Redesigning Cities
How should existing cities, their systems and policies, be redesigned to address 21st Century challenges?
REDESIGNING CITIES: The Speedwell Foundation Talks @ Georgia Institute of Technology is a series of presentations + conversations between leading urbanists that address 21st Century urban challenges: social capital, equity, climate change, outdated infrastructure, disruptive technologies, and money. The series is hosted by Ellen Dunham-Jones, professor and director of the Master of Science in Urban Design degree in the Georgia Tech School of Architecture.
Upcoming episodes for Spring 2025:
3/24 Natosha Reid Rice:
Creating Beloved and Thriving Communities Now, 6:00 - 7:30, Clary Theater and on Zoom
Register here
3/26 Neal Payton & Sarah Nurmela:
City as a Developer: From Dead Mall to Downtown, 6:00 - 7:15 and on Zoom
Register Here
3/31: Anthony Townsend & Debra Lam:
Can AI Empower Community Voices in Climate Adaptation? 5:00 - 6:15, Howie Physics Building - L2 and on Zoom.
Register Here
Episode 40: The economics of Cities
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.
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Episode 39: Redesigning Housing for Cities
Winner of the 2021AIA Young Architect Award and co-author of 9 Ways to Make Housing for People, Amanda Loper is Principal of David Baker Architects and director of the firm’s Birmingham, Alabama office. The video of her lecture walks us through their innovative nine ways of making beautiful affordable and market rate housing that is people-centered and locally-oriented. The podcast is a follow-up conversation with Ellen Dunham-Jones.
Video: Watch Here!
Episode 37: The Mobility Revolution
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.
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Episode 37: Place-Based Activism and Democracy
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 on how urban design and urban designers can empower the disenfranchised.
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Episode 36: Ending Global Sprawl
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 impactful advocate for linking sustainable growth and policy, Peter Calthorpe delivered this year’s Georgia Tech TSW Lecture, followed by a conversation with Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones.
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Episode 35: Redesigning Cities' Public Spaces
Too many public spaces in our cities and towns are failing to promote healthy behaviors and equitable access to opportunities. Streets have been taken over by cars that not all can afford. Parks have been neglected and obesity, anxiety and loneliness are at all-time highs. Learn how renowned urbanist Gil Penalosa has reversed these trends in Bogota, Toronto, and other cities whose leaders follow him and his strategies on Cities4All.org and 880cities.org.
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Episode 34: 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 documents them. Vice President and Urban Places Fellow with Stantec, David co-edited Suburban Remix: Creating the Next Generation of Urban Places (2018) and co-authored Design for an Urban Century (Wiley, 2015). Residential Architecture Magazine named David to their Hall of Fame as “the person we call to ask about cities.”
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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 Utopias: the Rise and Fall of Suburbia.
Podcast: Listen Here!
Listen to the lecture here!
We are grateful to the University of Georgia College of Environment + Design for permission to link the lecture Professor Fishman gave after our podcast interview with him
Episode 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 trail loop that has proven the popularity of walkability and bike-oriented development but promised to include future transit. Should that transit continue the city’s historic but troubled investment in streetcars or bet on emerging technologies like AV shuttles? How should such decisions be made about what transit goes where and what kind of city we want? Features Tejas Santanam, Eric Kronberg, and Rebecca Serna.
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Episode 31: Recognizing Ubiquitous Wetness and Decolonizing Boundary-Making
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 that there’s no such thing as “dry land”. It all gets rained on to some degree. Climate change is erasing those lines and forcing us to recognize ubiquitous wetness and rethink land ownership.
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Episode 30: Redesigning Cities with Social Infrastructure
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 cities in the desert, on the ocean, and on the moon?
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Episode 29: Carfree Urbanism and Missing Middle Housing
What are missing middle housing and carfree urbanism and why are they powerful means of tackling climate change, gentrification, public health and ineffective and racist planning and zoning? Daniel Parolek, architect, urban designer, and author shares the innovative solutions and projects his team at Opticos Design have implemented in two formats for this Episode. Ellen Dunham-Jones interviews Dan in the 30-minute podcast primarily about the firm’s carfree design at Culdesac, Tempe. In the 82-minute video sponsored by TSW, Dan gives an hour lecture with slides followed by Q&A.
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Season 5: Episode 28 | Redesigning Cities with Public Art
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.
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Season 5: Episode 27 | Redesigning the House
This episode asks if you change the house, do you change the city? The American Dream of ownership of a detached single-family house is increasingly out of reach – and out of date. It has an ongoing legacy of racist 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 Andrew Bruno of Georgia Tech will discuss the impact on cities and neighborhoods of alternative forms of houses/housing.
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Season 5: Episode 26 | Redesigning Cities for Local Entrepreneurs
What if developers thought of themselves as farmers nurturing their neighborhood’s abandoned buildings, planting 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 Options Real Estate in Dallas and Bernice Radle of Buffalove in Buffalo discuss how they have incrementally engaged in what they call “gentlefication” not gentrification to provide affordable, local solutions reviving their neighborhoods.
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Season 4: Episode 25 | Redesigning Cities for Public Health
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. Tune in to their conversation reinvigorating what it means today to design for health, safety, and welfare.
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Season 4: Episode 24 | Atlanta's Parks and Greenways as Agents of Urban Transformation
Building in part on its Olmstedian legacy, Atlanta is making unprecedented investments in new parks, greenways, and forests. Adrian Benepe of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden will lead a conversation with Clyde Higgs of the Atlanta Beltline and Tim Keane of the City of Atlanta on how this is radically transforming development patterns, trip modes, and the intersection of equity and ecology.
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Season 4: Episode 23 | Redesigning Cities with Affordable Housing
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.
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Season 4: Episode 22 | Redesigning Cities Post-Pandemic
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 Street Plans Collaborative and Tactical Urbanism fame, and Professor Kari Watkins, civil engineering at Georgia Tech help us figure it out.
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Season 4: Episode 21 | Redesigning Cities in Science Fiction
What can urbanists learn from how Sci-Fi authors have reimagined cities? GT Regents Professor in Science Fiction and author 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. Shaunitra Wisdom, GT School of Architecture Academic Advisor, author, and Periplus Fellow shares her insights.
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Season 3: Episode 20 | Redesigning Cities to Tackle Structural Racism
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.
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Season 3: Episode 19 | Redesigning Cities for a Tele-Everything World
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.
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Season 3: Episode 18 | Redesigning Cities with Green Infrastructure
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.
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Season 3: Episode 17 | Redesigning Cities with Neuroscience
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 will present their research on how spatial design impacts meaning, emotions and behavior, before discussing the implications for redesigning cities.
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Season 3: Episode 16 | Redesigning Critical Infrastructure for Climate Change
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 will present 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.
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Season 3: Episode 15 | Redesigning Cities and Suburbs for Women
Dolores Hayden, professor emerita of Yale, kicks off this episode with her seminal research on the history of feminist architecture and urbanism and how it contrasts to suburbia’s construction of women’s roles. Eva Kail then presents how she has implemented gender mainstreaming in the design of parks, housing, transit and neighborhoods while working for the city of Vienna, Austria for over thirty years. The rich conversation that follows, led by Julie Kim and Ellen Dunham-Jones of Georgia Tech, discusses why the US hasn’t followed Austria’s lead, hopes for future feminists, and more.
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Season 3: Episode 14 | Redesigning Cities with the Green New Deal
What is the Green New Deal and what might its advancing of equity, jobs, and justice in relation to climate change mean for redesigning cities? Billy Fleming of the University of Pennsylvania and Nancy Levinson of Places Journal inform, interrogate, and invite designers to figure it out in this co-hosted Places Event.
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Season 2: Episode 13 | Redesigning Cities’ Integration of Ecology with Technology
Marcel Wilson, founder of the San Francisco-based landscape architecture firm Bionic, presents his work in the REDESIGNING CITIES video, extracted from his presentation of the 2020 Doug Allen lecture. In the podcast, he and host Ellen Dunham-Jones discuss shifts in how we’re redesigning the integration of nature as an amenity, performative ecology, and infrastructural technology into cities and landscapes.
Season 2: Episode 12 | Building Carbon Positive Cities
Alan Organschi, partner in Gray Organschi Architecture and on the faculty at Yale University, and Scott Marble, Chair of the School of Architecture and partner in Marble Fairbanks, discuss Organischi’s research on the potential of timber construction combined with forest management to turn cities into massive carbon sinks.
Video: Watch Here!
Season 2: Episode 11 | Redesigning Cities with Philanthropy
Carol Coletta, President and CEO of the nonprofit Memphis River Parks Partnership, and Ellen Dunham-Jones, Director of the Master of Science in Urban Design degree at Georgia Tech and Co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia, discuss the utilization of philanthropy to improve the public realm with an emphasis on parks.
Podcast: Available on Podomatic.
Video: Watch here!
Season 2: Episode 10 | Redesigning Cities for Low-Status Communities
Majora Carter, a revitalization entrepreneur, presents her decade-long work on 'self-gentrification' and incremental development as a means to stem the stigmatization and brain drain out of low-status communities.
Podcast: Available on Podomatic.
Video: Watch here!
Season 2: Episode 9 | Redesigning Cities for Smart Mobility and Inclusive Innovation
The Newsweek Momentum Award Winners - We are proud to formally kick-off Season 2 in partnership with Georgia Tech’s Smart Cities and Inclusive Innovation initiative with the 2019 winners of The Newsweek Momentum Awards. The Newsweek Momentum Awards celebrate the people and cities propelling the world toward an environmentally sustainable, socially equitable, economically viable future of autonomous mobility and smart urban environments. Come hear from the five individual 2019 winners and representatives of this year’s “smartest city in the world.”
Podcast: Available on Podomatic (Part 1) and Podomatic (Part 2).
Video 1: Newsweek CEO Dev Pragad & Medellin, Columbia–World’s Smartest City – Watch here!
Video 2: Jan Gehl, Gehl Architects, Copenhagen – Watch here!
Video 3: Janette Sadik-Khan, Bloomberg Associates, former Commissioner of Transportation, New York City – Watch here!
Video 4: Reuben Abraham, IDFC, Mumbai – Watch here!
Video 5: Seleta Reynolds, General Manager, Los Angeles Department of Transportation – Watch here!
Video 6: Carlo Ratti, MIT Senseable City Lab, Carlo Ratti Associati – Watch here!
Season 2: Episode 8 | Redesigning Cities' Investments in Transportation Infrastructure
Chuck Marohn is the President and founder of Strong Towns, a growing movement that questions the fiscal responsibility of sprawl development patterns. He is a civil engineer and city planner whose early career was spent widening roads and advancing auto-dependency in accordance with what he’d been taught. He was interviewed by Georgia Tech’s Ellen Dunham-Jones, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, and Kari Watkins, Olmsted Professor of Civil Engineering.
Podcast: Available on Podomatic.
Season 2: Episode 7 | Redesigning Cities with Carbon Pricing Markets?
How can cities get a double dividend from cap-and-trade programs that mitigate climate change and revenues that fund adaptation? Does market pricing of negative externalities provide cities with a new set of tools for localizing carbon neutral benefits? These are some of the topics discussed by Josh Margolis of the Environmental Defense Fund with Dan Matisoff and Ellen Dunham-Jones of Georgia Tech.
Season 2: Episode 6 | Gentrification without Displacement?
Is gentrification without displacement possible? Joseph P. Riley, a civil rights leader and founder of the Mayors Institute on City Design will describe his efforts as Mayor of Charleston, SC for 40 years to answer this question in conversation withJess Zimbabwe, architect and Director of the Rose Center for Public Leadership at the National League of Cities and the Urban Land Institute.
Live Event: April 24
What Are People Saying? Read Our Blog (English/Arabic/Chinese/Korean) | Watch Testimonial
Podcast: Available on Google Play, TuneIn, Stitcher, and iTunes.
Video: Watch here!
Season 1: Episode 5 | Redesigning Cities Against Climate Change
Peter Calthorpe, author of Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change, planner, and developer of Urban Footprint and Rob Kunzig, senior environment editor at National Geographic and author of Fixing Climate.
Live Event: March 27
What Are People Saying? Read Our Blog (English/Chinese) | Watch Testimonials
Podcast: Available on Soundcloud, Google Play, TuneIn, Stitcher, and iTunes.
Video: Watch here!
Season 1: Episode 4 | Redesigning Cities for the Collaborative Economy
Episode Four features Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar and author of Peers Inc. and Gabe Klein, author of Start-Up City and former Commissioner of Transportation for both Washington DC and Chicago. They will draw on their broad expertise to discuss both the role of cities in shaping entrepreneurial, collaborative economies and in being shaped by them. Robin Chase and Gabe Klein will be hosting a book signing prior to the event between 5:15 and 6:00 PM at the Academy of Medicine. Books will be available for purchase
Live Event: February 20
What Are People Saying? Read Our Blog (English/Arabic/Chinese/Korean)
Podcast: Available on Soundcloud, Google Play, TuneIn, Stitcher, and iTunes
Video: Watch here!
Season 1: Episode 3 | Redesigning Cities' Parks as Social Infrastructure
Maurice Cox, Architect and Planning Commissioner of Detroit, and Mitchell Silver, Parks and Recreation Commissioner of New York City and former APA President will discuss redesigning parks as social infrastructure.
Live Event: January 30, 2019 from 6-8 PM, Historic Academy of Medicine
What Are People Saying? Read Our Blog (English/Chinese/Arabic) | Watch Testimonials
Podcast: Available on Soundcloud, Google Play, TuneIn, Stitcher, and iTunes
Video: Watch here!
Season 1: Episode 2 | Retrofitting Suburbia Too
Episode Two will explore the redesign of outdated, suburban infrastructure and associated aging malls, office parks, and other auto-oriented property types. How are suburbs confronting the challenges of climate change, equity, social capital, and new modes of mobility?
June Williamson and Allison Arieff will present and discuss innovative case studies and the forces helping or hindering their implementation. June Williamson is Associate Professor of Architecture at The City College of New York. She is author of Designing Suburban Futures and co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia as well as the forthcoming sequel. Allison Arieff is Executive Director of SPUR in San Francisco, Editorial Director of The Urbanist, contributing writer to The New York Times since 2006, and recipient of the 2018 American Institute of Graphic Arts Steven Heller Award for Cultural Commentary.
Live Event: January 9, 2019 from 6-8 PM, Historic Academy of Medicine
What Are People Saying?: Read Our Blog (English/Chinese/Spanish/Korean) | Watch Testimonials
Podcast: Available on Soundcloud, Google Play, TuneIn, Stitcher, and iTunes
Video: Watch here!
Season 1: Episode 1 | Redesigning Cities with Autonomous Vehicles
Episode One on December 4th will kick off the discussion on disruptive technologies with two pioneers at the forefront of smart cities design and regulations. Jeff Tumlin and Harriet Tregoning will present and discuss the leading strategies and questions for redesigning cities with autonomous vehicles.
Live Event: December 4, 2018 from 6-8 PM, Academy of Medicine
What Are People Saying? Read Our Blog (English/Arabic/Chinese/Korean) | Watch Testimonials
Podcast: Available on Soundcloud, Google Play, TuneIn, Stitcher, and iTunes
Video: Watch here!