(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 494: Bandaids on a Lack of Density

This week on the Talking Headways podcast swe’re joined by Nico Larco, Director of the Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon. We chat about his new book with Kaarin Knudson, The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook as well as a realization about how most of what we do in the United States seems to be bandaids for a lack of urban density.

To listen to this episode, visit Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of this episode.

Jeff Wood: [00:01:00] Nico Larco, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Nico Larco: It is so great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. Thanks for being back. I want to talk to you about your book, but first off, for folks that might not have heard you before, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Nico Larco: Sure. So my name is Nico Larco. I’m a professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Oregon, and I direct two centers. One is the Sustainable Cities Institute, where we look at the sustainability across a whole bunch of different disciplines, mostly focused on the built environment. I also direct the urbanism next center, where we look at the impacts of things like self driving cars, shared mobility, e commerce, and the impact that has on cities really interested in how it affects things like land use, urban design, transportation, real estate, and how that impacts things like equity, health, the environment.
And the economy [00:02:00] outside of that, I also am a strategic advisor and researcher for TNO, which is a Dutch national think tank. And yeah, that’s basically the things that I do during my day.

Jeff Wood: That’s a lot. How do you, how do you have time to sleep

Nico Larco: or do you, I don’t have time for, but I’m hoping, I’m hoping to change that.
Yeah. I’m more time for sleep. Yeah.

Jeff Wood: Well, you mentioned the university of Oregon, Eugene must be hopping right now at this time of year. I remember a few times going to a track town USA and seeing what was

Nico Larco: so much fun. I’m actually, I lived in Eugene for 10 years, but now I. Live in Portland, but Eugene during the Olympic trials, everything that happens Hayward field is just super fun.
The whole city it’s hopping.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, it’s awesome. I was there for a NCAA meet one time and just had a blast. It’s so favorable to runners. So the book is the sustainable urban design handbook. It’s about 400 pages and you had a coauthor. Can you tell us a little bit about Karin as well?

Nico Larco: Yeah. Karin Knutson is an urbanist, urban designer has done a lot of work in housing.
Also teaches sometimes at the university of Oregon. And really interestingly, since we published [00:03:00] the book, she has been elected as the mayor of the city of Eugene. Oh, so she’s going to be getting to put a lot of these things into practice as a mayor. That’s awesome. Just

Jeff Wood: bring the book to all of your meetings, I guess.
Well, as I mentioned before, it’s a big book and there’s a lot in it. How long did it take to put this together?

Nico Larco: Very long. So first of all, the book is based on something called the sustainable urban design framework and the framework took two or three years to develop. It was really a complicated task to try to understand all these pieces of what went into the book.
And so the book is really taking each 1 of these elements that are in the framework. I think there’s somewhere between 50 and 60. I lost track. I should know that and develops each 1 into its own kind of longer description. That process took more than 10 years. Uh, that was a really long, long process, a whole lot of research work into this, a whole lot of interviewing, you know, tons of people in a bunch of different fields, a lot of thinking about how we synthesize this.

And then, if you’ve had a chance to look at the book, hopefully, you can tell that a lot of the work was actually in [00:04:00] trying to simplify things so that people could easily understand it so that this could be a resource for professionals and for community stakeholders, elected officials, people who have a lot of depth in these topics and people who might not have as much.

Jeff Wood: You mentioned the organizing principles. I’m wondering, just kind of give people an overview of what the book is and maybe like what it does for folks.

Nico Larco: Sure. So the book basically asks a couple of different things. Like, so what is a sustainable city? Like how do you make a place sustainable? And also like, if you ask the question of like, is this sustainable or how can I make this more sustainable?
And it really tries to break down what’s a sustainable city. Really complicated. I’d say topic into digestible pieces. So I can tell you a little bit of what happened was, you know, I’ve done a lot of work on walkability earlier in my career. And as I was kind of coming to a good point and all that work, I said, well, you know, I’d love to understand.

More broadly, how sustainability works across all these different dimensions. Like if we think broadly, what is sustainability in urban design? And, um, as professors often do, I thought, well, you know, I’ll teach a class on this. [00:05:00] That’ll, that’ll force me to like put a lot of these things together. And so I created a class and thought, okay, I’ll just look up to see what people have been doing, like get myself read into this literature.

And what I realized really quickly is that no one has really done a really good job of putting together all these different pieces of sustainability and related them all. And, uh, you know, necessity being the mother of invention, there was a little bit of panic that happened. I said, well, how am I going to, how do I get my arms around these topics?

And so that’s where this concept was born. The sustainable urban design framework and what the framework does is it organizes all these different elements of urban design around these five main outcome goals and four main topics and the outcome goals are energy use and greenhouse gas based on transportation land use.

That’s basically, energy How do we get people out of cars and in a bike ped transit? A lot of people you’ve spoken to on this podcast talk about that topic. It’s the, you know, we, we, we’ve done a lot of work on this. Fantastic work has been done around this. The next outcome goal is water, which we really mean storm water.

You know, when the water falls from the sky, how do we make sure we reduce the amount of runoff that we have it moving horizontally on the [00:06:00] ground? And how do we mitigate the runoff that does happen? Next outcome goal is ecology and habitat. And this is basically thinking about the natural environment within all our both urban areas in between urban areas and things like how do we make sure we don’t touch things that we shouldn’t be touching, right?

How do we direct growth in areas that are not creating problems for ecological areas and habitat? How do we make sure that we mitigate the areas that we do touch? And then how do we create microhabitat? Lots of opportunities in the built environment and urban areas. The next outcome goal is energy use and production based on non transportation issues.

And so a lot of times. The areas that have kind of talked about sustainability and the built environment often mush energy together, the transportation land use part, which is how we move around. And then the other part, which really has to do more with things like microclimates, embodied energy, the way urban design is setting up the possibility of buildings being more sustainable, right?
Those types of things. And then the last outcome goal is equity and health. And that is really talking about things like how urban design affects affordability. Both the transportation and just [00:07:00] general your, your day to day life accessibility, obviously very related to transportation. That 1st outcome goal.

We talked about physical activity, which is both how much we move around for our basic transportation needs, but also how much am I doing exercise? How much am I getting out? And, and, you know, it turns out that proximity to parks and the types of parks that I have open spaces make a big difference for that.

Also safety. So that’s everything from making sure I, you know, I’m not involved in crashes, but also making sure I’m not living next to something that might be, you know, polluting or putting a school next to a freeway, for instance, and then the last 1 is social mobility. So how is it that the built environment is actually having an effect on how much I have a chance of, you know, getting out of poverty or, you know, improving my socioeconomic situation.

So those 5 outcome goals are kind of the main thing we’re trying to get to when we talk about sustainability, the built environment. And then what we did is we said, well, let’s look at these 4 main scales that we work in, which is region and city, large kind of areas district and neighborhood, which is really oftentimes the scale that we think of urban design.

Right? Like, I’ve got a new [00:08:00] district that’s being developed. Here’s like, 12 blocks that are happening block and street and project parcel and block and street and project parcel. Those scales are basically the same scale. It’s just a block and streets. Typically, we think of as the public realm and product parcels.

Typically, we think of as the private realm. So within parcels buildings. And so what this does is it organizes all these different elements within this kind of matrix, and it makes it much clearer for someone to understand, Oh, I’ve got a certain outcome goal. I want here’s the things that I need to be doing, or, Oh, I’ve got a project of certain scale.

Here’s the questions I should be asking. Here’s how these things relate to each other. So that was a tremendously long winded way of answering your question of saying what this book does. Is it helps you understand how you can create more sustainable places? What are opportunities to make a place more sustainable and how best to get people to work together in different disciplines, as I mentioned, community stakeholders, elected officials, developers, planners, designers, how you get people to work together on helping make that happen.

Jeff Wood: And it feels like you could pick up the book as a developer and, you know, flip to the project parcel [00:09:00] section and be like, okay, well, these are all the things that I need to do to my project to be more sustainable. And then for your elected official, you could, you know, take it to the block level or the city level and figure out all the things that you need to do.
And so I feel like it’s a nice kind of distilled way to look at these things without having to like read a Robert Caro LBJ long book. I mean, it is a big book, but at the same time, it’s very well condensed and also very understandable and simple. And so I think. People appreciate that, but there is a lot that you could have put in here probably that didn’t go in.

Nico Larco: Yeah. Yeah. Well, so first of all, it warms my heart to hear you say that, that you feel like it’s a simple piece, because that was really our goal, fake what’s a really complicated project and break it down into easily digestible pieces. And so we worked a lot on kind of making sure that the hierarchy of information was really clear.

And you could just say, like, like you said, like, Oh, I’ve got a project of this scale. What are these questions I need to ask? And Oh, this topic, well, let me just look. And then you can just turn to one of the chapters and each chapter has a similar format. You can really easily understand what the topic’s about, how it relates to other elements, what we’re [00:10:00] recommending, some background information, and then like, what you should really do. Each chapter has some design guides that can help with that. It’s

Jeff Wood: It’s kind of like an encyclopedia. You’re just like, okay, I need to know this topic. I can go to this page and then do that. And in the old days, when we had encyclopedia before Wikipedia, obviously, but now you have Wikipedia. This could be the Wikipedia of development.

I appreciate that. The other thing that I really like about this is that, you know, you are a reader of my newsletter. You understand like the way that we collect information and have a bunch of different topics. And I’ve been asked many times to just focus on transportation or just focus on urbanism and design.

And I feel like that’s kind of failing people because there are these things like water and ecology and habitat and energy use and all those things. That are all connected to each other. And so that’s another thing that I appreciate about the book is that you’re bringing all of these things together that are really important instead of just focusing on that one thing, which I do appreciate a good book about, you know, reducing emissions from transportation, but there’s a lot of those out there and connecting all the dots is actually very, very important, especially if we’re trying to be more sustainable.

Nico Larco: Absolutely. And, you know, the thing I’ve said a lot about this book is the biggest contribution it gives is that it [00:11:00] synthesize, simplifies, synthesizes and relates things that we know. So there’s a ton of fantastic information on any 1 of these topics. Obviously, a lot of the work that you’ve been doing and that you cover has to do with transportation.
But, you know, Talk about stormwater or habitat or, you know, affordability. There’s a lot of really good work out there. The problem is that it’s all siloed. And also, the problem is that it’s sometimes siloed, not necessarily will say in places that someone who’s interested in urban design or how the built environments happening.

Right? So maybe it’s more in economics or, you know, more in like an ecology kind of publication. And there’s kind of 2 piece of this. 1 is. If we’re going to be sustainable, we have to deal with all these pieces. And if we don’t, on the one hand, even know that these are the things that we should be dealing with, right.

Just having the attention to it is important. But then on the other hand, understanding what the relationships are, where there’s opportunities for synergies, where we have to like, think about trade offs. A lot of these things could be win win wins. I’m interested in bike infrastructure. Well, it turns out that bike infrastructure is a great place to also deal with stormwater and potentially deal with microhabitat.

You know, [00:12:00] this is a way of like on the one hand, many birds, one stone, but also it’s a way of building coalition and a building political support. If you can get people aligned around this one thing that we’re doing at this one scale, this one kind of element in the urban environment. And instead of just having it kind of as this, you know, one off thing, Oh, we can get all these other pieces out of it. We can maybe like tap different areas for funding. We can build different coalitions to help build the political will to help make those things happen.

Jeff Wood: And you also ask people to help you build off this too. I mean, you, you honestly say that, you know, the book is incomplete and I think any writer will cop to that. And so you ask people to help you put together more things and bring more questions to the table.
Nico Larco: Oh, absolutely. And I’ll say, you know, We have an extensive acknowledgement section because, you know, we’re really standing on the shoulders of a ton of different people. Someone once asked me, like, is there any book like this out there?
And, uh, now I can honestly say no. And I know why it’s really hard. There’s tons of different topics, tons of different things. Some of the stuff I knew a good amount before I started writing the book, a lot of these areas I knew [00:13:00] next to nothing about, I mean, ecology and habitat. I had a layman’s understanding of these things.

And, you know, the way to learn is to do a lot of reading and also talk to a lot of people. So, you know, really, really tremendously thankful to the people who we interviewed and who gave us comments on, you know, for instance, the ecology and habitat side of this or managed stormwater. And so you can almost think of this book in a way as just a snapshot of As we were learning more and more and more, we said at some point, like, well, we need to get this out.

And so this is where it is right now and here we’re sending it out into the world. But we realize, you know, things change conditions change. There’s new information that comes out or there could just be information that we just didn’t get right. So I would love to be hearing from people things that are helpful about this, but also things that we’ve missed and that we need to change. I really hope that we keep building on this and make it a more and more useful tool.

Jeff Wood: What is the thing that you learn the most about when you’re doing this? Obviously you said it’s taken you about 10 years, so you must have learned a lot, but is there something that sticks out in your mind?

Nico Larco: Oh my God, there’s so many.

Nico Larco: I’m going to say two things. It means like it is endless. There was so many like, Oh wow, [00:14:00] that’s how that works. Oh, here’s these opportunities. Uh, I’m going to, I’m going to say two different things. One of them is this whole question of equity and health. Actually, when we first, when I first started developing the framework, there was only four outcome goals.

Equity and health was not one of them, and I had a vague understanding of how the built environment really impacted equity and health. And I thought, well, most of that’s probably more on the policy side than actual physical design. And thanks to some fantastic conversations I had with people, which really opened my eyes and I was like, Oh, my goodness.

And I think, I think now actually, you know, this was 10, 12 years ago that those thoughts happened, but now it’s much more common to think about this, but really getting a much better understanding of how much the built environment is really impacting our abilities to, you know, be healthy, have access to healthy foods, have access to work, have affordable places that we can live, you know, as I said before, being able to get out of poverty, like the light went off.

The second one, which is very much related to topics you cover, and I’m almost embarrassed to say this because it seems like so obvious, but putting this all together, and this was partly in doing the book and partly I was lucky enough about seven years [00:15:00] ago to do a sabbatical in the Netherlands, I was working at TU Delft and then also at TNO, the think tank that I still work for, and you know, and For anyone who’s been to the Netherlands and who’s interested in like, you know, planning or urban design or any of these types of topics, you know, you walk around and you’re just like, Oh, my goodness.

Oh, my goodness. This is like everything we’ve ever been told could happen in the world. And here it’s happening. Right? I mean, like, there’s tons of cycling. There’s some excuse. There’s all this fantastic transit, just like everything. And I was living there for about a month and it finally hit me, which again, it’s a little bit embarrassing that it took me that long, but it hit me.
Oh, my goodness. Density. Density is the reason this works so well. Like density lets everything happen. I’m not saying that density guarantees that all these fantastic things happen, but oh my goodness, like density allows so many things to happen. And you know, I had this thought one day when I was actually cycling in the Netherlands.

I was like, most of what we do in the U. S. is trying to put band aids on a lack of density. Like, a lot of things that we’re trying to do are just that, you know, [00:16:00] our land use is wrong and we’re trying to find ways to, like, somehow make the thing work anyway. And, you know, there’s a lot of gymnastics involved in trying to get this thing to work.

And, you know, if there’s one thing, I think like a huge learning conviction that came out of this, it’s like density has to be the thing that we. We really work on that, that, that would be a huge step forward and not just for the transportation topics, but for stormwater, for ecology and habitat and use production equity, health, like density just helps all across the board.

Jeff Wood: It’s so crazy. Cause collectively as a, as a country, I mean, not you and I, or, or the folks probably listen to this podcast, but we seem so resistant to it as a general rule, but it’s so important for everything. And I’m wondering why we have this like reflexive, you know, kind of pushback against that idea of density, except for in a few places.

Nico Larco: This is like two weeks of a course that I teach, but there’s a lot of different things. I mean, so like, if you think about, you know, the suburban way of development that we have here, there’s a lot of different reasons that that happens. Part of it is cultural, right? So like, I mean, there’s a [00:17:00] whole lot of things that.

We’ve now kind of like has been instilled in us, everything from car culture being a thing, or like, you know, the backyard barbecue or this ideal of small town, even though somehow it’s kind of developed into a, into a suburban sprawl. And a lot of that came from, you know, popular media, a lot of actual push from some people in the federal government.

We also have policies that have helped reinforce those things. We have a whole economic engine having to do with auto oriented culture, which has pushed us toward those things. And also like kind of this. Billification sometimes of urban areas. And, you know, I have to say like, we’ve seen a huge shift in that in the nineties, I think is when it first started to soften a little bit, but before that, you know, like urban areas were to be shunned, right?

Like that, like that’s not where you would go. Right. And then there was this big shift, this renewed interest and rejuvenation of cities and people really understand like, Oh my goodness. I love. Having all these amenities, I love having access to all these events, people, moments, and, uh, you know, maybe being in the car all the time, being further and further apart is [00:18:00] not the best thing.

I think it’s, you know, a really interesting thing, maybe going slightly off topic here, but the National Association of Realtors has done a survey every year, mostly to get a sense of like, where’s the housing market going? And they used to ask a question, which was, Uh, would you rather live in a single family home or in multifamily housing?

And across the board, everyone was said single family home, right? And so this, you know, was a huge impetus for them to tell builders or for builders to read this and say, uh, we should build more single family housing. I think it’s in 2013 for the first time, they changed the way they asked the question, which was instead of asking, would you like a single family home or multifamily housing, they said, would you like.

A neighborhood where you could have single family homes or multifamily housing, but with much smaller lots that was walkable and bikeable. And you could actually walk to, you know, a local cafe or, you know, amenities nearby. Or would you like a large lot, single family home neighborhood where you have to drive everywhere?

And I don’t remember exactly numbers, but it was something like, yeah, I want to say like 50, a little bit more, a little bit less than 50 percent said they [00:19:00] wanted that first thing. And I, like, when I read that, I like had to sit down. I was like, Oh my goodness, this is like a huge unmet demand in our country.

The thing that people want, we are not building like that is a total mismatch between desires and the built environment that we have. And you also realize that the built environment that we have is in part comes from a lot of stuff that’s been built before, right? You know, the urban environment kind of persists as does all the mechanism that helped make those things happen.

Howard Davis, one of my colleagues wrote a book called the culture of cities, which is fantastic, which kind of talks about how all this mix of culture Policy building practices, all these things come together to give us the built environment that we have. And we have, we’ve created something that really points towards single family home auto dominated, even though, again, from the survey showed that that’s not the case.

And they’ve done the survey many times since then. And it’s fluctuated. Definitely things fluctuated with cobit. But overall, even if it’s not a majority, I don’t remember exactly what the latest numbers are. It is way more than what we have. For having [00:20:00] like, you know, dense walkable close to amenities, right. That kind of an environment that there there’s way less of them in the country than what people seem to say that they want.

Jeff Wood: It’s so crazy too, because I mean, we see that reflected in the price of housing. Right. And I mean, obviously a price of housing is going crazy everywhere, but you know, you have the most high prices in places that are super walkable, super compact places where you can walk to the grocery store in my neighborhood here in San Francisco. I mean, it’s pretty expensive to live here generally. And you know, I can walk to the grocery store. I can walk to anything basically on 24th street. I need, and I don’t, I don’t own a car. I sold my car in 2010 because I was tired of getting parking tickets for street sweeping. So it’s just so easy to get around and it’s valuable to people, I guess, because they want to live here and be near other people.

Nico Larco: And I always laugh when I’ve heard many times people say, Oh my God, that place is so expensive. No one wants to live there anymore. That place is too expensive. And you’re like, well, it’s expensive because everyone wants to live there.

Jeff Wood: Somebody wants to pay more than another person for it. Right. How, how idealistic are you?

Nico Larco: [00:21:00] Um, That’s a question you need to ask my wife. Uh, I, on the one hand, I am like, it’s kind of like a split personality. I’m like a huge optimist and super idealistic. Like I am like, you know, I want things to work well. On the other hand, in this book, I think. Points to that a lot. I am super pragmatic in how we get there.
So I would love the world to be like, and I think we can’t get to a place where we’re way more sustainable or using less energy, all these things. But I also realize, well, that’s not going to happen overnight and it’s not going to happen easily. And it can’t happen everywhere the same way. So like, you know, one of the real goals about this book was to not say here is the model for sustainability.
I don’t know if people are familiar, but places like Henry Solstad in Stockholm. Or Vauban. These are like incredible, beautiful, fantastic, sustainable neighborhoods, right? That have everything happening. And that’s, that’s great. If we can get more of those, great. But the reality is most places either don’t [00:22:00] have the political will or the expertise or, you know, the economic ability to do things like this.

And so this book was really pointing at, if you want to do one of those places, great. Look at this. This should help you get there. You’re doing a single family like neighborhood somewhere. Great. Let me show you how to make that as sustainable as possible. So the idea was not to propose a specific model of how things have to happen, but instead give you tons of entryways and whatever it is you can do wherever it is you can push, you know, whatever it is any neighborhood can do to make their area more sustainable in some of these ways.

Jeff Wood: That leads me to another kind of hard question, which is like, what, what is sustainability and what does it mean? And right. I mean, it’s, it’s a tough question. We use the word a lot and we’ve shifted also to resilience to a certain extent. Um, words start to, you know, get adopted and then they, they shift. But I’m wondering what that means. And especially in the context of building places.

Nico Larco: Yeah, this is an interesting conversation. So, uh, we actually have a section of the book that specifically talks about this because, [00:23:00] uh, you know, as we were doing this, the same kind of things, this question of, is it sustainability or should we use resilience or a whole suite of words that have kind of happened around this topic of sustainability?

Basically to me, it is very much kind of out of the Brundtland report and a whole lot of different traditions. How do we make sure that we are habiting. The earth happening our neighborhoods in ways that don’t cause problems that let us live our lives in ways that are, you know, fulfilling and happy and good, but then don’t cause problem for future generations.

That’s that’s I think the easiest kind of definition of this thing. I think there’s really important differences between. The idea of sustaining something versus being resilient to changes that happen or, you know, replenishing or actually improving the function of an area, right? To go towards this goal of, you know, being better for future generations in the book, we talked about this and very much the attitude I have, which.

Again, goes back to your question about how idealistic am I, um, is all those things are great. A lot of them are about splitting hairs, you know, if the continuum is [00:24:00] like, let’s say it’s like 100 right from like zeros, like we are completely doing horrible things in the world in terms of our natural environment and resources and things and hundreds being like perfect.
Where we start to see the differences is like at 85 or 90, right? Different in the actions we would take. And right now, maybe we’re living like at 30. So we’ve got a long way to go before we’d start to really talk about splitting hairs about how it is that we might actually do these things. And so this book is, you know, beyond the definition I just gave, we don’t go really too much more into it.
And mostly because I think If we can get to a point where things are going so well and we’re so much towards this path of, I’d say, a better way of inhabiting the hearth in ways that aren’t going to affect future generations. I’d love to have the debate then of like, all right, how do we get, how do we fine tune this thing?

We are, we are far from fine tuning. We’re more in like, you know, just general giving like overall shots in that direction. That’s great.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. Density, uh, reducing emissions through transportation, just like the general ideas. Is there a metric though, that, that we’re [00:25:00] focused on? I mean, a lot of times here in California, I feel like VMT is something that we’ve talked about and it’s helpful to organize ourselves around something that gives us goals and allows us to write legislation and things like that.
But is it VMT? Is it reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Um, you know, we can talk about sustainability all day, but then how do you measure it? Like, what is the way that you get to the point where you’re able to Implementing all the things in the book. Once you implement some of those, how much impact they actually had.

Nico Larco: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So each one of these elements that are in the book, each one of the chapters actually has a section which talks about metrics and the idea is to, because you know, There’s a ton of metrics. And I don’t mean that to say like, Oh, there’s endless metrics. Even like how we like measure, you know, like walkability.

Yes. There’s a million metrics for that. But even like we should think about there’s walkability metrics, but there’s also ecological health metrics and there’s also stormwater management metrics. And there’s also, you know, affordability metrics. And so part of what we’re trying to do in the book is to say for each element that you’re talking about, here’s a few metrics you might want to think about.

And so [00:26:00] depending on what, what’s important to you, again, like We’re always focused on those outcome goals, right? And to me, that is a, that is a political reality question. You know, what is it that your project, your jurisdiction, your community is most interested in? All right, here’s the things that we need to be doing.

Here’s the metrics for each 1 of those things. And so VMT is a good 1. I’d say again, density, amount of density that we have is, is a really good 1, which I would say affects VMT substantially, but yeah, like I said, for all these different outcome goals and for all these different elements, there are specific metrics that we need to be paying attention to.

Jeff Wood: I feel like there are so many too, we’re working on the house and, you know, we’re talking about lighting and how much color, uh, rendering lights have and whether it paint has VOCs and whether this, that, and the other thing. And it’s just like, there’s so much to consider and think about that. It’s good to have like a checklist almost of like what you need to do to go through all these things. Cause there’s so many.

Nico Larco: Yeah. And part of what we’re trying to do as well is to not make people feel overwhelmed because there is a ton of things to be doing, but you can also take it as complicated as you want to take it, but [00:27:00] let’s like, make sure we’re making. Change happened. Don’t let yourself be kind of overwhelmed by the complexity of this thing.
Jeff Wood: I’m looking at several NACTO guides on my bookshelf at the moment. I’m wondering, obviously, yeah, they’re great. Obviously this takes some of that and puts it into the book, but how is this different than say an NACTO guide or something that, you know, traffic engineers would use to like design a street?

Nico Larco: So first of all, Huge shout out to NACTO and I’ll say a lot of the inspiration for this book came from looking at NACDO guides and also came from something called the Green Studio Handbook that Allison Kwok, one of my colleagues at the University of Oregon put together. So in some ways, it’s very similar.

In fact, you know, we worked a lot with NACTO on early parts of the book, and then, you know, they’ll see a lot of their images. We’re super thankful that they allowed us to use them within the book and a lot of their, the learnings from the work that they’ve done. So in some ways, this is. Similar to a NACTO book, except that it’s much, much broader.

So NACTO does a fantastic job with things like street design. For instance, this is saying, okay, that’s great. Street design. In fact, you should use NACTO as a resource for that, but you should also think about all these different [00:28:00] scales, right? And think about how your transit networks and your cycling networks and your block size and your block connectivity, the way you’re dealing with parking, all these different.

Pieces, how they come together and relate to each other along that kind of transportation issue, but then also how that affects stormwater, how that relates to and affects ecology and habitat affects and relates to energy use and production and affects and relates to equity and health. So it’s really like a much broader version of what NACDA has done and much like, you know, in this book, we orient you.

And give you basic ideas of what you can do, give you design guides. But then we also tell you, here’s where there’s more information, right? If you’re interested in, like, you know, looking at bicycle friendly streets. Oh, my goodness. There’s tons of work that NACDA has done here to look at this. We do that for each 1 of these elements.

So, each 1 of the urban design elements, you know, you’re interested in how you end up doing daylight and restoring waterways, or how you’re dealing with robust urban forest. Well, here’s additional information you can look at.

Jeff Wood: I like that part of it specifically. There’s so many great details in the book. And I’m wondering if you have like a favorite for me specifically. I really liked the idea of the street block [00:29:00] orientation and how if you’re next to like the ocean, you should arrange your street blocks a certain way because it allows the breeze to come in a little bit better. Those little things that I didn’t really think about much. And so do you have a favorite thing that’s in the book that like really kind of, Oh my goodness.

Nico Larco: Just like picking your favorite child. I know I ask people to do this a lot and they hate it, but you have to do it. There’s, there’s so many interesting parts. All right. So one thing I’ll say I found super interesting is, so the elements throughout the framework, uh, sometimes they repeat, right?
So for instance, one of the ones that repeats that I think is really interesting is this idea of robust urban forests and that, you know, affects our transportation, affects stormwater habitat, affects energy use and production, affects equity and health. And so to me, like some of those were so interesting.

This. Say like, okay, this thing that we typically think of in one dimension. Oh, there’s all these other dimensions about it. And so if you keep on asking questions, it’s like, well, how do you maximize that part of it, or how do you maximize that you find like, Oh, you’re going to be making better decisions, right?

Oh, like maybe sometimes we should have, uh, you know, Regular street trees every, you know, 20, [00:30:00] 30 feet of the same species, but you know what, for habitat, it might make more sense to vary those species. It might make sense to cluster them and then have a space and then clusters again and like, have some more spread out.
That actually might be a whole lot better for habitat issues. Oh, and if also, you know, we think about how those trees make sure that they have continuous canopy that actually does tons better for energy use and production because we’re creating a great, you know, kind of shading for this area. And then we think about what species we’re using to make sure that we don’t end up using species that end up causing allergies.

And you’re like, I loved it when we’d come to elements that really like repeated and had all these, you know, the same thing that you’re designing has all these kind of compounding benefits.

Jeff Wood: There’s so much in there. I hope folks get a chance to take a look at it. I’m wondering if you have any like advice for people that are writing books or who want to write more on the subject, because obviously 10 years and 400 pages later, you all have like, you know, we’ve gone through it and probably been some tough times, some fun times. And I’m wondering if you have any advice for folks who might be contemplating a similar pathway. [00:31:00]

Nico Larco: My goodness. Oh, there’s like a flood of things that I’m thinking of. First of all, you’ve got to love the topic. I mean, there has to be like some passion there of like, Yeah. This really, this is an important thing and you have to first find the thing that’s important to you and then really understand why it’s important.

Cause that’ll continue to drive you. The second part is. Don’t be daunted. It’s like only look up as far as your heart will let you look up and continue to work. I’ve often said, if I knew how much work all this was, it would have been really hard to take the first step, but you know, be curious, start on something, chew on it and then, Oh, that other thing, Oh, that other thing.
It just don’t be overwhelmed. Like just, Chip away, chip away, chip away. Tell this to my kids all the time. I love hearing this. Um, but like just take it little by little and let the thing grow is a good way to be working. But like I said, you have to love the thing and you also have to like great people around you who support you, uh, family, friends, colleagues, who one can help you be smarter about the thing you’re doing, but also just give you energy and, and, uh, love and warmth and encouragement.
Those are important things to have in your life. [00:32:00]

Jeff Wood: I’m wondering if there’s something that surprised you about the process or surprised you about the topic areas.

Nico Larco: I’ll go back to like the equity and health one that to me was the biggest, like, kind of light going off where, you know, at first, as I mentioned, it wasn’t even part of the book. And then, like, now is 1 of the most number of elements in that book and all the transportation stuff on that. That is just, it was, it was such a revelation to me. And also like, it felt good because, you know, if we try to put this all on the policy side, almost on the operational side, like, Oh, no, equity is like an operational issue, like, no, there’s a lot of things that we bake into our cities that make it easier or harder for, you know, equity and health to actually happen.

I’d love to learn about that. Things like, as I mentioned before, you know, the quality of open space, right? So active and attractive open space on the one hand, you have to have access to these things. There’s tons of studies and a lot of the work that you’ll see in here, Each chapter is broken up into these different sections and two of them background importance.
And there’s a lot of peer reviewed literature and professional best practices that we look at in there. But you look at a lot of studies on open space and how much [00:33:00] people exercise. And one of the biggest limitations is how easy is it for me to get to that place, right? If it’s complicated for me to get to, you know, a place to shoot hoops, I probably won’t shoot hoops today, or I won’t go for a run.

So that was like, You know, really think about location of these things, but then also on the other side, the qualities that open space and that, you know, kids need something, you know, like, toddlers need something then, like, you know, middle school students need something different than high school college, you know, young adults to adults need something really different from older adults.
And so thinking about, oh, the design of these spaces. Would really shift based on those things. That’s like a really important piece. I’ll say one other thing that surprised me is, uh, before this, before I doing really research on the book, I just assumed native species are best in urban environments. We should use native species everywhere.

And, uh, talking to a lot of urban ecologists and urban arborists, you know, they quickly showed me the light with that idea, which is, you know, I heard from one person who said, you know, Nico, a living tree. Is much better [00:34:00] than a native tree, right? So native is great. Absolutely. But also, like, urban environments are kind of stressful environments for a lot of species.
And the best thing you can do is have a live, thriving species. So it could be that you use a street tree, which is not native to the area. It could be that that actually is going to be surviving much more thriving, much more. And maybe sometimes what you need to do is what works best here. Not necessarily what’s ideal here.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. It’s interesting because of all the discussions we have around here about eucalyptus trees. And also like, I think it was Cape town when they were reaching for their day zero and they started cutting down certain invasive species trees because they were sucking up all the water and things like that. But I do agree. And when we do cut down trees, you know, big trees to put in a road or put in a Path or whatever it is, it’s always frustrating because those trees have been there for so long and they’re already mature. And then putting in a spindly little nutrient is great, I guess, in 30 years. And the best time to plant a tree was yesterday, but, um, it is good to have those, you know, those strong and healthy plants that are thriving already.

Nico Larco: Can I mention one other thing that was [00:35:00] actually like a big surprise for me as well? Sure. Absolutely. All right. So this thing, I had no idea this thing existed, but I was lucky enough to do a Fulbright in Spain. And by luck, one of the people who was there was an urban ecologist. And so I was talking to her about, you know, what, what advice would you give an urban designer about how to make places more sustainable, more green, happier for all the things that you care about?
And she said, you know, really important thing is one, a mix of species, but also vertical complexity. And I had no idea what vertical complexity mean. And it pretty much means that you don’t just have what I now call like lawns and lollipop, right? Like, so lollipop trees. So like, it’s just like, you know, grass, grass, grass, and like the same species of large bushy tree above, you know, scattered throughout, but instead, like for habitat reasons, what you really want is vertical complexity that you have ground cover, grasses, sedges.

Shrubs lower trees, taller trees, enormous canopies all mixed together and that this what does is it creates a range of habitat types, right? And that the same species might want different times of the day or different parts of their life [00:36:00] cycle and that by creating that variety, you create a much richer habitat environment and you start noticing how much.
You know, in places where, you know, it’s good to have sometimes lawn. I like to play soccer. I love having a lawn would hate to have like sedges in there, but where possible, there’s all these moments where you can be like, well, we can make that a lot more, we can increase the vertical complexity and create a much more richer habitat, all these opportunities to do that throughout the urban environment.

That’s awesome.

Jeff Wood: So who should pick up the book?

Nico Larco: Everybody, of course, that’s a good question. And yeah, everyone, I’ve got this like maybe naive answer, but we really tried to make it for a whole different range of audiences. The first like category is obviously designers and I, you know, urban designers, architects, landscape architects, and planners.

I mean, that is like the very first grouping that I’d say the book should absolutely speak to people. They should look through this and, you know. I’m going to say like 70 percent of the things that are in there in terms of like topics, they should be like, I know something about this and then 30 percent they’ll probably know nothing about and then even of those 70 percent there’s some pieces that they’ll know a ton about on their own.

And then a lot that [00:37:00] they’re going to, that they’d learn from that. And hopefully this will be a really good tool to help them understand the relationships of this thing. They could do projects and figure out like, Oh, I’ve got a project of this scale. Here’s all the questions I should ask, or I’m talking to stakeholders about this thing.

Let’s get to the outcome that they’re looking for. Here’s all the like specific physical things that need to happen. So designers and planners first. Next is developers, right? So another way of understanding, you know, I think they’re very related to these fields, a great kind of decoder to understand how the environment can affect these different parts.

And next I’d say elected officials and community stakeholders, which are people who, you know, typically. It’s not their professional role to understand how the built environment works, but they’ve had a lot to say about how the built environment works, right? They’re going to need to make decisions or they’re going to need to give feedback and help people understand like what is it they’re trying to do.

I often say that the sustainable design framework is like a magic decoder ring for community stakeholders. Typically, stakeholders know what they want in terms of an outcome. And this is like, you can say, Oh, you know, what I really wanted to create a more, you know, a bikeable walkable [00:38:00] environment. Well, here’s all the things that need to happen.

Or God, what I really want to do is protect this habitat for this, you know, butterfly that I’m really interested in. Well, here’s all the things that need to happen, right. At the different scales in urban design to help make that happen. And so, yeah, so. I would say planners, designers, developers, elected officials, community stakeholders. That’s really our target audience.

Jeff Wood: I might send one of these to Kathy Hochul, she might need to read it. Well, the book is the sustainable urban design handbook. Where can folks find a copy if they wish to purchase a book?

Nico Larco: So I’m happy to say it’s available on Amazon again. And on, in Routledge, we had a wonderful experience, which the first printing sold out in the first three weeks.

Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah, it was great, except that it took them four weeks to print more books. So as of last week, it’s available again. So, uh, you can find it at Amazon. You can also find it at Routledge’s page. And then hopefully at your local bookstores, we’re hoping to get this in as many [00:39:00] bookstores as we can. So you look for it there or ask for it and have them order them.

Jeff Wood: Yep. Ask them to have it, have it delivered. Cause they’ll do that for you. And then where can folks find you if you wish to be found?

Nico Larco: Uh, so I absolutely wish to be found. You, you might’ve heard it in my voice. I’m kind of passionate about this stuff.
I’d really love to have us make better built environments. So if there’s any way that I could help. People either understanding this book, talking about it. I’d love to be giving talks about this. I’d love to be putting into people’s hands who can actually use it or, you know, helping in the actual using of it or understanding of it.So I’m at the university of Oregon. My email address is Nlarco. That’s N L A R C O at uoregon. edu. And I would love to be in touch and hear how we can work together and how it can help.

Jeff Wood: Awesome. People should pick up the book and then send, uh, Nico, all your ideas. Please, please, please. Nico, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Nico Larco: Thanks so much, Jeff. I loved being on the program. You guys did great work. Really appreciate it.