On the Park Bench - Welcoming Cities

hi everyone welcome to our webinar today we're just opening it up and letting people come in from the waiting room so we're going to give it a couple more minutes i first want to thank everyone for joining us today on a day when you might have other things on your mind so i think it's really important that we all do what we can to keep on keeping on so thank you all i'm lynn richards i'm the president and ceo for the congress for the new urbanism uh and i'm here to welcome you all to um our current edition of on the park bench a public square conversation we launched this series last spring as a platform to give our members a platform to kind of present the work that they're doing discuss emerging issues kind of toy back and forth um during this pandemic time when so much of our work is virtual um since we weren't able to meet in person we wanted to create this this space where we can come together once a week and and talk about what's new today we're going to hear from jason king pamela stacy and rob pietkoski around welcoming cities which is when we look at climate migrations what can cities do to become more welcoming for those climate migrants i'm really looking forward to that conversation todd zimmerman will be moderating but before that both todd and ashley walton will be joining us to talk a little bit about cnu's membership um as you know or maybe you don't know cnu is in the midst of our fall membership drive and what we're doing last week and this week is inviting members to come on to talk a little bit about why they're a member and why membership in cnu is so important so ashley why don't you talk to us a little bit about why you joined you joined as a student and now you've been a member for over four years that is right um so really i i like to jokingly say that i'm a cnu member because i was raised on it and while that's not exactly literal i grew up in a very very small town in east tennessee but was privileged to travel quite a bit with my family and was able to see a lot of different places and so i knew that i wanted to live in a city before i knew what an architect was and for many people though the first time that they experienced a walkable environment is their college campus and i went to college at andrews university and their urban design is integral to the curriculum it's foundational to the curriculum because of creating spaces for a community of people so that like i mean from the very beginning that is part of our architecture education and so the charter was actually required reading for me in in college so that was something that was just an underlying part of my education and the thing is though like most of what we learn on college campuses the rubber meets the road when we actually graduate and go out and try to test those experiences in real life and so to me the things that were so foundational to cnu were also so many of the reasons why i loved cities and as i became a design professional and eventually a licensed architect and now an architect and urban designer i wasn't just engaged in the loving of cities but the making of them from every level from policy to design and all of these things and so i think when you are working on something that integral to our day-to-day lives having that community of people who can who you can discuss with who can bounce ideas off of who you can dive deeper into so many of these concepts with become so important um and it's something as a person who really loves academia and academics the ability to not only talk about these things on an academic level but how we implement them uh all across the the country and around the world in so many different ways that's really why i'm a cnu member and having that ability to have my voice be heard in part of those conversations but todd what about you why are you a member of cnu well it's uh i'm just the opposite of you obviously i'm the world's worst student have no regard at all for academia uh i do i do uh have a really tight connection with cities uh because i can i've been in and around new york my entire life i was a housing journalist for a couple decades and my shock of going out into the united states from new york city and discovering what it actually looked like uh was was uh really extraordinary and we had a client pretty early on who said yeah i'm going to build do a development that's going to be like a town and the images just came right to my mind and a couple weeks later i think i met andres duane i go back to cnu uh to cnu2 and i've missed only two since or two or three since that time that the so you know the thrill of discovering collectively recovering collectively the uh the tools of civic art of making beautiful uh places uh places that people love but the the real reason is why am i a member now uh after all these years and cnu i've you know been been around for a while as you can probably tell the white hair is a giveaway of all the organizations that i've been involved with where i've spoken where i've had conversations with members cnu is the place where the heavy intellectual lifting gets done yeah there's implementation all the home builders know how to build the planners know how to plan now after after watching cnu for 25 years the financiers know how to finance but the actual intricacies of how all these things intertwine and how that that um that weave of all of the elements that that make a place work only cnu does that it's weird i always i always quote john muir when i'm trying to explain cnu and he said when we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the universe and that is that's sierra club but it also applies to the economics and implementation of place making and place recovery and cnu is the only place where you're still not locked in a silo where where a uh a traffic engineer can have a great housing id and it gets and it goes into a into a plan uh that there's that we are all we have our areas of expertise but we are all generalists and being able to be with other generalists and and be on a playing field where you can share ideas um and and new thoughts and we're still the thrill of discovery early on is still going on it it is and that's and that's why i am still a member of cnu and that's why i support it monetarily todd and ashley um both of what you said really resonated with me i've been a member of cnu since 2001 um for a lot of the same reasons that todd mentioned so what a lot of members don't realize is that we use membership dollars to support programs like on the park bench like rob studeville public square so we don't have grant funding for that it all comes from membership dollars so i encourage you all to join or renew you can do it online at members.cnu.org or much like npr scott shields is standing by now to take your call 973-714-7200 this is the last week of our fall membership drive so i hope uh you all will join um thank you ashley uh so much for joining us today and uh thank you again to our speakers and todd i'm gonna turn it over to you to kick off the this this edition of uh on the park bench thank you very much thank you lynn um this is a two in a row on on on our climate crisis as lynn mentioned we're going to be talking about welcoming cities how did how to give climate migrants uh a a soft place to land and we have a team from dover coal and partners jason king who is a principal and he has been the lead in about 200 projects around the country town cities neighborhoods and corridors pam stacy is the studio director she's the one that leads the the team that creates the illustrative plans so that uh all of the brilliant stuff that gets done can be communicated to folks that can't read a plan but can certainly understand a a picture that looks from the from the perspective of a of a pedestrian and rob piakowski is an expert on the relationship between transportation and urban design and he was a transportation planner and of course as you would suspect as a member of the dover coal team he has a passion for place making i'd like to turn it over to jason now to uh to begin our discussion of welcoming cities thank you thank you for having us um yeah i think it was a couple months ago at the cnu florida chapter meeting and lynn was talking about the concept of welcoming cities and um i had heard it in relation to uh political refugees or undocumented workers but i hadn't thought of it in terms of climate planning and that's absolutely what we need to do so i thought well you know we've done some projects and it gave me an opportunity to look back on the work that we've done and the effect it's happened so i'm going to talk about um hammond louisiana and the comprehensive plan that we worked on about 10 years ago and i'll look back and see what effect it's had or recall was working with a consultant team involving hall planning engineering and uh steve lavasso and associates from new orleans uh we're working specifically with the center for planning excellence out of baton rouge um and and what our job was was uh hurricane katrina had just occurred and um the population of new orleans was cut largely in half and the mass fast migration with people leaving with just the clothes on their back um you know worried uh to the center for planning out excellent cpacs and they started retooling the planning work that they had been doing throughout louisiana with the idea of uh in migration in mind as a kind of adaptation strategy um for you know a wetter a more turbulent world ahead and so instead of a big surprise and an evacuation and the tragedy of that they started to think ahead and they chose uh hammond hammond's a small town about an hour and a half north of new orleans you drive a little land bridge between lake mariposa and lake pontchartrain and hammond is 45 feet sea level whereas a lot of new orleans on average is even below sea level and it feels like the louisiana mainland just above i-12 and um and a comprehensive plan was in order and so they started to ask us to think about climate mitigation adaptation and preparing for uh for for leaving in a lot of ways coastal louisiana now the thing about hammond is that it's very very different from new orleans if you judge hammond based upon their big festival that they're known for the regional strawberry festival and then you you think of new orleans in terms of jazz fest for instance which is my favorite time to go to new orleans you know culturally these are two very different places the other issue is that um in terms of housing stock a different approach would be necessary and in terms of the median incomes we're talking about a different socioeconomic and economic demographic that needed to be accommodated thinking into the future so we had a charette a little over 10 years ago and it was attended by architects and um city the mayor and city council planning commission members of the public new residents a longtime residents pam was drawing um the illustrator plans you'll see in the presentation it was really well attended and we talked as part of our um conversation about how you know there's a great main street in hammond thomas street and we talked about how the upper floor of all these terrific storefront buildings were empty you know and we talked about how on the edge it was a decaying and blighted quite often graying on strip malls infrastructure in need of repair and update and we dave as planners do we did dot exercises among the ways of engaging the public green dots for where should we protect and red dots for where should we build and and it's good it's important if you're talking about growth and adding density i recommend you begin with what should we protect and so people were identifying spots for for parks and for new parks um and for trails to connect them so the comprehensive plan because it's about everything had a parks and recreation element and we began with um with parks and trails making uh life better for the current residents as uh change occurs into the future and then the red dots where should we build and you can see that the dots were placed in the historic downtown and on the different major intersections and then designers like pam then went and drew a luster of master plans for that area and then we codified those with a new future land use map and with form-based coding um ultimately a form-based code was approved for uh the entire town of hammond and you notice the purples of transects you know instead of the reds and blues and oranges of euclidean zoning what we were doing with the future land use map is we were making ultimately it much easier to build at higher densities to create a compact walkable mixed-use place but also a place that could um host many more people than the existing future land use map or zoning allowed for and we showed how that could be done well how you know these the necessary housing and workplaces on the the offices for the non-profits and uh and the places for people to um go to school could be accommodated largely along the commercial corridors and the organism has been doing this for a long time we go to the commercial corridor to the suburban strip and we say a lot more is possible there we have an oversupply of commercial and so we talk about housing and how we can create um new communities and you see the five-minute walk circles that way it's an integrated part of the town's fabric and then with renderings like this one done from james doherty we imagined a future where there's a lot more people but there's also at the same time a higher quality of life and a diversity of places to shop and to be and to recreate on the edge we talked about because a lot of hammond was still very green and the population was rising really fast after katrina and the subdivisions were coming in very very quickly and they were exasperating a problem in a lot of ways it was you know single-family houses in one spot and apartments in another and commercial in a third and the low-level war between all of them as they tried to stop each other from expanding or or growing and we tried to show of course right from the charter uh the interconnected network of streets uh great green spaces and um and a variety of housing types for a variety of people all designed in a way that made it uh work together and we of course you know like we do we went we examined all the housing stock and we said this is how hammond used to build and we could find the triplexes and the row houses and the townhomes and the duplexes and the granny flats of um of the last hundred years when this kind of stuff was built all the time and we talked about how this was hammond's tradition we just needed to project it into the future so now 10 years later if we look and see what has happened in hammond there's a few things to point out one is that new orleans hasn't had a major storm hit cat 3 since katrina and there's been multiple storms including just last week and pam and i have got friends who don't have power at the moment but there hasn't been um a massive catastrophic hit such that it decreased the population you know thankfully and hopefully that won't happen but the population before the storm was roughly 500 000. and as you know people left they went throughout the country austin and uh dallas and up to new england lewiston maine and out to the west coast um and uh and slowly that population has been rebounding and what that means is that the growth that we expected in hammond has been a lot slower than we thought they just reached 20 000 people and um we thought they would be reaching that five years earlier luckily you know there hasn't been a storm like katrina now at the same time the other important thing is that the plan is still is still the plan ten years later this is still the city's comprehensive plan it's still the guiding document i was talking to tracy at the city last week and she says she still goes to the plan um for every major case and she refers to it she uses as a training document so while they haven't had a big storm and the population has been rising slowly it's still very much in play and part of every decision now one of the great things that's happened is the second floor of all those buildings are full even now 90 of the historic buildings their second floor or their third floor are now um occupied and there's a mix of residents and offices in those and the plan helped the plan recommended moving from the international building code to the international existing building code and cdbg grants for facades and we reduced the parking requirements and got rid of the fire all the things that new organists do in order to make it easier to to put people in those second floors and you know with the forum based code in the downtown the new buildings that are coming in are just looking terrific holly and smith architects did this this is a brand new structure 200 downtown it's a mixed-use building with awnings and shop fronts and the parking is in the back and they rebuilt the sidewalk and there's oak trees that are planted and this would not have happened under the exist it was this was not even possible under the former uh code that they had and so older buildings are being revived uh and here we've got a gallery over the sidewalk and new structures are are on the way at square 71 this entire block uh in hammond's small shotgun homes were that were dilapidated are starting to become um places that can accommodate a lot more people and uh and design um which makes it you know choice-worthy nice place to live now just like happens all the time when we were doing the farm-based coding uh for the outskirts for the emerging suburban areas there was a lot of compromise right it's difficult to tell these areas to do something completely different we made traditional neighborhoods development entirely possible but it was hard to require and we had guidelines that improved the quality of development but ultimately as those areas densify more people arrive there was some effort you know and there were new requirements and i was part of the conversation on both of these new developments and the developers tried to bring some of the streets from the buildings closer to the street and they rebuilt the sidewalks there's even a chance an attempt on the left to have a green in the middle and there's even an attempt on the right to have a trail that goes around but but this is largely conventional development and as you can imagine design matters and this kind of development creates uproar and this is a growing pain created for the city of hammond and so the community is opposing these zoning requests new development is a big part of every political election uh meetings can get quite heated we made development easier with the land development regulations and the zoning no question um and we're facilitating this place growing and it's harder and it's harder in a lot of ways because uh because it was hard because the city didn't keep to the charter really so planning for immigration this is to summarize this means doing what new organists do best codes and plans that have higher densities mix of units required streamlined approvals form-based coding strengthening the historic districts um creating more parks and trails incentivizing affordable housing you know working with the land bank to create spots so that way they can be permanent affordability complete streets and all the mitigation adaptation measures um that uh that a new changing climate requires this is what we need to continue to do and we can do this knowing that we're working in such a way that when the next big storm comes whether it's florida or where i live or if it's louisiana that there are places where people can go to you know and continue their lives yeah thank you all right all right well hello i'm pamela king i'm the studio director at dover colon partners and i'm taking a little different approach looking at you know planning for a shoreline exodus with walkable urbanism you know most uh people live up really close to the coastline in the store because the beach is a great amenity just for where people want to live but it's also where a lot of jobs are as well and so we're looking at looking at more of the interior and using some trying to create amenities away from the shoreline but then also while doing the planning from the beginning thinking about climate change and mitigation and adaptation and what are things that you can add to a project to help the environment from the beginning the project i'll primarily be talking about uh has a amazing client knight kiplinger and a lot of what has been achieved is due to him along with marcella campbloor todd zimmerman also worked on this project as well and so it's not only rising seas but storms as jason mentioned i remember hurricane andrew in 1992 i was in high school at the time so i'm dating myself a little bit there and i remember it seems like everyone from south florida was moving up to central florida while the storm came and the gymnasium at my high school was just filled with people while we were going to class and so you know i just have this memory of that and always thinking like where is the you know best place to locate to hopefully not have to do that so looking at this new field is in martin county it's got a 26 feet above sea level whereas you know miami is typically only six feet above sea level and so every bit that you can get in elevation and more inland that you can get is going to help when you're locating a project now knight kiplinger has owned this property for a very long time in martin county and it used to be very connected to the surrounding area lots of natural systems uh and a portion of the property was used for farmland and the development was to the north and off to the east but now that development has come to this site it's kind of the hole in the donut and so it's appropriate to look at this site for you know what is his next phase as far as development as well as protection it's got a lot of development uh coming up around its edges it's a very beautiful sight it's got a lot of the natural uh wetlands and sloughs and uplands in this area that have not been disturbed or damaged and so we really wanted to look at what can we do to help preserve this large natural system that's surrounded by development but we want to try and keep it intact as much as we can we want to use it as an amenity we want to add trails uh for hiking and biking within walking distance of people's homes and so preserving it but then also using it as that amenity because so people can get outside and be active and have this great place that they want to show people when they come to town we often talk about postcard views and so you know getting people out and walking around without going to the beach this property has also been used for farming and so looking at this area where the farming is is a place where you can focus the development as opposed to where the natural systems are still intact before we were involved someone was looking at this property and saying if you could use conventional development the type of development that is surrounding this property what would it look like and so you can see citrus boulevard kind of diagonally cutting through the property but then it's all just very large lots and just really squeezed around the existing wetlands and the natural systems uh no longer really exist they're very disconnected and so we were like what is a better way and so using all the tools that we've learned from new urbanism you know creating a very compact core the uh connected neighborhoods each with its own center all uh compact and walkable but then really pushing all that development together so that we can really preserve what's there and so the focus of this project was to have 70 percent of the land to remain protected and undeveloped with only 30 percent of the site being developed that was not a requirement of the land development regulations that was uh what knight kiplinger as the steward of this land wanted to do and so he really pushed us to achieve that and so when you come from uh the south and the east along citrus boulevard you know we kept the pasture areas and the uplands and looked at putting in a pony club with horse trails there's a lot of people to the south of the site that owned horses and uh wanted a place to take them at the same time of having hiking and biking trails as well uh from the on the other side from coming from the north you have a lot of those wetlands and trails but then we're also preserving some of that commercial farm we're preserving 100 acres of commercial farms so that we're not just getting rid of the farming in addition to that there's also some citrus groves and plenty of acreage for a community farm to have another thing for the community to rally around and come together and then at the center is where the town pulls up against the road and is very compact and relatively dense compared to the surrounding areas but makes it feel like a place it's not a subdivision it's a town and so part of that center is having this csa farm stand you know starting to get people to the site early on and so this is what we're the project is currently working on developing this portion now so that it starts to bring people to the site uh even before there are homes making sure that the neighborhood has a mix you know we have our our community farm our csa we have you know commercial in the town center and a mix of housing types and building types and so instead of showing the traditional transect plan this is actually going a step further and showing the actual mix of housing types and sizes and just you know there it's not one long string of any one thing to really get that mixed feel in the community but also having a unique town center and each neighborhood has its own uh little core but also you know a commercial center right here by the road now those are things that are traditionally done with new urban projects and new communities and so here some of the things that we went a little bit further on is the northern portion of this site is lined by the c23 canal and that connects lake okeechobee with the ocean and the c-23 canal and the water coming out of lake okeechobee is very nutrient rich there's a lot of farming especially closer to lake okeechobee that occurs and so this is very nutrient rich water that often creates very dangerous algae blooms as it's heading out into the bay and into the ocean so our site is uniquely located where there is a gate a canal gate that can control the water coming from lake okeechobee and heading out and so we reserved over a hundred acres to put in a new wetland system that would take the water from the c23 canal clean it up through a series of flow through marshes and then return it to the c23 canal cleaner than when it was originally coming past our site so in addition to making sure that we're cleaning the water from our development area before it's heading off of our site we're also taking the water that's just passing by and cleaning it up before it continues on and so when you're talking about climate change you know just kind of recap we typically talk about mitigation and adaptation and so some of the mitigating things that we really focused on you know you want to lessen the amount of greenhouse gas pollution that's going into the atmosphere so that's looking at the walkable and bikeable streets using a mix of uses having connections to natural systems so you're just reducing some of the trips that people would be taking also with the smaller lots and sizes you have less lawns and so there's less water consumption and looking at the carbon capture you know the in addition to the you know the street trees that we advocate because they make great walkable places keeping the trees that already exist in these large uh pineland prairie areas you know they're already holding that carbon and so keeping that carbon sequestration uh intact and some of the adaptation you know looking at areas that uh when you can are a higher elevation and away from the coast of you know trying to move more towards uh you know in this example florida's interior as well as the country's interior and finding places where people will want to retreat to now not necessarily after the storm comes and you don't have a choice because there's you're not livable anymore we want to make choice-worthy communities now and that's something that i think you know cnu does a really good job of advocating for but also looking at it through the lens of adaptation is also important something a little different from when jason was talking is due to uh knight kiplinger's just stewardship of the land in the past and his commitment to creating you know 70 of open space and looking at cleaning up the c23 canal a place like martin county which traditionally is very hard to get development approvals has seen quite a bit of support from both the community and the board of commissioners and it's not just new communities i you know looking at wherever you have a place that's higher you know there's many many small towns this is a image of lake wales florida which is at 148 feet uh it was a bustling town at once but it's kind of uh emptied out of it and so looking at how do you bring back those neighborhoods replacing all of those lost street trees and filling in and so it's really you know all the aspects for cnu is is looking you know we can use it as a way to help out to create choice-worthy places and assisting with climate mitigation and adaptation so with that rob i will pass it over to you great thank you pam all right so my name is rob pierkowski i'm a town planner and urban designer at dover colon partners i'll be talking about the smart plan in miami-dade county and how it's an example of preparing cities to defend adapt and retreat with transit planning doberkon partners joined the planning process for the smart plan in 2017 and working with calvin giordano and associates to develop a land use and a lenny scenario envisioning plan for one of the six corridors of the smart plan so miami's already experiencing the effects of climate change especially when it comes to flooding we have a phenomenon down here called sunny day flooding where when the tide gets a little too high the water tends to flow in the reverse direction back to the storm drains from the bay and into the streets and this happens throughout the low-lying parts of the county especially in downtown and the beach and heavy rains got really exacerbate this problem and as we look back in history the designer cities have always taken into consideration the greater needs of protection and environmental considerations and in some cases those largely informed the shape that these cities and developments took a little about a little bit more about the smart plan it's the strategic miami area rapid transit plan and it's a program of projects to advance rapid transit corridors for the county and it's really intended to help achieve county and community population and employment goals along six rapid transit corridors of various types rail bus rapid transit monorail and so on and why is this necessary here this this is a really fast growing region about 20 60 3 million more people are expected across southeast florida and one to one and a half million of those within miami-dade county so you know begs to ask the question is where where will these people live and how will they get around we're talking about population growth or development traffic inevitably comes up and is the conversation we always have and concerns on traffic and parking or really what drive decision making in many cases the ultimate design of the places we build and looking at the status quo and accommodating this population would really stress the systems and if we just kept with highway building and sprawling subdivisions it would not really be a pleasant outlook for transportation so the growing population another another solution is needed but a new conversation on population and growth should really uh be more related to climate change the greater challenge for us in south florida and other coastal communities is the sea level rise over the next 20 years 50 years and 100 years uh the seas down in south florida are projected to rise anywhere from one feet one foot to two to four to six or even higher as we get further out and this will have a huge impact on where and how we build and miami and other coastal communities must plan for this and what exactly does this mean so planning for a growing population really must include mitigation strategies and adaptation strategies mitigation is really you know limiting the driving force of climate change and doing things to reduce emissions and this can be reducing vmt and transportation emissions limiting impervious areas for flood purposes utilizing more efficient building types and promoting renewable energy and this is a lot of things that cnu already already does in terms of creating mixed-use walkable places which really checks off a lot of the mitigation type of strategies and the other half of the equation is adaptation and adjusting to expected future conditions so this can be a little more complicated building in the right place meaning maybe retreating from lower lying areas and focusing on higher and dry areas reinforcing infrastructure and reinforcing developed areas and providing system redundancy you may have heard this quote that said a lot that the best transportation plan is a good is a good land use plan and a correlate to that quote really could be a good resiliency and adaptation plan is a great transportation and land use plan and with transportation as one of the leading contributors to greenhouse gases any mitigation must must address transportation as well as land use and adaptation will depend on on that as well so in this time of so many disruptive technologies we don't really know exactly what the future of transportation tech will be but we do know what types of places are successful and sustainable and these are the types of places that cnu's been advocating and designing for a long time this compact development is also necessary for adapting to the limited high and dry areas and it's a little easier to reinforce and protect so we know what we need to build but the questions really becomes where and how to how to protect them this requires some new ideas and thoughts where is good for reinforcement and density how do we reinforce where is good for some development of some types and where we ultimately uh make sense for better or worse to maybe retreat from and there's lots of tools and information available that can really help in this and this all ties back to things that we work really on a daily basis with land use planning designing neighborhoods transportation infrastructure and building design so let's look at miami-dade atlantic oceans to the east everglades and agricultural lands to the west and south the county is really large but much of it is unbuildable or shouldn't be built upon you can see the city of miami itself in pink and the existing metro system as we lay in the smart plan corridors and the half-mile buffers it really encompasses a lot of area and represents a large extension of rapid transit and looking at the wetlands we can clearly see where development can occur and how these transit corridors fit fit in and as highway building can induce sprawl hopefully transit building with the right regulations can produce walkable urbanism and then as we look at these as it relates to sea level rise for a projection for around 2070 most of these corridors with the exception of the beach um really are outside of the area projected here and inundated by 2070 and you know for those areas that are not in the immediate threat of sea level rise interest in miami is a different a different scale or in a different time frame than in other places these should then become areas where we really look for accommodating the growing population and the south corridor is the the one that dover coal worked on and so i'll talk about this one in just a little bit more detail we worked on divisioning and land use planning for this corridor which was a existing busway following the flagler railroad alignment from 100 years ago this is the fastest population growth area in miami-dade county and surrounded by large amounts of aglan as always public process is really important so through a series of workshops and study advisory committee meetings and public involvement we were able to help create a vision for how much growth this corridor could support and what it would look like today there is the existing bus transit way some new developments coming in at relatively higher densities but we still have a lot of vacant land some disinvestment and not a complete uh holistic outlook on where and how development should come in zooming in we see it's really just a narrow strip of land here with the agricultural areas and the urban development boundary kind of protecting a lot of the rural space and as we extend the south plan or the smart plan south corridor we could start to see some of the mitigation and adaptation benefits reduced driving it becomes possible reducing vmt transportation emissions and this is promoting building in the right place and provides a redundancy to the highways to have an alternative means of transportation and taking a closer look at sea level rise in the station areas we really wanted to see how the land use planning and visioning for the pedestrian sheds kind of fits in with the overall picture of looking at what challenges we may face from climate change so really these are the areas to focus the walkable mixed-use urbanism that cnu does and also opens the question for how how can we reinforce infrastructure in these areas while avoiding the other areas in between or a little further out where sea level rise is a little more uh areas that are a little more prone to sea level rise and we also did a brief tour of the corridor to help people understand what what this could mean at least from the urban perspective of what the development could look like and a lot of it is the things that cnu's been talking about and doing successfully for a long time infill development street design and a mix of uses making use of mall sites and how we retrofit and make more efficient use of the limited space that we have available down here that's actually at a higher elevation instead of sprawling out on that we'll really need to start thinking about focusing more in these higher areas and that also has the added benefit of higher transit usage which can help reduce emissions and really recognizing just you know how close this can get to some of the agricultural lands and you know by building densely in one place we tried to make the argument that we can protect the agricultural land and the other open space and wetlands that are so important so for our role for the smart plan was how do we adjust the land uses to meet the goals and visions for the higher densities in those station areas and by concentrating development into walkable centers we can have more resources to reinforce those areas and it becomes more practical to reinforce from sea level and storm surge smaller areas rather than larger ones and when looking at this diagram i couldn't help but think you know where where have i seen this before and kind of brings me back to the image at the beginning so people have been adapting cities and towns and the places we live to to meet their needs pretty much since the beginning of building them and as centuries ago we designed cities to repel and protect from invading armies we now have the invading sea to keep out the biggest difference is we have a lot of influence just over uh over just how strong a force it will be and so you know it's not just adaptation it's also mitigation right and with that i'd like to transfer over to questions thank you all uh that was uh three completely different looks but there is a common thread besides cnu i'm well aware that this is a part of a we're in the midst of a membership drive and i don't think that there could be a better advertisement for the power of cnu than seeing the the tools that our organization provides being used in three very different circumstances but um this uh we have some time left for q a for those of you out there there's a q a button in the lower center right so ask your questions that way and i will relay them to the panel i'm going to take the moderators prerogative and ask the first question and jason you and i chatted about this a little bit uh earlier but can you or your colleagues discuss how you feel that cnu is uniquely positioned to address climate change sure you know i think you answered the question todd when you were talking about what it was that attracted you to cnu you said you know these are generalists these are people who don't work within silos um these are these are the only people who can build new places because new places are complicated things um and so yeah the new urbanists do that really well we're just really comfortable thinking about uh 4 000 acres or or doubling the population in a small town or um or building a high density you know 60 units to the acre transit oriented development it's designed that's what the new urbanists have to contribute so if we're talking about levees and pumps those are the engineers right if we're talking about new regulations to curb emissions and those are the american planning association planners the new urbanists tend to be a little wary of new regulations but what we're really good at is designing new communities like pam was showing that get approved um and designing if you looked at rob's renderings those are pretty incredible but there's a form based code down there in homestead florida and so development is improving the quality of life and people are not fighting we're working on projects building those things that rob showed and uh and people are in a lot of cases welcoming this development it's creating a center and otherwise placeless sprawl so that's what we do we design great new places the the fact that this is a worldwide emergency will not stop nimbyism will not stop people from protesting development but if it's a if it's a great neighbor if it's a choice-worthy new center then then then you are creating cities that will welcome new development i think it's interesting you mentioned nimbyism i think that that seeing you promoting the notion of walkable urbanism and that combined with the affordability crisis that america faces has has given rise to the the yimby's the yes in my backyard which is becoming was was originally sort of a renegade group but is now becoming quite sophisticated we have a first question from a an attendee or viewer which is usually the first question have you encountered potential funding tools that can help communities carry out mitigation plans such as those that you've shown let's see if it's i'll just start and then rob and pam when it comes to funding mitigation so what mitigation is is putting less carbon pollution into the air and if possible even as pam talked about sequestering it turning carbon pollution into trees and into life in terms of mitigation you know rob's project that smart plan that transit plan you know that's a multi i don't know pedillion dollar project to to really it's going to double the ridership the transit ridership in miami-dade county so that is transportation funding and rob and i both worked on the long-range transportation plan that is taking transportation funding that would have gone into highways and flyovers and diverting that to create uh transit so you know the united states we don't like taxes very much uh we don't like paying for things but the reality is there are enormous budgets out there that can be redirected to accomplish transportation goals which put a lot less pollution into the air so i would say that our existing transportation budget is the first place to look i would say also when looking at funding is there are a lot of projects that are funded especially through like capital improvement plans and so it's looking at you know what is already on the books what is already being lined up to be done for a city or a municipality and so then how can you just change that project a little bit or add on to that project to make it so it's helping with the mitigation and the adaptation you know if that's you know there's a street that's going to be rebuilt well can you rebuild that street a little bit higher um you know if there's a storm water that's being worked on will can you make sure that pumps are included and that they have backflow preventers and so it's taking things that are already being funded and so it's not saying you have to fund this whole thing for climate change and for mitigation and adaptation but what's already being worked on and how can you just adapt that and maybe add a little bit more to make it so it's helping you adapt for the future okay thank you um we have uh no other questions would you is there did you folks discuss the the common threads uh amongst your the three very different case studies that did you consider teasing out that for a final final word to our uh to our viewers yeah we did a little and rob should definitely talk next i guess you could see that in hammond's case hammond louisiana where there was weaker design controls weaker form based coding small little apartment complexes were fought heavily right and in pam's case it's a 2 000 acre new community and uh and it's getting its approvals because there's a great form-based code and there's a developer who really night kiplinger who is committed to it and in rob's case you know these are massive new 50 to 75 unit per acre new cities really uh and there's a form based code already in those areas you know the county did the work of forum based coding all those spots rob showed that had circles and uh and so the quality of design in each of our case you know the higher the quality of design and the stronger the reassurance that it will be a great place the last resistance was encountered that's one thing that we i think we all showed what else rob and yeah a lot of it goes back to things that are pretty fundamental to to cnu it's really about place making and you know people people scale design and making walkable communities getting people out of cars or reducing the number of trips by vehicles really helps to in the mitigation side of limiting emissions and future contributions to global warming which in miami is a big concern we're seeing the effects already and and the other part of that equation is we need to build in limited and we have a less buildable area that's um located in good places uh miami is really you know really constricted and other places along the in the country are as well and so by density is going to be needed to not only accommodate the population but to have enough resources available to build the infrastructure to protect them whether it's sea walls or pumps or other types of systems for the coastal areas and that means you need to have the higher population and you know density without design is is really pretty horrible and so by creating places that you know match what the cnu stands for with walkable blocks attention to you know architecture and making sure that there's parks and street trees and comfortable places for walking and biking and living then you know it becomes more acceptable as you know as we saw at pineland prairie because it was good design and a walkable community and offered something besides the typical subdivisions it's able to move forward and i think that's really important and then one more thing todd just to add another thing we all had in common all of our presentations was the thing that we were lacking to be honest we were not able to say you know um that our projects uh would create this much um tons of carbon um per capita less for instance the normanism has not yet gotten to the point where we're able to quantify just how much greener rob's development was for pam's or what's happening in hammond i think we need to learn to do that i think when we present our new tnds we need to say per capita carbon pollution is is far less and uh and water usage and optimization is is uh far more and and and talk about how we're going to be producing power and i think we're still not there and and we need to look to others to figure out how we can create specific metrics to to explain how what we're doing really is uh helping uh the climate crisis and that's the next steps i think for us that's a good a very good point um we do have a second question that i think rob touched on um very well but uh it's sort of new urbanism 101 for the students listening please say something about the importance of making urban spaces place making the importance of geometry the appropriate dimensions rob uh talked about that a bit would either uh jason or pam want to expand on that as a having you're getting the last word so keep that in mind uh sure i mean uh i think another thing you know that we didn't talk about as much is the details of what went into designing each of the areas because our focus was more on the mitigation and adaptation and how using those items helps with the mitigation and adaptation but as an example with newfield you know it was a town center with a series of neighborhoods and each neighborhood was no more than a five minute walk from center to edge you'll often see walk circles rob had uh walk circles uh in his diagram as well so that you can kind of start to see the scale of a neighborhood and so whether you're looking at a transit corridor or you're looking at a walkable neighborhood or an existing downtown like hammond we always start by looking at like what is the size of a neighborhood and each of those neighborhoods really needs to be like i said it's a five-minute walk that's about one-quarter mile from center to edge and so somewhere within that center of that neighborhood uh you want a place to gather you know it can be a park it could be a starbucks it could be your town center but each one should should have one so each neighborhood has its own unique identity you should see the center you should see the edge all streets should connect to other streets you shouldn't be having dead ends um i'm just trying to think through some of the like the key principles i think about as i'm putting my pen to pape my pencil on the paper and drawing um typically you know you want to look at your you know your edges are going to kind of create the unique parts of your neighborhood you know as you are connecting one spot to another but then you're constrained by what's there and so it's really creating those small little moves while keeping everything connected i guess is i'm starting to get repetitive so i guess i'll end it there and just making sure that each neighborhood is its own thing no matter what scale you're planning at thank you pam okay well i just you know pam was talking about the the principles that you apply but then there's you know every every place is different we don't have a tabula raza and uh dealing with the with the challenges is where civic art comes in to play and when you think about the places that we love so many of them are the principles going up against land form you know think about san francisco dropping a grid on a very hilly place that's an obvious example but jason did you want to finish it off and then we'll we'll wrap up and sure well i was just picturing when pam draws one thing other thing that's going to be very important in the future in terms of plazas and the scale of the park and specific geometries you know we're talking about a more turbulent future with the seas rising and the storms but there's another feature on the other side of the country which is a hotter drier world and that is about you know creating public spaces with a great sense of enclosure with a lot of uh shade arc arcades and galleries um trees if you can count on them um and this is something else the new urbanism is really great at too because as it gets hot harder and harder to be outside we're going to have to be more and more deliberate about the spaces that we create and the charter and the designs that people have been doing for so long really speak to that i think i just wanted to put in that part thank you jason uh and thank everyone for uh viewing um be sure to let us know how we're doing uh the uh you can share your thoughts on the park bench make suggestions um complaints um and uh stay tuned for the next series we uh we've been doing this for some time now on tuesday november 10th on the andres duane will be sitting on the park bench and as of this moment he's he's planning on discussing the cnu charter but we'll know more at noon on november 10th eastern time and uh dewatsudani is putting together a series of authors forum on urbanism where an author and a reader discuss the book and uh this is this is one of the extraordinary things as a as a member advocate i feel that this is on the park bench obviously is extremely valuable but but this the intimate discussions of uh of authors of important work and interviewers like dan solomon interviewing michael dennis on architecture in the city i think we should charge for this stuff quite frankly but this is uh that's these these are two extraordinary things coming up um so thank you all and i uh want you all those of you i see there are 32 of you remaining and those of you who are not members raise your hands right now and uh call scott shields who is the membership manager and join cnu or if you don't like talking to human beings you can go to www.members.cnu.org thank you so much and we all look forward to next week thank you todd thank you everyone