 Hello and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us for our Mechanics Institute program online. Reimagining sustainable cities, strategies for designing greener, healthier, more equitable communities. I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Events at Mechanics Institute. Now for those of you who are new to the Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854, and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. We feature our General Interest Library and International Chess Club, ongoing author and literary events, and our Cinema with Film series, so please visit us online and also in person. The library is open five days a week. For this conversation, we will open for a Q&A with you, our audience, and also I'd like to mention that if you'd like to purchase a book, Reimagining Sustainable Cities. It is published by UC Press, and is also available at Alexanderbook.com or one of your independent bookstores near you. So, what will it take to make urban places greener, more affordable, more equitable, and healthier for everyone? We have four experts in the field to illuminate and help us think about new models of urban design and development that will help promote our growth, our communities, and sustainability. There are so many aspects of this, you know, land use and transportation and carbon footprint and issues of housing and ecology and restoration. And so we're very lucky to have our guest speakers who can illuminate how we can think about change and how we as citizens can also make those changes. And how this is going to affect human development. So I'd like to introduce our guests, first of all. The two authors. First of all, we have Steven M. Miller, who's professor in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of California Davis. His previous books include planning for sustainability. He is a fellow urban development reader co-edited with Tom, Timothy, Abitli, and climate change and social ecology. He is the Switzer Fellow and winner of the Dale Prize for Excellence in Urban and Regional Design and Planning. Also, Christina D. Rosen is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. So governing the fragmented metropolis, planning for regional sustainability, and growing a sustainable city. The question of urban urban agriculture with Hamil Piersle, and also planning ideas that matter, co-edited with Vishwa Priya, Sanyal, and Lawrence Dale. And here in Berkeley, we have two speakers. We have Louise Mozinga, who is professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning. She is a member of the Graduate Group in Urban Design of the College of Environmental Design and Director of the American Studies Program of the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. She is named a Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Studies in 2017. And she's a former associate of senior landscape architect with Sasuke He Associates. I hope I got that right. Sorry. And also our moderator, Christopher Jones, who is director of the Cool Climate Network, a university government industry partnership at the University of California, Berkeley, and a lecturer at the Haas School of Business. And his primary research interests are carbon footprint analysis, community scale greenhouse gas mitigation, and environmental psychology and environmental policy. So please welcome our four guests. Thank you very, very much, Laura. And thanks to the Mechanics Institute for sponsoring this event. And thanks to Louise and Chris for being discussants, and all of you for attending. Tina and I are going to do just about a five minute reading from the book to start with, and then perhaps say a few other words, and then we will move into discussion, a four way discussion with Louise and Chris. So Tina, would you like to kick us off. Sure. Thanks, Steve. And thanks to the Mechanics Institute for hosting us. So, I'm just going to read from the introduction, and just to give you a little flavor of the book. So, imagine a city where housing is affordable, where each home produces more energy than it uses. Different class, race and ethnic groups live nearby and enjoy each other's companies and company bikes and pedestrians outnumber cars. The air is clean and sounds of birds and children's voices can be heard. So many of those are visible from every dwelling, little is wasted or thrown away women people of color and LGBTQ individuals feel safe, respected and empowered businesses make decisions based on their benefits to workers, the public and the environment as well as their own bottom line. Leaders focused on long term collective well being, and everyone collaborates in planning the community's future and undoing the wrongs of the past. Imagine cities and towns, in other words, that will be sustainable and equitable far into the future. The vision may seem impossible, a dream so far from today's reality that is not even worth considering, but something like it will unfold eventually. If for no other reason, then, then that if humanity is to continue on this planet long term, it will have to figure in such ways. Business as usual, be a you, as we know it from the late 20th and early early 21st centuries is unsustainable. The only questions are how soon societies can move on to a better path, how much damage they will do in the meantime, and to what local forces will go to resist change. This book seeks to take sustainable city discussions to a new level by considering the steps needed to address the climate crisis, social inequality, racial injustice, dysfunctional democracy, terrible housing and contemporary challenges. Past sustainable city books have often focused on topics such as green buildings renewable energy, bike and pedestrian planning and compact land development strategies. However, we want to go beyond those to explore more fundamental structural changes. Our belief is that it is necessary to reimagine institutional economic and political structures. We call social ecology in order to make sustainable communities possible. This reimagining will be a creative process meshing changes in physical form with changes in policy codes, institutions and power structures. Hence, our use of the term designing in the title. Okay, and I'm going to take up from that with a couple other paragraphs from a bit later in the introduction. In our view that sustainable development is an oxymoron equating development with destructive overly consumptive ways of living. Others view the term as static, connoting some impossibly idealized steady state of society. However, in our view sustainability does not mean either continuing the status quo, or aiming at a static utopia. This is a process of continually and actively moving in directions that promote ecological health, social equity, quality of life, cooperation and compassion. The urban sustainability agenda has evolved greatly since planning and design professions began to embrace this concept in the 1990s. The climate crisis has become vastly more urgent and new emphases on urban food systems, safe and affordable water, structural racism, public health and reforming capitalism and democracy have emerged. I have a little we have a little graphic here showing how these new interests have come into the professions and the professions have themselves of things like urban planning urban design landscape architecture architecture have changed quite a bit in the last generation and are evolving fairly rapidly. The sustainability concept is often co opted to refer exclusively to environmental dimensions of change. Any meaningful discussion of it must include goals of social and racial equity, and economic transformation, both within industrialized countries, and between the global south and global north. Sustainability discussions must also address the structural barriers and injustices that to date have prevented the necessary level of action. For each sustainable community challenge there is of course no perfect solution. But in many cases, cities somewhere in the world have pioneered strategies that can make a difference. We seek to outline these approaches in each chapter with the hope that political discourse can be widened to fully consider them. Best strategies for any given community or society will depend on the context and may mix together multiple approaches that have been tried elsewhere. The concept is usually to acknowledge the need for change, and then to identify possible solutions. In other words, to reimagine. And let's see how we're doing in time. I am going to just mention one other thing at the very end of the chapter we are optimistic about the future generational shifts are underway in many countries. We see is the most diverse and politically engaged yet its members have grown up knowing that their success and even survival depend on their willingness to address issues, such as global warming and inequality. Intuitively, many young people know that be a you must change. And then each of us can look for creative action within our own lives homes and communities to reimagine a more sustainable world. Okay, I think that's probably enough reading because I think the discussion will be more, more interesting, I just want to mention the core message of the book, which is that it is time for a new generation of sustainable cities initiatives, which go beyond green buildings, eco restoration projects, like ways, and other achievements to date to launch a creative design oriented era of structural change in urban systems. Now the key words there structural change, bigger, fundamental things such as governance, how we conceive of housing, perhaps creating a new social housing sector. And maybe taking human needs such as healthcare out of the speculative market things like that are structural change. The process also needs to be creative and design oriented. The types of thinking that have gotten us into sustainability problems are not going to be the ones that get us out. Design is a creative process of manipulating forms, including institutions codes processes systems and patterns of thought. So hopefully we can explore that theme as well in our discussion. And lastly, I think we can all be optimistic as I mentioned. There's lots of gloom and doom I saw. Don't look up last weekend like many of the rest of us. And yes, things are not very bright in some ways, but in the long term we as societies will deal with the stuff. The only question is how soon. Okay, I think that's enough from us. I'm going to turn things over to Chris, and let's hear from Chris and Louise. Thank you for that introduction. And it was a real pleasure to read this book I want to start off with my recommendation and it was it's just full of information strategies, and ways to rethink are the way in which we engage with our communities, and the way those communities are embedded in social political and economic systems that also need to change. And I was also struck by the very second. This is the third paragraph and this is the really the theme of this introduction. And that that sentences. I want to describe this. Imagine this community where, you know, it is more sustainable and equitable and greener. And you say, you know, this vision may seem impossible a dream so far away, far from today's reality that eventually that it's not even worth considering. And then you say, but something like this will unfold eventually. But optimism is something that at least Generation Z needs. I think they have are growing up in an era in which one catastrophe and one set of setbacks after another as unfolded over their lifetime. Starting from terrorism to polarization to threats to our democracy to climate change and experiencing a living climate change. And through to COVID and I think there is a lot of doom and gloom out there. And so if you could thread this needle for us either both of you. Maybe tell us briefly what a world in which that does not address structural change, a world that does not embrace these design changes. The reason tell us why we can't that is unsustainable. Can you explain a little bit more about how we cannot persist in the business as usual. I think this is actually the topic of the first next two chapters, a bit about how the world would unfold if we do not address this these these structural and design changes. And then, maybe why, you know, the bit of why you're, you are optimistic that we will overcome those barriers. Okay, Tina, you want to have a go at that. I mean, I don't know if I feel like we're all living through the world that that's unsustainable right now. So, you know, if you're happy with the way things are right now, and getting worse and hotter and you know I mean, how many Americans and people all over the world have been impacted by climate. And, you know, you cannot hide from this so I think that's, I guess, for me I'm less worried that people don't see how bad it is. I think one of the reasons that Steve and I wrote this book is we both teach sustainable cities courses and we had felt there wasn't a book that was kind of optimistic enough or it was giving good, good solutions we felt like everything. I feel like a lot of the classes that I teach are so depressing I can't even teach them anymore so we were trying to figure out how do we, you know how do you frame the problem in a way that is realistic. But it's awesome but but also shows that there are a lot of people in the world who are not happy with the way things are going and are trying to make change. There's a lot of good stuff happening in the world so how do we amplify that. And, and, you know, and show people there's another way and I think that's really was our primary goal. Steve I'll flip it back to you. Yeah, again we prefer not to focus on the gloom and doom because I think anybody who reads a newspaper knows or looks outside the window on a day that smoke is obscured the sky, you know has seen this. But things are changing. We have a very minor prosaic example from my own field of urban planning. In the last year or two, a number of cities in the US and in fact, a couple states including California have eliminated single family zoning which is a very prosaic nuts and bolts thing. For the last 100 years, nobody thought that would ever happen. And, and they have also greatly reduced parking requirements, they realize we have a housing crisis, and it's not just in the US it's worldwide in many urban areas. And we need to do some pretty visionary things to address it. And, okay redesigning our codes is one of those things. There is a whole movement called the new urbanism which has come up with alternatives to the traditional zoning code form based codes, you know they're pros and cons to each of these approaches. But this sort of creativity is happening it just has not quite reached critical critical mass yet. So, equity. Okay, we've all seen George Floyd and how many other, you know, examples. TV or elsewhere. But I think we are starting to make, you know we're raising awareness at least collectively on on that one. So we could go on but yeah, the problems are big, but the solutions are starting to bubble up. I guess we have to solve these problems in order to to continue as a species and so I appreciate the positive, not only outlook but the really deep set of tools that this book provides one of the things I really enjoyed about it is, each chapter of the book has a table of strategies, and those strategies are all necessary in order to to truly live in more sustainable and vibrant communities. So it is a resource that I hope people will come back to the next sentence of the book that Tina did not read is the audience of the book includes all those who care about the future. So that includes you and everyone you know and so there is a lot to digest here. I was going through the strategies and I was classifying them into large structural changes. You might call those, you know, scalable changes, but they're really institutional changes and versus highly tailored solutions or you may consider those design choices and those design do take a lot of effort at the planning stage at the planning level and the city level. Often what planners are working with is is very locally oriented and and highly highly intensive takes a lot of talent, a lot of community engagement. And I think given that there are these large structural changes that need to happen. And there's also these a lot of on the ground work that needs to happen. I think people can kind of get overwhelmed. Where do I place my efforts so much needs to be done. If for somebody who is kind of wanting to make an impact. And I guess this is really for all all three of our other speakers here. Maybe somebody who's young, who sees so many places where they could make an impact and the book is very careful not to prioritize these solutions. But I don't know what would you say to somebody who really wants to make an impact but there's just so much to do. They're not sure where to get started. Do you know you want to lead off. Sometimes I have to go and try to convince people to become environmental studies majors, and then the parents keep asking me like are they're going to be jobs and I keep telling them, you know what environmental studies are going to be. So we're going to be in this area and we really need some awesome thinkers out there. I guess. You know, one of the things that I personally have kind of come to realize is that as academics we don't really have the time to sit around and talk about stuff anymore we kind of just need to get rolling, and we can't. We need, you know, like talking and even I met at an academic conference and I think part of our frustration was like, hey, all these academics are just talking about the same stuff again and again and again so like how do. So I think, you know, how do you, in wherever you're working, or whatever kind of your sphere is, how do you figure out a way to be a little bit noisy, and to kind of raise awareness, and sometimes, you know that means asking tough values questions I think this book, like we do talk about you know what is really important in society and how is the, it's the society that you're seeing it is that expressive of what we think it is important you know are we prioritizing families and you know individuals and communities like are we giving people time to express themselves are we respecting them, you know, so I think, I think that's the issue is, you know, in everybody is going to need a space to kind of be comfortable sharing their knowledge. And, but the there's, there's room for everybody in this, you know, like there's there's so much work to be done, but there's not time to sit on the, on the sidelines. So if you have, if you have a sense that the world shouldn't be this way and we're not making the right decisions. Then you need to hop in there and and and start speaking loudly. That's kind of where I think we need to be right now. So, let me add one more thing to my question and because just playing off what you've said Tina, sometimes, well at the cool climate at work that I where I work, we develop tools that all spheres of influence. I don't know, Steven, Luis, you could chime in. You know, for people who are listening in the audience, you know, we act at individual scales, interpersonal scales at organizations through organizations that are business or nonprofits or wherever we are at our community level. And then the public's policy, you know, kind of realm, and even a higher realm which may be kind of disruptive realm like what can I do that to change the existing system. Not only do people have to think about those spheres of influence, but they also have to think like, where am I going to direct, you know, within all the possible ways that I could interact within those spheres of influence. And I think it'd be really kind of confusing for for students young people to figure out, look, where do I fit in what you know what what can I do to be to be really impactful and how do I choose. I'd even approach that. I'm going to respond to that really quickly and then I'd love to get Louise into this. In the 1970s there used to be this bumper sticker which may be some of the older folks in the audience remember, think globally act locally. Well, that was great for the time. But I think we really need to think at many different scales, how things relate. And then we need to act, you know, wherever we can and not beat ourselves up too much that we can't act everywhere but, you know, maybe we can do stuff at our home, or our yard, or our street or a neighborhood, or our workplace, or, you know, our neighbor, our city, or maybe we have a bigger picture job or maybe we decide we have certain skills and we want to slot ourselves to be a chief sustainability officer for a fortune 500 corporation I mean that is a position that didn't exist. 2025 years ago, but every big company has one now. When I was graduating college I got on a train went to Washington DC and became a lobbyist for doing coordinating behind the scenes campaigns in Congress for a nonprofit. And then I later worked at a very local level in the city of Berkeley doing bike planning and stream restoration and various other things. Things just on UC Davis campus we got our chancellor to agree to develop a plan to end fossil fuel emissions for our campus and so you know, just wherever we are at different points in our lives we can do different things. Okay, Louise. Well, I mean, Stephen what you're saying is just start, start, get up, get about, you know, wherever you are, there is something to do in front of you do it. It is not that complicated. Actually, figure out what's in front of you what is in your realm and do it. You know, just pick up one thing and do it and then do the next thing, and then get somebody else to do it with you and then that's the way change happens I mean, I am exasperated we don't know what to do. Actually, Stephen and Tina, I think one of the great things about your book is that we tend to teach and to write about and whether in academics or in journalism or to talk about on, you know, various talking heads forums or podcasts or we tend to talk about social justice over here and then we talk about green infrastructure over here and we talk about land use over here and so forth and I think the great strength of your book is that you try to bring examples about all of those things together and show how they're interconnected. And anybody who's trying to understand, you know, what sustainability, how it is operationalized. Actually, your book is very revealing because you understand what social justice means in terms of not just housing which is where we sometimes you sort of narrowly think about it, but what does it mean in terms of public space or land use or green infrastructure, or, you know, a traffic. I think one of the one of like one of the things that for instance you was I thought was really interesting is you talked about the trade off in a new transportation system, as we have mobility which is extremely attractive right mobility is extremely attractive right though individual we buzz around how we want to. And then you talked about access. And I thought that that was a terrific sort of trade off. Okay, you might lose individual mobility, but you have access in a more dense, complex city to many many more things within a very short sort of round. And I think that there are several examples in your book where you sort of you present. It's not just an optimistic vision, it's showing how people can live more easily, more at ease in the world, through doing some of these things together so one the kind of array of interconnected things that you're talking about in the book is really excellent. The other thing is that it's about living better in a very kind of everyday sort of way. And you reiterate that throughout the book, which I think is really, really, really important and really good and you know I think that we as people who care about this thing you know we sort of fret where do we start. And I think you just start where you are. And if you kind of understand the basic principles which is what this book is trying to tell you, you will sort of find your way in terms of your own individual journey about where you, you know, think about this. Because I'm director of the center at Berkeley called the directors, the Center for Resource Efficient Communities. And one of the first thing I did is I got funding to create a handbook for city attorneys about doing new innovative kinds of streets because that's what you can do from working that you can come up with the most gorgeous interesting multi, you know, multi modal street that all the citizens were going and the city attorney will go. No, it's, you know, it's not been done before there's no standards for this there's going to be liability is I'm going to run into a tree and so forth. So we did like that's what I came out entirely out of practice. It's an opportunity. I did something it's now distributed everywhere. It's gotten covered in a lot of different realms because, okay, you come with an innovative sign the city attorney going. Here you go. Think about it this way dude. And that's really usually our dudes. And that's, that's, that's what we have to do we have to do what's in our own realm if you're a lawyer there's something to do if you were a doctor there's something to do. If you work for a ecology there's something to do I mean there are on every place where you sit. There is something to do in this realm and I think that that's incredibly important. I don't, I don't want to serve. I guess I have sort of given us well anyway I'll stop there, and then we can talk some more. Speaking of doctors. I used to teach in New Mexico and we had a an active living by design coalition there which is a, you know, public health type initiative to get people walking more. We worked with the doctors to have the doctors prescribe, taking a walk to people and literally putting that on a prescription pad. Yeah, that is starting to be done here you know there's a whole initiative at UCSF around this about giving prescriptions of walking in nature, not just walking for exercise walking on a treadmill but walking in nature. So this, you know these are all small changes I mean, it's kind of you know there's a, you know, complimentary medicine. I mean, I suppose that there are parts of the country where that doesn't exist but in most parts of the country now complimentary medicine exists. And you know and it was one thing that you know some, you know, renegade doctors did and not so you know maybe not doctors were doing 40 years ago we're doing it on the renegade side and now there's like centers for this right so you know in you know the reputable institutions and double blind peer reviewed studies and all that sort of stuff. So, I mean I think that we need to think about those that there's a very there's a comparability there as well and so I would just really say that. I would say that one of the things that we need to think about I mean I go back to this mobility versus versus access access, which I wanted you I mean I want you to do kind of a whole chapter on that about how your life could be different. So if I asked for anything that would be different in this book, I would want to a last book and a last chapter that said okay, I'm a, let's just say I'm a 63 year old woman who, you know, is so and so and how my life would be different. If many of these things would be implemented. So, what is my access what is my, I'm a five year old, you know, Latino boy, how would my life be different. You know, a 32 year old mother of two. How would my life be different, I think that that's understanding the, what, like Jennifer Allen pred calls the daily path implied by your book would be so so so vividly better, I think, writing that down for our next book. Okay, excellent. Yeah, I mean I think that that's really really important that you kind of take it down to the level of like what is in front of you, not just, you know, I like your drawing you know that that's a wonderful, you know, perspectival view and so forth. But the problem of that it's, it's actually up above. What is, what is my path through that. And how does it. How would it change my life. And you know rich people know this, right, all the perfect neighborhoods, you know the Elmwood and Berkeley, Valley in San Francisco. You know, they know these good neighborhoods, you know, they know they have a piece of this already, and it's highly value right the people Albany and north of Berkeley off Solano Avenue, you know, they already have piece of this and they're already valuing it so why isn't that sort of everywhere. Well, I'd like to pick up on that there's there's a nice drawing in the middle of the book, if you can see that but it's basically a vision of a sustainable community that has well connected network of streets and a mix of land use types and urban growth boundary. Thank you, Luis and mix of apartments and there's renewable energy, half the housing is social housing, complete streets designed for many modes of transit, etc. And, and I think we find examples of this I know that we have colleagues that have gone around the world and looked at these sustainable communities. But how do we not just have these little nodes or these little islands of sustainability. You know, when we what we really want to promote is, you know, change at all levels for all communities I mean, I think you could even have an even more inequity or at least you know it's a problem when only some of us can live this, this life and not all of us. And so I wanted to pull up just looking at strategies in particular. I think one one of the many, many tables, I bet it because people are asking about this already in the comments well what are some real strategies that we can look at. I'd like paid tape on page 230. There's a really nice table of structural change at the kind of the higher level. And then there's local public engagement. So I just want to kind of read some of these strategies and I think there's a strategies where all of us have some level of influence, maybe did kind of, I could get kind of some comments from other speakers. But at the structural change level we're talking about things like a restricting lobbying and improving elections. We can all think about how relevant that is right now. And strengthening public oversight of media educating ourselves to be good citizens education of course is a really big topic, increasing transparency and government and reducing conflicts of interest and then at the local engagement level, there's improving public hearings so that everybody is heard and that there's, there's time limits on what people are saying and that the, that the, that there's more transparency, making engagement more interactive we can think of like, I guess discursive kind of democracy here where everybody's views are being heard, appointing citizen juries using all the new media more effectively employing participatory budgeting which is a wonderful idea that hopefully that would be employed everywhere. These are kind of structural kind of governance types of, of, of changes. And, but these do not exist in many places. And so is, are these areas that are just critically fundamentally necessary and important, and among these. I don't know. There's so many strategies here. I have my own bias towards some of these. Do any of you want to highlight some of these that you think are particularly important. I'm, I'm throwing this one at you. Let me start. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I work a lot with students about strategizing their future careers and you know where they're going to go how they're going to get stuff done. And the strategies vary for each person, depending on what they're interested in depending on their own personality what their skills are. So, somebody is a really good meeting facilitator okay that's hugely important and there are a lot of specific skills they can learn to facilitate public meetings and make sure that one, the cranky neighbor down the street doesn't dominate the meeting and prevent the affordable housing from getting built or, you know, whatever, but that everybody and that people who haven't spoken get in and there's a whole set of skills that go with that which are pretty common sense but they're not what we teach necessarily in our programs. And and then there are other types of things presenting things visually is really important these days. UC Davis has a visual literacy requirement for our undergraduate students because the world is getting more visual we're all online and simple graphics can really convey ideas. So learning how to. And some people have great graphic skills and can do that. Other people are, you know, have other things so so it's going to vary Chris I'm resisting giving any answer, because I just don't think it plays out that way. I guess I guess the reason why I bring this up I mean, so a couple years ago I had a mid career crisis, I'll call it, I've been calling it that. And that is, I realized when I plotted California's greenhouse gas emissions against the United States emissions and I normalized them for the year 2000, and I also normalized them at the year 1990. And I realized that California emissions are kind of leveled off and we're even going up in recent years, whereas us emissions are going down. In California we had, we have 500,000 people working in green jobs. We have some of the most innovative policy and rigorous policy with cap and trade program, 10s of billions of dollars, half a million people working in the green space. And, and, and I fear that we're being really diffuse with our with our resources and talent, because there is so much to do. And I suppose if we had three times as many people in this space or four or five or 10 times doing 10 times as much work that we can make some good progress on these things but I don't want to. I think we're kind of training people to be making 1500,000th of a contribution to less than average progress on meeting these big changes, you know, so I, I didn't maybe want to. I think there's a people want to know like where what's really really important. And I guess maybe that really varies from person to person where they have leverage, but also if I can follow up on that one. There are skills of thinking strategically how to make a difference. And again, we have an a sustainable environmental design major that we started about six or eight years ago. And that's kind of one of the learning objectives help giving people experience thinking strategically. If you're one example that always I always loved there was a couple in LA who just had a boring tracked home in somewhere in Korea town, but they decided to green it and make it the greenest possible. So they, they developed the LA eco house, and they had school groups come and do tours through it and see how the water recycles and the banana plants grow and, you know, the energy is handled and so forth that that was a very difficult project, but they leveraged a lot of educational benefit out of it. Or some of, you know, some, maybe we, you know what we just did up at UC Davis we identified the person who had the power the chancellor, we, you know, had 280 faculty and 1300 students, you know, communicate this message to him that we want a plan to do use and we got that. So there's different strategic levers different times and places and we need to all gain skills of how to identify them and pursue them. First though, I think you're actually getting at something different. Can you hear me. Yeah, and I remember I did say I was going to try to be a little provocative here so so yeah let me. So I think you're getting at something different and I would identify this as one of the questions that I had about the approach in the book, which was. There's a very kind of, I don't know, kind of facile marriage between community participation government and NGOs. Right now, I actually think the relationship between community participation government and NGO in California in particular is highly dysfunctional and highly wasteful. Yeah. And you have, you know, you have do coders. And let me, let me, let me, let me preface this by saying, I'm the vice chair of a board of trustees of an NGO in San Francisco so I mean I like I'm part of this, I may be part of this problem I guess I'm saying is that you have philanthropic money going towards NGOs who don't have people who are extremely wealthy and don't pay a fair share of taxes. And so don't go to government at the same time government is, you know, at times, unbelievably exasperating, right. And, you know, also very, very wasteful in our own ways. You know, and, and, you know, I'm not, you know, I live in San Francisco I actually don't live in Berkeley. Do we pay the most per capita of any city in the United States, by far. Do we have the, you know, I know that we're supposed to have the greatest but we actually don't I mean, come on. Anyway, so that, you know, should be much, much better. So, you know, so that's part and then you have community participation which has been weirdly and destructively co opted. So, I, you know, that's one of the things you kept on sort of circling around these three things as if they each are the intrinsic saviors in this sort of situation, but there are some really bad problems and their interactions are also not good. You know, and I mean I could point to specific problems and, you know, specific NGOs but I'm not going to tattle tail that way but you know I think that that's that that system isn't working NGOs have been set up as this parallel kind of government, government, and there are sort of in this, you know, they're in a kind of codependency a bad codependency situation. And then you got, you know, citizen participation in there stirring the pot, you know, using it for usually much more kind of elite. You know, nonprofit industrial complex I agree, you know, yeah. So, you know, so I. So that's, I mean I understand you Chris that these we don't have, we don't have governance systems. I'm not talking about government system but governance systems that are really functional. I think we actually have a lot of money between NGOs and the government. Right, there's a lot of talent and resources out there we need to direct it and be strategic about it as Steve mentioned, something that we haven't brought up is social movements. The book discusses black lives matter credit Timbergs movement and youth movements and others. Does anybody want to chime in on on that last topic of, you know, we need to work locally but also our, is there a movement out there right now is do we need a new movement movement is there one that that are few out there that are that are worth checking out. Tina you get all the tough questions fossil fossil free is one. One is another right and there's, I think we need movements of people who are not afraid to call, call out things that are wrong, and that are not working and that's what you see, you know, in the incredible bravery of black lives matter and and Greta, you know you see, especially young people saying, this is not okay, we are not okay, this system is not okay, and, and pushing for something different. You know, I mean, one thing that I feel like, you know, I've learned is that if you think something's wrong, you're probably right. You know, so you should, you should like hang tight with that and keep going because they're and and and over time, people's ideas about things will change but we have to keep pushing them to do that kind of change otherwise we you know that there's like a lot of inertia in the system so you need people to undo that. And luckily we have a lot of really upset young people and black lives matter and coven you have these crises so I mean I think one of the things about this book and we had to kind of go back and rewrite it a lot is that you know we we had written a lot of it before COVID. And so trying to end black lives matter and thinking about how do we, you know, is it what's going to be different after this and I think everything's going to be different. So we, you know, I'm, I'm looking forward to more movements. And, you know, and that kind of, you know, and really having a new vision of a lot of people are very unhappy with the way the world currently works so like, can we do better I think we can. Yeah, I just like to point out that a really key thing. One of the things that I teach is actually the history of the American landscape. And we had a period of extraordinary change in cities. Now we may now argue with what those changes were but in the immediate effect of those changes were actually dramatic. And they were helpful to all classes of people and every race of people and that's the progressive era changes in city government and infrastructure. It's very worthwhile to look at the alliances that built that built that change. I mean, I know that, you know, I know about Flint, Michigan and I'm not, I don't want to be sort of Pollyanna about it. But in much of the country you open the tap and you drink the water and you don't immediately get cholera. Okay. And that was not the case in 1890. Not the case in 1875. And the reason that changed is because of the progressive era alliance between industry, women's groups, right. Women's clubs look into it they were extraordinary young people, settlement house leaders. They're early kind of immigrant leaders and labor unions and so forth. And there were some self interest in there. The interest that the, the, the industry, industrial leaders when her workers dropping dead all the time having to replace them. And, you know, there were a lot of there was an alliance there some of it was self interest some of it was altruism, but it was an interesting alliance and I don't know why people don't go back and look at that alliance. That in a generation, change garbage collection, sewerage, water supply, any housing standards, any number of things. I think I think you know to go ahead Steve and then we'll go to Q&A. Yeah. Yeah, we need to go to Q&A. Similar things have happened in different places at other times. Yeah, I studied Portland, Oregon a fair bit at one point. And that's, you know, known as a best practice of American planning partly some people think they're only the best at self promotion but, and they certainly have the problems but there was a, an alliance there of some nonprofits. There were neighborhood government civic elite types, local farmers who were generally smaller scale more family oriented than in California. And they got the home builders in or at least some of the more progressive home builders. So there was a political alliance in the mid 20th century that has led to 60 70 years now of one innovation after another that kind of build on one another. And Carl Abbott who's an historian of Oregon calls it the Oregon planning style. It's not unique to Oregon, that same different sorts of coalitions can occur other places and this is one of the things I learned from being in Washington DC for my 20s. You don't get anything done there unless you build a coalition of some sort you have a bunch of different players coming at it from different angles. I totally agree with everything you said about local participation Louise I think we need a new philosophy of that that does involve the public but that keeps it short and focused and produces results. And having spent 15 years as a local activist in Berkeley in the Bay Area. And give you lots of examples that didn't produce results, and that just burned everybody out, and that weren't fully inclusive anyway and you can never include future generations by definition. And you will never get illegal, you know, you're undocumented people out to public meetings. So, we have to get beyond the idea that enough meetings will solve the problem. So, it's, it's time to move on to our Q amp a Pam Troy or events assistant will be reading off some of the questions and we'll hear from you. Okay, well the first question that came up is by is from Malcolm Campbell is capitalism itself sustainable. I would like to hear from each speaker on this. Okay, I'm happy to lead on that one unless you want to Tina. That is a super fundamental question and if we talk about structural change, that's the biggest. Okay democracy is pretty big too but um, there was a wonderful book edited in the late 1980s by Martin O'Connor who I believe was teaching at UC Santa Cruz, then called is capitalism sustainable and on the cover it was a photo of a man with an axe. And it was a tree growing out at his base and he was chopping his own, you know, trunk off capitalism may well do that it may well scuttle itself. We lay out to alternatives in the, or several alternatives in the book, some sort of revision of capitalism is essential, some sort of greater public sector oversight and limits to the power of, you know, corporations and other things. There's a lot more work on alternative market oriented economies that are for example all co ops, or all other types of non Wall Street organizations and there are examples different places in the world of that kind of thing. I'm going to punt on the question I do think that at minimum capitalism needs to be hugely reformed though. And if we look at the influence of the oil companies over the climate issue, for example, you know, that alone is enough to argue that it's not sustainable. Tina you want to add to that. Yeah, I mean, I think we talk a fair amount about sort of thinking about alternatives I think that the, the kind of growth machine always consuming more, and you know, is clearly not sustainable. You know, we have to figure out. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things we, we also kind of raise is this issue just have kind of consumerism, you know, like a lot of our economy is built off of always meeting more and always consuming more and is that, you know, the sort of reduces the human experience to the bad of the consumer and that's something that definitely needs to be questioned so yeah, I mean, I don't see it necessarily going away anytime soon but I think there are some cracks and some lessons to be more cooperative models. And, and, you know, we should try to bring those you know community land trusts and, you know, other ways of, of, you know, focusing more on on on people and not profit so I think it's chapter three of the book and it's one of my favorite chapters so I really I'm tempted just to take a screenshot of this, you know, table of strategies and you have three paradigms seven emphasis and several city strategies here so there's lots to discuss on that one. We have lots of interesting things going on there's a whole de growth movement. Louise you want to get it on this one. Yeah, I mean there's lots of models of, you know, different the alternative versions for instance of GDP right so, you know, gross domestic domestic product we assume that capitalist economies can grow in order to stay healthy. And that's not to me that this is not a new question I mean economists have been thinking about that for really really long time. The, you know, the overwhelming sort of, you know, a paradigm is that it is that of course they do and so on and so forth and that's not actually a kind of proven. The choices are, I mean I see if you want to keep a market economy now I'm going to say also, I've been known to kind of get up the conferences and just sort of say, you know, I'm actually a communist. But so, because I'm just sort of sick of sort of defending capitalism but I'm not going to defend capitalism only. I'm going to say that there's basically two ways that you can control its rapaciousness. It's before the fact and after the fact. And so the before the fact is about either breaking up large companies or not allowing companies to get so big as to be so incredibly dominant that then they determine, you know, everything that you live and breathe which I mean we are on zoom. Okay. So I'll point out the irony about that. And, you know, I'm looking at an Apple computer. And, you know, this is I'm sure you know somebody's going to tweet or Facebook about this. So, understanding that I am wholly and completely enmeshed in this. So, can you know, you know, can you break up companies and not make them so big and the other is that you, you tax wealth at a completely different rate than we are currently taxing wealth, which is sort of the Scandinavian model, which is you force everybody live simply because if you don't live simply you're going to be going to give most of your money away anyway so you might as well live simply and it just makes your life simpler and you know hopefully better. So, you know that that is, that's the other alternative within a market economy. I think that though there's another question about that which is, I mean, and how can I say this. It's interesting to me to watch the pandemic as it's unfolded for all the reasons that everybody talks about what's interesting to me is the way that we're sort of stuck at the 60% vaccination rate. And, and so, you know, because there's no question that vaccination would help you yet. There's 40% of people who won't do it. I'm not just, I'm not willing to sort of say oh they're just simply Trump pieces I actually I think that there's something else going on here. The government hasn't cared for people for really really long time our society hasn't cared for people for really really long time. We haven't let people have access to doctors regularly for really really long time. And so surprised people are not going to go to doctor or medical institution and get their vaccine, which was very different than when the polio vaccine came out people were had much more access to doctors actually they may not have had insurance but it was a totally different system. You know there's still doctors that made house calls for God's sakes. So, I think it's really important to understand what you need to put in place to have people sort of have a sense of collaboration and being in this thing together. And, you know, where, you know, me paying the kind of taxes that I need to, you know, it, I understand better what it matters because I am actually taken care of in so many ways. So, that's what I would say. The next question is from Adele basic. How can we get average people in San Francisco to accept multi unit housing every time a project is announced people protest against it. Okay. Well, there's a wonderful book that has come out recently by somebody who was a classmate of mine actually 25 plus years ago at UC Berkeley Dan Parolek. And I've got it here in my desk somewhere called missing middle housing. Yeah, and it's great making the case that there are lots of relatively small two and three story housing forms that have just been forgotten in the American history. And these days we're either going for pretty big apartment buildings or single family homes, and there's a whole spectrum in the middle there that look and feel kind of like existing neighborhoods but actually do have multiple units in the same building and if I think if we looked at any older city in the Bay Area or most cities in the world, we will find a lot of that. So, that's one way. And another way is I think you just don't let the neighbors have a veto. You know, yes it's important to listen to neighbors yes it's important to tailor the project to the neighborhood and get in things that local people need and so forth, but you don't let them totally veto the project because cities evolve cities change and we need housing desperately. And it did just pass a law that requires cities to allow splitting of lots and adding secondary dwelling units on them so it won't necessarily happen in the places that we want it, it may happen in the places that we don't want it in the urban infield kind of perspective, but that's one example there's also a lot of yinbi ism out there. In fact, some of the same people who promoted nimby ism years ago and realize that we're creating, you know, seven jobs for every one unit of housing are now promoting yinbi ism and realizing in the Bay Area we need to create more housing and be for for all a whole number of reasons so there's a movement I think is shifting. Okay, we've got a few more minutes are there more questions. Well, I don't see any more questions, but there was Laura did bring up something that maybe. Maybe some of you can expand on this to greater streets and public spaces reduce violence. Yes, Louise Louise posted a response to that. Probably the consensus in the design fields correct me if I'm wrong Louise has been that getting more eyes on spaces tends to improve safety. You know, there's probably some caveats we could make, but if you slow down the traffic if you add, you know, landscaped medians and bulb outs and pedestrian friendly design and bike paths, you get more people out in the public realm and there are things for certain but that is likely to make those places safer. I think street design. Let me just on the optimistic front. You know, 3040 years ago. We were all about widening streets and just building more capacity and that area of design has totally revolution. Become totally changed we have all sorts of complete streets and road diets and green streets and bikeways and all sorts of creative effort being put forward on on that front so that's one of the more hopeful areas and if you look throughout cities you will find many of those. What I was talking about is called the topography of wellness and spy. Sarah Jensen car. You know, okay, like Steven she was one of my students. Here's the editor dissertation. But you know so I guess this is a little bit self promotion on my part but it's an excellent book and just gotten attention from the New York Times and a whole host of other places. She talks about about green and public health. And, and I mean there's just tremendous amount of work on this already and her own work about this. There's some very specific work by Bill Sullivan at the University of Illinois, very specifically about green spaces and crime. There's very, very rigorous statistical analyses. So, you know, social science analysis of this. And, you know, it sounds like it can't be true. But I mean, again, where do rich people go to make their neighborhoods safer a buy up property and walkable neighborhoods that were built on. Well, I wasn't that question was inspired by a New York Times article green streets can reduce violence. So I just wanted to get your opinion on that. I also want to ask Chris about the cool climate calculators and how can we calculate our carbon footprints and and what can we do as individuals to do that and I know that your models have been used for government and different organizations and corporations so can you just give us a little heads up on on that research and and the techniques and how we can utilize it. So what we do is we try to understand what drives consumption and then look at that find spatial resolution demographic information housing information, vehicle information, energy prices, etc, weather, and we estimate consumption down to neighborhood scale. And what we find in the Bay Area is that many neighborhoods are very sustainable, particularly their lower carbon compared to other locations with the same income level. But so if you had you lived somewhere else in California rather than say in in downtown Berkeley or San Francisco your carbon footprint will be much higher. But what we also find is a huge like a five times difference in the size of carbon footprints, even within the Bay Area. So what you can do is you can go on to cool climate.org and you can use the household calculator. And when you put in your location it gives you the carbon footprint of a household like you in that neighborhood. And then you use the calculator and you compare yourself to that that benchmark that similar household. But there's also a policy tool. So we go to cool climate.org forward slash scenarios as a tool that I worked on with with Steve Wheeler and Professor Cameron at Berkeley and and we came up with a rough policy tool so you can put in any city in the state or any any neighborhood and you'll see which policy intervention areas have the most effect on reducing emissions some places it's it's urban infill other places it's a vehicle electrification, etc. And so what we find is that the tailoring is really important. But also, you know, kind of thinking about the book, you know, we've got some broad strategies here, but a lot of tailoring really is required. And so that's where kind of we need to understand let's start with some good basic information, carbon footprint and inventory data should just be step zero basic planning tools like this should be step zero like let's start with a good, you know, like a place and then from there we can start the discussion and start getting into the real action that's needed. So thanks for bringing that up. Great. And also for the rest of you, I'd like to hear like 25 words or less. What strategy would you start on immediately what's your top number one from your from your point of view in your in your specific work. And I am going to say, meditation and art, because I think the humanities and personal awareness in all this emphasis on stem in our society have gotten totally left out of things. I'm still working on green infrastructure. And I think that's fine. Green infrastructure okay. I'm going to be say something totally different but data science. I believe there's a lot of data out there and that we can put it in to work for, for good at very low cost so scalability is really important for me. And that's one way to do it. Tina, you're on you're on mute. Thanks, my, my kid was coming in. So, yeah, I mean I think that to me the big thing is breaking down silos and just trying to think about problems more holistically. By the way, I put my email in the chat, I'd be happy to communicate with any audience member who has further questions or anything. And I think we're at the end of our time are we. So, I want to thank everyone for participating in a in a very compelling conversation. I know that is such a huge topic that you know when we have a conversation like this we just often just get on the surface. But I hope it's stimulated everyone to start thinking in different ways to use the resources that we've mentioned to also purchase one of the books are reimagining sustainable cities. And also to look up are the different websites that we've mentioned in the chat, and also see how you can contribute and move your communities forward and also your politicians and representatives to to get that those bills and into legislation on whatever level, city, state and federal. So I want to thank everybody for a conversation tonight and we look forward to more conversations on this topic. And good night to all. Thanks so much to the Mechanics Institute. Thank you, thank you, Louise and Chris.