REDESIGNING CITIES: The Speedwell Foundation Talks @ Georgia Tech School of Architecture

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 is a companion to the video of Dan’s hour-long lecture given the same day and also available at the Redesigning Cities website.

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 art projects they have each worked on and their impact on cities and different kinds of public spaces.

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 will discuss the impact on cities and neighborhoods of both exclusive single-family house zoning and alternative forms of houses/housing. 

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 starts digging!

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.

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.