Ellen Dunham-Jones: Retrofitting suburbia

45,096 views ・ 2010-06-29

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00:16
In the last 50 years,
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we've been building the suburbs
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with a lot of unintended consequences.
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And I'm going to talk about some of those consequences
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and just present a whole bunch of really interesting projects
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that I think give us tremendous reasons
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to be really optimistic
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that the big design and development project of the next 50 years
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is going to be retrofitting suburbia.
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So whether it's redeveloping dying malls
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or re-inhabiting dead big-box stores
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or reconstructing wetlands
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out of parking lots,
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I think the fact is
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the growing number
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of empty and under-performing,
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especially retail, sites
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throughout suburbia
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gives us actually a tremendous opportunity
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to take our least-sustainable
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landscapes right now
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and convert them into
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more sustainable places.
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And in the process, what that allows us to do
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is to redirect a lot more of our growth
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back into existing communities
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that could use a boost,
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and have the infrastructure in place,
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instead of continuing
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to tear down trees
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and to tear up the green space out at the edges.
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So why is this important?
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I think there are any number of reasons,
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and I'm just going to not get into detail but mention a few.
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Just from the perspective of climate change,
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the average urban dweller in the U.S.
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has about one-third the carbon footprint
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of the average suburban dweller,
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mostly because suburbanites drive a lot more,
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and living in detached buildings,
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you have that much more exterior surface
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to leak energy out of.
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So strictly from
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a climate change perspective,
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the cities are already
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relatively green.
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The big opportunity
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to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
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is actually in urbanizing
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the suburbs.
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All that driving that we've been doing out in the suburbs,
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we have doubled the amount of miles we drive.
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It's increased our dependence
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on foreign oil
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despite the gains in fuel efficiency.
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We're just driving so much more;
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we haven't been able to keep up technologically.
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Public health is another reason
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to consider retrofitting.
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Researchers at the CDC and other places
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have increasingly been linking
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suburban development patterns
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with sedentary lifestyles.
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And those have been linked then
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with the rather alarming,
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growing rates of obesity,
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shown in these maps here,
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and that obesity has also been triggering
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great increases in heart disease
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and diabetes
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to the point where a child born today
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has a one-in-three chance
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of developing diabetes.
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And that rate has been escalating at the same rate
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as children not walking
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to school anymore,
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again, because of our development patterns.
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And then there's finally -- there's the affordability question.
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I mean, how affordable is it
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to continue to live in suburbia
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with rising gas prices?
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Suburban expansion to cheap land,
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for the last 50 years --
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you know the cheap land out on the edge --
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has helped generations of families
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enjoy the American dream.
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But increasingly,
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the savings promised
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by drive-till-you-qualify affordability --
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which is basically our model --
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those savings are wiped out
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when you consider the transportation costs.
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For instance, here in Atlanta,
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about half of households
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make between $20,000 and $50,000 a year,
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and they are spending 29 percent of their income
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on housing
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and 32 percent
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on transportation.
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I mean, that's 2005 figures.
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That's before we got up to the four bucks a gallon.
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You know, none of us
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really tend to do the math on our transportation costs,
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and they're not going down
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any time soon.
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Whether you love suburbia's leafy privacy
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or you hate its soulless commercial strips,
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there are reasons why it's important to retrofit.
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But is it practical?
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I think it is.
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June Williamson and I have been researching this topic
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for over a decade,
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and we've found over 80
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varied projects.
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But that they're really all market driven,
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and what's driving the market in particular --
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number one -- is major demographic shifts.
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We all tend to think of suburbia
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as this very family-focused place,
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but that's really not the case anymore.
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Since 2000,
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already two-thirds of households in suburbia
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did not have kids in them.
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We just haven't caught up with the actual realities of this.
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The reasons for this have a lot to with
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the dominance of the two big
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demographic groups right now:
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the Baby Boomers retiring --
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and then there's a gap,
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Generation X, which is a small generation.
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They're still having kids --
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but Generation Y hasn't even started
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hitting child-rearing age.
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They're the other big generation.
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So as a result of that,
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demographers predict
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that through 2025,
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75 to 85 percent of new households
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will not have kids in them.
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And the market research, consumer research,
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asking the Boomers and Gen Y
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what it is they would like,
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what they would like to live in,
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tells us there is going to be a huge demand --
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and we're already seeing it --
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for more urban lifestyles
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within suburbia.
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That basically, the Boomers want to be able to age in place,
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and Gen Y would like to live
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an urban lifestyle,
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but most of their jobs will continue to be out in suburbia.
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The other big dynamic of change
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is the sheer performance of
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underperforming asphalt.
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Now I keep thinking this would be a great name
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for an indie rock band,
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but developers generally use it
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to refer to underused parking lots --
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and suburbia is full of them.
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When the postwar suburbs were first built
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out on the cheap land
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away from downtown,
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it made sense to just build
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surface parking lots.
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But those sites have now been leapfrogged
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and leapfrogged again,
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as we've just continued to sprawl,
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and they now have
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a relatively central location.
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It no longer just makes sense.
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That land is more valuable than just surface parking lots.
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It now makes sense to go back in,
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build a deck and build up
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on those sites.
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So what do you do
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with a dead mall,
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dead office park?
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It turns out, all sorts of things.
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In a slow economy like ours,
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re-inhabitation is
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one of the more popular strategies.
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So this happens to be
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a dead mall in St. Louis
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that's been re-inhabited as art-space.
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It's now home to artist studios,
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theater groups, dance troupes.
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It's not pulling in as much tax revenue
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as it once was,
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but it's serving its community.
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It's keeping the lights on.
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It's becoming, I think, a really great institution.
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Other malls have been re-inhabited
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as nursing homes,
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as universities,
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and as all variety of office space.
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We also found a lot of examples
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of dead big-box stores
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that have been converted into
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all sorts of community-serving uses as well --
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lots of schools, lots of churches
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and lots of libraries like this one.
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This was a little grocery store, a Food Lion grocery store,
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that is now a public library.
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In addition to, I think, doing a beautiful adaptive reuse,
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they tore up some of the parking spaces,
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put in bioswales to collect and clean the runoff,
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put in a lot more sidewalks
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to connect to the neighborhoods.
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And they've made this,
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what was just a store along a commercial strip,
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into a community gathering space.
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This one is a little L-shaped strip shopping center
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in Phoenix, Arizona.
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Really all they did was they gave it a fresh coat of bright paint,
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a gourmet grocery,
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and they put up a restaurant in the old post office.
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Never underestimate the power of food
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to turn a place around
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and make it a destination.
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It's been so successful, they've now taken over the strip across the street.
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The real estate ads in the neighborhood
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all very proudly proclaim,
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"Walking distance to Le Grande Orange,"
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because it provided its neighborhood
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with what sociologists like to call
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"a third place."
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If home is the first place
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and work is the second place,
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the third place is where you go to hang out
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and build community.
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And especially as suburbia is becoming
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less centered on the family,
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the family households,
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there's a real hunger
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for more third places.
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So the most dramatic retrofits
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are really those in the next category,
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the next strategy: redevelopment.
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Now, during the boom, there were several
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really dramatic redevelopment projects
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where the original building
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was scraped to the ground and then the whole site was rebuilt
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at significantly greater density,
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a sort of compact, walkable urban neighborhoods.
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But some of them have been much more incremental.
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This is Mashpee Commons,
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the oldest retrofit that we've found.
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And it's just incrementally, over the last 20 years,
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built urbanism
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on top of its parking lots.
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So the black and white photo shows
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the simple 60's strip shopping center.
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And then the maps above that
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show its gradual transformation
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into a compact,
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mixed-use New England village,
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and it has plans now that have been approved
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for it to connect
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to new residential neighborhoods
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across the arterials
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and over to the other side.
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So, you know, sometimes it's incremental.
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Sometimes, it's all at once.
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This is another infill project on the parking lots,
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this one of an office park outside of Washington D.C.
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When Metrorail expanded transit into the suburbs
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and opened a station nearby to this site,
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the owners decided
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to build a new parking deck
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and then insert on top of their surface lots
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a new Main Street, several apartments
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and condo buildings,
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while keeping the existing office buildings.
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Here is the site in 1940:
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It was just a little farm
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in the village of Hyattsville.
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By 1980, it had been subdivided
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into a big mall on one side
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and the office park on the other
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and then some buffer sites for a library
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and a church to the far right.
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Today, the transit,
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the Main Street and the new housing
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have all been built.
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Eventually, I expect that the streets
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will probably extend through a redevelopment of the mall.
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Plans have already been announced
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for a lot of those garden apartments
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above the mall to be redeveloped.
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Transit is a big driver of retrofits.
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So here's what it looks like.
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You can sort of see the funky new condo buildings
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in between the office buildings
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and the public space and the new Main Street.
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This one is one of my favorites, Belmar.
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I think they really built an attractive place here
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and have just employed all-green construction.
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There's massive P.V. arrays on the roofs
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as well as wind turbines.
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This was a very large mall
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on a hundred-acre superblock.
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It's now 22
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walkable urban blocks
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with public streets,
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two public parks, eight bus lines
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and a range of housing types,
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and so it's really given Lakewood, Colorado
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the downtown
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that this particular suburb never had.
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Here was the mall in its heyday.
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They had their prom in the mall. They loved their mall.
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So here's the site in 1975
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with the mall.
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By 1995, the mall has died.
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The department store has been kept --
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and we found this was true in many cases.
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The department stores are multistory; they're better built.
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They're easy to be re-adapted.
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But the one story stuff ...
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that's really history.
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So here it is at projected build-out.
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This project, I think, has great connectivity
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to the existing neighborhoods.
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It's providing 1,500 households with the option
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of a more urban lifestyle.
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It's about two-thirds built out right now.
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Here's what the new Main Street looks like.
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It's very successful,
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and it's helped to prompt --
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eight of the 13
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regional malls in Denver
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have now, or have announced plans to
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be, retrofitted.
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But it's important to note that all of this retrofitting
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is not occurring --
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just bulldozers are coming and just plowing down the whole city.
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No, it's pockets of walkability
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on the sites of
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under-performing properties.
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And so it's giving people more choices,
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but it's not taking away choices.
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But it's also not really enough
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to just create pockets of walkability.
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You want to also try to get more systemic transformation.
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We need to also retrofit the corridors themselves.
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So this is one that has been
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retrofitted in California.
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They took the commercial strip
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shown on the black-and-white images below,
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and they built a boulevard
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that has become the Main Street for their town.
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And it's transformed from being
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an ugly, unsafe,
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undesirable address,
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to becoming a beautiful,
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attractive, dignified sort of good address.
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I mean now we're hoping we start to see it;
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they've already built City Hall, attracted two hotels.
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I could imagine beautiful housing going up along there
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without tearing down another tree.
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So there's a lot of great things,
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but I'd love to see more corridors getting retrofitting.
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But densification
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is not going to work everywhere.
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Sometimes re-greening
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is really the better answer.
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There's a lot to learn from successful
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landbanking programs
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in cities like Flint, Michigan.
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There's also a burgeoning suburban farming movement --
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sort of victory gardens meets the Internet.
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But perhaps one of the most important re-greening aspects
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is the opportunity to restore
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the local ecology,
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as in this example outside of Minneapolis.
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When the shopping center died,
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the city restored the site's
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original wetlands,
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creating lakefront property,
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which then attracted private investment,
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the first private investment to this very low-income neighborhood
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in over 40 years.
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So they've managed to both restore the local ecology
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and the local economy at the same time.
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This is another re-greening example.
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It also makes sense in very strong markets.
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This one in Seattle
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is on the site of a mall parking lot
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adjacent to a new transit stop.
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And the wavy line
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is a path alongside a creek that has now been daylit.
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The creek had been culverted under the parking lot.
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But daylighting our creeks
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really improves their water quality
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and contributions to habitat.
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So I've shown you some of
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the first generation of retrofits.
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What's next?
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I think we have three challenges for the future.
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The first is to plan retrofitting
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much more systemically
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at the metropolitan scale.
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We need to be able to target
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which areas really should be re-greened.
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Where should we be redeveloping?
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And where should we be encouraging re-inhabitation?
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These slides just show two images
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from a larger project
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that looked at trying to do that for Atlanta.
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I led a team that was asked to imagine
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Atlanta 100 years from now.
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And we chose to try to reverse sprawl
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through three simple moves -- expensive, but simple.
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One, in a hundred years,
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transit on all major
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rail and road corridors.
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Two, in a hundred years,
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thousand foot buffers
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on all stream corridors.
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It's a little extreme, but we've got a little water problem.
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In a hundred years,
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subdivisions that simply end up too close to water
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or too far from transit won't be viable.
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And so we've created the eco-acre
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transfer-to-transfer development rights
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to the transit corridors
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and allow the re-greening
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of those former subdivisions
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for food and energy production.
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So the second challenge
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is to improve the architectural design quality
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of the retrofits.
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And I close with this image
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of democracy in action:
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This is a protest that's happening
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on a retrofit in Silver Spring, Maryland
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on an Astroturf town green.
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Now, retrofits are often accused
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of being examples of faux downtowns
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and instant urbanism,
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and not without reason; you don't get much more phony
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than an Astroturf town green.
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I have to say, these are very hybrid places.
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They are new but trying to look old.
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They have urban streetscapes,
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but suburban parking ratios.
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Their populations are
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more diverse than typical suburbia,
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but they're less diverse than cities.
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And they are
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public places,
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but that are managed by private companies.
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And just the surface appearance
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are often -- like the Astroturf here --
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they make me wince.
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So, you know, I mean I'm glad that
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the urbanism is doing its job.
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The fact that a protest is happening
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really does mean
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that the layout of the blocks, the streets and blocks, the putting in of public space,
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compromised as it may be,
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is still a really great thing.
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But we've got to get the architecture better.
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The final challenge is for all of you.
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I want you to join the protest
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and start demanding
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more sustainable suburban places --
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more sustainable places, period.
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But culturally,
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we tend to think that downtowns
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should be dynamic, and we expect that.
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But we seem to have an expectation
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that the suburbs should forever remain frozen
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in whatever adolescent form
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they were first given birth to.
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It's time to let them grow up,
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so I want you
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to all support the zoning changes,
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the road diets, the infrastructure improvements
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and the retrofits that are coming soon to a neighborhood near you.
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Thank you.
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About this website

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