As listeners and viewers to Redesigning Cities 40+ episodes should have figured out – urban design is complicated business! It requires integrating a wide range of social, transportation, energy, and environmental collaborators, infrastructures, networks, and design details into a spatial framework. Luckily Nico Larco, lead author of the Sustainable Urban Design Handbook talks us through this matrix of issues, as well as his research on emerging technologies and new mobility.
Jul 03, 2025•1 hr 34 min•Season 7Ep. 45
What roles do homeownership, the affordable housing crisis, and the law play in achieving the goals of Dr. Martin Luther King’s beloved community? Can housing design, land use policy, and activism overcome political and social barriers to enrich connectedness, neighboring, and belonging – especially today? Drawing on her extensive experience managing transformational change in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors, Natosha Reid Rice speaks to these challenges and shares lessons on how to le...
Jul 03, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Season 7Ep. 42
Can Urban AI activate human agency in the performance and design of cities, particularly in relation to climate change? Can the unfair systems that produce climate vulnerability in the first place, expand the role of marginalized stakeholders in climate adaptation? Leading urban tech researcher, Dr. Anthony Townsend examines the role that artificial intelligence innovations could and are playing in empowering such communities. From resilience planning chatbots to synthetic visualizations of floo...
Jun 27, 2025•1 hr 17 min•Season 7Ep. 44
Why are more and more cities buying their dead shopping malls and taking on the role of master (re)developer - rather than leaving that job to experienced real estate developers? Downtown Westminster is an excellent example of this kind of suburban retrofit. Its lead designer, Neal Payton, Senior Principal with Torti-Gallas + Partners and Sarah Nurmela, Mayor Pro Tem of Westminster, CO present the project and discuss both the advantages and challenges of such an approach.
Jun 26, 2025•1 hr 24 min•Season 7Ep. 43
Wildfires, urban heat, sea level rise, and the many other impacts of climate change are starting to turn desirable communities into high-risk locations and threatening food and water supplies. How, when, and where will displaced people move? How are cities preparing for the loss or gain of climate migrants? Award-winning author and investigative reporter Abrahm Lustgarten shares research from his new book on these questions. Host Ellen Dunham-Jones leads a follow-up discussion with Abrahm, Jairo...
May 15, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Season 7Ep. 41
Amanda Loper, principal of David Baker Architects and director of the Birmingham, AL office is an expert on designing beautiful, affordable and market rate housing that's both contemporary and local. Ellen Dunham-Jones interviews her in this follow up to her lecture at GA Tech on her and David's new book, N ine Ways to Make Housing for People .(see the video on the Redesigning Cities website.) They discuss designing housing for people vs as a commodity, "small but mighty" interventions, how to d...
May 15, 2025•42 min•Season 7Ep. 39
Cities only have a finite amount of land – does it make sense that they tax lower density areas at a lower rate? How should cities balance the cost of maintaining infrastructure on a per acre basis with how land use policies impact the amount of property taxes those same acres produce? Joe Minicozzi explains the simple math that anyone interested in redesigning cities should know. This fascinating talk relies heavily on visuals. Listeners unfamiliar with his 3D visualizations of property tax/acr...
Nov 08, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Season 6Ep. 39
This episode continues the discussion begun during Episode 32: What Transit Modes Where? and is co-hosted by Better Atlanta Transit. Atlanta-based experts give Pecha Kucha/Lightning Talks on innovations in micromobility, micro-transit & communication technologies, inclusive transportation, transit policy and legislation. Opening and closing remarks discuss the implications of these innovations on our experience of cities in general, and Atlanta in particular.
May 25, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Season 6Ep. 38
How have youth organizations in disinvested neighborhoods reinvigorated models of democratic citizenship and collective life? Can the exercise of collective agency in the physical space of “the commons” provide young people with the practical skills to engage with today’s economic, racial, and ecological crises? Dr. Sharon Egretta Sutton’s newest and sixth book, Pedagogy of a Beloved Commons: Pursuing Democracy's Promise Through Place-Based Activism , makes that case and we discuss her research ...
Apr 09, 2024•28 min•Season 6Ep. 37
As urban population growth across the globe continues to sprawl outwards, how do we promote healthier development patterns in diverse economies and cultures? With a particular focus on corridors, Peter Calthorpe presents the strategies he developed in association with the World Bank to address the three dominant types of sprawl: high-income sprawl as found in the US, low-income sprawl as found in Mexico, and high-density sprawl as found in China. A prolific author, visionary urban designer, and ...
Mar 26, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Season 6Ep. 36
Episode 35_Gil Penalosa
Dec 12, 2023•58 min•Season 6Ep. 33
Redesigning Suburbs How and where are North American suburbs being redesigned to address dramatically changing demographics, technology, market preferences, and climates? The pandemic and Work-From-Home accelerated earlier trends of the urbanization of dead malls and office parks. But they also renewed leapfrog exurban development. Join this conversation between academic host Ellen Dunham-Jones who researches suburban retrofits, and David Dixon FAIA, an award-winning professional who designs and...
Nov 24, 2023•43 min•Season 6Ep. 32
Redesigning Cities for the 2nd Global Urban Revolution What does it mean for humanity that we are transitioning from a rural to an urban species? This is the fundamental question that Professor Robert Fishman is exploring. Professor Emeritus from the University of Michigan, he was trained as an urban historian at Stanford and Harvard, and is the author of the highly influential books Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier and Bourgeois Utopia...
Nov 24, 2023•50 min•Season 6Ep. 32
What Transit Modes Where? New modes of getting around are exploding. Now, in addition to fixed rail, bus, and streetcar, smartphones and algorithms have expanded on-demand mobility such as microtransit vans, scooters, and e-bike rentals. Some of our streets already have robotaxis and AV shuttles. Will the skies soon include podcars and UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles)? What kind of city, social equity, and neighborhood form do these different modes shape? In Atlanta, the Beltline is a 22-mile tra...
Nov 24, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Season 6Ep. 32
How do we think about the boundaries between land and water? Dilip da Cunha argues that those boundaries have always been much more fluid—literally. And he argues that the history of how we’ve organized cities is one of ever-increasing efforts to control, subjugate, and manage water while colonizing the land into administered parcels of private property. Dilip and his late partner, Anuradha Mathur, argue that climate change is actually helping us recognize how uncertain it is that there’s no suc...
Aug 04, 2023•35 min•Season 6Ep. 31
Kai-Uwe Bergmann, partner at BIG, the Bjarke Ingels Group, and host, Ellen Dunham-Jones, discuss the how, what, and why of designing joyful social functions into practical infrastructure at all scales. How did their ideas of hedonistic sustainability embolden them to convince clients to build a ski slope on top of a power plant in Copenhagen, build a concert hall on a highway intersection, turn storm surge fortifications around lower Manhattan into public parks and gardens – let alone design new...
Apr 01, 2023•39 min•Season 6Ep. 30
Dan Parolek and his team at Opticos Design coined the term and wrote the book on Missing Middle Housing to describe house-sized buildings with multiple units. These duplexes, quadplexes, cottage courts, etc. are essential tools in creating equitable walkable urbanism. In this episode, Ellen Dunham-Jones talks with Dan about their implementation at Culdesac, Tempe, the country’s first and largest carfree and mobility rich community built from scratch. For those interested in images, the podcast i...
Feb 28, 2023•30 min•Season 6Ep. 29
Whether heroic commemorative bronze statues, contemplative experiences of transformed materials, or vibrant activist murals, public artworks give cities cultural and economic value and provide meaningful identity to communities. But how do different kinds of public spaces and community identities influence public artwork? Stephanie Dockery, manager of Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge and Tristan Al-Haddad, architect and founder of Formations Studio will present and discuss public ar...
Feb 28, 2023•43 min•Season 6Ep. 28
Change the house, change the city? The American Dream of ownership of a detached single-family house is increasingly under attack. It has a racist history and ongoing legacy of segregation, a high environmental footprint, fosters sprawl and loneliness in ever-smaller households, and is increasingly unaffordable. Diana Lind, of the Penn Institute for Urban Research and author of Brave New Home: Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing , Ellen Dunham-Jones and Andrew Bruno of Georgia Tech w...
Dec 08, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 5Ep. 27
What if developers thought of themselves as farmers, reviving their neighborhood’s abandoned buildings, planting locally symbiotic uses, and growing small business entrepreneurs? And what if they wanted to teach you how to do the same in your neighborhood? Monte Anderson of the Incremental Development Alliance and Options Real Estate in South Dallas, TX and Bernice Radle of Buffalove Development in Buffalo, NY will discuss each of their work and its impacts as Season 5 of Redesigning Cities star...
Nov 27, 2022•48 min•Season 5Ep. 26
How are younger cities leveraging the renewed importance of urban parks in the pandemic? Adrian Benepe of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Trust for Public Land, Clyde Higgs of the Atlanta Beltline, and Tim Keane from the City of Atlanta will discuss how Atlanta’s investments in new parks and greenways are building on its Olmsted legacy while radically transforming development patterns, trip modes, and local ecology.
Mar 17, 2022•54 min•Season 1Ep. 24
Today, a minimum-wage earner can afford a one-bedroom apartment in only 145 out of 3,143 counties in America. Andrew Ross of NYU and author of Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing (2021) and Shelley Poticha of the NRDC and former Director of Sustainable Housing and Communities at HUD will discuss how ineffective government planning, property market speculation, and poverty wages have created this housing crisis -- and the policy and design measures needed to pull us out of it....
Mar 17, 2022•57 min•Season 1Ep. 23
Dr. Richard Jackson, emeritus professor of public health at UCLA and former Director of the CDC National Center for Environmental Health and has argued that architects and planners can have more impact on the health of the next generation of kids than all the physicians in the world. His words are best proven correct through the work of renowned architect Michael Murphy of MASS Design Group, dedicated to the construction of dignity and rooted in healthcare design. Listen in on their conversation...
Mar 12, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 4Ep. 22
Lock-downs, work from home, and fears of crowded indoor space during the pandemic have shifted how many of us use streets. From “streateries” and street racing, to drive-by birthday parades and outdoor schools, our streets have become significantly more social. Will these shifts last if and when the pandemic eases – and what do they mean for public space, transit, and mode-splits? Professor Vikas Mehta of the architecture and urban design programs at the University of Cincinnati, Tony Garcia of ...
Mar 12, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Season 4Ep. 22
How can we undo the ways economic policies have contributed to structural racism? And how should we redesign cities to reflect and advance equitable economies? Raphael Bostic, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and Catherine Ross, Regents Professor of City Planning and Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology will discuss solutions to these and other questions.
Mar 12, 2022•1 hr 24 min•Season 4Ep. 22
What can urbanists learn from how Sci-Fi authors have reimagined cities? GT Regents Professor in Science Fiction Lisa Yaszek discusses with host Ellen Dunham-Jones how diverse voices from around the world have challenged racial and gender norms in science and technology while proposing alternative kinds of cities, spaces, and social justice. Yaszek is the author of Galactic Suburbia and co-editor of Literary Afro-futurism in the Twenty-First Century. Shaunitra Wisdom, GT School of Architecture A...
Nov 12, 2021•56 min•Season 4Ep. 21
Post-pandemic, how might we leverage tele-work-medicine-education-everything to even the playing field between rich and poor places instead of exacerbating the digital divide? University of Arizona Professor Arthur C. Nelson and Debra Lam, Executive Director of Georgia Tech’s Partnership for Inclusive Innovation will help me, Redesigning Cities host Ellen Dunham-Jones, think through this question.
Nov 12, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Season 3Ep. 19
Josiah Cain, Director of Innovation at Sherwood Design Engineers presents the firm’s advanced techniques for regenerative site design before Mike Messner, Professor in Practice at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business, leads their conversation on the implementation, financing, and future prospects of these high-performing sustainable strategies.
Mar 31, 2021•1 hr 16 min
Sarah Williams Goldhagen, critic and author of the award-winning Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives, Sonit Bafna, associate professor and director of the Georgia Tech SoA Ph.D. program, and Harrison Fraker, Dean Emeritus at UC Berkeley and author of Minding The City: Field Notes on the Poetics of Sustainable Public Space present their research on how spatial design impacts meaning, emotions and behavior, before discussing the implications for redesigning cities.
Feb 23, 2021•1 hr 11 min
As climate change and urban heat islands compound the impacts of non-climatic events such as pandemics and blackouts, critical infrastructure too often fails just when it is needed most. How do we rethink and redesign critical infrastructure at the city, neighborhood, and microclimate scales? Brian Stone presents new research findings from the Urban Climate Lab at Georgia Tech in discussion with Doug Kelbaugh, author of The Urban Fix: Resilient Cities in the War Against Climate Change.
Feb 16, 2021•50 min
