's the time for us to to um to remember that and i think that um yeah anyway that's you know there's one topic in your book that you you devote really an entire chapter to we haven't touched on it all yet i'd like to give a chance to bring it up which is the the relationship between global forces and local places you know as planners working in a specific place what what do we need to understand about that well i think um that was manifested i've seen it manifested in my travels and you know my reinvented life you know it's not just amazon and the hq2 story which i do tell um in the book through a slightly different lens perhaps than others but it's also stories of um global forces that impact local businesses um in similar ways around the world these become issues of learning from each other about how to re-envision our high streets as they're called here or main streets it becomes stories like the one that i conveniently turn to not anticipating your question but the story of a fruit and vegetable company in london called bobtail fruit that no longer exists in a physical setting such as the borough market or any of the london markets which tourists love to visit so the question is a global you know the glo has the global well you know we have multiple forms of global there we have the the the fact that perhaps a a fruit and vegetable business is not going to do well at a market stall anymore unless it is subsidized by the municipality but we also have the tourists who come to london and want to see the old style markets in operation but then we have the reality and that is that bobtail fruit lives on they live on in a warehouse underneath a rail arch near waterloo station in london and they live on as a delivery service it's the same family delivering to offices and residences in particular during the pandemic with the same customer service that they are so proud of over the years going back to generations and with community involvement in the locales where they used to have their fruit and vegetable stalls so that's not quite a direct answer to your question but it's it shows that all cities or you know towns are dealing with these global issues of online retail of of um you know how do we how do we get rid of the automobile how do we do all these things to uh you know offset climate change and i think that particular chapter that you refer to actually spends a lot of time with exemplary local solutions to common global pressures so we're getting close to wrapping up with the end of our time here i want to i'm saying that out loud just in case any of our attendees have a question that they haven't written yet they're sort of hanging around in their heads um tigran is there anything on these questions you haven't been able to say yet that you wanted to get a a word in i was actually trying to find and i'll find it i was saying it in the chat there was a beautiful article written about the future of uh architecture education in the in the us by stan allen i think it was a dean at princeton school of architecture for the design observer and he had a beautiful quote also quoting a book on cosmopolitanism what kind of globalism is needed today and it's also very deeply rooted in the context and study of local places but also some kind of a cosmopolitanism which is not artificially preserving authentic local traditions nor giving in mindlessly to the forces of globalism but actually looking at the hybridity of contemporary culture that works with tradition and the new forces sort of in in that sense so i can say that in the chat it was pretty pretty nice yeah yeah and i will say i will say the book has um of that almost exact perspective people who've written about um over tourism are way ahead of us um in this regard and that from them i dropped a lot of the principles we talked about i also um i also note that um i believe speaking of island press publisher for my first few books i believe they have a new book on over tourism which might be worth looking at as well well and i think for anyone who's working in economic development you know anywhere uh it it's always struck me that cities and towns are you know they are fixed in a location but they are influenced and kind of buffeted by all of these flows flows of people and capital and businesses that come in and out from around the world now and aren't fixed in a place and and towns have to deal with those changes right and you know i like to talk about the continua um that are inherent in under you know you apply and learn and whether it's in an idealistic all all-encompassing way or pieces of it um you know there's old there's continuum between old and new tall and short global and local um you know one could create and i'm sure many people have quite the matrix of of the various continua that that we need to reference when we're talking about um the particular snapshot of a place identity so tigran and chuck i have a last question for both of you which is what did you hope i would ask that i didn't ask you tigran you take that one um what is the next paradigm in urbanism where are we going probably 19 no we that might have been something that that i know you kept that jennifer for next term what what happens with all these issues in the post covered times has this really sort of changed our perception to cities and do we look at cities completely different and do we do we need to change our urban lifestyles after this or are we going to go back to square one or continue the way we're you know discussing cities with different paradigms sometimes interconnecting sometimes opposing some sometimes differing ideologies or do we go in the same you know happy shiny train uh like pps has done for years as margaret crafter says happy shiny urban is a good urbanism uh or is it really much much more complex than that so maybe post cover 19 that's something that's going to come and i'm sure rob rob would mention the cnu next year that's going to be a big issue at cnu for sure you guys are going to tackle that for from different aspects right so many people i mean in the interviews and podcasts that i've done um that that certainly always comes up um i think the other you know the other the other issue that comes up parallel to that is well you know given um given the pandemic and given the tremendous illustrations of climate change that we've seen around the world and the the various post george floyd movements and so on and so forth what what will become of cities going forward just is you know will will cities survive in their current form which is a sort of an offshoot of tigran's question and i was asked that by a very accomplished presenter somewhat of a legend and bbc london and i you know my answer was um come on it's london you know we've been you know it yes and i think there's a sort of um uh there's a sort of universalism that that it really involves speaking as to that that question earlier question about do does identity change yes it does and it's i think remarkable to think about how we are going to come out of this and that's not necessarily a question you didn't ask many of your questions were were real really built around that notion i wanted to thank um charles chuck tigron and jennifer for a great really interesting discussion and all of the people who participated in this and [Music] once again thank you for being part of cnu's on the park bench [Music] and have a great day thanks everybody thanks for having me yeah thank you thank you yeah thank you thank you jennifer bye bye