(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 503: The Architecture of Urbanity
October 9, 2024
This week on Talking Headways, we’re joined by architect Vishaan Chakrabarti to talk about his book The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy. We discuss the goldilocks density, defining urbanity, the ennui of young architects, and much much more!
How to Make Room for 1M New Yorkers – NYT | Vishaan Chakrabarti in Vital City
To listen to this episode, find it at Streetblog USA or in our hosting archive.
Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the show:
[00:07:10] Jeff Wood: Vishan Chakrabarty, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? [00:07:21] Vishaan Chakrabarti: Sure. I was born in India, came to this country with my parents when I was two years old. [00:07:27] They came here with 32 and two kids. And grew up in suburban Boston and traveled a great deal with my parents. My dad was a scientist. My mother was a classical singer. And so we had traveled on a shoestring budget to cities around the world. I think my love of cities come from those early trips. [00:07:46] Jeff Wood: Where’d you go? Gosh, [00:07:48] Vishaan Chakrabarti: We went to the Soviet Union before the wall fell because my father had a lecture in Helsinki and we took the overnight train to what was then Leningrad. Soviet troops boarded the train at two in the morning, go through our bags, German Shepherds, Kalashnikovs. It’s great. It’s like a Bond movie. [00:08:05] We went to all sorts of amazing places. And again, they had so little money, but like somehow my father like would splice and dice Figure it out. And then studied engineering and art history and fine art in college. And that ultimately led, after some work in New York, to urban planning. [00:08:26] And then I went to architecture kicking and screaming. I was very, as someone who had studied planning and was really steeped in policy issues and urbanism, I was a little skeptical about the relevance of architecture to the world. And then within two weeks I got sucked into studio and I never looked back. [00:08:46] A lot of my professional life is about weaving. What’s interesting about, you went to Austin, like in so many schools, architecture and urban planning are co located and yet the two really don’t talk to each other for all the talk of interdisciplinary this and that. I am really a kind of manifestation of both disciplines. [00:09:04] And, the most recent book is this attempt to weave those. And what I find We live in such a specialist kind of nation that there’s always this desire to say, Oh if he’s talking about this, he’s not that if he’s talking about that, he’s not this. And I really try to keep myself on that line because I think it’s the scale shift that is so intellectually interesting. [00:09:28] And so anyway, that’s how I got to here. [00:09:32] Jeff Wood: I find myself getting a little bit of imposter syndrome when I try to talk about things that are outside of the realm of what people believe I know or understand. And we try to cover a lot of stuff on the newsletter, environment, cities, housing, planning, transportation, all those things. [00:09:44] But I also feel like sometimes I should stay in my lane to a certain extent. And I feel like that’s wrong because we know so much about our experiences with things that we do and the people that we talk to and the friends that we have. [00:09:56] Vishaan Chakrabarti: My wife and I yesterday were talking about refinancing a mortgage, and we’re like do you think the bank has baked in like a rate change in September? [00:10:02] Like the two of us are central bankers. People do that all the time. You think about the political world we’re in, we’re just like, We get immersed in all this information that’s outside of our disciplines. And to me, the interesting thing is, can you weave it in? And this book, it’s a lot of disparate topics in there. [00:10:19] There’s neoliberal economics and there’s cars and there’s there’s a lot of different things. And I think for some people that probably will be fairly discordant, but I think that’s our jobs today. Like you can’t. Climate change, political division, like these things are so complicated and I don’t think you can really tackle them without some interdisciplinary breadth while maintaining your disciplinary depth. [00:10:44] That makes sense. [00:10:45] Jeff Wood: Yeah. Oh, totally. They’re so connected, right? They’re so connected because all these things, even in their silo, There’s a hook to get you into that other section. You talk about cars and stuff like that in the book, and we’ll get to that in a second, but I just feel like that connectivity is clear in your book. [00:10:58] But also I feel like that’s an important point to make because we shouldn’t be stuck in the transportation space only, or the urbanism space only, or the housing space only, because all these things are interconnected or even healthcare for that matter. It just seems like all these things are connected. [00:11:12] And when we keep them disconnected, it hurts us all. [00:11:15] Vishaan Chakrabarti: It’s funny. My first job out of college was as a transportation planner at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey because my weird background in art history and engineering, I don’t know how I ended up being a transportation planner because I had done some interning and I loved it. [00:11:31] And so I think transportation has always just been near and dear to my heart because it’s a divine issue and it’s a social justice issue and it’s an economic issue and it’s it’s all those things. And yeah I don’t find the disaggregation of this stuff very interesting. [00:11:45] Jeff Wood: You have varied experience from the New York City planning department. [00:11:48] You’re the Dean of the UC Berkeley college of environmental design. You’re an architect with your firm. Now how does all that mix of experiences and work shape you? Not just your education originally, but just like all the experiences you had after that. [00:11:58] Vishaan Chakrabarti: So POW is, the firm is very much trying to synthesize, even though it’s an architecture firm, it’s a hardcore architecture firm, most of what we do is architecture, we actually don’t do that much urban planning, but we practice a lot of urbanism within the architecture that we do, and we can talk about what that means, but yeah, at some point, starting your own firm is a wonderfully freeing thing, especially as a person of color in America, like you can get out from underneath a lot of stuff, but also, It just allows you to not have to listen to the people who say, stay in your lane over here, stay in your lane. [00:12:32] You create your own lane. And I think what’s wonderful about the country is that the people who are interested in finding you in the lane that you’ve created are great. And they will hire you to do things, and you do interesting things together. I was an urban planner, and then I was an architect, and I was planning to just stay a hardcore architect. [00:12:47] I was in a big firm. I was fairly happy. Then 9 11 happened. And 9 11 kind of put me on a 10 year detour into a bunch of other things. Yes, I worked for Mayor Bloomberg right after 9 11 as the director of planning for Manhattan, and then did this joint venture for a train station, and then worked in academia, wrote my first book, went back to architecture. [00:13:06] I always tell young people that they should You know, it’s one thing to switch jobs every six months. I’m not recommending that, but I think it’s important to have a lot of different professional experiences, especially when you’re young and architecture can be the worst in terms of It’s like an extremely monastic practice, right? [00:13:23] You’re supposed to go, and you pledge celibacy, and you go do this thing for years, and then you get licensed, and then you focus on how a piece of glass meets a piece of metal, and like, how a piece of glass meets a piece of metal is incredibly important, right? But it’s not, you gotta look up from your desk. [00:13:40] And we were always taught from the first day, In design school that all acts of architecture are political, so if that’s true, what’s the political environment in which you practice and so how very much takes all those disparate experiences. And I do this with a team of people who have similarly nonlinear backgrounds, right? [00:14:02] So I call them a bunch of Swiss army knives who are constantly curious. So if we work with a transportation planner or a structural engineer, we are absolutely spellbound by what they have to say about a site because it’s all sauce for the goose. It all helps to make the kind of rich urban tapestry you’re trying to build. [00:14:22] And so it is a real joy to be able to do that. Running an architecture firm sucks, but it is a real joy to be able to create that lane for yourself and run down it. [00:14:33] Jeff Wood: I think running the business of anything sucks, doing the work is fun, but running the business is never the most joyful for sure. [00:14:40] It’s terrifying. Yeah. So you mentioned, you wrote another book, a country of cities, a manifesto for urban America back in 2013, I think it was, where did that book take you in terms of what you were thinking of at the time? And, as it led into the book that we’re going to talk about in a second, the architecture of urbanity. [00:14:56] Vishaan Chakrabarti: First of all, I love writing and I’ve always loved writing and I used to think of it as an avocation and increasingly think of it as a vocation and, it’s like very commonplace for architects to say, do other visual things, paint, sculpt, whatever. Writing is a much more unusual thing. In fact, architects are very good at butchering words. [00:15:17] Yeah, I have this great respect for language. And so I had started writing a blog for the architectural lead in a place called urban omnibus called the country of cities. And it was like a 10 part thing. And after the, like the 10 parts were done, several people said to me, This is no longer a blog. [00:15:34] It’s a book. It was all this advocacy for density and cities. And, it’s interesting to me, like, when I studied city planning before I said, architecture is the early 90s. These were not a hot topic. If you think back. Cities had gone through a lot of malaise and, people were talking about suburban cities and they were talking, there’s early talk of the Internet. [00:15:58] And there’s always been this idea that people can work from a mountaintop. And and it’s funny, by the time I got to writing this first book, a series of books had come out. I think Ed Glazer’s Triumph of the City was near the same time and some other Books that came out and there was this recognition that the world was urbanizing. [00:16:15] And so suddenly you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting someone who was talking about or writing about cities, which is great. I think it’s fantastic. Like more the merrier that book as much as I enjoyed. Writing it and working like that was not an architectural book. I would say for the most part. It was really much more a kind of policy book, a lot of graphics in it that were infographics really something I’m very proud of is we did a tremendous amount of fact checking with that book. [00:16:43] My editor and I am like, I had research assistance and as much there are people who hate the book politically. Because it’s arguing for density, and I didn’t realize I was running into a culture war when I was arguing for density, but no one’s really assailed any of the facts in that book, which I’m really proud of. [00:17:02] But the genesis of this book is really about the fact that the first book didn’t answer a set of questions that brought me back actually to architecture in the sense that. The first book, A Country of Cities, was a strong piece of advocacy for transit oriented density in this country and kind of less focused on the New Yorks and San Franciscos and more, Rust Belt cities and cities where density could easily take place because they had been so carved out by urban renewal. [00:17:30] And as I toured the country, The response I got from people who were interested was like, okay, Bishan, I get the economic and environmental argument for transit oriented density. There’s only one problem. All these new places that people are building are soul crushing crap. It’s they all look the same. [00:17:49] If they’re denser, they’re these blue glass places. If they’re less dense, it’s like these ticky tacky places, the same Starbucks on the bottom. None of them channel the history or narratives of our local communities. To me, those early questions in some form. Were the kind of genesis of what we today call NIMBYism, especially in progressive communities, and I’m not saying all NIMBYism is about architecture. [00:18:15] There’s a bunch of people are going to be anti density no matter what, but what I really started to understand was that the means by which you build a place, not just the design, but the process, community engagement, And then in terms of design, how you can handle the local to build this kind of global idea which is we build cities a certain way around mass transit and so forth at different density scales. [00:18:40] And we have a bunch of global metrics that we use units per acre, or other things. That are very technocratic, but that’s like a couple of surgeons talking to their patients about, scalpel techniques. It doesn’t, you got to meet people where they are and talk to people about what will this mean to build this thing in their community? [00:18:59] So the second book is really in some ways a retort to the first book. This isn’t some technocratic exercise. It’s about how you think about people building their neighborhoods and their worlds. [00:19:12] Jeff Wood: Yeah, it makes sense. And it gets me to the next idea, which is this idea of urbanity, right? Thinking about that word in a way that separates the discussions between whether rural is better or urban is better and You’re framing and repositioning of the word itself. [00:19:25] The quote that I took out of the book specifically is today We build metropolis not urbanity. [00:19:29] Vishaan Chakrabarti: Correct. And then what I wanted to do is separate the idea of urbanity and urban from size If you just ask a random person on the street and you say, what do these words mean to you, urbanity, urban, or even if you look it up in the dictionary, you’ll usually get some version of two things sometimes amalgamated. [00:19:47] One is that it’s about snobbery. There’s something cosmopolitan in a bad way about the elite. The second is that you’re talking about really like big megacities, and again, sometimes those two things get conflated. I wanted to really disassemble that because I think it’s a super important word in large measure because if you look at human history as a species, and the pandemic has borne this out, we have organized in communal environments since antiquity. [00:20:16] And the book has this big timeline that tries to explain this, that across the world, and it wasn’t just for commerce, it wasn’t just for barter, in fact, most of the cities that we think of today that were built in antiquity, ancient Beijing, ancient cities across Mesoamerica, they were largely built for spiritual reasons, power, cultural reasons, things that extend well beyond barter, right? [00:20:40] And so what you start to understand is that as a species and with the majority of us as bipeds, we interact in physical space. And that’s something that we actually have chosen as a species to do. So post pandemic, people didn’t go run and move and work to a mountaintop, we’ve seen people move out of big expensive cities. [00:21:02] We’ve seen those people move into And Less expensive urban environments. Right now, Kansas City and Nashville and Austin and San Antonio, all these places are boom towns. These people want some form of an urban life, right? But not necessarily in cities they can’t afford. And so urbanity. Is defined in the book as both a spatial and cultural condition where people basically have different cultures and classes collide in space. [00:21:34] That’s basically the definition and the idea is that can happen in a small rural town or it can happen in a big city. And there are big cities that is a metropolis but is not very urban. And so just because it’s fun, I like to take Copenhagen to task. Because as I’m sure you’re aware, Copenhagen has been this like vaunted paradise of planners for like as long as I not as long as I can remember, the last 10 years or so. [00:22:03] And it’s everyone bikes to get their kale and all of that. And I go to Copenhagen, it’s a lovely city. You talk to people there and you’re like, where are all the immigrants? I literally had a senior city official, we’re riding the metro, and I asked this question and he literally looked at me and he said, Oh, they’re very happy. [00:22:23] They live in a neighborhood over there. And without any sense of irony, and I’m like, this place isn’t urban, not by my definition. Because to me, it requires the grit of what I call in the book, positive social friction, the idea that people who look different, pray different, and maybe most importantly, think differently from one another, collide in space. [00:22:47] So I use the example of Tokyo, which does not have a lot of foreign born people in it, but Tokyo is a city of like subculture, like crazy subcultures, and they all interact and have this friction in space. And to me, this is fundamental to what makes a city feel alive and serendipitous and special. [00:23:10] Like it always cracks me up when you see these lists of 10 most livable cities. And it’s Duke guards, you’re like, really, how come 8 million people live in New York and, 19 million people live in Mumbai. There’s a lot of wealthy people. In these big quote unlivable cities around the world that could live anywhere, but don’t move to Stuttgart. [00:23:32] No offense to Stuttgart, but my point is just, there seems to be this weird idea that in order for a place to be livable, you’ve got to crank the urbanity dial down and What the book is trying to advocate is that no, actually what we need in our society today, especially given the divisions that social media has wrought, is face to face contact of difference. [00:24:00] To me, what beguiles me about cities is the idea of difference. That we see people who, again, maybe look different or pray differently, but also just like they dress differently. They have some fundamentally different attitude about how you exist in the world that makes you think and makes your mind grow and challenge your assumptions. [00:24:25] And to me, those The rich complexities of culture. I don’t think we talk about that in this space of let’s have 30 units an acre and make sure that the bus rapid transit can get there. Like, all that’s important. But to what end? And it’s not just some carbon emissions per capita. And that’s important. [00:24:45] But to me, that’s almost a kind of byproduct of you. The cultural condition that people are seeking, and it’s funny. I really struggled with the subtitle of this book and it’s designing for nature, culture and joy. And so that was decided, I don’t know, 6, 8 months ago. And then suddenly the book comes out in this environment where everyone’s been coconut filled and joy. [00:25:11] Yeah. And everyone’s talking about joy and this is a very good thing for book sales, hopefully, but like the larger point. Yeah. Is that I think we’re just at this moment, we’re coming out of the pandemic coming out of the murder of George Floyd coming out of really tough things that our society’s gone through and no one is trying to downplay their seriousness, but if you don’t have joy in your daily life, don’t have some sense that your life is going to be experientially better than the empirical stuff. [00:25:41] Means less and less, right? And so this is why the design of experience, at least for me, is critically important. And then the last thing I’d say is we are starting to see data on that point. Like the book mentions this extraordinary book called A Good Life. It’s the longest study of human happiness that’s ever been done. [00:26:02] It’s been done at Harvard. It’s a longitudinal study. It’s happened for generations. And it comes out with this conclusion. I’m vastly oversimplifying, but basically, if you control for a bunch of variables like smoking and things like that, that both happiness and longevity are associated with strong social connections. [00:26:21] And so my question then becomes. How do we design a built environment that is conducive, and I use that word very specifically because sometimes the right will glom onto this stuff as some weird globalist plot to control how people live, but use conducive. To how people live and can make healthy connections. [00:26:43] They choose to or not. That’s up to them. But can we create platforms? And to me, that always starts with the street. The street to me is the most basic building block of the entire human endeavor. And the problem is we think about streets. As something built for cars, we have sidewalks that date back millennia in human history and in urban form. [00:27:07] And again, it’s that first place where people make contact eyeball to eyeball and experience serendipity and difference. And that then extends to plazas and parks and the doorways of buildings and public space inside of buildings. But to me, it always starts with the street. And so that’s where the book starts, too. [00:27:28] Jeff Wood: You also talk about the creation of kind of banal buildings worldwide, and I think that connects to this as well. And you talk about this, too, in the book. How should architects and urban professions change in the 21st century to address the things that you just brought up in regards to urbanity and the mixing of people if they choose to do [00:27:44] Vishaan Chakrabarti: again, this transit oriented density thing, stood up about a week ago and said, we need to build 3 million new homes in the United States. I think Senator Warren has been doing extraordinary work around housing. There is a worldwide housing crisis. My firm did an op ed in the New York Times in December about how to house a million more New Yorkers while maintaining the character of New York City. [00:28:08] And the response we got was absolutely global. Almost every major city in the world has a housing crisis, and everyone’s trying to figure it out. And part of the puzzle goes back to this thing I said before, that most existing communities feel like the new stuff is awful. And some of them weaponize that because they’re trying to just not get any more new neighbors in their neighborhood. [00:28:33] Shame on them. But, There are people who have a legitimate point. A lot of stuff is awful. In fact, most of it’s awful. And the book tries to disassemble why that is. Yeah, some of it’s the boogeyman of developers. And a lot of developers need to be more ambitious than they are. A lot of it’s the way we mass produce building materials now, globally. [00:28:57] A lot of it’s international building code. Because international building code has made if you think about like our most beloved urban environments that are dense, Paris and Barcelona are really dense central Shanghai, the old hutongs of Beijing, really charming places. Every single one of them is illegal by today’s codes. [00:29:19] And for reasons that are really good reasons, wheelchair access, fire retardants, like all of these things that one by one was death by a thousand The kind of density that people actually think of as a positive thing. And so we can’t just rewind the tape. It’s not about being nostalgic, but we have to understand where we’ve been to go forward. [00:29:44] And so in the book I talk about there are new technologies for wheelchairs. There are new technologies for putting out fire in buildings. We don’t need to design our entire built environment for 7 billion, what will be the, by the end of the century, 10 billion people. Around a couple of bad pieces of technology that could be much better. [00:30:06] So like the wheelchair, we’ve had wheelchairs that could climb stairs. For years, they’re sure they’re expensive, but right now, architects, developers, builders, and like all of our clients, universities, et cetera, we’re literally spending trillions of dollars. Buildings are much bigger as a consequence of having to accommodate this invention. [00:30:31] That needs an upgrade for every single person who needs a wheelchair and I’m very sensitive. Both my parents passed away. They’re both in wheelchairs at the end of their life. I’m 1000 percent for wheelchair access and I don’t want it. So I don’t want it misconstrued. If you could give people better wheelchairs, you could design better environments. [00:30:50] Same thing with fire trucks. If you walk down the average American suburban subdivision. And you see a sea of pavement that’s now a heat island, like people in Phoenix are tripping and getting hospitalized because of burns because they’re falling on asphalt that has gotten so hot from the sun. [00:31:11] Why is there so much asphalt? Because of the turning radius of a ladder truck. And I like go to these planning meetings. I like rip what little hair I have out because in Europe, you just use smaller fire trucks. It’s it’s, it is so the tail wagging the dog and today we can, we have drone technology. [00:31:32] We have all these other ways of dealing with these things. And so we can’t go back to scratch, but at least as we build new things, as we think about retrofitting things, and we think about the places that people really cherish and they’re always tight knit spaces, pedestrian oriented, and as an architect who really believes in cities. [00:31:56] I spend most of my day wrestling down parking garages and fire lanes, all of these things. They’re super practical and I get that people have their needs in like a big sprawling country. Creating these places of urbanity, creating places where community can get together. It’s almost always this crazy fight with 20th century bad technology. [00:32:24] Jeff Wood: There’s this interesting section in the book too, about the rise and damage of neoliberalism, especially from a public investment perspective. And I think that kind of ties into this discussion about fire trucks and, public good and those types of things. I’m wondering how the system that kind of rose in the eighties is really impacting us today, because it seems like it’s done a lot of damage to our ability to. [00:32:46] Have government do things that we want them to do and make them, create places that spark joy, for lack of a better phrase, [00:32:53] Vishaan Chakrabarti: right? So the neoliberal project, this basic idea that you need to starve the beast of government, what the book tries to go through is the history of where that comes from and how much it’s undergirded by race. [00:33:05] And what I mean by that is prior to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society stuff and prior to the civil rights movement, there isn’t a lot of angst in this country about federal expenditure of tax dollars, right? So 1956. Federal Highway and Defense Act. We spent a massive amount of money building highways. We built, Teddy Roosevelt built national parks. [00:33:32] No one sat there and said, Oh, this is crazy profligate spending. But When you suddenly say the spending has to go, we’re going to redefine public to make sure we include all of the public. We’re in a country where African American women did not get full rights to vote nationwide until 1965, the year of my birth. [00:33:53] And so the definition of public needed to expand to include everybody. As soon as that happened, all of a sudden, government expenditure went from, Oh sure, we’re going to give people the GI Bill and mortgage interest deductions, and like, all of that’s absolutely fine. To, oh my god, welfare queens and public housing are sucking away all of our tax dollars. [00:34:16] None of it was ever true. Especially as a percentage basis. Take the mortgage interest deduction. Biggest housing expenditure the United States makes. It is. A boondoggle of a subsidy, why it was ever made so that it could help people above the average price of an American home, right? So you’re eligible if you’re a married couple, I think, to 1. [00:34:41] 1 million dollars. The average home in the United States is, I believe, under 300, 000. Maybe it’s now a little higher because of inflation and all that. Why was this ever a good idea? Again, because it wasn’t really neoliberalism. It wasn’t really starving the beast. It was saying, we’re spending too much on a certain kind of person. [00:35:02] And that was usually about cities and urbanity. The book also goes through what really undergirded the destruction of Pruitt Igoe and public housing, and, these crazy recriminations about it was, the federal government shouldn’t be in this cause, cause developers do it more efficiently or, like these things simply weren’t true, but we gutted these systems. [00:35:24] And so to me I don’t think we focus enough on what the, again, in MAGA is about what’s the, again, about. It’s not just like Culture Wars about going back to a time when Black people and women knew their place. It is that, but it’s more than that. It is about a moment pre Great Society where we had people on the dole, but it was the kind of people that we thought should be on the dole because they, quote, deserve it. [00:35:53] They work hard, they deserve it. And the suburbs are a creation of this mentality. And so it’s been very damaging. All of that. I think we are now finally coming out of that, we’re doing some work for the FAA and just getting closer to some of the stuff that Pete Buttigieg has been talking about. [00:36:14] Undoing some of the damage that was done with federal renewal and highways, just this recognition that a lot of bad things happened in our cities. And now we have the reverse problem, which is communities, particularly communities of color. That held our cities together through the bad times, through the 70s and the 80s through all this disinvestment through white flight through highways, all that stuff. [00:36:40] Now, as cities, is like Seinfeld and friends and like all those people rediscover cities. Then all this gentrification takes place and now, like in New York City today, we’re losing historically black populations because they can’t afford to live there anymore, even though they are the people who held the place together through the worst of times. [00:37:00] And so I think that history is really important to know, because it’s hard to be a lover of cities and a builder of cities without knowing, the context in which you’re stepping. And so the book tries to go through that in some detail, but with a really specific lens around architecture and urban planning. [00:37:19] Jeff Wood: I do the fact that we’re starting to change the discussion around that, specifically with the investments that we’re trying to make. And now those investments aren’t perfect. The infrastructure bill is not perfect. The inflation reduction act is not perfect, but they do provide money and, the basis for starting to talk about this stuff differently, right? [00:37:37] Oh, [00:37:37] Vishaan Chakrabarti: they’re massive accomplishments. So the first book, which is out in 2013, a lot of it was written in 2009, 2010 period. And I was an early Obama adapter, the fact that my beautiful brown children grew up with a dark skinned president was enormously important for me and my family. I’m still Amazed by that man, you will remember his 2009 stimulus package because the economy had been so tanked by the Bush administration, there was all this stuff about like high speed rail. [00:38:08] So what happened as usual, the left ate itself, right? The Obama administration needed shovel ready projects because the money that they were spending, it was a stimulus package. It was supposed to be stimulative. So anything that was a more ambitious transportation project or infrastructure project needed like years of environmental impact work. [00:38:30] So where did most of that stimulus money go? It went to filling potholes in New Jersey. I’m being intentionally provocative, but there’s $8 billion of high speed rail money that just all got dithered away into the small bore things. And so what the Biden folks did here on infrastructure on industrial policy, like I’ve driven cross country six times. [00:38:53] I know the middle of the country very well. And we’ve ravaged the middle of the country. And the fact that a president stood up and said, we’re going to build again in this country. We’re going to build tips and we’re going to build battery plants and we’re going to do all of this stuff. It’s just extraordinary how much they got done in 4 years. [00:39:14] And yes, it’s all imperfect. But democracy is imperfect. People who believe in democracy have to stop believing in perfection. That is the path to fascism. Sometimes I want a hat that says make a little corruption great again, right? The book talks about this. [00:39:27] If you’re going to sit there and say, oh the Obamacare website, come on, give me a break. Working governments really hard post Reagan, post neoliberalism, most government runs on bubblegum and shoestring. People have no idea, even on the left, people have no idea how hard people in government work, and it’s just, it’s going to be imperfect. [00:39:48] It’s going to be imperfect. And that’s the just, that’s the nature of consensus driven democracy. It was really refreshing to hear, I think, especially Michelle Obama talk about that the other night. Thank you. At the convention where she said, these guys are going to, these guys are human. They’re going to make mistakes. [00:40:06] We got to have their back. And yes, all the bills are imperfect, but I think they are directionally enormous and that we will be reaping the benefits of the Biden administration in this country for 25 to 50 years. [00:40:22] Jeff Wood: Yeah. And it’s going to build up capacity of public service, right? That’s the biggest thing is trying to figure out how to get away from a system that doesn’t allow the government to figure out how to do things the right way. [00:40:34] We have this discussion all the time. I’m sure you’ve heard about this a lot, is how expensive It costs to build a subway in the United States. It’s a lot of things, but it’s also the folks that work for the public agencies, being able to get in there and do the work that they need to do. [00:40:46] And we have a bunch of consultants and stuff like that. But if you farm everything out outside of the agencies, it makes it harder. [00:40:52] Vishaan Chakrabarti: Yeah. No, we need to do something about the infrastructure industrial complex. It is a huge problem. And the other thing is the jurisdiction thing. If you ride crossrail in London, you understand that transport for London is one agency that had one jurisdiction over the entire place. [00:41:05] You look at what happened with congestion pricing in New York city. We don’t have the jurisdictional setup that we need because this entire country was built on this idea of decentralizing power. But I just wanted to catch something else you said, which is When Eisenhower passed the Highway Act in 56, it was also part of a national mood. [00:41:24] There was a desire to de densify, people were worried about nuclear war in the cities. There was also all of this stuff around race that was clearly emergent. The guest who’s coming to dinner thing, there is a national mood that is coupled with Biden’s infrastructure bill. Young people are the most energized and adamant I’ve ever seen about this housing issue. [00:41:50] They are shut out. They’re pissed off. And so I think what’s going to make the infrastructure bill successful is the fact that there is now grassroots advocacy that’s going to latch on to top down administrative things that have happened from the federal government and locally say, we want these things, the ballot referenda we’re seeing for transit, the elimination of single family zoning and all sorts of municipalities. [00:42:20] There is a very powerful I think what a lot of youngins call it today is this abundance movement, it’s being driven by a very large demographic. To me this thing of what happens at the federal level for it to really work is it’s about its synergy with what happens at the local level, and that I sense writ large. [00:42:42] Across both red states and blue states, there is no political divide there. Kamala Harris talked about 3 million new housing units, which is great. It’s music to my ears. But my question is Where? What? How? We’re not gonna use government subsidy to again promote sprawl, right? And yet, some will argue that’s the cheapest way to build starter homes. [00:43:07] But I think a tremendous amount of thought needs to go into not just the quantity, but the quality. [00:43:14] Jeff Wood: Yeah, your discussion about the building type that is at that sweet spot, the 50 dwelling, it’s an acre, the Goldilocks and also your New York times article thinking about that too. We recently had some folks on from USC talking about their research and sprawl and kind of how California is different from Texas and the housing markets. [00:43:32] And, California, has lots of regulations and all that stuff in Texas, less but actually it’s not that’s causing the difference in housing prices. It’s. The availability of sprawling land. And so Houston’s starting to run out of land, Las Vegas starting to run out of land for that sprawl. [00:43:46] And so the housing prices are going to get closer to California. And so there’s that discussion as well as like you, you’re asking where do we put these housing units? If you have to stop putting them on periphery on these cheap. Pieces of land with cheap housing construction, you have to start going inward. [00:44:02] And so what does that mean for the cost of housing and production? What does that mean for the codes and stuff, the zoning reforms, all that thing, all those things that happened with that. So I found that really interesting. The research that they were working on, that was like, California and Texas are really not that different when it comes to how this is going to end up. [00:44:17] California just happens to be in the future. [00:44:20] Vishaan Chakrabarti: The thing is the things that we call cities outside of the big cities. Okay. Are marked with parking and the detritus of urban renewal and that Goldilocks scale is the perfect scale for those cities. Inner city, Detroit inner city, Houston, because a, there’s a lot of those cities that are composed of single family housing fabric already. [00:44:46] It’s not, right? And so that scale works. But the other thing is, if you just look at the basic economics. It’s incredibly hard to make concrete buildings with elevators and fire stairs work in those environments. They just don’t pencil, right? And I think that model is a really good replicable kind of prototype for how to do infill density. [00:45:11] In a lot of our cities that really want that info density, because, young people want to live there. And and you can do that relatively inexpensively and it has this whole carbon negative aspect. I think it can be an important part of the conversation, which goes back to this thing about the 3 million new housing units and what could they be? [00:45:29] Jeff Wood: Yeah. And I think politically they get out of a lot of trouble by not mentioning that, but they have to address it somehow. You can’t just build more housing on the periphery. It just doesn’t make sense from what they’re trying to do from an environmental standpoint with a climate change action. [00:45:43] And the [00:45:44] Vishaan Chakrabarti: federal government does that all over the place, right? Like we’re, we want this competition design, air traffic control towers, this R2D2 thing you mentioned, right? There are all sorts of sustainability criteria and other criteria. Like It’s just not that hard to bake in criteria that says, if you want government grants, you need to, do things a certain way and especially for municipalities to say, hey, you want money to build housing. [00:46:07] Great. You’ve got to loosen up some voting restrictions and you’ve got to do the following things. And then it becomes the municipalities choice, whether they want to do that or not, that is really a SOP for the federal government. It’s just not such a big deal. And that’s what’s really exciting about this moment. [00:46:25] We can stop fighting about the what, and we can start thinking about the how, right? And that’s interesting, because you can engage communities in that question, and you can just, you can start to imagine a very different way. The constitution, what the American dream means, because for a lot of people now, the American dream is not that long and two SUVs in the driveway. [00:46:47] There isn’t a substitute vision, right? And so we have this idea about American dream. It’s about opportunity. That’s great. But there’s still a lot of people who have in their heads that it’s the suburban house and the two kids in the driveway. This is a moment where we can stop squabbling about what an American family means. [00:47:05] We know now that American family means lots of different things, lots of different people. Same idea. Then, therefore, their housing should mean lots of different things for lots of different people. How they get to work should mean lots of different things for lots of different people. And opening that up and having that conversation about the how, that to me is the most exciting part of this moment. [00:47:24] Jeff Wood: How would you frame that? The previous framing was a car. Never drive it in a chicken, the pot of every house or something like that. Something along those lines, like how would you frame that for a new generation? Cause that’s, whoever comes up with that phrase or framing wins the contest. [00:47:36] Right. [00:47:37] Vishaan Chakrabarti: In the first book, I called it an infrastructure of opportunity. And so I was thrilled when Harris came out with this opportunity economy label, because if you look at the origins of the American dream, it has nothing to do with houses and cars is written by a guy named James Tristell, Adam 1931, I think. [00:47:55] And it, Is about equal opportunity for every man and woman in the country, pretty advanced for 1931, right? That was the American dream. And so that’s what I’m saying. You can then translate that into like multiple visions for how people live. We don’t need a 1 size fits all. It certainly isn’t a nuclear family living in a single family house with 2 cars in the driveway. [00:48:18] And again, Goldilocks is a model for some people, for other people that live in a single family house, hopefully near rail based transit. Other people who live in apartments in the city, that’s fine, but let’s give people the range of options and again, I think that will start to address the two big issues we’ve got as a society, political division and climate change, because it starts to create a kind of communal density. [00:48:44] Jeff Wood: There’s a section in your book that talks about young architects and their anui, and there’s a number of references to their paths to anui. And I’m wondering what you hope for young architects and young people generally, because I feel like that’s something that you focus on. [00:48:56] Vishaan Chakrabarti: Yeah, I spent a lot of time in and out of academia, and I spent a lot of time speaking to younger people younger people, meaning 20s, 30s. [00:49:05] And architects are always you know, they’re, it’s a crazy profession. People feel like they’re disrespected. It’s amazing. If you go to pick out stone in Italy and you understand a place where architects are respected, literally you’re treated like a prime minister or something when you land. [00:49:21] But in most places, people don’t understand us. They don’t understand what we do. They confuse us with builders. They don’t like, they just don’t get what we do. One of the challenges for this book was to have it read for multiple audiences. So I absolutely wanted it to read for policymakers and policy wonks and people in the world who think about how you construct our built environment and especially around climate change and social division at the same time. [00:49:47] It is a kind of challenge to my own discipline because my discipline has argued itself out of its own relevance. I talk about the fact that we have continuously been more and more risk averse and gotten ourselves away from things that would, you know, present risk. And so you relegate yourself to the kiddie table, and then you complain about the chicken nuggets, right? [00:50:09] And this leaves young architecture students really adrift because. I came of age when success in architecture meant building some spaceship in the sand built by slaves. And this architecture thing was born, and that is not at all what undergirds the beginnings of modern architecture. The beginning of modern architecture was a social movement. [00:50:33] And so giving young architects a potential new direction of what they can consider as success is part of what the book tries to lay out. So what I had to weave in there is like, why a policymaker would care about such an issue. And they should care about that issue, the same reason that they care. Law schools are pumping out good ethical attorneys that are thinking about the law and smart and new ways or doctors or economists or any other major discipline in our world that impacts things like climate, right? [00:51:09] And so hopefully young artists will get something out of the book that helps give them some sense of hope and a kind of why about what they do, because most of them are smart enough to go do something that earns them more money and whatever. But It’s a passion profession, but passion towards what is the question? [00:51:28] Jeff Wood: Is it hard? There’s an ethical line that you follow in your work and discuss in the book about not working for dictators, not working on jails, not doing those types of things, but some of the young architects might get pulled into that stuff because they’re working for a large firm that decides that for them or they decide to work, it’s hard or it’s hard to find a job and the job that they find is the one that doesn’t have kind of the higher ideals that they might want for themselves. [00:51:53] Vishaan Chakrabarti: I think it’s really important for young people to have a voice, and they do have a voice today. And, it’s getting harder and harder. I know some of those large corporate firms and some of them are stepping away from designing prisons. Some of them are stepping away from designing in Saudi Arabia. [00:52:05] We got called to work on this absurd Neom thing, this MBS project 3 times, and we said no every time. And it is, I’ll tell you where it’s hard. It’s hard because it’s very hard to make ends meet. But I think the more young people push on the profession, and there are groups of young people who do this, who organize separate from their jobs in nonprofits and so forth, who push on the profession and say, the profession has to have a higher bar for itself. [00:52:32] It the book talks about a Hippocratic oath. For our profession, then that’s going to lift all boats, right? There’s going to be fewer architects in the future because of AI. And what do those fewer architecture firms do? I’m hopeful there because, back when I was a baby architect, you couldn’t say boo to your boss. [00:52:49] That’s just not the way things are anymore. [00:52:53] Jeff Wood: There are a number of projects your firm has done, and this is something I ask most folks and they hem and haw about it, but I’m wondering which one you’re most proud of or which one is most interesting to you. [00:53:02] Vishaan Chakrabarti: That is a toughie. In the book, we try to lay out a number of examples, both historical examples and things done by other firms that kind of set the stage for, so it’s not just like promoting our work. [00:53:12] I thought that was very important. But it’s hard for me not to say Domino right now. I’ve been working on the Domino Sugar Refinery in the park around it for 10 years, and it’s a point of tremendous pride because not only did I think it came out beautifully, and the owner developer, Two Trees is amazing, and they did an extraordinary job with it, and, the community was very much a part of how that whole thing came to be. [00:53:38] It’s also, it exemplifies this thing that we started the conversation with, which is it is a lot of density on that site. There’s transit in terms of ferry and biking. I wish there was more transit. There’s still hope for a light rail line someday. The community really pressed Jeff for this idea that it shouldn’t just be these banal buildings. [00:54:01] And that the new architecture, and in our case, what we designed, the sugar refinery, which is a weave of old and new, needed to channel the character of this place. And so this notion that architecture can help pull history forward into the future is, I think, for many people, again, not everyone, some people are always going to be nimby, but for many people, compelling if you can explain to them the stakes. [00:54:25] And that’s when the technocratic stuff becomes really important. If you say, look, 7 billion going to 10. We all know that there’s basic statistics. People are trying to urbanize. We have a housing crisis. I think most people were good. People will hear all that. But then if you can explain to that, then that you’re going to do it in a way. [00:54:43] That has quality that has bearing in terms of their understanding of their own neighborhoods. This is a notion of a palimpsest of layering history. So Domino, I feel like does all that pretty well. And so right now, especially since that’s our major built work architecture. Takes so long, right? There’s other things on the horizon, but like right now, that’s the thing. [00:55:07] I’m the proudest of rock and roll hall of fame expansions coming in Cleveland. There’s a building in Princeton that’s coming bridge under construction in Indianapolis, so there’s a lot of fun stuff, but that’s the one that like makes my heart go a flutter. [00:55:22] Jeff Wood: That’s awesome. I have a Cleveland band for you that plays only transit music. [00:55:26] If you’re interested, [00:55:27] Vishaan Chakrabarti: excellent. [00:55:27] Jeff Wood: There’ll be on the show soon. [00:55:29] Vishaan Chakrabarti: Cleveland’s an amazing rock city. [00:55:32] Jeff Wood: And also as a Star Wars fan, I must admit I was impressed by the ability to get an R2 D2 reference in a discussion about air traffic control towers. Absolutely. It’s also great too. [00:55:43] Vishaan Chakrabarti: Thumbs up for the stout. [00:55:44] Enough with skinny models, R2 D2s. [00:55:50] Jeff Wood: It’s never really easy writing a book, as we know from the folks who have written books and been on the show, and it’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of stress, but also a lot of fun, too. I’m wondering, was there something that was easy about it? [00:56:02] Vishaan Chakrabarti: Oh, for me, writing is my great therapy. [00:56:05] I just wrote a piece in vital city. Things come to me and I have to write them down. And, both the design of buildings and the writing of anything like editing is something that’s an incredible art form in both designing something and writing something my daughter was asking me if I’d ever retire and I’m like, no. [00:56:24] And then she pushed me and said But what would you do dad? If you just, if you didn’t have to work anymore. And I just, I said, I think I’d sit around all day and think about the difference between synonyms. It’s crazy that there are all these words that kind of mean the same thing, but they have these sort of little shady distinctions. [00:56:45] I don’t mean shady in a bad way. Shades of distinction between them. And I love that. I love that about language. It’s very similar to architecture about one kind of brick versus another kind of brick and why and you know writing a book is Incredibly challenging, I had a really great Publisher this time especially last time was great too. [00:57:03] But this is this university press. It’s an academic press the whole other level you would think that the writing was the hard part And this is a seven year project and writing. There was a lot of rewrites. The pandemic happened and insurrection happened. There’s a lot of stuff that happened. [00:57:18] But also when you go through academic review and then you’re, you just can’t wait to get to the fun stuff of figuring out graphic design. And Penny Ram was an incredible graphic designer. But look, the other thing is it’s absolutely terrifying. Cause it’s there for posterity. Like this essay I just published in vital city. [00:57:36] I wrote my publisher and I said, Oh, it’s missing a comma here. It’s already out. And he just changed it. And it’s fine. You can’t do that with a book, right? Like a book is out there for posterity. That is. Absolutely terrifying. But just I believe. In the analog virtues of architecture film or vinyl books are right in there. [00:58:01] And that’s not to be a Luddite. It is just, I think the digital world has made us even more fond. Of the physical things that give us joy and for me, books are absolutely that and the more I know about how they’re made and the paper and the whole thing, [00:58:21] Jeff Wood: it’s fantastic. I want to say I’m holding the book right now. [00:58:24] And the coolest thing to me, and I read a lot of books, but the coolest thing to me is this huge fold out. With all of the, with all of the city plans and street network grids and all that stuff. I love that. It’s just remind me of planning. My publisher [00:58:39] Vishaan Chakrabarti: just rocks because we realized that this was going to be really hard to do on a two page spread. [00:58:45] And I had, by the way, I should say this amazing in house research team in my office who spent just untold hours. Doing the drawings and the research, and they’re all name by name in the back of the book, but that gatefold, I am hoping that in fact, that entire chapter is something that people use in schools, like people should understand the history of these things. [00:59:07] And, we went through this really ugly period in the 1980s, where history became historicism and it became turned into really bad architecture. And so that got rejected by the academy. And then the next thing, no one was teaching history anymore. And postmodernism and you didn’t need to know history anymore, right? [00:59:26] Any, everyone’s truth was everyone’s individual truth. No, I’m sorry. There’s history. And so hopefully the book will help ground people back into that. [00:59:36] Jeff Wood: I think you should make it into a poster. Honestly, you should, people should buy the book and get it, but you should make it into a poster. What a really good idea. [00:59:42] When I was a kid, when I was in high school, I liked star Wars and I liked certain movies. And I was runner too, as I ran track and cross country. And so I would go into the magazines and I’d cut out all the clips and stuff. And then I put them on my wall. And this feels as my older planner self, this feels like something I’d want on my wall. [00:59:56] So poster. [00:59:57] Vishaan Chakrabarti: Wow. You’re going to get royalties for that [01:00:02] Jeff Wood: one. I don’t need them, but I would love a poster if you make one. [01:00:04] Vishaan Chakrabarti: Okay. Fair enough. [01:00:07] Jeff Wood: The book is the architecture of urbanity designing for nature, culture, and joy. Where can folks find a copy? You [01:00:13] Vishaan Chakrabarti: can pre order it on Amazon right now. It’ll be out the end of September and it should be in local bookstores and small, design bookshops and other kinds of bookshops like that. [01:00:23] We’ve targeted a lot of small bookstores for its distribution. It’s against Princeton university press. It has this nice silver cover. Yeah. It’s a beautiful book. Yeah. And so it should be pretty easy to get. [01:00:35] Jeff Wood: Awesome. And where can folks find you if you wish to be found? [01:00:38] Vishaan Chakrabarti: The easiest way to email me is info at pow. [01:00:41] studio. Website, or I’m on social media at vsan NYC on the thing that Elon Musk destroyed or LinkedIn. [01:00:50] Jeff Wood: Vsan, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time. [01:00:52] Vishaan Chakrabarti: Thanks, really a pleasure. Appreciate it.
