Former Chief Urban Designer of The City of New York Alex Washburn returns to WIRED to answer another round of the internet's burning questions about city planning. How should cities accommodate electric bikes? Can urban planning mitigate over-gentrification? How can urban planning prevent crimes? What does the future of public transportation in urban centers look like? Can a city ever reach population capacity? How's it possible for a city to run out of water? Alex Washburn answers these questions and many more on City Planning Support, Vol. 2.
Director: Justin Wolfson
Director of Photography: Constantine Economides
Editor: Richard Trammell
Expert: Alex Washburn
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Brandon White
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Casting Producer: Nicholas Sawyer
Camera Operator: Christopher Eustache
Sound Mixer: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Kalia Simms
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Additional Editor: Jason Malizia
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
Director: Justin Wolfson
Director of Photography: Constantine Economides
Editor: Richard Trammell
Expert: Alex Washburn
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Brandon White
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Casting Producer: Nicholas Sawyer
Camera Operator: Christopher Eustache
Sound Mixer: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Kalia Simms
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Additional Editor: Jason Malizia
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
Category
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TechTranscript
00:00I'm Alexandros Washburn, former chief urban designer of New York City,
00:03and I'm here today to answer your questions from the internet.
00:06This is City Planning Support.
00:12At Mary Morse Martí, what's your thinking about how to best accommodate electric bikes?
00:18I think they merit their own on-street travel lanes.
00:21And I think they do too.
00:22They are great forms of transportation.
00:24They are the fastest growing form of transportation,
00:27but they go very fast and they're relatively heavy.
00:29You can't treat them just like a pedal bicycle.
00:31There are injuries to pedestrians.
00:33We do need to have some way of moving them at the speed they want to go in the right way.
00:38Now, will this be done by a third level of pedestrian bike, electric bike car?
00:45Or what if you could have, at the scale of a bike,
00:49ramps and flyovers, like a miniature interstate system that would work for electric bikes?
00:54Wouldn't that be pretty cool to just join our city, stitch it back together?
00:58It's a crazy idea, but electric bikes make us have to think outside the box.
01:02Patrick Trogber asks, how does one solve gentrification?
01:07Gentrification is the process in a city where people who live in a neighborhood
01:12are displaced by people who come into their neighborhood who are richer.
01:15It's been going on for as long as there have been people in cities,
01:18but there are things that we can do to change the equation.
01:21Typically, it's renters that get displaced,
01:23whereas owners get to either stay and enjoy the fancier neighborhood or sell and enjoy the profits.
01:30What if there were a way to remove the displacement part of gentrification?
01:35What if when the neighborhood got better, it just added more places to live
01:41rather than taking places away from people who are already there?
01:44For that to happen, you, of course, have to build more housing that's there right now.
01:48That means density.
01:49A lot of people are scared of density,
01:51but density, if you do it right, can be pretty good.
01:54Singapore, they've got this really cool way of leaving old parts of the city
01:58that have two, three-story buildings and integrating buildings with 50 stories right into them,
02:03but in a way that fits in to the street life.
02:06And if you do it right, the density comes with the other big thing about great cities,
02:11which is diversity.
02:12In an ideal city, you're going to have plenty of rich people coming in,
02:16but you also have people of all economic strata
02:19that get to stay in the same neighborhood.
02:21That's the future answer of gentrification,
02:23but it's a really hard problem because it really hasn't been solved.
02:27Aaron Lubeck.
02:29In my opinion, more than 75% of every urban planning,
02:33architecture, and landscape architecture program today should focus on sprawl repair.
02:38That's a good point.
02:40Most of us actually live in sprawl in suburbs.
02:44So what is sprawl?
02:45Sprawl is expansion without thought.
02:48How do we change that?
02:49How do we get it to be the 15-minute city that the Parisians seem to be so good at?
02:53You essentially have to retrofit an environment that has been designed for cars
02:58in a way that makes economic sense and still functions.
03:01Old, disused malls now become mixed use.
03:05People build some housing.
03:07They turn them into a street.
03:08There's a great saying, if you want to build a great city, build a great street.
03:11In some of the newer higher-end developments,
03:13like there's something called the Esplanade at Aventura in Miami,
03:17they've actually created a brand new pretend street in a shopping mall.
03:22It's not really a street that has cars or anything or traffic
03:26or any attempt to get you from here to there.
03:28It's just a place between two stores.
03:30It's actually physically quite pleasant to walk down there,
03:33but it drives you nuts because every store is playing their own music.
03:36If we can solve urban sprawl, maybe we can solve the problem of too much music.
03:41Reddit user asks,
03:42In what ways can architecture or urban planning reduce or even prevent crime?
03:46The answer is it doesn't, and it's been tried all the time.
03:50When I was young, the answer to preventing urban crime
03:52was to remove columns from buildings and instead
03:56just have overhangs as you walked down the street
03:58so bad guys couldn't hide behind the columns.
04:01Architecture is neither the cause nor the solution to urban crime.
04:05At Alkaline Moon asks,
04:08The Boring Company sounds like a money laundering scheme.
04:11Like really? A single lane tunnel will solve traffic?
04:14The Boring Company builds tunnels that are supposed to take people
04:17very rapidly from point to point.
04:19So this is kind of cheating in an urban design sense
04:23because you are going only from point A to point B.
04:26You could do that with a subway train too.
04:28I have a hunch there is something far in the future that they're preparing for.
04:32What I think is actually going to be the next form of rapid transit,
04:37self-driving car trains.
04:39You type in where you want to go,
04:41they merge with other cars that are also self-driving
04:44to go very, very fast along a route
04:46and then you split off to go to your individual destination.
04:49This kind of combines the speed of an electric train
04:53with the ease that we've come to expect from cars.
04:56At Basil, TGMD,
04:57How do trees cool the city or is it just the shade?
05:00Trees are like the single greatest thing that can happen to a city.
05:04Every tree provides oxygen for between two and five people.
05:09A tree-lined street can be 10 degrees cooler than a street without trees.
05:14Think of trees as wonderful natural machines
05:18that make every aspect of living in a city better.
05:20Are there any examples of city planning that didn't use trees?
05:25Well, actually, yes, there are.
05:26For instance, in a lot of 18th century Nordic cities,
05:29you'll see them excellently planned, beautiful architecture,
05:33but there'll be no trees in the street.
05:34But you got to remember that in the context,
05:37back then, 95% of the people lived in rural areas.
05:41As cities grew, we realized the folly of our ways.
05:44And actually, if you look at London from 40 years past that point,
05:48suddenly there are trees everywhere.
05:49At Elliott Mace,
05:50New York took centuries to build, as do most cities.
05:54What city was ever built before people were even living there in this manner?
05:59China made several ghost cities trying to make this happen.
06:01Now their real estate industry is collapsing.
06:04China had the greatest spurt of urbanization
06:06the world has ever seen over the last generation.
06:09So I can see why they might overshoot the target a little bit.
06:11But let's get back to the fundamentals of your question,
06:14which is, can you build a city in anticipation of its citizens?
06:18And I think the answer is no, because citizens are who builds a city.
06:23I don't want to live in something that somebody else planned and built for me.
06:28You know, a city is not a hotel room.
06:30A city is a living organism.
06:32And how we change it defines us.
06:34The best cities do grow changed by the people who want them to be better.
06:39They're citizens.
06:40At IPTVS, what's your vision for public transportation in the future?
06:44The distinction we make now between public transportation like a public train
06:49and private transportation like a private car,
06:51that distinction is going to change.
06:52What is a car is going to change.
06:54They'll be shared.
06:55They may have different forms.
06:57They'll be smaller.
06:58It's really less self-driving than it is self-parking cars.
07:01That is the immediate future.
07:03In a way that you can get in a self-driving car,
07:05but then it'll go park itself while you enjoy the place you are trying to get to.
07:09And you don't have to make room to store that car while you are enjoying the place.
07:14Imagine what that's going to do spatially to everywhere.
07:17Now suddenly you don't have to build parking right next to where you want to be.
07:21Let the car deal with it.
07:22TigerSagittarius86 asks,
07:2420 years on, was the Big Dig worth it?
07:27Yes, the Big Dig was very worth it.
07:28But what is the Big Dig?
07:30Those of you who love Boston because it was planned by cows back in the 17th century,
07:34in the 20th century,
07:36some transportation planners built giant highways,
07:39interstates that just cut right across that gentle fabric of the city.
07:43They really screwed up the neighborhoods on either side.
07:45In the later part of the century,
07:47somebody came up with an idea.
07:49Hey, let's take that highway that's cutting Boston in two,
07:53and let's put it underground.
07:55Let's dig a tunnel.
07:57They called it the Big Dig.
07:58And it's worked.
07:59Yes, traffic still gets around at the capacities of the interstate.
08:03But on top, you now have some new parks.
08:06You have some new streets that are sized more for pedestrians.
08:11And you have now all that growth,
08:13urban repair that's come up and healed around what used to be a scar.
08:17So yeah, it's been a big success.
08:20And we should do more of it in other cities.
08:22At Yash90ku,
08:24what does a sustainable city look like to you?
08:26Sustainability now, it's actually more about survival.
08:30I have to think about sustainability in the context
08:33of what's called the risk equation,
08:34the multiplication of probability times consequences.
08:38How likely is it for something bad to happen to your city?
08:42And if it does happen, how much of your city will it affect?
08:45We're seeing this every day with weather events
08:48that are hitting cities around the world.
08:50Now, a sustainable city has got to be a resilient city.
08:53It's got to be a city that can survive before it can thrive.
08:57Nine Virtues asks,
08:59can someone explain to me why taxpayers have to pay for stadiums?
09:02The reason why cities use taxpayer monies to fund stadiums
09:06is to increase business in a city
09:08and therefore increase taxes that come back.
09:11Say there's a part of the city that needs help.
09:13It needs an upgrade.
09:14And a stadium downtown will be able to attract 20, 30,000 people,
09:18200 nights a year.
09:20They want to spend money.
09:21They want to have a good time.
09:22That generates growth immediately around it.
09:24And it can work.
09:25Washington, D.C. did something very successful like that in its downtown.
09:29Let's look at the other end of the spectrum.
09:31Let's say you give somebody a billion dollars to build a football stadium,
09:35which is only used 12 days out of the year.
09:37And you don't put that stadium right downtown in a neighborhood
09:40where people can build shops and restaurants.
09:42You put it out and surround it with a giant parking lot.
09:46That's not a good investment.
09:47That's not really bringing a lot of money.
09:49Like anything else in real estate, it's location, location, location.
09:53And cities better keep that in mind before they write the next check.
09:57At diet, Dr. Dazzle.
09:59Whatever happened to the Hyperloop?
10:00The Hyperloop.
10:01Well, that is merely the current incarnation of something
10:04that I've been following a long time called
10:06Magnetic Levitation Transportation, MAGLEV.
10:09Hyperloop is a train that travels in a vacuum,
10:13which is contained in a tube,
10:16but it travels on a magnetic cushion.
10:18I don't know how it's going to do in the long run,
10:20but let's don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
10:23Magnetic levitation can get things moving very fast
10:27with very smooth rides and very little energy per person.
10:31The only one that's been built and is functioning on a daily basis
10:35is in Shanghai, going from the airport to a downtown subway stop.
10:39It is amazing.
10:41You're traveling 300 kilometers an hour and you don't feel a thing.
10:45It combines the kind of hyperlocal ability to stop that a subway has
10:51with the speeds practically of an airliner.
10:54Imagine combining those two what you can do
10:56in terms of linking a city or several cities together.
10:59It's pretty powerful.
11:00J1000C.
11:01Does the Los Angeles River or other similar rivers
11:04have to be concrete for flood control?
11:06The answer is duh, no, of course not.
11:10And who came up with this idea in the first place?
11:14These are some of the legacies that we are living through in cities
11:18from this kind of 1950s, say, orgy of hard engineering.
11:24There is a big project turning it more park-like and using it as a corridor.
11:27That's a good thing.
11:28But there's a lot of work to it.
11:30It's a big river.
11:30And unfortunately, its design was replicated all over the world.
11:34Even in Athens, Greece, one of the most beautiful rivers of antiquity,
11:38the Ilisos, was turned into a concrete ditch.
11:41And then to add insult to injury, a highway was built on top of it.
11:45No, no, no, no.
11:48If you want to control floods, you leave room for the water to flood.
11:53The Chinese call it a sponge city.
11:55People in Brazil, where they had those horrible floods recently,
11:58are coming up with these great ways of figuring out where water would go
12:01and then turning that area into a park.
12:03Parks can flood temporarily.
12:05The water goes back down eventually.
12:08So no, do not make your river concrete.
12:13Make your river part of an incredible park system that,
12:17on the day it floods, will save you.
12:19But on the day it doesn't flood, will delight you.
12:21Hey, at Super Maurice, is there a reason buildings can't have a wind gauge type of
12:25windmill or even some form of those spinning road signs to generate power?
12:30Use a combination of those and solar?
12:32You know, that's a question we asked ourselves back at the Department of City Planning.
12:35How could we change zoning restrictions and regulations to promote
12:39buildings generating their own power?
12:41Solar was a good one.
12:42Yeah, we figured out how to do that.
12:44But then we thought about these windmills or turbines, urban turbine.
12:48What happens if you put a bunch of spinning windmills on top of buildings?
12:52We found out pretty quickly from our public outreach.
12:54What happens is you get eee, eee, eee.
12:58You get squeaky.
12:59Unfortunately, we really weren't able to get much enthusiasm for
13:03windmills at the scale of an individual building.
13:05At our bike lane, NYC, can we nix parking on some streets and nix some streets on some streets
13:11and turn them into housing with bike lane and pedestrian access,
13:15like the superblocks they have in Barcelona?
13:17The Barcelona superblocks they're referring to is the beautiful city in Spain, Barcelona,
13:22known for its wonderful urbanism, has decided to take some blocks and bring them together
13:26so that the streets don't divide up every block.
13:29I'd like to think about this question from a different point of view.
13:32How would it be if we had a street that was different from another street right next to it?
13:39Makes me think of something I've always wanted to see in a city,
13:42which I'll call it the Tartan grid.
13:44The Tartan grid is the plaid pattern that Scottish people wear on their kilts.
13:49What if we had a grid system in a city that one street was just like the streets we have now,
13:54but the next street over changed the mix?
13:56The car lane was really narrow, but the bike lanes were really big,
14:00and the pedestrians were even bigger.
14:03And then you go to the next street over and you change the mix again.
14:06Maybe we have a lane for an electric bike,
14:08and then go back and repeat the pattern by going back to the normal street.
14:12Now, if you do that, you're going to get all the benefits of different transportation balances.
14:19Let's say you're a truck driver.
14:21You're going to want that car street.
14:22But if you're a bicyclist, you're going to want that other one.
14:24If your kids are going to school, you're going to want them to take that third one.
14:27But they all go generally to the same place.
14:29So you get the benefit of the network that a grid gives you,
14:33but you get the choice of experience this different type of street gives to you.
14:38At Ron Letsoko, why is it that every city in most countries has a building that looks the same?
14:44Do they hire the same designer or engineer or architect?
14:46No, they don't, but they have the same code.
14:49It's called the International Building Code.
14:51Unfortunately, it forces everything to be kind of the same.
14:54One of the simplest examples of this is a code provision that says
14:57you don't need to have operable windows in a commercial building, in an office building.
15:01This leads to glass towers everywhere.
15:04This is a movement that's been afoot a long time,
15:07ever since the modernists in the 1920s, to kind of impose a single way of building on everywhere.
15:14I don't like it.
15:15I think places should look different.
15:17And as a place grows and you build new buildings,
15:20let's make that place be more like itself, be more different.
15:23To tackle that, though, it's not just as easy as getting a new architect.
15:26You're going to have to go and examine those codes as well.
15:29At Vinny Motherland, can I ask, at what point is it okay for a metropolitan city
15:34to simply reach a reasonable capacity and have that be an okay thing?
15:38That is a question humanity has been trying to answer for its entire civilized existence.
15:43When is a city too big?
15:45Rome got to be a million people and it still wanted to get bigger.
15:49Tokyo today has 30 million people, biggest city in the world.
15:53It doesn't seem like there are any limits, maybe.
15:56I think there are.
15:57But those limits don't happen at what we call the city scale.
16:00Those limits really have to do with neighborhoods.
16:03What is the largest that a neighborhood can get and still be viable and pleasant?
16:08And then how can you stitch those neighborhoods together to create a great city?
16:13Brandon White asks, how do most urban planners feel about favelas?
16:18Favelas are areas, let's say in Brazil, that are haphazardly built,
16:24that are in a city but aren't really hooked up to a city.
16:27Many people look at them as places of crime, places to be avoided, but they're not.
16:32They are really part of the city and they have their own form of organization.
16:37I think that the right way to think about favelas is to look at them
16:41as one end of the urban spectrum compared to the other end of this urban spectrum,
16:45say a fancy shopping street.
16:47Sao Paulo is sort of the king of cities in terms of the biggest favelas
16:52and the most sophisticated streets.
16:54And people don't actually interact as much as they should.
16:57I think if people went to favelas more,
16:59and people from favelas went to the shopping, as they call them,
17:02you would start building that social trust that would let people see
17:06that cities can look different and yet still be the same.
17:09At cycles six mile, nearly a third of downtown Detroit is parking.
17:14Perhaps just one more parking lot will fix it.
17:16Yeah, just one more parking lot.
17:18We had a bunch of walkable cities in America.
17:21In the 50s, people started tearing down the buildings and building parking lots.
17:25It was like a disease, practically.
17:28If you looked at an aerial picture of downtown Detroit in 1965,
17:32you'd think like, oh, was this bombed?
17:35It was a pretty noxious cocktail of people leaving for the suburbs
17:41and then policies meant to redevelop downtown.
17:44You almost got government cheering people on,
17:46working the tax codes so that they would tear down their building
17:50in the hopes of some kind of renaissance center
17:53that Detroit built relatively unsuccessfully back in the day.
17:57They were meant to revitalize an area, but no, they didn't.
18:01So Detroit has clawed its way back and it's a great success story,
18:05but it's not because of the parking lot.
18:06It's because of the people moving to Detroit
18:09with a vision of what it can be tomorrow.
18:11Young people, grassroots, and it's still got a long way to go.
18:14There's no question about it,
18:15but it shows something about the resilience of cities.
18:18We want to be there, that we're working at it.
18:21Chef Carpaccio, is there any way to solve
18:23the insane rising cost of housing in NYC?
18:26Oh, it is very expensive to live in New York City.
18:29It's been a problem for a very long time.
18:31You open a newspaper from the 1920s, housing crisis in New York City.
18:35It's too expensive to rent here.
18:37We've tried everything.
18:39We've tried building public housing at the scale of Robert Moses,
18:43all the housing blocks that you see.
18:44We've tried expanding into new neighborhoods,
18:47but somehow the rent still gets to be too damn high for each generation.
18:52It's a problem that seems to be part of New York's growth.
18:56Every year, hundreds of thousands of people move to New York City
19:00searching for their dream.
19:01Just a little less hundred thousands of people leave New York City.
19:05They've had enough.
19:06That's actually very healthy for a city if it can continue growing.
19:10Now, New York has historically had other problems which we have solved.
19:14Probably my favorite is the crisis problem of 1910,
19:18which was there is too much horse manure in New York City.
19:21If we can solve that one, I guess there's always hope.
19:23rr913, how are you feeling about the shelving of the congestion pricing plan?
19:29One word, ug.
19:31We really need the money that congestion pricing was going to bring in
19:33to fix the subways and do all sorts of needed transit projects.
19:37Congestion pricing has worked elsewhere in several Nordic cities
19:40and probably in terms of scale closest to us in London.
19:44It's just a way of making cars pay a bit more of their share
19:48of the overall transportation costs.
19:50But it's a shame.
19:50We put in all the infrastructure and then we pull back from it.
19:55Doxyadis of Detroit asks,
19:57what were some of the dumbest proposals in urban planning history?
20:02Wow, we'd be here all night if we really answered that question in its fullest.
20:06One that I'll class perhaps more as a failed experiment
20:09than as an outright failure is Brasilia,
20:12the new capital of Brazil that was built in the 1950s.
20:15If you've ever been there, it is an impossibility to walk.
20:19It is meant to be seen from the sky.
20:22It's meant to be photographed.
20:23It is a monument to its architect's sense of self.
20:27But it is a wretched city to get around.
20:29Now, being the capital of Brazil, one of the great countries of the world,
20:32of course, it eventually filled up with people.
20:35And now it has growth around it.
20:37But you'll see that the little edge cities that grow around Brasilia
20:40look absolutely the opposite of Brasilia.
20:43People are building the kinds of places they'd really rather be in.
20:46And Brasilia stands as kind of a failed experiment in image making.
20:51At jbucobeng, how is it possible authorities can let a city run out of water?
20:57How?
20:57It cannot happen.
20:59If a city runs out of water, a city dies.
21:01Water is the single most important resource to have a city become livable.
21:06So authorities have to do everything they can to provide a water supply in New York City.
21:12There is a third water tunnel under construction.
21:15There is an enormous upstate network to gather water and provide for it
21:19that's been worked on diligently for over a century.
21:22Sao Paulo had a very difficult choice recently when a drought
21:26drained some of their reservoirs because they had been using water to create electricity.
21:31And suddenly they were faced with this dilemma.
21:34Uh-oh.
21:34Do we turn off the lights or do we turn off the tap?
21:37Can't let your city get there.
21:38All right, that's it.
21:39That's all the questions.
21:40Hope you learned something.
21:41Till next time.