(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 552: Under a Highway in Birmingham Alabama
October 8, 2025
This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Ben Donsky of Agora Partners to discuss City Walk BHAM in Birmingham Alabama, a public space project that connects two sides of the city separated by a highway. We chat about positive public space, doing something instead of nothing, and what it takes to make projects like this happen.
To listen to this episode head on over to Streetsblog USA, or find it in our hosting archive.
Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript:
[00:00:00] Jeff Wood: Ben Donsky, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.
Ben Donsky: Thank you Jeff.
Jeff Wood: Thanks for being here, before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
[00:02:20] Ben Donsky: Sure. I’m an urban planner. I have been practicing for about 22 years.And you know what they say? Practice makes well, a planner. A planner, exactly. And um, my. Work has really focused on public spaces and helping my clients, so all kinds of different entities, government foundations, as well as a variety of different types of private sector entities. How to develop what are called high, high-performing public spaces, so [00:03:00] meaning public spaces that really.
Aim to meet the needs and desires of surrounding communities. I’m based in New York City. I have lived in New York longer than I have lived anywhere else, 20 plus years. But I grew up all over the country and I work all over the country. Grew up in rural and suburban and urban environments, and to get to continue visiting all those different types of places.
In the work that I do, which is very lucky.
[00:03:35] Jeff Wood: Do you find that background and experience helps you kind of navigate some of the, not the politics, but the different folks who might be interested in different things when you’re talking about public space?
[00:03:44] Ben Donsky: Yeah. I think being able to go into situations and listen and ask questions is extremely important because you know, it’s the same types of skills that help you.
As a kid, move to a new city or town and learn about the local culture. You know, it is a lot of the same types of skills that I use today, and I think I also developed a kind of curiosity about the differences between these places when I was growing up. And so now, you know, I, I get to really explore those things.
So I think there’s definitely a connection.
[00:04:26] Jeff Wood: Do you feel like a little bit of a shapeshifter sometimes? Like I, I do my family, my mom grew up here in San Francisco where I am now, and then I grew up in Texas, in Houston. And then, so if I am here in San Francisco, I’m a multi-generational San Franciscan. But if I am in Houston, I was born in Humble Texas.
So it’s like wherever I go, I can fit in a little bit and not be yelled at for being in California and Texas, or not being in Texan in California.
[00:04:48] Ben Donsky: So as a teenager, I moved from the Orlando, Florida area to San Francisco. Which is a pretty, pretty shocking,
[00:04:56] Jeff Wood: that’s a pretty different experience, right?
[00:04:58] Ben Donsky: Yeah.
We could talk more about San Francisco offline, but yeah, I, uh, I think that was a really formative experience. And then going from, you know, an inner city, public high school, then to an elite private college. Was another kind of big shift. So I think, yeah, being able to talk to different types of people is extremely important.
I I don’t love the term shapeshift.
[00:05:25] Jeff Wood: It came to my head an understanding of many different people in places.
[00:05:29] Ben Donsky: Yeah. Getting an understanding all those people. But I also think there’s something very critical about, you know, not changing who you are, depending on the context, because I think. Being honest and open and sincere with people is such an important part of placemaking and such an important part of community-based economic development and place-based economic development.
And people can tell when you are. Faking [00:06:00] it. That makes sense. I guess I should clarify on my end, like, you know, when I, when I would go to public meetings here in San Francisco for bus rapid transit or something along those lines, and there’s a lot of nativist folks, right? There’s a lot of folks who won’t listen to you or even listen to where you’re coming from.
[00:06:13] Jeff Wood: If you tell them that you’re from another place, they’re like, oh, you’re from outside. And so I feel like that’s kind of like the tough spot that a lot of planners are in when they come into places in cities. Oh,
[00:06:21] Ben Donsky: totally. Yeah.
[00:06:21] Jeff Wood: And come in and people are like, well, you’re not from here, so you don’t understand.
And so well, I always tell people wherever city I go, I, I am. Never going to be more of an expert in your community than you are, right? I don’t live there. I don’t work there. I am visiting there on occasion. That’s not my job. My job is not to become an expert and know everything about your community.
[00:06:45] Ben Donsky: My job is to figure out how to translate techniques, principles, methods that have been. Successful in other places, in other contexts, figuring out how to apply those to your specific context to meet your specific goals. And so the answers from project to project, the recommendations are always changing, right?
Everything is gonna be unique to a specific community, but a lot of those methods and techniques and ways of thinking about. Public space, ways of thinking about developing, activating, and managing public spaces, those translate and what we can do is help empower people in their communities and build capacity in those communities so they can, you know, leverage all of those methods and tools to create great places.
[00:07:48] Jeff Wood: Yeah, it’s funny, I’ve, I’ve heard other folks say that they’re never, uh, more of an expert than when they’re from out of town because they go forbids in their own town and they never get them. But then if they go to other towns, they do because people like the outside expertise. It’s a funny back and forth.
[00:08:02] Ben Donsky: Yeah. There’s definitely an element of that. Right. I, I do think, I also think there is some advantage to, you know, being removed from a situation of not having all of the baggage. That accompanies some of these projects, but that’s not, you know, that’s not the same in my mind as expertise in their community.
[00:08:25] Jeff Wood: Sure. Yeah. I wanna go back in time a little bit like when you were a little kid, were you always interested in cities and planning and urban issues?
[00:08:32] Ben Donsky: I started when I was probably a kid, I started looking at New York City transit maps and whenever we would visit. New York. I had an older brother who moved here when I was about eight, so that’s probably when I started to fall in love with New York and started to fall in love with cities.
And I [00:09:00] loved the idea of this complex transit system that had all these moving pieces, but it, I think it was really a couple of things moving to San Francisco. And then being put in the middle of a gentrifying neighborhood, right? Being kind of part of the first wave of gentrification, of part of Noe Valley.
Further up Dolores Street, like up what they call like upper Noe Valley.
[00:09:27] Jeff Wood: that’s where I am.
[00:09:29] Ben Donsky: So you know it well, I grew up partially on 27th and Dolores in the mid nineties. During the transition it was, it was already a always a safe place, but being part of that gentrification and then again learning the transit system backwards and forwards and just falling in love with that.
And then strangely, uh, seeing the movie Roger in Me, which is all happened around that same time. I was probably about 15 years old. And there’s this section in the movie Roger and Me, which has made a huge impression, uh, about festival marketplaces. And when they put the auto world in, in Flint and it failed.
And then there was also Michael Moore did a another TV show, TV Nation, I think. And he compared two aquariums in it. One was downtown Camden and the other was downtown Chattanooga. And. I just found this type of stuff fascinating, and so I started to get really interested in downtown redevelopment as a teenager, so I’ve, yeah, I’ve been interested in cities probably since I was about eight or nine years old.
[00:10:34] Jeff Wood: I love it. I love hearing people’s stories about how they get into this stuff too. We talk about this all the time on the show, but like everybody comes at it from a circuitous, you know, direction, becoming a city planner or becoming a grapher or whatever somebody may be. But folks out there listening that might not feel like they have a root to being or doing something that they love, they actually do because there’s so many different ways.
And so I ask people about their childhoods a lot. Alright. I wanna talk with you about Birmingham. You’ve been working on this project in Birmingham, creating public space under a highway. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about how this project came about and some of the details maybe of the city and the highway itself.
[00:11:08] Ben Donsky: Sure. So to be clear, we actually, I started working on this personally when I was at my previous firm. This would’ve been in early 2016, was I was first involved and. We wrapped up our work. We’re not currently working on City Walk Birmingham. Our last work for them finished, I believe in about two years ago, but I was involved, you know, off and on for about seven and a half years from the initial conception and planning of the project all the way through its operation.
So the project actually emerged as a compromise. Between Alabama, DOT, and a variety of different community members, [00:12:00] some of whom had organized themselves into a nonprofit group that was attempting to stop a highway reconstruction project, this highway when it was originally built in Birmingham. This is highway interstate.
59 and Interstate 20, they come together. If you look at an aerial photo of where this highway goes, you will notice a curious bend right at the location of City Walk. That bend in the highway route is a result of highway planners when this was originally built, intentionally destroying. The neighborhood where all of the civil rights leaders in Birmingham were living.
So I think it’s really, really important to start with the idea that there had been a thriving black neighborhood. This neighborhood was destroyed intentionally to build a highway. And possibly, I’m sure they hoped. Interfere with the civil rights movement. So when it was time for Alabama, DOT to reconstruct this highway because its useful, life had expired, this was obviously gonna be very controversial.
I I, I would’ve thought if I were at Alabama, DOTI would’ve said, oh yeah, this is gonna be a really controversial project. We should get out in front of that. But they they didn’t, and I was actually brought in on the recommendation of a lighting designer. ’cause this was a highway project. So the designer who was doing all the lighting for the highway as well as regular highway lighting as well as architectural and decorative lighting, I had previously worked with on several projects, including a couple in Newark, New Jersey.
And he basically pitched me to Alabama Department of Transportation as a white guy who was gonna be comfortable. Talking to all of the black constituents that they were not comfortable talking to, and my first work on the project was essentially to go in and figure out is there a viable program?
Is there a feasible program? For a public space underneath a highway that could actually engage the community and be desired, valued. Could it meet some existing needs, open space needs in Birmingham [00:15:00] if we were to put it under a highway and can we get to a community driven solution for that park?
And when I started. Obviously people were extremely skeptical that something like this could work, that it would be a pleasant place to be. And I should note that a lot of community residents really wanted to bury the highway. They wanted to bury it and cap it. Which was funny because one of the projects that they pointed to as a precedent was one that I, I had been involved with for many years called Clyde Warren Park in Dallas, which I worked on for something like eight years or something.
And I was told, you cannot mention Clyde Warren Park because Alabama DOT will go crazy if you mention that they’re not gonna bury the park, not gonna cap it. They don’t have the money. And so that was really off the table. And I, and I do believe that bury it was, I don’t think it was ever really on the table.
[00:16:01] Jeff Wood: The DOT made it so that it was basically not on the table. Anything’s possible, but yeah, anything is possible. Right? But it’s like, but the DOT had probably decided a long time ago that like, they’re not burying the highway or making it into a surface level boulevard.
[00:16:12] Ben Donsky: Well, and the reality is it’s elevated on both sides, either side of downtown.
So they would’ve taken an elevated highway, had it go underground, and then have it go elevate again, which, you know, I’m not an engineer. I can imagine that’s complicated. But yeah, anything is possible with money but yeah, DOT was never gonna bury it. And in fact, there was probably more skepticism at DOT around the viability of a public space under the project than there was in the community after we did some extensive community engagement, I think over the course of six to eight months.
We were able to have a series of meetings with a lot of different constituents and which really I was actually surprised that we got to that point because the first meeting I went to there was so much bad blood between DOT and different stakeholders, not just the black community, really all of the representatives from neighborhood councils and neighborhood organizations.
Were opposed to the project. Very skeptical. Had a very, very poor relationship with DOT, and so it took us several workshops to really figure out, okay, this is a venue that maybe can make up for the lack of high quality play facilities and a lack of green space in some other neighborhoods. Like how can we specifically incorporate.
Play facilities was one, a big one was skating facilities. [00:18:00] There was no, not, there was no skate park anywhere in Birmingham and people had to drive to, I think, Tuscaloosa to get to the closest skate park. So we had, you know, skating community to BMX community showing up in big numbers, and that was really, really helpful.
But you know, we had 31 acres of space, so it really wasn’t too challenging to carve out different uses and programs for different spaces and then, you know, develop a management structure that would allow for all of those great things to happen and allow for third party organizations in the community to really produce a lot of these events and with financial support from public agencies.
[00:18:51] Jeff Wood: What’s on both sides of the highway? I’m looking at a map out of it right now. It looks like downtown and it looks like a bunch of hotels and basically the convention center.
[00:19:00] Ben Donsky: So the convention center and the adjacent entertainment district was all originally developed as part of this very large urban renewal.
Project, which included the highway
[00:19:15] Jeff Wood: when they first built the highway.
[00:19:16] Ben Donsky: Correct. So on one side of the highway, it’s the convention center On the other side, it is the historic downtown core, but it’s largely institutional uses. There’s a jail in one of the buildings. There is the performing arts high school for the state of Alabama, which was a really cool thing to have adjacent to the space, but it’s largely institutional and government buildings.
On one side and, and then the convention center on the other.
[00:19:47] Jeff Wood: I’m curious about the discussions that you had with the local, like black community, with folks who are interested in seeing what would happen with this space. Um, obviously the DOT was not really budging on any big changes, but also like what got them to change their mind.
Like what was it that got it into their head that this was actually maybe possible?
[00:20:07] Ben Donsky: I think it is really important to remember that. Individuals in public agencies can sometimes still have a significant impact. And there was a gentleman, the regional engineer for Aldot, a gentleman named De Jarvis Leonard.
I think once he was convinced that this was going to be something that the community would embrace or could embrace, then he wanted to make sure. From the DOT side that it was gonna happen and that they were gonna do everything they could. Did I ever have a formal, extensive, or informal, extensive conversation with him about his personal motivations?
Not really, but it was hard to be a part of, [00:21:00] you know, multiple rounds of community engagement. Over multiple years and not be affected emotionally by some of the stories that you heard from people who were senior citizens now, but were children or teenagers when their homes were taken away from them, or even kids, teenagers, young adults today, talking about literally not having a place to go do this specific.
Recreational activity, you know, it becomes very obvious. This is a, this is a space that is really gonna be needed. Right. And so I think I, I cannot really give enough credit to, to Jarvis Leonard of him kind of pushing through whatever red tape to make sure that. We could put structures underneath a highway, which is hard to do.
We’re currently working on a highway project in St. Petersburg, Florida, and everyone we go through, this is, I think our fourth one. We have these same conversations with DOT about, oh, you can’t put any permanent structures under there. Well, what do you mean by permanent? And we kind of. You know, come to some resolution, but, and some negotiation.
But I think he really tried to make sure we were gonna have the structures and the amenities necessary permission to do those things from DOT and FHWA to help activate the space and make it valuable. And you know, I think also the involvement of the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Center Authority was really, really critical.
They actually manage and operate the space. Now that wasn’t. Originally the plan, but from the very beginning, the convention center who operates, you know, not just the convention center, but also the, the, uh, arena Stadium and the Entertainment district, they understood that a really successful public space here would be good for them financially, get more visitors, maybe benefit some conventions, but they also understood how projects like this.
Can affect people’s perceptions about downtowns and affect people’s perceptions about cities. So they understood it from an economic development perspective. So I think they were able to lobby aldot from that angle. And so Aldot was simultaneously hearing from the community and going through a much more extensive and unusual community engagement process for them.
’cause they’re typically doing standard check the box. Public engagement engage for building highways and maintaining highways. They’re not doing the more extensive and more, I’ll just say creative types of engagement that you do when you’re developing parks and public spaces. So the combination of that, the economic development arguments that they were hearing, I think it all kind of came together for them, and Aldot became a supporter.
[00:23:52] Jeff Wood: I do wonder about the results of having people play and recreate under a highway. I know that other highway [00:24:00] caps and lids around the country have seen lots of pollution, lots of particulate matter increases. We know that, you know, building apartments near highways in places like Los Angeles and even Oakland are subject to higher concentrations of particulate matter and also higher instances of asthma and other respiratory diseases.
So I’m wondering obviously it’s the best. Thing you could do with what Alabama DOT was doing, but also there’s some negative impacts of that overall for a longer term. How do you mitigate that?
[00:24:27] Ben Donsky: Well, uh, so first I would say that if you’re choosing between building a park not next to a highway, or not under a highway, and one under a highway, choose the one that’s not next to or under a highway, right?
I think that’s pretty obvious, but that’s not usually the choice that we’re facing. So the real question becomes how do you program and activate the space in light of those potential concerns? Because if the real question is, well, are we gonna develop a public space here, or are we just gonna let it go to weeds?
Which is, that’s typically the choice, right? It’s are we gonna develop a public space under this highway? Are we gonna do nothing? I’d say building the public space is better, right? But yes, absolutely. We need to be cognizant of those issues. Air quality, particulate matter. Uh, look, I’m not a, not a scientist, I’m an urban planner, but my understanding is that those issues are very site specific, context specific, that there are probably places where it is more dangerous to do this type of project and places where it is less dangerous.
To do this type of project, you know, we’re probably not gonna recommend people doing, you know, an entire marathon underneath a highway, right? But can you do a lower impact? 45 minute Tai Chi class. If the sound conditions allow for it, maybe that’s okay. So it’s important to take those things into account, but I think it’s also important to remember like the choice that we’re we have here is not necessarily, oh, should we build a park someplace else versus under this highway, at least when I’m getting involved, that’s not on the table.
It’s should we do something under this highway or should we do nothing under this highway? How is it funded? CityWalk was funded as part of the larger highway project, so that was through mostly federal funds.
[00:26:33] Jeff Wood: I guess the IAJA came out after this was almost completed, right? So there would be no reconnecting communities funding or anything along those, because there was a lot of money in the i a for these types of things.
Actually, initially it would’ve been like 20 billion, got knocked down to 1 billion and now it’s gone again. But there was money for a lot of types projects like this to reconnect communities that had been ripped apart by the construction of highways back in the fifties, sixties and seventies.
[00:26:57] Ben Donsky: Yeah, no, this project was funded before that We [00:27:00] wanted to complete it in advance.
Of the World Games, which were in Birmingham in 2021,
[00:27:08] Jeff Wood: who uses the space now?
[00:27:10] Ben Donsky: A lot of different types of people use the space, so I have seen coaches with high school students doing football drills. I have seen people taking quinceanera photos. There’s a spot, there’s one particular spot in City Walk that’s become a really popular place for taking photos.
So lots of quinceaneras and wedding photos. There are downtown residents, greater downtown residents, using the really large dog park. That was a big need. There was no dog park anywhere in Greater Downtown Birmingham. We’ve got some downtown office workers, a lot of families at the big playground, so you know, it’s really diverse.
And then on big event days, you’ll see more event visitors, more people from out of town. You know, if there’s a UAB football game or a big event at the arena, you know, that changes the makeup quite a bit. But on a normal non-event day, you’ll see a lot of people from around the region on the weekends and on weekdays, it’s kind of more people from downtown and surrounding neighborhoods.
[00:28:17] Jeff Wood: I’m also wondering the folks who had concerns on both sides, the DOT and the local community groups, how are they feeling about the outcome?
[00:28:26] Ben Donsky: Well, I’ll confess, I don’t have any particular insight beyond what one can read by, you know, searching through social media and looking at at press coverage. But if you look at the number of visitors and you look at the social media.
It seems to be very, very positive. The skate park, definitely lots of people taking photos at the skate park. Definitely has been really well received. So yeah, it seems like it’s been very, very positive. I’d say the one challenge that has continued is not really related to use of the space. It’s more about revenue development and management.
It has been challenging for the Convention Center authority to develop all the revenue that’s needed to operate the space.
[00:29:20] Jeff Wood: That’s one thing that kept on popping up in my searches when I was looking at the background and research is some of the funding shortages and, and troubles. And I feel like that’s something that’s pretty unfortunately normal with a lot of parks and recreational areas is it’s hard to find funding, especially if they’re not like specifically revenue generating.
They can generate revenue and they generate wellbeing and there’s something to be said for public spaces. Basically it shouldn’t have to generate revenue. It’s not a business, it’s a community asset, but then there is the need to pay people to do certain things. So.
[00:29:49] Ben Donsky: Yeah, and, and I think it’s important to remember that a space under a highway can’t ever become a park, a formal, official park, so that sometimes makes it more [00:30:00] challenging because there is no dedicated source of funds that can be tapped into.
In this case, all of the public money has to be specifically appropriated for this project. And the city of Birmingham, to my knowledge, was always very, very upfront and said. We don’t have enough money to pay for our existing parks. There’s no way we’re ever gonna be able to spend a dollar here. And you know, I am very sympathetic to that argument.
Especially because, to your point, I do believe this is a space that can generate some revenue through events, through there is a beer garden in the space and you know, if a park is gonna be generating revenue. It’s not really fair to be taking dollars away from parks that can’t, especially, you know, parks like this.
In downtowns, they produce a lot of economic benefits, and so the real question is, can you capture a portion of those benefits to help operate the park? And for a variety of reasons, in Birmingham, they have not been able to do that.
[00:31:09] Jeff Wood: What do you take away from this project to your next projects?
[00:31:14] Ben Donsky: So I actually think this is one of the more challenging under highway public spaces.
Certainly it’s the most challenging I’ve ever been involved with. I think it’s one of the more challenging of any in the country because of the surrounding land uses that we mentioned because of the history and the context of the site. So in a certain way. One of the lessons I take away, well, if this can get built, you know a project that is contentious, that has no real owner in a sense, the designer and I used to have a joke about this is a project that has no client, because when we were first working on it, DOT didn’t want this thing.
They didn’t wanna run it, the city didn’t wanna run it. Convention Center didn’t wanna run it. So we joke, we, we had a project without a client and so. This was a really, really challenging situation, when I’m working in St. Petersburg, Florida right now, I’m saying, well, this is, this is cake compared to Birmingham.
So if Birmingham can get built and Birmingham can be popular and work and attract all those people, then I think we have an opportunity to do this in places that have better foot traffic, that have better economic fundamentals, that have better surrounding land uses, that have all kinds of things that we didn’t have.
In Birmingham. So I’m actually optimistic about the potential for these spaces to have impacts on communities all around the country if we let them go forward.
[00:32:58] Jeff Wood: What was surprising to you about this project? I mean, [00:33:00] you mentioned a couple of things here, but was there anything that surprised you or like that made you think, this is not what I expected, but maybe as a good outcome?
[00:33:08] Ben Donsky: One thing I was nervous about. Was actually dedicating as much space as we did to recreation, meaning primarily pickleball courts. ’cause that’s in this day and age, a lot of what that means. But also I had mentioned like some general multi-use turf fields, and we have a couple multi-use courts. I was nervous about those spaces and whether they were gonna really become dead zones and you know, well not so much the pickleball courts.
We knew those were gonna be busy, but all the other recreational facilities, I was nervous those were gonna become dead zones. And we have seen so much formal and informal use of those spaces. So that was really a really positive surprise. And you know, the other thing is I really have been surprised. To the degree that the space has been embraced by all different segments of the Birmingham community and something that’s really cool there is, I didn’t know that Birmingham had a small.
But active South Asian community and we got a holy festival at City Walk and that was really cool, really surprising to me. Also, you know, you, you do these products you hope that people will, will find the space. You hope that you have designed it and created programming parameters that are flexible enough.
To allow for a lot of different types of activities, but also with the infrastructure to allow for specific things to happen. You know, you, you plan spaces to work like that, but it doesn’t always happen that way in the end. And so when you see the result and you see all of these different local community-based groups actually moving their events to the space or creating new events for the space, I mean, that’s just about the best thing that you could ask for.
[00:35:19] Jeff Wood: For sure. So what’s up next for you besides the the Florida project? Are there other ones that are figuring out what to do with their under highway spaces?
[00:35:27] Ben Donsky: Yeah, so like I said, right now we just kicked off Trails Crossing Park in St. Petersburg, Florida, uh, a couple weeks ago. And we are also working in Sacramento for the City of Sacramento on Old Sacramento, which is connected to downtown via a pedestrian tunnel that goes under a highway.
Uh, you may be familiar with that one. So we’re working with them to address some of that and then. We’re also, uh, I think gonna be getting started now on a [00:36:00] project in Louisville. And that one is for a private developer looking to do sports adjacent development at their minor league baseball stadium.
Nice. Which is next to a highway and there is another public space opportunity underneath the highway.
[00:36:17] Jeff Wood: Awesome. Well, where can folks find out more about what you’re doing?
[00:36:21] Ben Donsky: Agora partners.com. That’s A-G-O-R-A partners.com. That’s our website and uh, I am not a real big social media guy to be honest with you though I am on LinkedIn and you can find me on LinkedIn.
And anybody who’s listening wants to start a conversation, I am totally open to, uh, dms and just about anything you want to talk about. Probably related to parks and public spaces I would think. But my dms are open on LinkedIn and uh, I’ve got a Reddit account, but I’m not gonna say what that is.
[00:36:58] Jeff Wood: Okay, that’s fair. Well, it’s funny, I was on Reddit and folks were posting positive things about the parks, so, well
[00:37:03] Ben Donsky: that’s great. I’ll say I do not ever comment on my own work on Red.
[00:37:09] Jeff Wood: They were really excited that on Hot Days it was one of the few places downtown where they could get shade. So
[00:37:13] Ben Donsky: there are some advantages to these spaces.
Yeah. Ben, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.
Hey, thanks so much, Jeff. I really appreciate the time to talk,
