I'm Alexandros Washburn,

former Chief Urban Designer of New York City,

and I'm here today to answer your questions

from the internet.

This is city planning support.

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@Mary Morse Marti, what's your thinking about

how to best accommodate electric bikes?

I think they merit their own on street travel lanes.

And I think they do too.

They are great forms of transportation.

They are the fastest growing form of transportation,

but they go very fast and they're relatively heavy.

You can't treat them just like a pedal bicycle.

There are injuries to pedestrians.

We do need to have some way

of moving them at the speed they want to go

in the right way.

Now, will this be done by a third level

of pedestrian bike, electric bike car,

or what if you could have at the scale of a bike

ramps and flyovers, like a miniature interstate system

that would work for electric bikes?

Wouldn't that be pretty cool

to just join our city, stitch it back together?

It's a crazy idea, but electric bikes

make us have to think outside the box.

Patrick Traughber asks, how does one solve gentrification?

Gentrification is the process in a city

where people who live in a neighborhood

are displaced by people who come into their neighborhood

who are richer.

It's been going on for as long

as there have been people in cities,

but there are things that we can do

to change the equation.

Typically, it's renters that get displaced,

whereas owners get to either stay

and enjoy the fancier neighborhood

or sell and enjoy the profits.

What if there was a way

to remove the displacement part of gentrification?

What if when the neighborhood got better,

it just added more places to live

rather than taking places away from people

who are already there?

For that to happen, you of course have

to build more housing that's there right now.

That means density.

A lot of people are scared of density,

but density if you do it right can be pretty good.

Singapore, they've got this really cool way

of leaving old parts of the city

that have two, three story buildings

and integrating buildings

with like 50 stories right into them,

but in a way that fits in to the street life.

And if you do it right, the density comes

with the other big thing about great cities,

which is diversity.

In an ideal city, you're gonna have

plenty of rich people coming in,

but you also have people of all economic strata

that get to stay in the same neighborhood.

That's the future answer of gentrification,

but it's a really hard problem,

because it really hasn't been solved.

Aaron Lubeck, in my opinion, more than 75%

of every urban planning architecture

and landscape architecture program today

should focus on sprawl repair.

That's a good point.

Most of us actually live in sprawl in suburbs,

so what is sprawl?

Sprawl is expansion without thought.

How do we change that?

How do we get it to be the 15 minute city

that the Parisians seem to be so good at?

You essentially have to retrofit an environment

that is been designed for cars

in a way that economic sense and still functions.

Old disused malls now become mixed use.

People build some housing,

they turn 'em into a street.

There's a great saying, if you wanna build a great city,

build a great street.

In some of the newer higher end developments,

like there's something called the Esplanade at Aventura

in Miami, they've actually created

a brand new pretend street in a shopping mall.

It's not really a street that has cars or anything

or traffic or any attempt to get you from here to there.

It's just a place between two stores.

It's actually physically quite pleasant to walk down there,

but it drives you nuts

because every store is playing their own music.

If we can solve urban sprawl,

maybe we can solve the problem of too much music.

Reddit user asks, in what ways

can architecture urban planning

reduce or even prevent crime?

The answer is it doesn't,

and it's been tried all the time.

When I was young, the answer to preventing urban crime

was to remove columns from buildings

and instead just have overhangs as you walk down the street.

So bad guys couldn't hide behind the columns.

Architecture is neither the cause,

nor the solution to urban crime.

@Alkaline Moon asks,

the boring company sounds like a money laundering scheme.

Like really, a single lane tunnel will solve traffic?

The boring company builds tunnels

that are supposed to take people very rapidly

from point to point.

So this is kind of cheating in an urban design sense

because you are going only from point A to point B.

You could do that with a subway train too.

I have a hunch there is something far in the future

that they're preparing for.

What I think is actually going to be

the next form of rapid transit.

Self-driving car trains.

You type in where you want to go,

they merge with other cars

that are also self-driving

to go very, very fast along a route

and then you split off to go to your individual destination.

This kind of combines the speed of an electric train

with the ease that we've come to expect from cars.

@Basil TGMD, how do trees cool the city?

Or is it just the shade?

Trees are like the single greatest thing

that can happen to a city.

Every tree provides oxygen for, you know,

between two and five people.

A tree lined street can be 10 degrees cooler

than a street without trees.

Think of trees as wonderful natural machines

that make every aspect of living in a city better.

Are there any examples of of city planning

that didn't use trees?

Well, actually, yes, there are.

For instance, in a lot of 18th century Nordic cities,

you'll see them excellently planned,

beautiful architecture,

but there'll be no trees in the street.

But you gotta remember that in the context back then,

95% of the people lived in rural areas.

As cities grew, we realized the folly of our ways.

And actually if you look at London

from 40 years past that point,

suddenly there are trees everywhere.

@Elliot, New York took centuries to build,

as do most cities.

What city was ever built

before people were even living there in this manner?

China made several ghost cities

trying to make this happen.

Now their real estate industry is collapsing.

China had the greatest spurt

of urbanization the world has ever seen

over the last generation,

so I can see why they might overshoot

the target a little bit.

But let's get back to the fundamentals of your question,

which is, can you build a city

in anticipation of its citizens?

And I think the answer is no,

because citizens are who builds a city.

I don't wanna live in something

that somebody else planned and built for me.

You know, a city's not a hotel room.

A city is an living organism

and how we change it defines us.

The best cities do grow changed by the people

who want them to be better.

They're citizens.

@iptvs, what's your vision

for public transportation in the future?

The distinction we make now between public transportation,

like a public train and private transportation,

like a private car, that distinction's gonna change.

What is a car is going to change.

They'll be shared.

They may have different forms, they'll be smaller.

It's really less self-driving

than it is self-parking cars that is the immediate future.

In a way that you can get in a self-driving car,

but then it'll go park itself

while you enjoy the place you are trying to get to

and you don't have to make room

to store that car while you are enjoying the place.

Imagine what that's gonna do spatially to everywhere.

Now suddenly you don't have

to build parking right next to where you wanna be.

Let the car deal with it.

TigerSagittarius86 asks, 20 years on,

was the big dig worth it?

Yes, the big dig was very worth it.

But what is the big dig?

Those of you who love Boston,

because it was planned by cows back in the 17th century.

In the 20th century,

some transportation planners built giant highways,

interstates that just cut right across

that gentle fabric of the city.

They really screwed up the neighborhoods on either side.

In the later part of the century,

somebody came up with an idea,

hey, let's take that highway

that's cutting Boston in two and let's put it underground.

Let's dig a tunnel.

They called it the big dig and it's worked.

Yes, traffic still gets around at the capacities

of the interstate, but on top you now have some new parks,

you have some new streets

that are sized more for pedestrians

and you have now all that growth urban repair

that's come up and healed around what used to be a scar.

So yeah, it's been a big success

and we should do more of it in other cities.

@Yash90ku, what does a sustainable city look like to you?

Sustainability now is, it's actually more about survival.

I have to think about sustainability

in the context of what's called the risk equation.

The multiplication of probability times consequences.

How likely is it for something bad to happen to your city?

And if it does happen, how much of your city will it affect?

We're seeing this every day with weather events

that are hitting cities around the world.

Now, a sustainable city has got to be a resilient city.

It's gotta be a city that can survive before it can thrive.

9Virtues asks, can someone explain

to me why taxpayers have to pay for stadiums?

The reason why cities use taxpayer monies

to fund stadiums is to increase business in a city

and therefore increase taxes that come back.

Say there's a part of the city that needs help.

It needs an upgrade, and a stadium downtown

will be able to attract 20, 30,000 people,

200 nights a year.

They wanna spend money, they want to have a good time.

That generates growth immediately around it and it can work.

Washington DC did something very successful

like that in its downtown.

Let's look at the other end of the spectrum.

Let's say you give somebody a billion dollars

to build a football stadium,

which is only used 12 days outta the year,

and you don't put that stadium right downtown

in a neighborhood where

people can build shops and restaurants.

You put it out and surround it with a giant parking lot.

That's not a good investment.

That's not really bringing a lot of money.

Like anything else in in real estate,

it's locations, locations, locations.

And cities better keep that in mind

before they write the next check.

@DietDrDazzle, whatever happened to the Hyperloop?

Hmm, the Hyperloop.

Well, that is merely the current incarnation

of something that I've been following a long time

called magnetic levitation Transportation, Maglev.

A hyperloop is a train that travels in a vacuum,

which is contained in a tube,

but it travels on a magnetic cushion.

I don't know how it's going to do in the long run,

but let's don't throw the baby out with a bath water.

Magnetic levitation can get things moving very fast

with very smooth rides

and very little energy per person.

The only one that's been built

and is functioning on a daily basis is in Shanghai,

going from the airport to a downtown subway stop.

It is amazing.

You're traveling 300 kilometers an hour

and you don't feel a thing.

It combines the kind of hyperlocal ability

to stop that a subway has

with the speeds practically of an airliner.

Imagine combining those two,

what you can do in terms of linking a city

or several cities together.

It's pretty powerful.

J1000C, does the Los Angeles River

or other similar rivers have

to be concrete for flood control?

The answer is, duh.

No, of course not.

And who came up with this idea in the first place?

Oh, these are some of the legacies

that we are living through in cities

from this kind of 1950s, say, orgy of hard engineering.

There is a big project turning it more park-like

and using it as a corridor.

That's a good thing, but there's a lot of work to do,

it's a big river and unfortunately

its design was replicated all over the world.

Even in Athens, Greece,

you know the one of the most beautiful rivers of antiquity.

That Elissonas was turned into a concrete ditch

and then to add insult to injury,

a highway was built on top of it.

No, no, no, no.

If you want to control floods,

you leave room for the water to flood.

The Chinese call it a sponge city.

People in Brazil where they had

those horrible floods recently

are coming up with these great ways of figuring out

where water would go

and then turning that area into a park.

Parks can flood temporarily,

the water goes back down eventually.

So no, do not make your river concrete.

Make your river part of an incredible park system

that on the day it floods, will save you,

but on the day it doesn't flood we'll delight you.

Hey, @SuperMaurice, is there a reason buildings

can't have a wind gauge type of windmill

or even some form of those spinning roads signs

to generate power?

Use a combination of those in solar.

You know, that's a question we asked ourselves

back at the Department of City Planning.

How could we change zoning restrictions

and regulations to promote buildings

generating their own power?

Solar was a good one.

Yeah, we figured out how to do that,

but then we thought about these windmills

or turbines, urban turbine.

What happens if you put a bunch

of spinning windmills on top of buildings?

We found out pretty quickly from our public outreach.

What happens is you get eek, eek, eek, you get squeaking.

Unfortunately, we really weren't able

to get much enthusiasm for windmills

at the scale of an individual.

@OurBikeLaneNYC, can we nix parking on some streets

and nix some streets on some streets

and turn them into housing with bike lane

and a pedestrian access

like the super blocks they have in Barcelona?

The Barcelona super blocks

they're referring to is the beautiful city in Spain.

Barcelona known for its wonderful urbanism

has decided to take some blocks

and bring them together

so that the streets don't divide up every block.

I'd like to think about this question

from a different point of view.

How would it be if we had a street

that was different from another street right next to it.

Makes me think of something I've always wanted to see

in a city, which I'll call it the tartan grid.

The tartan grid is the plaid pattern

that Scottish people wear on their kilts.

What if we had a grid system in a city

that one street was just like the streets we have now,

but the next street over changed the mix.

The car lane was really narrow,

but the bike lanes were really big

and the pedestrians were even bigger.

And then you go to the next street over

and you change the mix again.

Maybe we have a a lane for an electric bike

and then go back and repeat the pattern

by going back to the normal street.

Now if you do that, you're gonna get all the benefits

of different transportation balances.

Let's say you're a truck driver,

you're gonna want that car street,

but if you're a bicyclist, you're gonna want that other one.

If your kids are going to school,

you're gonna want 'em to take that third one.

But they all go generally to the same place.

So you get the benefit of the network that a grid gives you,

but you get the choice of experience

this different type of street gives to you.

@Ron Letsoko, why is it that every city in most countries

has a building that looks the same?

Do they hire the same designer or engineer or architect?

No, they don't, but they have the same code.

It's called the International Building Code.

Unfortunately, it forces everything

to be kind of the same.

One of the simplest examples of this

is a code provision that says you don't need

to have operable windows

in a commercial building, in an office building.

This leads to glass towers everywhere.

This is a movement that's been afoot a long time,

ever since the modernist in the 1920s

to kind of impose a single way of building on everywhere.

I don't like it.

I think places should look different

and as a place grows

and you build new buildings,

let's make that place be more like itself.

Be more different.

To tackle that though, it's not just

as easy as getting a new architect.

You're gonna have to go and examine those codes as well.

@VinnyMotherland, can I ask, at what point is it okay

for a metropolitan city

to simply reach a reasonable capacity

and have that be an okay thing?

That is a question humanity has been trying to answer

for its entire civilized existence.

When is a city too big?

Rome got to be a million people

and it still wanted to get bigger.

Tokyo today has 30 million people,

biggest city in the world.

It doesn't seem like there are any limits maybe.

I think there are, but those limits don't happen

at what we call the city scale.

Those limits really have to do with neighborhoods.

What is the largest that a neighborhood can get

and still be viable and pleasant?

And then how can you stitch those neighborhoods together

to create a great city?

Brandon White asks,

how do most urban planners feel about Favelas?

Favelas are areas, let's say in Brazil,

that are haphazardly built,

that are in a city but aren't really hooked up to a city.

Many people look at them as places of crime, places

to be avoided, but they're not.

They are really part of the city

and they have their own form of organization.

I think that the right way to think about Favelas

is to look at them as one end of the urban spectrum

compared to the other end of this urban spectrum,

say a fancy shopping street.

Sao Paulo is sort of the king of cities in terms

of the biggest Favelas and the most sophisticated streets,

and people don't actually interact as much as they should.

I think if people went to Favelas more

and people from Favelas went to the shopping

as they call 'em, you would start building that social trust

that would let people see that cities

can look different and yet still be the same.

@cyclessixmile, nearly a third

of downtown Detroit is parking.

Perhaps just one more parking lot will fix it?

Yeah, just one more parking lot.

We had a bunch of walkable cities in America.

In the fifties people started tearing down the buildings

and building parking lots.

It was like a, like a disease practically.

If you looked at an aerial picture

of downtown Detroit in 1965,

you'd think like, oh, was this bombed?

Was a pretty noxious cocktail

of people leaving for the suburbs.

And then policies meant to redevelop downtown.

You almost got government cheering people on

working the tax codes

so that they would tear down their building

in the hopes of some kind of renaissance center

that Detroit built relatively

unsuccessfully Back in the day.

They were meant to revitalize an area, but no they didn't.

So Detroit has clawed its way back

and it's a great success story,

but it's not because of the parking lot,

it's because of the people moving to Detroit

with a vision of what it can be tomorrow.

Young people, grassroots,

and it's still got a long way to go.

There's no question about it,

but it shows something about the resilience of cities.

We want to be there that we're working at it.

Chef Carpaccio, is there any way to solve

the insane rising cost of housing in NYC?

Ugh, it is very expensive to live in New York City.

It's been a problem for a very long time.

You open a newspaper from the 1920s

housing crisis in New York City.

It's too expensive to rent here.

We've tried everything.

We've tried building public housing

at the scale of Robert Moses.

All the housing blocks that you see,

we've tried expanding into new neighborhoods,

but somehow the rent still

gets to be too high for each generation.

It's a problem that seems to be part of New York's growth.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people

move to New York City searching for their dream.

Just a little less hundred thousands

of people leave New York City.

They've had enough that's actually very healthy

for a city if it can continue growing.

Now, New York has historically had other problems,

which we have solved.

Probably my favorite is the crisis problem of 1910,

which was there is too much horse manure in New York City.

If we can solve that one,

I guess there's always hope.

rr90013, how are you feeling about

the shelving of the congestion pricing plan?

One word, ugh.

We really need the money that congestion pricing

was gonna bring in to fix the subways

and do all sorts of needed transit projects.

Congestion pricing has worked elsewhere

in several Nordic cities

and probably in terms of scale closest to us in London.

It's just a way of making cars pay a bit more

of their share of the overall transportation costs.

But it's a shame.

We put in all the infrastructure

and then we pull back from it.

DoxiadisOfDetroit asks, what were some

of the dumbest proposals in urban planning history?

Wow, we'd be here all night

if we really answered that question in its fullest.

I'll class perhaps more as a failed experiment than

as an outright failure is Brasilia,

the new capital of Brazil that was built in the 1950s.

If you've ever been there,

it is an impossibility to walk.

It is meant to be seen from the sky.

It's meant to be photographed.

It is a monument to its architect's sense of self,

but it is a wretched city to get around.

Now, being the capital of Brazil,

one of the great countries of the world, of course,

it eventually filled up with people

and now it has growth around it.

But you'll see that the little edge cities

that grow around Brasilia,

look absolutely the opposite of Brasilia.

People are building the kinds of places

they'd really rather be in.

And Brasilia stands as kind

of a failed experiment in image making.

@JBUCOBENG, how is it possible authorities

can let a city run out of water?

How?

It cannot happen if a city runs out of water, a city dies.

Water is the single most important resource

to have a city become livable.

So authorities have to do everything they can

to provide a water supply in New York City,

there is a third water tunnel under construction.

There's an enormous upstate network

to gather water and provide for it.

That's been worked on diligently

for over a century.

Sao Paulo had a very difficult choice recently

when a drought drained some of their reservoirs

because they had been using water

to create electricity

and suddenly they were faced with this dilemma.

Uh-oh, do we turn off the lights or do we turn off the tap?

Can't let your city get there.

Alright, that's it.

That's all the questions.

Hope you learn something.

Till next time.

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