 Thank you. We are now going to segue into our first conversation on the resilient city and rethinking the urban landscape. I would like to introduce, and if you could go ahead and come on up, Kate Benfield, who is the Director of Sustainable Communities at the National Resources Defense Council. Kate is also the co-founder of the LEED rating system for neighborhood development, the co-founder of the Smart Growth America Coalition, and he writes frequently for the America City's channel blog on the Atlantic website, which is really terrific. We also will have Justin Hollander, who is Assistant Professor of Urban Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, studies public policy issues of land management and environmental changes associated with economic decline. Justin wrote a book called, a timely book called, Sunburn Cities, the Great Recession, Depopulation, and Urban Planning in the American Sun Belt, and Sandra will also join us in this conversation. Alicia's asked me to read a couple of these cards that you filled out when you came in. Name one resilient character, real or fictional, explain why, and somebody, it's anonymous, wrote Mickey Mouse. That's a good one, a classic Disney character to span the ages, and of course, oh, this one's fantastic, Wiley Coyote, a protagonist with nine million lives. There is somebody who fits the Churchill's definition of success, right, going from failure to failure with enthusiasm. So why don't I move over here. I should have mentioned that Justin is now to my left, correct? And this is Kate. So maybe, Justin, if we could start off with you, and if you could try to help us define what a resilient city looks like. Well, thank you so much for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here. This is a topic that is actually of strong interest to me, and I've been thinking about these questions for a long time. I'm not sure how much I've used that word, resilient, but... Now's a good time to start. Maybe as opposed to sustainable city? Yeah, sustainable, stable, that's another word I like to use a lot. But the kind of work that I've done has been focused at the local government level, primarily looking at how neighborhoods change. And so early in my career, I spent a lot of time looking at cities and towns that were growing, and as they had more people, more jobs moved to areas, they had more housing, more shopping centers, more roads, and what we did was, as a planner, we embraced this concept of smart growth. And smart growth said that there is a way that you can manage this change that was happening in a way that can basically preserve the quality of your environment to the points made earlier, and that you don't have to change who you are as a city, as a town, you can manage it. And smart growth has a lot to do with making sure there's a lot of different options for transportation, so public transit, walking, biking, it has to do with the idea of mixes of uses. So it's not like just, this is a residential neighborhood, but maybe there's something close by that's retail, or maybe there's some office close by. And so that was smart growth. And then later, more recently in my career, I've really been more interested in the flip side, which is what happens to cities when they start to lose population, lose jobs, and then what does it mean to manage that change in a way that's going to preserve the quality of life of the people who are there, and so they don't have to change. Yes, this notion of managing decline smartly I think is quite interesting because we tend to always, even if we buy into the idea that resources are limitless in America, there's this effort to think about smart growth, but that still presupposes because we're Americans that there's always going to be growth. But of course, in a lot of urban areas that's not been the case. And how you manage that seems almost more compelling in a way than places that are growing that might have more resources and such. But is it all about... Let me turn to you, Kate, because I was struck reading some of the things that you've written that Atlanta is apparently a beacon of hope on some of these issues, which, you know, Atlanta, and I confess I don't spend much time there, but you always, it's, you know, over the decades is often pointed to as one of the culprits of sprawl, and now it seems there are good ideas coming out of Atlanta? Well, I'll echo that I am very happy to be here and join all of us for a really interesting program. I think Atlanta is an interesting case because it's both a beacon of despair and a beacon of hope. And to some extent, the despair has driven the hope so that, I think Chris Weinberger called Atlanta perhaps the fastest expanding human settlement in history. And as a result in all the problems that come with sprawl and transportation patterns and eating up the landscape and all of those things, there has been some very interesting innovation in Atlanta. Some projects that I'm particularly fond of are the sort of iconic now downfield revitalization called Atlantic Station, which is prospering in midtown Atlanta. And one of the country's most interesting sustainability and smart growth projects is something called the Atlanta Belt Line, which is a repurposing of a 22 mile railroad loop around downtown Atlanta. And the idea is to convert that into a loop of parks and transit that would spur revitalization of some of the most distressed neighborhoods in Atlanta along its route and at the same time create some 5,000 units of workforce housing. So it's really a brilliant idea that's going to take both capital and political will to implement. But I'm pretty excited about some of the things that are going on there. And do you have sort of an elevator pitch definition of the term resilient, or do you find that resilience is a helpful concept in thinking about cities? I will invoke my friend, Steve Muzon, who wrote a book called Original Green, which I think is one of the most important books on sustainability over the last decade or so. Steve's definition is can you keep it going in a healthy way into an uncertain future? And I think that sums it up about as well as any of us can. And that encompasses the notion of flexibility, which you referred to. Sandra, you mentioned that in your talk, Sandra, that crises are contagious, which is kind of a very sobering way to think about it. But we see it clearly in this shrinking world. But are good ideas and best practices and successes equally contagious? That's a really difficult one. Give me some hope here. Yeah, I think they are. But I think because you work against a certain inertia, you actually have to get them going with such momentum that they can become contagious. One of the things in the work that I've done on sort of innovation that became really important, if you study case studies, for example, of industrial innovation, when things are really new, you need to change minds. You need to get people to adopt a different mindset about things that they've been doing traditionally. That calls into question those people's identities. Those are very important to them because they have built on them for most of their career. So what you need to do is you need to create what we call scaffolding structures to get sufficient momentum going and to reinforce the new sufficiently so that it can actually take off. And I think that is something which in the sustainability debate is a really important element. We have this conference next week in London with most sustainability scientists from all over the world. And one of the main issues there is we have talked about this for so long. Why has there not been more collective action? And I think some of that has to do with these issues of identity change, creating new structures that are sort of in parallel initially to our existing structures, but that allow that momentum to actually grow to become contagious. And a last element is if you look at cities over the long-term time, they are by far the most resilient thing humans have created. They are there since 5000 B.C. and they keep growing. Now the question is, is that in itself continue to be a possibility? And it only is a possibility as long as we start innovating. So I would argue that in your case what is happening clearly is that Atlanta is hitting a tipping point where despair has come in certain areas to be so big that people actually really start innovating. And I think that is another part of that whole dilemma. When you mentioned that in Europe certain urban design practices have taken hold or forms of planning as a result of people's higher comfort level with the idea that resources are finite. I think we all have sort of a vague sense of the kinds of things that you are talking about, but are there a few concrete examples of urban planning mechanisms that are firmly rooted in Europe that we could import? Well, firmly rooted is a flexible sort of concept. But I can give you a couple of examples. One of them is in Stockholm where they are creating whole new parts of the city on a totally different energy concept that is a lot smarter than the actual one. Another one that I am more personally involved with is a new city in Holland located between Amsterdam, Utrecht, The Hague and Rotterdam next to the airport of Schiphol where the whole structure of that city is now being thought from the green perspective. And that comes up with completely different kind of building structures, road construction, density measures, everything there is being rethought and trying to put into what is a smart kind of urbanization. Now, my point was a little bit more general. It is that Europeans are much more used to regulation because they have needed that arbitration of scarce resources for such a long time. So it is easier in some ways to impose regulation than it is here, at least that is my perception of it. I was thinking, as you were talking, I was trying to think about is there any space left between Amsterdam and The Hague? Yeah, it turns out that they have a little bit and they are going to fill that up too. It is going to be a very vertical city then? Yeah, to some extent. Justin, are there going to be lasting consequences from this financial crisis which is so much tied to the crisis around our housing stock and land use issues? As we move out of, hopefully, knock on wood, of the Great Recession, 10, 20 years from now, are there going to be ways in which urban planning and innovations in cities that people will be able to trace back to this moment in time or is this going to be seen as a lost opportunity? What a great question. I don't know. This is definitely a time where there is a lot of attention focused on these issues of scarcity, these issues of climate change, but so quickly that can get swept up and people will be all excited about the new exciting ideas. So I think I'm going to have to say lost opportunity. I don't have the optimism to say so. I saw headlines somewhere yesterday about have Americans fallen in love with Mac Mansons and you do see there's a lot of some momentum around mixed use places of the type that you were describing, although I guess some of that predated the immediate crisis. But this idea in terms of how to address the housing crisis, there's a lot of talk in Washington about the administration should do more to allow people to meet their obligations and not foreclose. But it doesn't seem like you get beyond that type of discussion on how to handle this crisis. And I know you've written about some more imaginative proposals in terms of how to take advantage, if taking advantage is the right way to talk about a crisis. What would you like to see happen? How would you like the discourse in Washington to be different around these issues? I think a longer view of what tends to be a cyclical process of growth and decline that occur in just about every city in the history of the world, you can correct me. But I mean there's a longer view that suggests that cities will have times when they're growing and they'll have times when they're shrinking. And that during the periods of growth there's a lot of things that we can do to make sure that that community does not have that negative outcome, the famines that we learned about in Australia. And then during the times of decline that we can retrofit that urban environment, that we can reconfigure it, right size it if you will, in a way that's going to be able to preserve that resilient character. And the exact details of how you do that, I mean I think need to be made at the neighborhood level, at the local level, the people who live in these places. But there is a role for government, federal, state, local governments to create processes that empower people to help make those decisions and not to just say, well this is our zoning and this has always been our zoning for the last 50 years, so let's just keep it. Zoning can be a tool to reinvent the blueprint of a community and in times of depopulation, economic distress, zoning can be rethought of and reinvented. Do you have an Atlanta that you like to point to as a beacon of despair slash hope? Despair slash hope. Or a case study where you find something particularly interesting happening in the US on these issues. Well I've actually been spending a couple years doing research in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which is just southeast of Boston. It was the wailing capital of the world in the 19th century. Moby Dick took place there. This is a fascinating city that went through those very same periods of boom and bust that I was talking about. And over the last 80 years it's been steadily losing population. So you could read about all the statistics, you could read all about the history and you could say I'm afraid to go. This is a terrible place, why would I ever want to go? But if you could somehow overcome that and you go, it is a lovely city. It is a city that is teaming with economic activity and people and parks and historic sites and you wouldn't know it. And so what I've been doing is studying how it is that the city has essentially managed that process. And I came up with a term, I call it urban absorption, that the city has essentially absorbed those vacant spaces that have been left behind because fewer buildings and fewer people. And so that process is something that I've been able to document in New Bedford. I'm actually writing a book about that right now, but if anyone's interested I'm happy to talk more about it. It's interesting, my first job in journalism was in Pittsburgh in the mid-90s and that's a city that you could argue has managed, declined, I mean just in the sheer sense of population loss gracefully and it's kind of altered economic base. Sandra, one of the things that is interesting about your work is that you have such a wide lens perspective on this having done, I saw one of your talks on the fate of the cities in Mexico, Mexico, Toti Wakan and Chichen Itza. So you talk about the resilience of the cities as a concept, but of course many cities weren't so resilient themselves and for reasons that we don't often understand yet, although you've spent some time studying this. Is it usually the environment question that leads to the death of cities? I need to first clarify something that I said. I think urbanization is a very resilient thing. Urban systems are extremely resilient. Individual cities can clearly collapse. I will not speculate about the reasons for the collapse of a place like Toti Wakan. One of the things that we very often see in early urban situations is that there is such an afflux of people that after a while that creates all those unintended consequences and organizational talent is not capable of dealing with it. And so that then means that people lose interest in actually being part of the city and they go and do something else. They move away in this particular case. It may well be that they move to secondary cities and that after a while in the Valley of Mexico you get Tenochtitlan which then becomes the dominant city. So you see afflux there as well. But I would like to refer to another study that we have done in Europe. We took at one point five and a half thousand municipalities in the southern half of France and we looked for the European Union at where they could most effectively invest to actually further the development of that region. And so you came up with four categories of cities the ones that would be a total loss in any case, the ones that would absolutely be a win in any case and two intermediate categories that were just around the boundary and where we tried to say well those are the ones that you need to invest in. And the characteristics that we came up with to determine individual cases are the age profile of the population and in particular the working population, the diversity of crafts and the diversity of innovation potential that is available and the diversity of resources around the city, natural resources and the connectivity with a road network. Those were the four dominant elements by which you could actually predict which cities would collapse and which would not. And so that might help in this particular discussion so we can see about that. Great. Kate, do you care to speculate on the reasons why Doty Wakan fell? I know you're eager to. Well actually what I'm eager to join is the conversation about shrinking cities for a moment because I have a different perspective on that issue than a number of people in the area do. I think in the U.S. we have a funny definition of cities in our discourse and they are typically defined by arcane boundaries that were drawn hundreds of years ago that no longer have any reference to either the economy or the environment. The cities in the United States and I suspect elsewhere or not expert elsewhere are metropolitan areas now. So I think we have to look at what's going on in cities and metropolitan areas. If you look at Pittsburgh's metropolitan area population it's been stable for 50 years. If you look at all of the so-called shrinking cities you will find that their developed land area has been shrinking but expanding and in some cases expanding rather dramatically. So what you have is that parts of the city are expanding and parts are shrinking. So the question is what to do about that and my contention is that as long as we look only within the boundaries of the jurisdictional central city to try to make those places more resilient we will fail. If we look at the metropolitan area I think what needs rightsizing are the suburbs not so much the central cities. So I have a different view about that as to why a city in Mexico may have failed I have no idea. Let me ask you it's one of those things you could speculate on because nobody knows. But let me ask you organizations like the NRDC that have been quite effective at galvanizing awareness around environmental issues but perhaps not so effective so as to alter the way we think about the limits to growth of these metropolitan areas and as you said and that's an important clarification in a lot of these shrinking cities the metropolitan area isn't shrinking and in some ways the jurisdictional boundaries expand it in order to leapfrog these political constraints to growth. Do you feel that organizations like yours are gaining traction in this issue on the subject of how we should approach urban development and what's the, again we sort of stipulated earlier that the Europeans are doing this in a way that we are not is that true, is that going to change? Well I do think it's true that the Europeans are ahead of us I don't think there's much question about that. I also think that the smart growth agenda that Justin referred to earlier is now mainstream in every planning office in the country so I think there has been a great amount of progress on that. I do most of my work at either the regional level or the neighborhood level I've seen more progress at the neighborhood level than at the regional level but I do think there's a lot of progress I wouldn't claim sole credit as NRDC for making that happen I think we are privileged to be part of a conversation and a network that together I think is making it happen and I think that the changing demographics in the country are going to propel us further in that direction as the millennials reach home purchasing age at the same time that the baby boomers are retiring number one really is a prime market for large lot suburbia the demand for the kinds of living that I think and probably the rest of us on the panel think are more resilient that demand is going to go up and the demand for large lot suburbia I think is already going down if you look at what's happening to home values and the geography of that to tie it to the financial crisis that you spoke of earlier I think that the slump in real estate has hurt both good development and bad development but I think it's hurt bad development worse than it's hurt good development so in a sense it hasn't been a net problem for sustainability probably been a net gain for sustainability which is not to say that I advocate Before I start asking about the Mayans I think I need to open it up to questions and comments and even before I do that I want to have a shout out for Joel Garot who is my chief co-conspirator in putting these together and actually contributed some really good reporting and thinking on this issue of how ordinary areas grow with a book that focused on edge cities so Joel if you have a question you can go first otherwise I will don't want me to put you on the spot you can think about it questions, comments, Joel or anybody else? here in the third row wait I'm sorry just again because of the broadcast wait for the microphone and introduce yourself please I'm French citizen resident in Norway moving to the United States I'm involved specifically in Sweden, Norway, France and Japan now my point is what you said about identity in Sweden they don't have villages for the last 200 years a deliberate decision so was for the last 200 years focused on developing urban whereas in Norway they had a totally different valley based type of development for my question is how do you and Japan so how do you integrate in these various cases France, Sweden, Norway, Japan the idea of identity cultural identity, natural identity and how do you integrate it in your practical recommendations I remember UNESCO Task Force for Intangible Cultural Heritage and our conclusion at this stage is that the identity is crucial so if you compare the Jews and the Gypsies you might have some too extreme there but it's something happened to make the desert blossom and to survive across the world like the Gypsy, why? so this is a sustainability issue I don't know what resilience it is but it's still there do you want to answer? look, I'll talk to you now not as an archaeologist but as a cultural anthropologist because I had some training in that as well and some substantive field experience in the desert, in Syria, in the Philippines and in other places I think the biggest problem has been that identity has been ignored in globalization and that therefore we have strived through consumerism for a normalized globalization and we have, and that is now leading to all kinds of counter movements clearly in whatever part of the world you're now talking about but we are beginning to see that our ideas of development need to take identity into account collective identity into account and I think that makes some of the difference it's certainly the difference between Sweden and Norway that you're talking about but in France again it's not only actually national identity it's the south versus the north it is all those kinds of issues breaking down identities is incredibly complicated and in some ways maybe that adds to the resilience because it may become under pressure but then ultimately it resurges if you look at acculturation studies you can actually even sort of begin to think about which elements a particular culture with a particular identity will accept and which ones it will actually not accept and either ignore or suppress or something else so my main point here is the not taking identity into account is a huge problem in this whole set of issues Joel do you have some? Not to put you on the spot Thanks Hi, I'm Joel Guerra with New America and ASU and I wrote a book called Edge City Years which is the cue, right? So as you say metropolitan areas are expanding even if the old industrial downtown sometimes are shrinking Edge cities like Tyson's Corner and like the Dulles area and all of Phoenix for that matter can be seen as a resilient response of an adaptive people to the problems of the old industrial downtowns Now I know planners hate these places because they're all ad hoc Do you think that Edge cities are doomed or do you think we're going to invent something else and if so is that resilient? Well I think we'll find out in Tyson's Corner because that was the perhaps most iconic of the Edge cities that you profiled in your book and for those of you who are out of town it's in suburban Virginia here outside of DC in this absolute chaos as Joel said everything urban planners hate but it's now the subject of a retrofit that's very ambitious by Fairfax County to take advantage of four new mass transit stops that are going to be built in adjacent to Tyson's Corner to spur a more walkable design in what is now a very unwalkable place and I think that will take a number of decades but we'll find out whether Tyson's resilience is a resilience for the 21st century or whether it's stuck in the 20th Can I ask a quick answer as well? There was an interesting study maybe about ten years ago Rob Lang and the folks at Brookings they called the boombergs so these were booming suburbs and they did this analysis nationally found those places that were substantial in size they were not right in the core of the metro area so they weren't exactly Edge cities I revisited those boombergs in the last six years the vast majority of them have lost have a net loss in housing units so that means a substantial vacancy and abandonment in these types of places Well throughout the whole Phoenix area west of the Central Valley of California coastal Florida and so I mean I have a report that I published with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy a link is on my website and you could check that out so there's definitely a problem with these places because I think that they boomed too much and they busted Towards the middle gentlemen First of all this is Mike McDonald, Global Health Initiative I'm wondering if there is any kind of map global map of carrying capacity of ecosystems Secondly I'm a little concerned that we are going toward times in which many of the ecosystems do not support the population so that there's actually a resource an absolute resource constraint that will kill cities and you see population declines and I'm just wondering what you think of the networks that are emerging resilience networks population town movements and how we're seeing Occupy emerge and revolutions take down large systems quickly is it possible there's a new form of organization that could take us into some kind of balance with the ecosystems that may be failing Well I would I think all of you could I was saying with respect to carrying capacity and the finite limit of resources is a good point there I think cities are the solution not the problem Cities are much more efficient environmentally in the way that they use resources than are for instance sprawling suburbs and I think that the only way that we are going to be resilient and appropriately responsive to these finite resources is to focus on suburban systems a couple of things one on your sort of maps of carrying capacity carrying capacity is totally determined also by the techniques that are available and so it's very difficult to give you an absolute map you can give relative maps and you can give maps that are related to particular kinds of ways of exploiting I think that is an important element in this then I think one other element you have to realize that the suburbs of course have been created at a time since the industrial revolution basically when energy was not a fundamental constraint to society all the cities that are older than that had that as a major constraint and that is why people walked them rather than drove them and so this whole energy balance here plays a huge role now I also believe that this movement in particular of the transition cities and so on is actually become quite powerful and is leading particularly in Britain but now also in this country to all kinds of bottom up inventions that deal with local situations and that are therefore better adapted to the circumstances than anything that could be devised top down and so that shift in itself I think in people who are locally taking their own fate in their own hands is actually I think a very very positive thing in all of this. Last of all just one remark also to you Tyson's corner and things like that of course it's interesting that we have always focused on the dynamics of cities as a whole and of course a lot of the most important dynamics are actually at those edges and so it is very interesting to from a different perspective to start studying the transitions from non-urban to urban at the edges of cities and I wonder whether that would actually have some clues as to the questions you were raising. Let's take two more third row here on this side. My name is Kimberly Cranton and like you have had training in cultural anthropology and what caused me to be so interested is living in Gothenburg, Sweden and then living in Cambridge, Massachusetts so Boston is really a mess compared with Gothenburg which is a planned city Boston which has always been an unplanned city but they were started at the same time and I wonder whether you have done a study of planned cities and what the results are. I can say one little thing I think planned cities were unsuccessful until essentially the industrial revolution we have a number of cases of planned cities from the 16th and 17th century in France for example, they've all been deserted there has been no capability to maintain the system in part because those systems were not sufficiently adhered into a wider footprint than the later cities are there are some really successful examples in Britain there are some total failures as well Milton Keynes has always been dragged ahead as the big success story in Britain I think you need to do if you plan that to take a number of factors into account that aren't usually taken into account and that is that the location of where you plan is really fundamental to the success or not of a planned city and there's others but I'll just leave it at that one for the moment I am not a big fan of new planned cities I think that we have so much space for development within the footprint of our existing metropolitan areas that it would be really a waste of resources to go out in the middle of nowhere and try to create something new and if you look at the history of recently planned cities and my knowledge of this is not nearly as long range as George Sanders they have basically turned out to be commuter suburbs in almost every case and I think there's a lot of utopian idealism about new planned cities but when I look at something like Mazdar and other places I just think no matter how good the technology is this is not completely dependent on technology and I would much prefer that we have well planned neighborhoods and developments within our metropolitan areas before we go out and create new ones last question on the edge there in honor of Edge City Hi, I'm Jamie Ewald I'm a Ph.D. student studying resilience at New Jersey Institute of Technology my question is about sustainability literature it talks about being able to absorb or respond to disturbance and continue functioning and the sustainability literature is looking at well being current and future generations in your work how do you define functioning and is it definable and then how do you define well being and is it definable in the planning world we use measures like population growth or we use measures like income or poverty level and so there's been a real growing interest in economics and then it's playing out elsewhere to look at happiness and so here what you're doing is you're really just essentially asking people how satisfied they are with their life and there's actually pretty good data out there I did a short study where I looked at that and saw no correlation between how happy people were and whether the population was changing either growing or shrinking in that city so I think that there's that's a potential starting off point I do think that there are some very interesting kind of emerging indicators of what would constitute a well functioning happy if you will a place and one think tank that I've run across is called the Healing Cities Institute that was founded by a guy named Mark Holland who was the sustainability director of the city of Vancouver before going into this and I'll just read you a very quick list of their eight principles for healing cities whole communities meaning that they're complete in their parts conscious mobility restorative architecture thriving landscapes integrated infrastructure nourishing food systems a supportive society and healthy prosperity we can spend the rest of the day talking about all of those things but I throw them out because I think they're interesting healthy prosperity well on that note, thank you for your conversation and sorry to have to cut it off