Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are tackling
a subject that is, well, it's literally all around
us right this second. Unless you're listening
to this in, I don't know, the middle of a pristine
forest, in which case, lucky you, you're likely
sitting in, standing on, or moving through the
built environment. It's the background noise
of our lives. The thing we're so immersed in
that we... We rarely even stop to analyze it.
We really don't. I mean, we argue about politics.
We stress about the economy. We obsess over the
latest tech gadget. But we rarely stop and ask,
you know, why does my suite look the way it does?
Or why does that specific office building make
me feel completely drained at 3 .0 p .m. every
day? Right. But when I was going through the
stack for this deep dive. one statistic chest.
It completely recalibrated my sense of urgency
here. I have a feeling I know which one you're
looking at. It's the big one, isn't it? It's
the big one from the UN Global Status Report.
I think if you stopped the average person on
the street and asked, what is the biggest threat
to the climate? They'd probably say cars, right?
Or maybe factory smokestacks. Sure, transportation
and industry. That's what comes to mind. And
they wouldn't be wrong, exactly. But the data
says that buildings... Just the operation and
the construction of the structures we inhabit
account for 37 percent of global energy use.
37 percent. And then if you tack on the manufacturing
sector that's used to create all those materials,
the steel, the concrete, we are talking 39 percent.
global co2 emissions it's just a massive slice
of the pie I mean to put that in perspective
for you the entire aviation industry every single
plane in the sky which gets so much heat for
being carbon intensive is usually responsible
for about two to three percent of emissions Wow
so buildings are an order of magnitude more impactful
it's not even in the same lead Okay, so that's
the context we need. I mean, we might shame someone
for taking a long -haul flight, but we don't
think twice about the giant glass office tower
they work in. When that tower might be doing
far, far more damage over its 50 -year lifespan.
Right. And that really frames the mission for
today. We aren't just talking about architecture
in the sense of, you know, is this building pretty?
We're talking about the city. As an organism.
I like that framing. An organism, how it consumes
energy, how it grows, how it breathes, how it
moves people around, and ultimately how it survives
or doesn't. The city as organism. I like that.
And to dissect this organism, we've got a stack
of research that really breaks it down into four
distinct but interconnected systems. So we're
going to start at the, let's say, the cellular
level with green building, the individual structures
themselves. Then we're going to zoom out to the
tissue level, which is smart growth. basically,
how we arrange those structures. And then from
there, the circulatory system, which is transit
-oriented development or TOD. That's how we connect
everything. And finally, the brain, the master
strategy behind it all, urban planning. Or sometimes
the lack of a master strategy. Yeah, that too.
You know, I used to hear the phrase urban planning
and my eyes would just glaze over. I immediately
zoned out. I pictured like a bunch of bureaucrats
in a basement arguing about zoning laws and fence
heights. Sure, setbacks and floor area ratios.
It sounds incredibly dry. It does. But looking
at the history here from Baron Houseman in Paris
to Jane Jacobs in New York, it's actually incredibly
dramatic. It's a power struggle. It's a fight
over how we live, who gets to live where, and
what our daily lives feel like. It is absolutely
high stakes. And the shift we're seeing in the
literature right now is just fascinating. For
a long time, we were in what you could call a
prescriptive era. What do you mean by that? It
was all about just following a code. The rulebook
said you must use this much concrete. You must
have a window of this size here. It was a checklist.
Now, the entire conversation is shifting to a
performance era. We're asking different questions,
not did you follow the rules? But how does this
building actually perform? Does it generate its
own power? Does it clean its own air? Does it
actually make the people inside healthier and
more productive? So from following rules to measuring
results. Precisely. Okay. So let's start at that
micro level then, the green building revolution.
And I want to challenge a mental image that I
think a lot of us have. When I picture a green
building. My mind used to go to like a yurt or
maybe a hobbit hole. Something very earthy, right?
Cob walls, straw bales, that kind of thing. Exactly.
Something low tech. But then on the other hand,
I also picture the classic city of the future,
you know, the sci -fi version. And that is always
sleek, it's silver, and it's completely covered
in glass. The crystalline tower. Right. But the
research we looked at suggests that our obsession
with the glass skyscraper might be one of our
single biggest environmental mistakes. It's what
some are calling the glass skyscraper paradox.
And to really get it, you have to go back a little
bit to the modernists. Think about someone like
Mies van der Rohe in the 1920s. He drew these
incredible sketches of what he called skin and
bones architecture. Zero glass skins. Yeah, these
crystalline towers. And at the time, it was revolutionary.
It represented transparency, openness, democracy,
lightness. It was the complete opposite of a
heavy stone castle. And let's be honest, it looked
cool. It looked incredible. It still does. But
technologically, it was a disaster just waiting
to happen. The problem is physics. Glass, even
the best, most advanced glass today, is a terrible
insulator compared to a properly insulated opaque
wall. In the industry, we measure insulation
by its R value. A standard, well -insulated wall
in a new house might be R20, maybe R30. And a
single pane of glass is like? It's like R1. Even
a really high -tech, triple -glazed, argon -filled
unit is maybe R4 or R5. You're just leagues behind
a solid wall. So you're essentially building
a tent. very fancy, very expensive tent. You're
building a greenhouse. That's the perfect analogy.
The sun's shortwave radiation comes right through
the glass. It hits the surfaces inside, turns
into longwave radiation heat, and then gets trapped.
So in the summer, you're just baking the occupants.
You are literally baking them. So what do you
have to do? You have to install massive, oversized
air conditioning systems just to keep the building
habitable. You're fighting the architecture with
mechanics. There's that famous example from London,
right? The walkie -talkie building. Oh, yes.
The skyscraper that melts cars. Yeah, it has
this curved... glass facade that acted like a
magnifying glass. It focused the sun's rays so
intensely that it melted parts of a jaguar that
was parked on the street below. Exactly. And,
you know, that's the most extreme headline grabbing
version. But every all glass tower is doing a
less dramatic version of that thermally. It's
just a constant heat trap. Which is why the sources
mentioned that some energy experts and even I
think it was Mayor de Blasio in New York a few
years back started floating the idea of banning
all glass skyscrapers. They did, or at least
demanding that they meet such high performance
standards for energy use that the all glass look
becomes functionally impossible. You'd have to
have such small windows to meet the code. So
if we're moving away from the glass box, the
term that kept coming up was bioclimatic design.
This seems like, you know, just common sense.
But the texts imply we basically stopped doing
it for about 50 years. We did because we didn't
have to. Once air conditioning became cheap and
ubiquitous after World War II, architects got,
well, a bit lazy. They could design the exact
same glass box for Dubai, for Reykjavik, and
for Singapore, and just assume the HVAC engineer
would figure out how to fix the temperature problem.
Bioclimatic design says, stop. Look at where
you are on the planet. Right. Use the climate.
Don't fight it. Exactly. If you're in a cold
climate like Chicago, you put the big windows
on the south facade to catch that low winter
sun for passive heating. If you're in a hot climate
like Phoenix, you use deep overhangs or breeze
soleil, these shading devices, to block that
direct hit of the summer sun. So it's using the
building itself as a kind of machine rather than
just stuffing a machine inside the building.
That is the perfect way to put it. Now this connects
to another concept I found really important.
The life cycle assessment. Or LCA. Because usually
when we think about a building's energy use,
we just look at the utility bill. Right. The
operational carbon. How much electricity did
we use this month? But the sources talk about
embodied energy. Can we break that down? Because
I feel like this is the hidden iceberg of the
whole climate conversation. It absolutely is.
Embodied energy, or embodied carbon, is the sum
of all the energy required to produce a building
before anyone even turns on a single light switch.
So everything. Everything. Mining the iron ore
for the steel, crushing the limestone and heating
it to 1400 degrees Celsius for the cement, felling
the trees, manufacturing the glass, transporting
all of it to the site, the cranes, the assembly.
All of that is embodied energy. And how much
of the total pie is that? For a standard building,
the embodied energy can be 30 % or even more
of its total carbon footprint over its entire
life. And here's the kicker. As our operations
get cleaner, as the electrical grid gets greener
with solar and wind, that embodied slice gets
bigger and bigger proportionally. It becomes
the main problem we have to solve. And this brings
us right to the materials. If concrete and steel
are these carbon bombs and they are... I think
I read that cement production alone is something
like 8 % of all global CO2. It's huge. If the
cement industry were a country, it would be the
third largest emitter in the world behind China
and the U .S. That's insane. So if that's the
problem, what's the alternative? The source stack
points to something that sounds almost archaic.
Wood. Mass timber. Right. But I have to play
the skeptic here immediately. If I tell someone
we are going to build a 20 -story skyscraper
out of wood, my first reaction is going to be.
Fire. Of course. Are we just building giant matchsticks
in the middle of our cities? That is the number
one question, and it's a completely valid fear
based on history. We all know about the Great
Fire of London or the Great Chicago Fire, but
mass timber, and specifically a product called
cross -laminated timber or CLT, is a totally
different beast from the little two -by -fours
in the walls of your house. So how is it different?
These are massive, thick, solid panels. They're
made by taking layers of lumber and gluing them
together at perpendicular 90 degree angles. You
end up with a solid block of wood that's incredibly
strong and stable. How does it handle fire? Yeah.
I'm still stuck on that. It's all about physics.
Think about what happens if you try to light
a giant log with a single match. It won't catch.
Now, when a massive block of wood, like a CLT
panel, is exposed to intense fire, the outer
layer chars. That charcoal layer that forms actually
acts as an insulator. It's a protective coating
that protects the structural core of the wood
from the heat. So the building maintains its
structural integrity for a very long time, often
longer than steel. Wait, longer than steel? That
seems completely counterintuitive. It is, but
it's true. Steel doesn't burn, but when it gets
hot enough, it loses its strength. It gets soft.
It turns into spaghetti. It buckles and the building
collapses. The wood in a mass timber building
chars at a slow, predictable rate, but it stays
standing. So it fails more gracefully, I guess.
In a way, yes. And because of all this testing,
building codes are finally changing. We're seeing
buildings pop up like the Mistornet in Norway,
which is an 18 -story timber tower. It's a hotel.
It has apartments, offices. And the environmental
benefit here is, what, a double whammy? It really
is. First, you are avoiding all the massive carbon
emissions from manufacturing concrete and steel.
That's a huge win. But second, the tree itself
sequestered carbon from the atmosphere while
it was growing. And now you are locking that
carbon into the building's frame for 100 years.
So the building itself is a carbon vault. Exactly.
It's a form of carbon storage. But let's be realistic.
We aren't going to stop using concrete overnight.
I mean, it's everywhere. The source has mentioned
some pretty wild innovations, though, like self
-healing concrete. This sounds like something
out of a sci -fi movie. Is this real or is it
just, you know, lab tech? Oh, it's real. It's
still expensive, so it's not mainstream yet.
but the mechanism is fascinating what they do
is they embed dormant bacteria usually a specific
type of bacillus into the concrete mix bacteria
in the concrete right and alongside the bacteria
they embed little capsules of their food like
starch or calcium lactate so they're just sitting
there sleeping okay then when the concrete cracks
and all concrete eventually gets tiny cracks
water seeps in that water is the trigger it wakes
up the bacteria and they get hungry they get
hungry they eat the starch and as a waste product
they excrete calcite which is basically limestone
so they fill the crack with their own waste they
literally heal the crack they seal the building
back up from the inside out it's biomimicry it's
mimicking the way that a bone heals itself that
is absolutely incredible but this brings us to
the big practical problem the rub We have all
these cool technologies. We've got smart glass,
mass timber, bacterial concrete, hempcrete, thermacork
insulation. But whenever I talk to anyone in
the development world, they say it costs too
much. The famous green premium. Exactly. The
sources say it's about, what, a 2 % extra cost
up front? On the surface, that doesn't sound
like a lot. So why isn't every single new building?
A green building. This is a classic economic
failure that we call the split incentive problem.
It's a huge barrier. Walk us through that. Okay.
Imagine you're a big developer. You're building
a new office tower. You pay the extra 2%, let's
say it's $2 million, to put in better insulation,
high performance windows, a super efficient HVAC
system. You've paid the premium. You've paid
it. But then you lease out the office space to
100 different companies. Who pays the electricity
bill every month? The tenants. The companies.
The tenants. Who benefits from the lower energy
costs that your $2 million investment created?
The tenant. Exactly. The developer pays the premium,
but the tenant gets all the savings. So unless
the developer can market that greenness to charge
significantly higher rent, which is sometimes
possible, but not always, they have no direct
financial incentive to eat that upfront cost.
I see. The person writing the check isn't the
one getting the reward. That's the split incentive
in a nutshell. But the sources also mention a
different kind of ROI, a different return on
investment. And this one seems like it should
motivate the companies themselves, the tenants.
It's about productivity. Yes. And this is potentially
an even bigger deal. There's a rule of thumb
in commercial real estate called the 330 -300
rule. 330 -300. Okay. In a typical office building
over a year, a company will spend about $3 per
square foot on utilities, energy, water. They'll
spend about $30 per square foot on rent. And
they'll spend about $300 per square foot on pay.
payroll for the people sitting in that space.
So salaries are by far the biggest expense. By
a factor of 10. So the argument is this. If you
can use green building principles to improve
the indoor environmental quality. Better air,
more natural light, fewer toxic chemicals off
gassing from the carpet. And you boost the productivity
of that $300 bucket by even 1%. That completely
dwarfs any savings you'd get on the $3 electric
bill. It completely erases the extra construction
cost. We have study after study showing that
high CO2 levels in meeting rooms, which happens
all the time in these hermetically sealed glass
boxes, makes people cognitively sluggish. It
impairs decision making. We are literally making
ourselves stupider with bad architecture. So
the sales pitch shouldn't be save the planet.
It should be stop sedating your employees. That's
the pitch that wins in the boardroom. OK, so
that's the building, the cell. But a perfect
self -healing carbon storing timber building
is, well, it's kind of useless if you put it
in the wrong place. If you build a... LE'd platinum
headquarters in the middle of a cornfield where
5 ,000 employees have to drive their SUVs an
hour each way to get to work, you've failed.
You've completely missed the point. You've built
what some people call a green sprawl building.
You solved one problem while creating a much
bigger one. Right. So let's zoom out. Let's move
to the macro level. Smart growth and the fight
against sprawl. I think we need to define sprawl.
carefully here because it's not just, you know,
suburbs. People hear sprawl and they think of
their nice suburban neighborhood. No, it's not.
Suburbs can be fine. Sprawl is a specific and
often destructive pattern of development. It's
characterized by a few key things. Very low density,
a strict separation of uses. Meaning houses are
over here, shops are five miles that way, and
offices are 10 miles in another direction. Exactly.
And the third and most important is total and
complete car dependence. It's a landscape that
is hostile to the human body. You cannot live
in it without a car. It's development that expands
across the landscape much faster than the population
itself is growing. And the sources bring up a
really controversial point here. I think most
of us tend to think sprawl is just, you know,
what people want. It's the market at work. People
want the big yard and the white picket fence.
But the subsidy critique argues that sprawl is
actually a massive government -funded project.
It absolutely is, whether we intended it to be
or not. And one of the biggest hidden mechanisms
is how we price our infrastructure. Specifically,
something called average cost pricing. Okay,
can you walk us through that? Sure. Let's take
two people. We'll call them Alice and Bob. Alice
lives in a downtown apartment building. Bob buys
a brand new house in a subdivision 10 miles out
at the edge of town. Okay. Alice in the city.
Bob in the excerpts. Right. Now, to get electricity,
water and sewer service to Alice, the utility
company just has to patch into the existing grid
that's already running down her street. The pipe
is right there. It's cheap. Makes sense. To get
those same services to Bob, they have to run
miles of new pipe, new wire, maybe build a whole
new electrical substation. The cost is, you know,
10, 100 times higher. It's incredibly expensive.
But when Alice and Bob open their utility bills
at the end of the month. They pay the exact same
rate per kilowatt hour of electricity or per
gallon of water. Alice and all her dense urban
neighbors are effectively overpaying to subsidize
the massive infrastructure cost of Bob's sprawling
lifestyle. If Bob actually saw the true cost
of running that power line to his remote house
on his monthly bill, he might decide that the
big yard isn't worth an extra $500 a month. It's
a hidden subsidy for the suburbs. That's a provocative
way to put it. But from an economic standpoint,
yes. We socialize the long -term costs of the
infrastructure, but we privatize the short -term
benefit of the cheap land. That's what fuels
straw. So smart growth is the antidote to this.
And when you boil it all down, the core principle
seems to be mixed use. Right. It's about breaking
the model of what's called Euclidean zoning.
Euclidean, like the geometry. Exactly. It was
named after a Supreme Court case involving the
town of Euclid, Ohio, back in the 1920s. And
that case enshrined the idea that you had to
keep uses separate. Residential here, commercial
there, industrial way over there. And that's
what gave us the city where you can't have a
corner store in a residential neighborhood. Right.
Smart growth looks at that and says, please build
the corner store, build the cafe, the daycare,
the pub. If you can buy a quart of milk or meet
a friend for coffee without getting in a car,
you have fundamentally changed the carbon math
of your daily life. But here's the paradox. I
found this part of the research really counterintuitive.
It's called the paradox of intensification. My
assumption has always been more density equals
less traffic. Simple. It's a tricky one. It's
a matter of scale and how you measure it. Density
absolutely means less driving per person. If
you live in a dense, walkable neighborhood, you
might drive five miles a day on average instead
of the 30 miles you'd drive living in a sprawling
suburb. So individually, your impact is much
lower. That's a huge win for the planet. However,
because there are 10 ,000 of you packed into
that one square mile, the local roads in that
specific area might be more congested than the
sprawling suburb where everyone drives 30 miles,
but they're all spread out over 100 square miles.
So the local lived experience is the traffic
here is terrible. Yeah. Even though the global
reality is as a community. We are driving dramatically
less. Exactly. And that makes the politics of
density incredibly difficult. People vote based
on their daily experience of being stuck in traffic,
not on per capita vehicle miles traveled statistics.
The Portland example in the sources was fascinating.
They're famous for this. They set up an urban
growth boundary. Right. A literal line in the
dirt on the map saying the city stops here. We
will not extend services beyond this line. And
they densified inside the line. Transit use went
up. Biking and walking went up. It was a success
story, right? In many ways, yes. But traffic
congestion inside that boundary still got worse.
And it increased faster than in comparable cities
that didn't have a boundary because they were
cramming more and more economic activity into
a fixed amount of road space. So you have to
be honest with people. The goal isn't necessarily
to make your car commute faster. The goal is
to make the car commute irrelevant for more of
your trips. If you are still trying to live a
car dependent life in a smart growth city, you
are going to be miserable. The design is trying
to send you a message. And that message is get
out of the car. Get out of the car. Which segues
perfectly to our third pillar. Yeah. If we're
getting people out of their cars, where are we
expecting them to go? That's transit oriented
development or POD. The circulatory system of
our city organism. And the golden rule here that
I saw over and over again is the walk shed. Specifically.
The half mile circle. Why a half mile? Is that
just an arbitrary number someone picked? It's
not arbitrary at all. It's based on behavioral
psychology. Urban planners and transit agencies
have done countless studies, and they found that
for most people, a 10 -minute walk, which is
about a half mile or 800 meters, is the psychological
limit. A breaking point. Yeah. If the train station
is an eight -minute walk away, people will walk
without even thinking about it. If it's a 12
-minute walk, they start to perceive it as too
far, and they'll get in their car and drive to
the station, which defeats the whole purpose.
So you have this hard 10 -minute radius to work
with. So the entire goal of TOD is to pack as
much valuable stuff as possible, apartments,
offices, shops, grocery stores, inside that 10
-minute circle around the transit stop. That's
the whole game. In Arlington, Virginia, they
call it the bullseye approach. They have the
highest density, the tallest buildings right
on top of the metro station in the center of
the bullseye. Then it tapers down as you move
away until you get to single family homes at
the edge of the circle. Let's look at the success
stories because, you know, in the U .S., we're
generally pretty bad at this. But Curitiba, Brazil,
keeps coming up in the literature as this incredible
model. And they did something really clever with
buses. Curitiba is the poster child for what
you might call frugal innovation. Back in the
1970s, the city was growing incredibly fast.
They knew they needed a mass transit system like
a subway. But subways are expensive. Unbelievably
expensive. Digging tunnels can cost literally
a billion dollars a mile in some cities. Curitiba
didn't have that kind of money. So the mayor
at the time, an architect named Shami Lerner,
asked a brilliant question. How do we make a
bus act like a subway? And the answer wasn't
just... you know, painting a red lane on the
road. No, it was much more holistic. The key
innovation was the tube station. If you think
about a normal bus, why is it so slow? A big
reason is because everyone has to climb up the
steps, fumble for change, pay the driver one
by one. It's called dwell time. Lerner's idea
was to build these elevated glass tubes on the
sidewalk at the bus stops. You pay your fare
to enter the tube before the bus even arrives.
When the bus pulls up, its doors are at the exact
same level as the tube floor and massive doors
open like on a subway and everyone just walks
straight on. So the bus dwells at the stop for
15 seconds instead of two or three minutes. Exactly.
They got subway -like speeds and subway -like
capacity for about 5 % of the cost of digging
a tunnel. And then, and this is the crucial part,
they use their planning power to zone for high
-density skyscrapers strictly along those dedicated
bus corridors. The transit and the land use work
together. Then there's Hong Kong. And this one
is fascinating to me because it's a financial
model. The MTR, their transit system, makes a
profit, a huge profit. Here in the U .S., every
single transit agency is perpetually begging
for tax dollars just to keep the lights on. What
is Hong Kong doing differently? They utilize
a model that's often called rail plus property.
In most cities, the transit agency is just a
transportation company. They run trains. That's
it. In Hong Kong, the MTR is also one of the
biggest real estate developers in the city. How
does that work? Well, because the government
owns almost all the land, when they decide to
build a new subway line, they give the MTR the
development rights for the land on top of and
around the new stations. So the MTR builds the
station underground and then they also build
the 50 -story condo tower and the shopping mall
right on top of it. Exactly. And they sell those
condos or they lease out the mall space for a
massive profit. That profit then cross -subsidizes
the cost of running the trains. system called
value capture value capture the transit system
itself creates an enormous amount of real estate
value in new york or london when a new subway
stop opens all the private landlords nearby see
their property values triple overnight they get
to pocket that wealth in hong kong the mtr creates
the value and then captures it to fund the system
it's why their transit is one of the few profitable
systems in the world that seems incredibly smart
why doesn't every city do that Because in most
Western democracies, the land is already privately
owned. A transit agency can't just seize all
the land around a new station and become a developer
without massive, protracted legal and political
battles over eminent domain. Hong Kong had the
unique advantage of government land ownership
to begin with. Right. That makes sense. But now
we have to talk about the dark side of this,
the unintended consequence. Because when you
build these beautiful, walkable, transit -connected,
desirable neighborhoods. Rich people want to
live there. The G word, gentrification. It's
the central challenge of urban improvement today.
And specifically, the sources call it transit
-induced gentrification. It feels like such a
cruel irony. You build a subway line to help
working class people get to their jobs more easily.
But the very presence of that subway makes their
neighborhood so desirable that their rents skyrocket
and they get priced out. It creates what sociologists
call a spatial mismatch. The people who need
the transit. the most low -income service workers,
are pushed further and further out to the fringes
of the city where the transit is worst or nonexistent.
Meanwhile, the people who can easily afford a
Tesla are the ones living in the fancy condos
right next to the train station. So how do we
solve that? It feels like an intractable problem.
The sources hint at policy tools, but what actually
works on the ground? Well, the one thing we know
is that you can't just leave it to the free market.
The market will always serve the highest bidder.
You need aggressive, intentional policy. The
most common tool is inclusionary zoning. Which
means what exactly? It means if a developer wants
to build that new luxury TOD tower, the city
says great. But as a condition of approval, 20
% or 30 % of the units in your building must
be set aside and rented at permanently affordable
rates. Not just affordable for the first year
and then it goes to market rate. Permanently.
Deed restricted. Other tools include things like
community land trusts, where a nonprofit organization
owns the land under the housing to ensure it
stays cheap forever. But the key is you have
to bake equity into the plan from day one. If
you wait until after the neighborhood is already
gentrified, it's too late. This brings us perfectly
to the final overarching layer, the brain of
the operation, urban planning. The master strategy.
And the history here is really a battle of competing
ideologies. It's the God's eye view planners
versus the street level activists. That is the
perfect way to frame the last 150 years of city
making. So let's start with the ultimate God's
eye planner. Baron Haussmann in Paris. We all
have this romantic image of Paris. The wide boulevards,
the cathedrals, the uniform stone facades. It
feels beautiful and organic. But the sources
describe his methods as, well. It was urban warfare
in a way. It was stump pulling, as one historian
called it. You have to remember what Paris was
like before housemen in the mid -19th century.
It was a medieval maze, a labyrinth of narrow,
winding, dark streets. Now, it was dirty. It
was unsanitary, yes. But it was also rebellious.
The citizens of Paris were famous for their uprisings.
They could throw up a barricade across a narrow
street in 10 minutes and hold off the army for
days. The emperor, Napoleon III, did not like
that. So the famous wide boulevards weren't just
for fresh air and sunlight. They were for cannon
fire. They were designed to be too wide to barricade.
and to allow for the rapid movement of troops
to quell any unrest. Haussmann cut through the
heart of the city like a surgeon with a machete.
He demolished entire neighborhoods and displaced
tens of thousands of poor people to the outskirts.
He created a beautiful, sanitary, and easily
controlled city. It's the classic example of
planning imposed from the top down. And that
top -down philosophy seems to have carried right
into the 20th century with figures like Le Corbusier.
Oh, absolutely. Le Corbusier, the great Swiss
-French modernist architect. He looked at the
chaotic, dirty industrial city of the early 20th
century and said, this is a failure. This is
irrational. His vision, which he called the Radiant
City, was to knock it all down. Start over. Start
over. He wanted to build giant, identical, cross
-shaped skyscrapers set far apart in a massive
park. Segregate the cars onto elevated highways,
keep the people neatly stacked in their towers.
He called it a machine for living in. It sounds
orderly. But it also sounds kind of like a prison,
sterile. It felt like one to many people who
ended up living in the places inspired by his
vision. The most famous and tragic example in
the U .S. is the Prudity Go housing project in
St. Louis. They built it almost exactly to Le
Corbusier's principles. 33 identical 11 -story
towers in a park. And what happened? It was a
social catastrophe. There was no street life.
The long, empty corridors became dangerous. The
elevators were constantly broken. The park was
a windswept, dead zone that nobody used. It became
a symbol of architectural failure and was famously
demolished with explosives just 20 years after
it was built. And leading the charge against
that whole mindset was Jane Jacobs. This really
is the David versus Goliath story of urban planning.
It really is. Jane Jacobs wasn't an architect.
She wasn't a planner. She didn't have a PhD.
She was a journalist, a mother, living in Greenwich
Village in New York City. And her Goliath was
Robert Moses. Robert Moses, the master builder
of New York. He was the most powerful, unelected
official in the state's history. A true disciple
of Le Corbusier. And Moses wanted to ram a 10
-lane elevated highway, the Low Manhattan Expressway,
right through the heart of Soho, Little Italy,
and Greenwich Village. He would have just wiped
them off the map. Completely. He saw them as
outdated, inefficient slums that needed to be
cleared for the progress of the automobile. But
Jane Jacobs argued that these so -called slums
were actually incredibly complex, highly functioning
urban ecosystem. You talked about the sidewalk
ballet. The sidewalk ballet, the intricate, constant
dance of neighbors watching out for each other,
the mix of the butcher, the baker, the family
living in the apartment above the shop. She argued
that safety in a city doesn't come from empty
green lawns between towers. It comes from eyes
on the street, from a constant, vibrant public
life. And she won. Against all odds, she won.
She won. She organized her neighbors, she protested,
she got arrested, and she stopped the highway.
And her book, The Death and Life of Great American
Cities, which came out in 1961, effectively killed
the Le Corbusier school of thought and planning.
Today, almost every smart growth principle we've
discussed, mixed use, walkability, density, is
basically just us trying to recreate the things
Jane Jacobs loved about her Greenwich Village
neighborhood. So how do we ensure that we have
more Jane Jacobs and fewer Robert Moses figures
in our cities today? The text mentions a framework
for this, Sherry Arnstein's Ladder of Citizen
Participation. Yes. This is a great mental checklist
for any listener who's ever been to a community
meeting about a new development. The latter has
eight rungs and it starts at the bottom with
manipulation and therapy. Which sounds bad. It
is. Right. That's when the city holds a community
meeting. That's really just a one way lecture
to tell you what they've already decided to do.
It's the decide, announce, defend strategy. We've
all been to that meeting. We have. Then you move
up the ladder to consultation, where they might
listen to your feedback in a survey, but they
make no promises to act on it. The goal is to
get to the top rungs, partnership and ultimately
citizen control. This is where the community
actually has a seat at the table and helps co
-design the plan for their own neighborhood.
And we have new tools for this now that seem
pretty powerful. Digital twins. I made a joke
earlier about the matrix, but this seems like
a serious upgrade from the old cardboard models
on a table. It's a huge leap. A digital twin
is an incredibly detailed, data -rich virtual
replica of the entire city fed by real -time
data from thousands of sensors. So real traffic
data. Energy usage from buildings, wind patterns.
All of it. Planners can then use this model to
run simulations. What happens if we rezone this
block for a 40 -story tower? What does that do
to traffic at 5 p .m.? Does it create a wind
tunnel at street level? Does it cast a shadow
over the nearby elementary school playground?
So you can fail in the simulator instead of failing
in real life, which costs billions of dollars
and ruins people's lives. Exactly. And you can
make it accessible to the public. You can show
the community, look, here is exactly what the
shatter from this proposed building will look
like on your apartment on June 21st at 4 p .m.
It brings real data to what are often very emotional
arguments. So we've done it. We've synthesized
the building, the neighborhood, the transit,
and the master plan. But I want to end on a kind
of philosophical note that came up in the conclusion
of the source deck. We always seem to be looking
for the next high -tech fix for our problems.
Smart windows, AI -driven traffic lights, drone
deliveries. But the expert commentary suggests
the future of the city is the past. That is the
central irony of all of this research, isn't
it? We spend billions and billions of dollars
developing these incredible new technologies,
but the most energy efficient, sustainable, and
often the most beloved neighborhoods in the world.
They look a lot like the ones we built in 1900.
Walkable. Medium density. Built with local materials
like wood and brick. With passive cooling from
courtyards and windows that actually open, I
mean, this 15 -minute city concept that everyone
is buzzing about now as if it's some radical
new idea that was just called a city before 1950.
We're effectively spending trillions of dollars
to reverse engineer the common sense that we
lost when we fell head over heels in love with
the automobile. That's a very humbling thought.
We don't necessarily need a technological miracle.
We just need to remember how we used to live.
There's a phrase I think is useful. Location
is carbon. Say that again. Location is carbon.
Location is carbon. You can change all your light
bulbs to LEDs. You can recycle every plastic
bottle you use. You can buy an electric car.
And those are good things. But the single biggest
environmental decision any of us makes is where
we choose to live. If you choose to live in a
big drafty house 20 miles away from your job,
you have baked in a massive carbon footprint
for yourself that no amount of recycling can
ever fix. If you choose to live in a smaller
apartment, That's a 10 -minute walk from the
subway and the grocery store. You've done 90
% of the work before you even get out of bed
in the morning. That really puts the ball firmly
in the listener's court. It's not just about
what the city planners decide to do. It's about
the market signals we all send with our rent
and our mortgage checks. Absolutely. We vote
with our feet. This has been a massive topic,
but I feel like I see my own street completely
differently now. I'm looking for the thermal
leaks in the buildings. I'm looking for the density
or lack thereof. I'm looking for the eyes on
the street. Once you see the city as an organism,
you can't unsee it. Thank you for guiding us
through the blueprint. This has been fascinating.
It was my pleasure. And to our listeners, thanks
for taking the deep dive. Next time you're out,
go for a walk in your neighborhood and ask yourself,
is this a machine or is it a habitat? We'll see
you next time.