(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 456: The Living City

This week on Talking Headways we’re chatting with professor Des Fitzgerald about his new book The Living City: Why Cities Don’t Need to Be Green to Be Great. We chat about what trees mean to people, the proliferation of moguls that want to build new cities, and the idea of what makes the good city.

To listen to this episode, head over to Streetsblog USA or our archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript on the show.

Jeff Wood (1m 25s):
Well Des Fitzgerald, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast. Thanks,

Des Fitzgerald (1m 50s):
Jeff. Before

Jeff Wood (1m 51s):
Before get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Des Fitzgerald (1m 54s):
Sure. So I’m a sociologist. I do a lot of work around kind of histories of urban mental health. It’s my big kick at the moment. I live in a city called Cork in Ireland, which I suspect lots of people won’t know. It’s a kind of a regional city, the south of, right at the bottom of the island, it’s about 300,000 people. I’ve got two kids, they’re one and three. I don’t sleep very much. Just partly why I have this kind of, I, I can see myself in the zoom. I got bags under my eyes. It’s because my one year old is up at four this morning.

Jeff Wood (2m 21s):
I totally understand. I just sent my one yearold out the door, so excellent. We’re in the same spot. Out

Des Fitzgerald (2m 26s):
The door is the best place for one year olds. Yeah, so I I I, I teach sociology at University College Cork. I’ve been in the UK for about 10 years up to now. Moved back to Ireland recently and that’s an interesting transition in a lot of ways. It’s an interesting urban transition that we can talk about a bit, but I teach sociology of cities, sociology and mental health and kind of general kind of thing. Well,

Jeff Wood (2m 44s):
I wanna know, what’s your introduction to cities and you know, your interest in them, like where did that come from? Was it something that happened when you were a small child or is it something that happened later on in life?

Des Fitzgerald (2m 54s):
No, I mean, it’s interesting. I mean my, my real interest is, and still is, and I think it’s in this book too, is, is actually in mental health. I’m interested in how we think about mental health culturally and how that changes over time. And so something I got really interested in a few years ago was this kind of idea that’s been around since like mid 19th century, early 19th century maybe, which is that there’s some serious relationship between urban space and mental health. That there’s something about cities that for some people some of the time produces madness. And that’s been a kind of a phenomenon we’ve known really since the late 19th century, really since the formalization of the psychiatric profession. It’s kind of in some ways the, it’s always the foundational finding of psychiatry really when they first started.

Des Fitzgerald (3m 36s):
You know, when, when asylums become relatively professionalized, when they first start to do demographic studies on people in asylums, it’s kind of the first thing they see is this preponderance of people in asylums who were born in or have spent most of their life in urban spaces. So that’s just been a huge debate over the years since. So I, I’ve been thinking about that for a bunch of years, kind of historically and sociologically about what that tells us about, you know, our cultural ideas about the city. But in the middle of kind of doing that work, well, I’ll tell you where I come in with this. So, so a few years ago, you may or may not know this, the middle of me doing this work, London declared itself a national park city. I dunno if you know this. So, so this is a big kind of splashy attempt, I guess really just to promote green space and kind of, you know, wildlife and various kinds of nice things in, in London.

Des Fitzgerald (4m 21s):
And of course calling a city a national park city is deliberately a provocation, right? It puts two things together that don’t normally go together. So I was just kind of vaguely following this and I was online one day and I saw an architecture firm who were partnering with the people organizing this had made this animation. And I dunno if you know London, Jeff, it’s an animation of it’s Fleet Street looking east of Fleet Street. So it’s right in the center of this historical city of London looking up towards St. Paul’s Cathedral and the LED hall building, the one that looks like a cheese grater. So it’s a very kind of old urban sedimented space, a really kinda classic London view. And in the animation, like vines suddenly start coming down, the buildings like grass span up out of the streets and like trees spread up everywhere.

Des Fitzgerald (5m 1s):
And you know, I looked at this and I thought, this looks like the apocalypse to me. And so this, this idea that like this apocalyptic vision was like aspirational all of a sudden was like a big wow moment for me. I was like, where, how have we, where have we got to in thinking about cities that like this kind of vision from like the last of us suddenly feels like, you know, a good future for urban space. So I was kind of thinking about that a lot. And then it occurred to me that the kind of historical stuff I was thinking about in the 19th century, that interesting kind of mental illness, that idea that there’s something about urban life that is just not good in some sort of way that that is related to these contemporary ideas about the city as a space that is just not good for us.

Jeff Wood (5m 42s):
You know, it’s, it’s interesting because it, it gives me more context about the book, which is great. But also one of the things that came to mind when I first started reading this was the biblical stories of Adam and Eve and Sodom and Gomorrah and those types of things where, you know, for a long time cities have been, you know, vilified by the powers that be. And it’s interesting from that perspective, I just think that, you know, the general anxiety among humans that perhaps we’re getting away from our natural roots comes out so long ago. And it continues until this day. And I find that fascinating as somebody who grew up in a suburb, a leafy green suburb called the livable forest. Mm. And now lives in the city of San Francisco in the center, right? And so it’s an interesting kind of move, you know, that continues at throughout history and I find that really fascinating, especially now that we know things like a meteor actually hit Sodom and Gomorrah and destroyed it, right?

Jeff Wood (6m 32s):
They, they, they’ve just like found that out. Who,

Des Fitzgerald (6m 34s):
Who sent the media? Jeff gave some kind of angry daily. I mean, it’s true. I mean that that I think the city has long stood in for a certain kind of collective anxiety about modernity, right? So I think when people get anxious about the world in moments of transformation, and you see this, I talk about this a little bit in the book. You see this in kind of the early modern world in England around anxieties about deforestation. You see it in the 19th century as people start to move in great ways from the countryside to urban spaces when there are these kind of collective cultural anxieties about the transformations of moderni that with which we’re now reasonably familiar, the city often comes to stand in for the thing that is wrong or the figure of badness or the kind of central symbol of like, I guess like moral degeneration often to use kind of quite 19th century language.

Des Fitzgerald (7m 24s):
I mean, I, that historical story is, is well known. I think the thing that’s kind of interesting to me about how it appears in the present day is that, you know, I’m, I’m a university academic, I’m moving kind of very, you know, middle class bourgeois liberal kind of circles. And it’s striking to me that it is, you know, today relatively taken for granted progressive liberal opinion that cities are bad, right? That there’s kind of, that there’s something that kind of romantic, I would say even kinda reactionary idea that the city is an unnatural space.

Jeff Wood (7m 54s):
I mean that’s, that’s an interesting thought and that’s something that I thought about too is there are some sides I feel like that feel that way, but other sides that don’t. I feel like, at least in my circle that I operate in, which is a very urban planning centric, obviously transportation centric circle, the city is good from a standpoint of if the denser you are, the more emissions you’re reducing, the, the, the more people you’re connected to, the possibility of reducing or loneliness is greater, those types of things. And so I, I do see that though on, you know, I guess maybe the far left or maybe closer to the progressive set that there is a feeling that the city needs to be fixed in a way. Hmm. Because it’s not, it’s not green enough or because it’s not, as you say many times in the book because, you know, it doesn’t go far enough in becoming natural to a certain extent.

Des Fitzgerald (8m 42s):
I think what’s really distinctive about the contemporary discourse, or at least the discourse we’ve had since sort of the 1980s, I would say is that the city has done something to us on a species level, right? That as a species that has evolved in a very particular sort of way. The city just does not have the affordances we need. And this is the kind of Edward O. Wilson kind of discourse about humankind’s evolution on the Savannah. And so Wilson has this whole idea that, you know, we need to live on high spaces where we can see predators down below. We want to live near water, we wanna live, live near living things. All those sorts of things. That kind of strange evolutionary story about the city as something that is just like species inappropriate, I think is quite distinctive in how we think about urban space today.

Des Fitzgerald (9m 24s):
And I think it’s that kind of, I would say quasi scientific story that has trafficked this quite traditional anti-urban feeling into more kind of, you know, what might call liberal technocratic spaces or it’s made it more kind of thinkable in those kind of spaces. You know, it’s, it’s no longer the case that you hate modernity because you’re, you know, just a kind of a reactionary who doesn’t like, you know, the modern world. It’s be it’s you have an anxiety about people’s health and you have an anxiety about our health as a species and what is good for us as a population and therefore what was a kind of, kind of anti delian kind of reactionary idea becomes a technocratic scientific one.

Jeff Wood (9m 59s):
You know, one of the funny things that I found in, in the book and is it’s very fourth wall to a certain extent, like there’s, there’s a lot of like where you, you talk to us personally in the book and I, I really like that, but I also appreciate, you know, you being honest about your friends, kind of wondering why you’re writing a book about how trees are bad Yeah. And some of your skepticism as well. And I’m curious about your skepticism I guess, and kind of where that comes from and you know, some of the ideas that you can see from going and talking to all these people that actually work, but you’re still not quite convinced.

Des Fitzgerald (10m 30s):
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I mean, you know, I, I’m trying to avoid some kind of like therapeutic response to this. I do. Well, I’ll give you the kind of therapeutic response I, I mentioned in the book, and this is kind of true, like say in the book at one point, you know, as someone who’s kind of grown up in significant proximity to like literally a bog, you know, I dunno any kinda romantic pastoral ideas about like the countryside. And that’s a little bit true. I mean, I spent the first seven years of my life in the Midlands of Ireland, which is a distinctly not urban, not glamorous space. It really is a, a bog, right? I mean people still are digging turf out of the ground and using it to heat their homes there. And then we moved to Coken as a teenager, which is a slightly bigger space, but it’s still, you know, it’s not, you know, it’s not Manhattan. It’s very provincial. So maybe the therapeutic thing here, Jeff, is, is about growing up on an island kind of, when I was in my early twenties, my, my now wife and I, we moved to London.

Des Fitzgerald (11m 16s):
I have a very vivid memory, which is like so vivid that it is definitely not true. But nonetheless, I, there’s very vivid memory of when we moved to London. And sometimes if you get lucky when you’re flying into London, if you’re flying to city airport, which is right in the center of the city, it sometimes the plane kind of does a circle. It comes in from the east. So you get a really low down view of the city. And London of course is a huge city, an extremely spread out city, right? So it has this kind of quality of just kind of buildings going on as far as the eye can see. And I have this very vivid memory of us flying in and getting that view and just feeling like extremely soothed and relaxed just, and really having that kind of sense of like, oh, this is where I should be. This is like, this is like the place for me. It’s where I was, you know, I, I obviously was born in the wrong place.

Des Fitzgerald (11m 57s):
This is where I should have been. And so I’ve always had that sense of like, like I genuinely have always found big cities relaxing and rural spaces, if not like, frightening, at least kind of anxiety producing. Like my parents live in the countryside, they live in the middle of nowhere and out their kitchen window you can see a mountain and they find this beautiful, this, this is a real bonus of their house. They can see a mountain at the kitchen window. And to me genuinely like that mountain is a symbol of something kind of frightening and horrifying. This, there is just something about that like, I don’t know, it has this kind of post-human quality to it. I mean it’s back to that kind of apocalyptic sensibility again. So I think, I guess the answer to your question, Jeff, is I’ve always been genuinely baffled by the idea that people find rural spaces soothing.

Des Fitzgerald (12m 43s):
I like that is just genuinely just not a, not an affect I’m capable of. And so like the book is partly trying to make sense of like, what is it that other people see in this that I’m not seeing?

Jeff Wood (12m 53s):
So then what did you learn about, you know, other people’s feelings about nature in cities and for example, trees. Let’s go there because you have a whole chapter in which I actually connected to quite closely. But I’m curious what you learned about trees generally. I mean, that’s such a big topic obviously, but it’s something personal to me, I guess. So I’m curious what you came about after, you know, doing the research and, and coming up with the, the chapter in the book.

Des Fitzgerald (13m 17s):
Yeah, I mean, I I, it, it’s a good question. I guess the reason I fixated on tr, I mean, I’m, I’m not against trees. I do feel the need to say no, no, but no, it’s, it’s not you. I do get this from friends a lot and as I say, it’s in the book and it’s kind of a joke, but it’s also not a joke, right? Like, like so there was a big drama last week in England, which probably didn’t make it to North America, but there’s a famous tree in England called the Sycamore gap tree. Did this, I dunno if this, this Yeah,

Jeff Wood (13m 39s):
I saw

Des Fitzgerald (13m 39s):
It. Yeah. So it’s this very old, very picturesque tree in a kind of a scenic hollow in Hadrian’s walls. It’s kinda a popular hiking route. And there was a tree that was also in Robinhood, prince of Thieves. And last week the country woke up and someone had chopped down the tree overnight, right? And there was these kind of like traumatizing images of the stump, you know? ’cause now there’s a gap with just a stump in it. I’m like, people lost their minds, right? And there was like, people lost their minds to the extent that like, it’s very obvious though, whatever’s going on in people’s feelings about what happened. It’s not about the tree, right? This, this single tree is not doing anything environmentally, right? It’s not doing anything for anyone’s kind of sense of, of peace and relaxation. It’s clearly symbolizing something.

Des Fitzgerald (14m 22s):
And it’s that kind of, it’s like, it’s that sense of deep attachment that people have to, not just individual trees, but the tree as a certain kind of symbol of all that is good and right and proper in the world. That to me is like surprising and alarming and genuinely, like when that tree got cut down, I had like five texts from different people kind of making the same joke. It’s like, oh, lucky you moved to Ireland, or I think this was you. You know? So like it’s, it’s interesting that like, like it’s interesting that it’s how transgressive it is to say I don’t like trees, right? That is genuinely quite a transgressive thing to say now. And even the fact that it’s transgressive, I think is worth thinking with. I mean, I genuinely don’t like trees. I have allergies.

Des Fitzgerald (15m 3s):
Like the idea that everyone wants to be in a forest, you know, is, is I just think it’s baffling and I have a kind of a pet theory, which is that like what feels like my odd, you know, idiosyncratic position about trees is not odd, idiosyncratic that lots of people feel like this, but actually it’s kind of culturally impossible now to say I don’t like trees. You know, actually I prefer if to cut down the trees on my street, right? That is just kind of impossible to express. I mean, sorry, that’s not an answer to your question yet, but that’s kind of partly where I came in with that,

Jeff Wood (15m 29s):
Which happened in Sheffield, right? Like that’s kind of what happened. That is what happened. There’s some people that were like, I want some of these trees gone.

Des Fitzgerald (15m 36s):
Yeah. So I mean the Sheffield story is, is is super interesting. So, and as you know, a bunch of years ago now, Sheffield City Council basically hired a private company to, not to cut down the trees actually, but actually to manage the roads. So it was actually a road management program that the city council wanted to do. And in the course of managing the roads, of course the private company that was hired to do this wanted to cut down a bunch of trees, which is not atypical in kind of road management or road widening procedures. And then that kind of snowballed and escalated to the point where the company was cutting down many thousands of trees and it became this huge public scandal. There was massive protests by local people trying to protect trees. And you know, it sounds kind of like, I dunno, maybe it sounds kinda arian or kind of cutesy to people, but like it got, it was not any of those things.

Des Fitzgerald (16m 21s):
It was violent and unpleasant. The police were involved, big private security companies were involved. It all got super nasty, super fast and then can just resolve itself. And it’s very unsatisfying way that the council eventually, because things escalated so badly, the council basically paused the tree cutting program. And then many years later, as is is often the case kind of admitted that wasn’t so great and now it’s not happening. And now there’s a whole different partnership and things are, you know, looking a bit better. But exactly as, as you said, I mean the reason I went to Sheffield was exactly to kind of meet people. Like it was so baffling to me that you would put so much on the line to protect trees, right? That people were really putting like their livelihoods, their reputation, you know, their criminal records frankly online to protect trees in urban space.

Des Fitzgerald (17m 4s):
That to me was so unimaginable to me for myself that like, I wanted to kinda meet people who were willing to do that. And as I guess it hopefully comes across in the book that like, I am sympathetic to this or I’m like, I’m sympathetic to these people. Like I know it sounds like I’m kind of skeptical about this endeavor, but I don’t want it all to come across as like dismissive of people for whom this is a really serious major issue. And I think I, I think I get it. I think I get why it matters for them, but why it matters for them I think really doesn’t have all that much to do with trees as kind of biological or botanical objects. I think it has to do with trees as things that stand in for what we want a good city to be like.

Des Fitzgerald (17m 44s):
I don’t think what alarm people about that tree cutting program was the trees itself. I think what alarmed them was that sense of like practices and the objects and the kind of ways of going about things that we think constitute good urban life, whatever those things are, they’re on the other side of this program. And so the program comes to stand in for all those kind of wider anxieties about, you know, local democracy, about participation, about people’s capacities, access good housing actually because the trees associate with nice housing and all those sorts of ancillary things going on in the background.

Jeff Wood (18m 15s):
I also found it interesting that there was a discussion about the folks who didn’t want the trees taken down, but also the folks that were hiding in their houses worried about the repercussions from their neighbors who wanted the trees taken down. Yeah, yeah. It was kind of like a confrontation. It feels very, in our discussions today here in California and and across the United States, we talk a lot about housing and nimbyism, right? Yeah. And it feels very like the two sides of that clashing a somewhat similar way and the idea of control, local control, control over your space, control over this and that and the other thing. And some people like the trees for the reasons why they like the trees. And some people don’t like the trees because they wanna have control over their garden or they wanna have control over a space that they feel is theirs.

Jeff Wood (18m 57s):
And I felt that that kind of headbutting on that really interesting. I

Des Fitzgerald (19m 0s):
Think that is really interesting. And I think that was one of the things that sort of took the activists by surprise that actually what seemed to them like a completely unreasonable over the top approach to the trees was actually like welcomed by significant amounts of people. And exactly for the reasons you say like people who just don’t want leaves falling in their front garden that they have to clean up or don’t want in particular birds pooing on their car. That was a real thing for a lot of people. But I think we should take those seriously as clashes that are about the good city, right? I think we should take that seriously as clashes about not about trees or not about, you know, obviously it’s ridiculous to not one leaves to fall in your garden, right? You live on planet earth. But I think we should take it seriously as two very different visions of what good urban life looks like.

Des Fitzgerald (19m 44s):
And I think we, and I, and I think control is a really right way to think about it actually. I mean, I think people’s sense of how much control they have over the space around them is really important. Like trees obviously stand in for lots of people for a certain sense of calm and timelessness and all, all those soothing qualities. But also it seems quite plausible to me that for other people, tree standing for unruliness for like lack of control. And I think one of the things I talk about in, in the book is the relationship between urban tree management and the scientific management of cities more generally. And the coincidence not the, the like, like the temporal coincidence of the idea that we can govern the city rationally with the emergence of urban tree science as a distinctive set of practices.

Des Fitzgerald (20m 31s):
And that can sense that like you govern the trees, you govern the city. I think I do think that’s part of what’s going on in those clashes between neighbors in Sheffield, right? That kind of sense that who is going to get to say whether or not leaves fall on this patch ground. That becomes like a really important political question that is worth taking seriously.

Jeff Wood (20m 49s):
It’s a really interesting scientific question too, because of all of the data science and artificial intelligence and stuff that’s going on right now, like you mentioned, I mean the idea behind measuring the amount of CO two A tree can take out of the atmosphere is very, like you say in the book, it’s very soothing to council presidents and stuff who want be able to measure things. And we talk a lot on the show recently about ecosystem services, which you mentioned in the book. Sure. But it’s very quantifiable in a way and in a way that otherwise isn’t. You know, we had Paula Derna on recently talking about her book pricing the Priceless, right? Figuring out carbon trading and you know, the whole idea is that how do you put a price on something so you can operate in this capitalist system that we run in at the moment.

Des Fitzgerald (21m 29s):
Sure. I mean, I feel like I’m dismissive of a lot of things in the book. I’m actually doing proofs for like the British Edition at the moment and I kind of going through the proofs going like, really, I, I should be nice about someone at some point. So I’m kinda rude about ecosystem services, but actually I’m, I’m more sympathetic to it that

Jeff Wood (21m 42s):
First off I wanna say I didn’t feel, didn’t feel offended. I feel offended. Didn’t good. I feel like you were questioning for good reason. So I I want to Okay. I wanna make sure that you hear that.

Des Fitzgerald (21m 50s):
No, no, don’t worry. Yeah. But, but that, that’s good. I mean, but I mean, for example, I have a colleague who works on the relationship between tree canopy cover in cities and the cost of mental health prescriptions and treatment down the line. So his, his whole thing is that you can, you can not just quantify vegetation in urban space, but actually you can quantify the exact savings and visits to clinicians in therapy in lost days to work all those sorts of things for each square meter of tree cover in a city. I like one that’s like super sophisticated I think. So I like, I don’t like in terms of like how you actually get your hands on that data, how you use it, I mean, it’s nothing that I could do. So I don’t wanna be dismissive of it at all. And I absolutely get why you need to use this language to speak to policy makers, to speak to kind of community groups, you know, to kind of like, I get the rhetoric of it, you know, it makes total sense to me.

Des Fitzgerald (22m 40s):
It’s still completely deathly. I think it’s, you know, and I think we should allow ourselves to think that, but there’s like, it, you know, I see this as someone who actually doesn’t particularly like vegetation, but like to me the quantification of vegetation is much more violent than anything I could think of, right. That kind of sense. That like, you know, trees are an asset that we need to cash out. You know, to me that’s quite dreadful. And I say that as someone who doesn’t particularly like trees and I like it, it, it’s baffling to me that lots of people’s affection for trees or like desire to have trees in cities is trafficked through that very kind of calculated quantified discourse. I feel like it’s the ecosystem services people who don’t like trees, right?

Des Fitzgerald (23m 20s):
I mean that, that’s genuinely like in some ways my horror of the tree I think has more authenticity to it than like the kind of bureaucratic attempt to quantify and manage the tree. Right? I think like, I think on a genuine, I think like my dislike has more respect for it than like the kind of economist attempt to like cash it out.

Jeff Wood (23m 38s):
It’s interesting. I mean I, I can imagine some economists being that way in my personal feeling about it is that we’re losing a lot of, of nature to calculations of economic development, right? And so in where I grew up in, in Texas, a piece of, of improved land was one where they wiped out all the trees and they gave you a, a flat piece of dirt of course. And so the calculations of it can be, I guess, sinister in a way. And I agree with you that treating a tree as a a pile of cash is not the way to go. But at the same time it’s a way to value that nature in a way that it wouldn’t otherwise be. And I guess that’s where I would be coming from. I think that’s the way that ecosystem services comes across in, in my mind. But I do appreciate the difference.

Des Fitzgerald (24m 19s):
No, no, I think that’s totally fair. I think, I mean this seriously, I think if you want to have an effect on the world of policy or you wanna have a real effect on some real space, then like, maybe I shouldn’t say this, but like my book is not gonna help you. Right? And I mean that genuinely, like, I kind of give myself permission to kind of play the critic in the book, right? And I give myself permission to like not come up with any positive solutions. And actually when I, when I give talks on this every, and I hope you won’t ask me this, Jeff, on a very brief ask. So, you know, so what would be good? Like, what would be a good, what would a good city look like? And I just, I give myself permission to not do that partly ’cause I’m not qualified to do that. I don’t have any expertise in those kind of things. But partly because, you know, I have, I guess I have some faith, Jeff, that there are people like you, like smart people doing this work well.

Des Fitzgerald (25m 1s):
So like, the fact that I give myself permission not to do this doesn’t mean that I don’t think it’s valuable and doesn’t mean that like in a kind of a policy space, I would totally get why you would do that. You, you definitely wouldn’t rock up and like give, you know, an historical count of the kind of rational management of the city since the 19th century. Right? That that’s not helpful to anyone trying to protect space in Texas or California or whatever. It’s that, that’s completely useless. I get that.

Jeff Wood (25m 24s):
I do appreciate like the, but I, I, I just, I don’t wanna be feel like, I don’t want you to feel like I’m arguing with you about this ’cause I’m not No, no, please

Des Fitzgerald (25m 31s):
Argue with me.

Jeff Wood (25m 32s):
But I felt reading the book, it was interesting because it basically was a critical look at my urban planning history or my urban planning education, right? I actually have, I should disclose this, I have a picture up here on the wall that was drawn for me of Raymond Unwin. We did a, a audiobook version of Raymond Unwins Town Planning and Practice, right? The 1909 version of the book. Yeah. And, but you have questions about the folks from that time period and also generally like new urbanism and, and you know, prince Charles’ Pound Berry and Leon Kreer and those folks who, a lot of people that I, you know, do associate with and really love what they’re about and what they think of. And so I find it really fascinating that you come from it from that different angle. And I was really appreciative of that because it made me question some of the things that I had grown up with in planning.

Des Fitzgerald (26m 18s):
Can I ask you a question, Jeff?

Jeff Wood (26m 19s):
Yeah, absolutely. What

Des Fitzgerald (26m 20s):
Is, what does the people like about pound berry

Jeff Wood (26m 22s):
As, as the person in the book said? I don’t think it’s pound berry itself. I think it’s the process, right? I think it’s the process of putting it together, the new urbanists generally, I think it’s the general ideas that they like and implementing them is much harder than actually producing them. Right? I guess I should say implementing them is much harder than, you know, than not. I, no,

Des Fitzgerald (26m 43s):
You know what I mean? Like totally. So what I can be sympathetic to in Pembury is, so I I, in the book interview one of the architects in Pembury and he says something like, listen, think of this as an experimental space, right? Think of it as like just one attempt to do this one thing that’s a little bit weird and a little bit different. And that, you know, if we hadn’t done this, this would just be like any bog standard British housing estate, right? Yeah. Would be kind of rows and rows of these extremely dull, packed together red bricks, small houses with like bad light, no places to play cars parked everywhere, right? So that was the alternative. So maybe this little experimental attempt to do something odd, different, you know, read it in those terms. It’s kind of much more defensible. I I can see that.

Des Fitzgerald (27m 23s):
And also, as you say, it’s almost as a kind of a test bed for different kinds of things. So like one of the things they’re proud of is how they’ve put all the services behind the houses, right? So don’t have to dig off the streets with the services. Again, I’m sympathetic. There’s all these kind of quite subtle things that you don’t really see. Like they took the opportunity of a space governed by a certain kind of vision of how planning should work, just to say somewhat top down. Like took that as an opportunity to work experimentally. Yeah. ’cause you couldn’t do this in other spaces where you’d have to consult with local people. You don’t have to, all kinds of other kind of considerations that come into play. But if you know, like it’s a space that’s literally owned by a king, you can, you can like do something they can’t otherwise do.

Jeff Wood (28m 1s):
Speaking of Kings, I feel like also a lot of the discussion in the book was about folks who had ultimate power to design places and they end up being eugenicists or kind of overly, it goes back to that control thing again. I feel like yeah, this idea of of not creating places for people to live but creating humans to forward the, the empire or things like that. I feel, I felt that that was very interesting. And in the case of Port Sunlight seemed very true.

Des Fitzgerald (28m 28s):
Yeah. It’s quite explicit in Port Sunlight. I mean like, I, I do think I should disclose that, and I say this in the book, that the research for this book was funded by the Lie Human Trust, which of course comes from a bequest from William Liever the founder and potentate of Port Sunlight. But like lever’s vision of the capacity of a town to improve racial stock in his terms is really quite explicit. His sense of the place of urban planning in imperialism is quite explicit, right? Like with people like Ebenezer Howard, you’re doing a bit of like reading into like the kinda eugenic discourse at the time and how the particular kind of words might bubble up that are problematic.

Des Fitzgerald (29m 9s):
But with re you don’t have to read it in like it’s, it’s on the surface. And so like, there’s just something really striking to me about this. Like, I dunno if you’ve been to Port like, but Portana is like very cutesy. It’s like small, these little kind of like gly attached terraces. It’s very small, it’s kind of, it all looks inwards. It’s quite beautiful. But the kind of juxtaposition of that kind of cutesy little like hobbit town basically, and actually the explicitly imperialist and racist vision that animates it, I think is what makes that such a potent space to me.

Jeff Wood (29m 42s):
It’s just really interesting from the standpoint of how it came about. Right. And a lot of the discussion in the book about design too, that leads towards fascism in a certain way. I found really interesting too and makes me think about who has control over design. Right now we’re in California, there is a, a bunch of, you know, tech moguls. You might have heard of a couple of them. You might not have like Steve Jobs wife and, and a bunch of other folks who basically put down a billion dollars to buy up a bunch of land so they could build a new city. Yeah.

Des Fitzgerald (30m 10s):
So this is a story in Ireland because the brothers who own Stripe are investors in this. So it’s became a quirky story in Ireland. But like, yeah, so I mean like, but that’s deeply sinister, right?

Jeff Wood (30m 20s):
It feels that way. Yeah, it feels that way. It feels like they didn’t wanna play under the existing rules, so they wanted to create a place where they could have their own rules. Right.

Des Fitzgerald (30m 29s):
I think that’s quite right. I do think one should think about. So it’s unfortunate actually because since I like sent off the manuscript of the book, a bunch of kind of these odd tech utopian visions have sprang up. So one is this, I think the, the, certainly the holding company is called California Forever. Is that right? That’s, that’s the space,

Jeff Wood (30m 46s):
That’s the kind of the holding name for it, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Des Fitzgerald (30m 50s):
And the other of course that I would really wish was in the book is Neum. Yeah. Or the line

Jeff Wood (30m 55s):
Saudi Arabia.

Des Fitzgerald (30m 56s):
Yeah. The Saudi Arabia kind of high-tech nature utopia. I actually went to Venice during the summer to see, so the line had an exhibition kind of at the fringes of the Venice architecture Biennale, which was on this summer. So they rented a space in the center of Venice and had this kind of unsettling show about, not like, about Neo and about the line in particular, but like really a show about a certain kind of, if you sat down, imagine what is an autocrats idea of what the urban future looks like. This would be the show. It’s just this kind of very smooth, high-tech soothing music. No people, it’s all about kind of work and live to work and the kind of highly managed spaces you can go in after work.

Des Fitzgerald (31m 41s):
And I do think we need to think these kind of spaces one together. So I think we should, if we can draw a line actually between the line and what’s happening in California, what’s happening in osa, which is this other potential new kind of tech utopian space that’s gonna happen somewhere in the United States. Like, I think we should think those simultaneously as kind of instances of a, of the same movement, even though they’re quite different efforts in many ways. And I think we should think them historically, we should trace them back quite specifically to not just in the Garden City movement, but to kind of 19th century company towns. And to, as you say, Jeff, as other attempts to think about like, how can we do urbanism without a certain set of rules, right?

Des Fitzgerald (32m 21s):
How can we do urbanism in a much more kind of disruptive way? That’s absolutely what the tech tycoons of their day who are putting money into, you know, the first Garden City company. That’s exactly the kind of vision that animated them. And I do think if we can make sense of like what happened there, what they were doing, what went wrong with those spaces, then we’ll get a good grip on like what’s happening today. So I think the mistake we’re making today is seeing these kind of spaces as kind of quirky or strange or kind of just a bit odd or funny or, you know, with, with the line that kind of constantly is people say, well, it’s not gonna happen. So they’re not gonna build, you know, if, if you see the images of the thing, it looks so extraordinarily like alien that it, it seems impossible this thing will ever exist.

Des Fitzgerald (33m 2s):
But to me I like, I don’t think we should be reading these things as kind of quirky news stories. I think we should be reading them as troubling and sinister iterations of a longstanding worrisome urge.

Jeff Wood (33m 14s):
So I’m not gonna ask you what a good design would be, ’cause I know that’s not what the doctor ordered. But I do wanna ask you if folks aren’t out there trying to figure out new ways of building cities or new ideas for building cities, are we stuck in the past?

Des Fitzgerald (33m 32s):
Why not the present, that’s why the future of the past?

Jeff Wood (33m 37s):
Well, I’m thinking of this in a way that, you know, if we’re not thinking about ways to build cities in a different way now and maybe they don’t need to be a different way, I, I’m, I’m leaving the question open to a certain extent. Sure, sure. But at the end of the book, you were talking about kind of looking to the past, which the California forever city is, is they wanted a city of the past or something like they actually said that out loud, right. Or super futuristic, like the ideas that that Schumacher comes up with. Yeah, sure, sure. Like if, if we’re not thinking of different ways to, to go about city building, where do we end up I guess is maybe my, my question. Yeah.

Des Fitzgerald (34m 9s):
I mean, I, I guess I guess for me, this is probably a boring like sociologist kind of answer, but for me, like design and building and physical space is not where we would start with any of that. In some sense. Those, you know, design fields to me like so far downstream what a good city is or feels like or looks like or the kind of practices that pertain in it, that it’s, it’s uninteresting to me. I mean, something that kind of concerns me a lot about kind of contemporary urban discourse is the focus on aesthetics. And I think this is often a lot of my concern about the more kind of traditional mind of stuff or the kind of ery, you know, is that kind of sense that like there’s a certain aesthetic vision and once that aesthetic vision is achieved, then we have a good city.

Des Fitzgerald (34m 52s):
And so the social practices that make up the city, the people’s kind of working relationships like housing tenure, you know, how good the transport is. I don’t mean walk up in the sense of can you walk in 50 minutes, but like, is it just a nice experience to walk in the space? Will you bump into your path? All that I think gets left behind in this kind of aesthetic discourse of like, what does the good future city look like? Or how should we design the good future city? And I mean, that really was like when I, when I went to Venice, I mean, there’s a lot of things that were upsetting about the line, but like the complete absence of like human beings in its vision of the future good city is like deeply unsettling. And that really feels like a certain, like, it feels like the end point of a certain kind of aestheticized discourse in which like humans are almost secondary to, you know, good urban design or like what a good city looks like.

Des Fitzgerald (35m 39s):
I mean, in the book I kind of like, like I’m, I’m rude about a lot of places in the book, but like, I’m rude about places like Copenhagen or like Paris and that’s kind of for the same reason where I feel like people think, they just see photos of like a nice harbor site city with these quirky little houses and the painted nice colors and you can see boats and it all looks kind of nice. I’m like, that’s the vision of the good city and it’s just so, it’s just so vacuous to me. It’s so empty, you know, it’s so, so distant from anything that I think we’d need to take seriously if we’re gonna take seriously the question of what does the good city look like that I just, I’m completely dismissive of it.

Jeff Wood (36m 13s):
I think that’s an interesting kind of discussion we’re having here in the United States about housing, right? Yeah. Because there’s so much need for housing because we have been really bad about building it Yeah. That we’re behind here in California at least millions and millions of housing units and that’s why it’s so expensive to live here. And then the discourse pops up about whether a building should be over five stories or not. Right? Yeah. And, and whether that’s okay. And I feel like that’s one of the things that I break with, you know, new urbanism about and, and a lot of the designers like Leon Career or others where Sure. You know, I, I like some of the idea ideas that they espouse, but then other ones like, you know, we shouldn’t have buildings that have elevators in them is, is something that just never made any sense to me.

Jeff Wood (36m 53s):
Or even gel for, you know, for, you know, lack of another person who is very influential and has lots of great ideas about, you know, human cities and things like that. But at the same time, pushing out the ability to build tall buildings or house people in that way is frustrating to me, I feel like. And and so I think that’s part of the discourse too in the design field.

Des Fitzgerald (37m 12s):
I think that’s right. I mean, something that is, I feel is, is genuinely kind of a tragedy, certainly on this side of the world, is like, it feels like there’s cultural agreement that that moment of massive post-war reconstruction, which was really in large part about building huge amounts of social housing in quite experimental physical spaces, right? In very high, very high towers produced with quite, you know, recent materials. Like the kind of collective agreement we have now that, that was a failure I think is actually kind of tragic. Like the, the idea that we can’t do that anymore or that was something that shouldn’t have happened. And not that I’m like nostalgic for like the kind of 1940s, 1950s urban vision, but like the fact that it’s now just unthinkable to not just build housing, but to build social housing, right.

Des Fitzgerald (37m 55s):
To build social housing in which the vision is not that like just people who are poor or on welfare will live there, but actually everyone will live there because the social housing will be so good that everyone will want to live there and that will hire the best architects. I mean, you know this perfectly well. The, the London County Council hired huge amounts of architects right out of the architectural association. Like the loss of that vision I think is genuinely a tragedy. You know, I did a small bit of work that I never followed up on, on the archive of a woman called Margaret Willis. And Margaret Willis also worked for the London County Council. So London County Council in the 1950s. This just seems unthinkable now. Didn’t just have its own architects, it had its own sociologists. Right. So Margaret Willis was hired as a sociologist by London County Council to actually visit people who were being moved into these new spaces on the outskirts of London.

Des Fitzgerald (38m 39s):
And just see what it was like, like what did they say about it? Like, did they like it? What do their kids think of it? And she produced these really beautiful reports that are not really available online, but they’re, they’re in an archive in Edinburgh. This is a simplification, but like people really liked it, right? That there was some, there was a sense of adventure about moving into this very high building that you could be up high and you could see your kids playing below. So that was nice. I think we just told ourselves too much of a story. Like we told ourselves like a 1980s story about kinda residual as social housing long after the state had given up on maintaining it or you know, imagining that it could be something good that we’ve really forgotten. Like what that was like in the 1950s and how transformation that was for lots of people.

Jeff Wood (39m 18s):
That’s an interesting part of the, of the book too, is the idea that we come at cities from our views that were formed in the eighties and nineties when cities weren’t resurgent. Right. They were, they were on the downswing. And I found that compelling as well. We often chat about cities and quote unquote fixing them with green space as if a taxi driver was still the movie of the week. Right. That

Des Fitzgerald (39m 43s):
A death witch. Yeah. Or death Witch. I mean it’s true. I mean like, even though I have to remind people, remind myself that like in the 1980s that London was considered a failing city, the population was falling, you know, people were trying to get the hell out of it, you know, and San Francisco is the same, but London is just now a city that you just, you you cannot live in unless you work for like Merrill Lynch. Right. It’s just like a completely unthinkable that you might live in London. So, and it, the idea it was so recent that like this was a place you would go if like life hadn’t worked out that well. Yeah. Or you had to be for some reason. I think it’s really forgotten about.

Jeff Wood (40m 13s):
Is there something that you learned from writing the book that you didn’t quite expect to come out the other side?

Des Fitzgerald (40m 18s):
I mean, something that kind of took me by surprise, I’m gonna choose my words a bit carefully here, is that I was surprised how unconvincing the evidence was for the relationship between nature contact or green, green materials and mental health. So I think we kind of take it, you know, more or less for granted that like having more green stuff in urban space is good for mental health, right? I think we just, we just kind of assume that, and a lot of that goes back to the kind of Roger Ulrich stuff and all the studies that follow them. And it’s not that I don’t think this is true, and it’s not that I think those studies are bad, but I think there is a big gap between the extent and quality of the evidence for this relationship and like how prominent that discourse is in urban planning circles, if that makes sense.

Des Fitzgerald (41m 6s):
Like I had assumed that this is of course true, that we would really would radically improve mental health in urban space if we just, you know, put like green walls everywhere and put trees down every street. And I’m no longer convinced that that’s the case at all. I think it would’ve some kind of an effect, but like the effect would be so much smaller than making people’s housing permanent or like resolving inequality or you, or intervening in inequality. You know, it’s just what was a surprise to me was like how prominent the kind of urban greeting to solve mental health discourse is in certain circles and like how relatively small scale and still early stage and not super convincing the evidence currently is. If that makes sense. Yeah. Again, I stress, it’s not that I think those studies are bad or, but it’s just that like, it’s pretty small scale still and nowhere near where you would expect it to be for like how big the interventions people are producing on, on behalf of it.

Jeff Wood (41m 53s):
How much of it is it an income issue where, you know, we know for example, that areas of low income often don’t get the investment in greenery that high income places do. So you’ll see places in Los Angeles for example, with the places with all the trees or the basically the rich places in the places without the trees or the places where folks don’t have as much. And so there’s kind of a skewing part of that as well. And I’m just wondering how that might be connected to the lack of knowledge or the lack of resources put into that field of study.

Des Fitzgerald (42m 24s):
Yeah, I mean I think, I think in fairness, I, I like, I I think there are life to this. I mean, you’re, you’re quite right and I, I think this too that like, you know, if, if you walk down a leafy street, you can be pretty sure in a street where like people are pretty high incomes, right? So like in some sense, I know this sounds clear, but like of course they’re happy, like they’re doing fine in life. You know, you know, there was an amazing study done in Denmark where they got historical, I talk about this a bit in the book, but they got historical satellite data that could show how much green space was near a person’s house when they were age 12, I think. And then they could track that to the person’s likelihood of a mental health diagnosis. I think at age 50, just ’cause this is Denmark, they keep all kinds of like creepy data on people.

Des Fitzgerald (43m 4s):
So like researchers can do this and they’re able to show like in a really interesting and convincing way that basically the, like the per the, the percent that like the number of meters of green space near your house as a child had a strong like dose response relationship with your, with your likelihood of being diagnosed with mental illness in, in adulthood. That’s super convincing. But like, it is surely the case that people who are growing up surrounded by green space are people who are growing up with all kinds of advantages, right? Both tangible and intangible. Not just things like income, but things like, like cultural capital, like parents’ education, all those things that predict a relatively safe, comfortable, secure life.

Des Fitzgerald (43m 46s):
Which of course will then predict or will then reduce the likelihood of the, you know, becoming super stressed and developing a serious chronic mental health problem. Now I’m not saying that those researchers aren’t alive to these issues. I’m sure they’re controlled for all kinds of demographic factors, but like you, I just cannot be convinced. I think that we can separate the cultural association of greenery with, you know, good social, cultural, economic life and mental health.

Jeff Wood (44m 11s):
One of the interesting things I saw in there too in the book was thinking about how when people go to nature to unwind there Yeah. Purposefully doing so. And there’s an interesting connection between that I feel like, and I mean I love green spaces and going to the forest and I used to run track and cross country, so I was in the forest all the time, right. And I found it soothing and relaxing and everything else. But also I feel like sometimes if you’re going to the forest or you’re going to a green space, you’re doing it purposefully and it’s not necessarily just by chance that your mood might improve by walking by a tree.

Des Fitzgerald (44m 45s):
Exactly. That, I mean, I talked to you in the book, I talked to a, a really, really good British psychologist called Eleanor Ratcliffe. And she says like, well, she says two things. She says, one, it’s certainly true that like being surrounded by greenery and nature has a calming effect. But that’s not because of anything inherent to nature, right? It’s not the nature ness of it that makes it soothing. It’s the fact that it’s like, you know, cognitively enough, very demanding. It’s usually kind of quiet like it has all those other kind of associations that are just ancillary to the fact that it is a green space. And we could easily conceive of an urban space that would have the same qualities and would surely have the same kind of calming effects. And the other thing she says is that when we go into a green space, when we go to a forest or a park, we’re going to a space that we’ve been told since like early childhood is calming, is associated with kinda wealth and comfort and serenity, right?

Des Fitzgerald (45m 31s):
So like of course then we enter those spaces, then we experience those feelings. I experience ’em authentically. I’m not trying to say that like people are duped or their food, like I’m sure the feelings are very real, but again, it’s not because of any kind of like deep metaphysical quality of trees. It’s because we’ve been socialized to think that being near trees will calm you down. And so you go near trees and yes, it calms you down. I mean that’s, you know, self-evident I think.

Jeff Wood (45m 54s):
Yeah. Well the book is The, Living, City, Why Cities Don’t need to be Green to Be Great. Where can folks find a copy if they wanna, actually, I should say folks should get a copy. Where can they get one?

Des Fitzgerald (46m 6s):
Let’s see. Well, folks can pre-order the book comes out, I dunno, exact date, mid-November. So folks can pre-order from their favorite online or local store. I would say that’s published by basic books and hopefully we’ll be reasonably widely available from November.

Jeff Wood (46m 22s):
Awesome. What’s next for you? Are there any other books on tap or anything that we should be looking out for?

Des Fitzgerald (46m 28s):
Well, so something I talk about a little bit in the book is the kind of politics of traditional urbanism, right? The fact that a certain kind of vision of the traditional city seems to skew right words, right? And then at the same time, something that struck me recently is it’s interesting how frequently now I would say people not just on the right, but people on the far right, how often they track their kind of vision of the future through a certain kind of urbanism, right? So this kind of online fetish for like classical urbanism for kind of these little traditional spaces, which is often quite subtly associated with like deeply reactionary ideas is I think kind of under explored, right?

Des Fitzgerald (47m 12s):
I mean, I say, I mentioned the book. I mean, one of the kind of last things that Donald Trump did before he left office was to sign an executive order to say that all federal buildings had to follow traditional or classical styles. Like that’s not coincidental, right? So I think I, I would really like to make sense of what it is about that relationship. ’cause there’s nothing inherent in traditional classical design that is rightwing, right? And, and lots of people like I need to stress who are working in this sphere are absolutely not rightwing or, you know, are not political or, you know, that’s, that’s not what animates them. But there is something happening between those two things. I think there is a kind of a, it’s gonna sound paranoid, I put it like this, but I kind of a global right wing movement, which is laundering itself at least partly through a certain vision of the city. And I don’t think we’ve well understood that, and I think it’s probably worth understanding.

Jeff Wood (47m 55s):
Oh, I look forward to reading what you come up with. Well, Des, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time. Thanks,

Des Fitzgerald (48m 0s):
Jeff. It’s been a pleasure.