← New Books Network
New Books Network
Benjamin Schneider, "The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution" (Island Press, 2025)
01:13:03
Loading summary
Transcript161 lines
- [00:01]
Commercial Voice
Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body.
- [00:03]
Benjamin Schneider
Relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today.
- [00:08]
Commercial Voice
Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast.
- [00:16]
And breathe.
- [00:17]
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.
- [00:28]
1-800-Contacts.
- [00:31]
Uniswap Advertiser
The Uniswap wallet makes it easier and safer to own and use Crypto Created by pioneers of the crypto economy, the Uniswap protocol has powered over $3 trillion in trading volume and it's trusted by tens of millions worldwide. With the Uniswap Wallet, you can discover, swap and manage your crypto all from your phone. Buy your first crypto assets in just a few taps and start exploring the freedom of decentralized finance with Uniswap. Tap the banner to get started.
- [01:01]
Jack Daniels Advertiser
This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old no. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee.
- [01:27]
Timmy Correjo
Welcome to.
- [01:27]
Benjamin Schneider
The New Books Network.
- [01:31]
Timmy Correjo
Hello. This is the New Books and Urban Studies podcast, part of the New Books Network. I'm your host for this episode, Timmy Correjo. Today, I'm excited to be speaking with Benjamin Schneider, the author of Unfinished Igniting the City Building Revolution, published by island Press in 2025. In the unfinished Metropolis, Schneider argues that city building is a lost art and that the United States needs to embrace new transportation technologies, new types of housing, and new ways of using streets other than cars and parking. Doing so, he takes readers on a tour of various historical episodes and engaging contemporary actors in the US that are trying to put these ideas into practice. To start us off, Benjamin, could you please talk about your background and how you got to this book project?
- [02:25]
Benjamin Schneider
Yeah, thanks, Timmy. Thanks for having me. I am a journalist and I've been working as a professional journalist for the past decade or so, ever since I graduated college and from the start as a journalist, I was covering urban planning and public policy from my days as a fellow at CityLab in 2017. So basically I've been following a Lot of these trends in urbanism and urban planning for my entire career. And I felt that I wanted to kind of bring together what I'd learned into one easy to read and interesting package in this book.
- [03:02]
Timmy Correjo
Yeah, that was really clear to me. It felt like a great compendium of the latest on urbanism from the US context. Could you maybe just to sort of kick us off, could you further talk about the big picture overview of the book? You talk a lot about city building and this art of city building that the US has been lacking in recently. And at the same time, I also noticed one of your first footnotes was the Power Broker by Robert Caro, which infamously details the life and career of Robert Moses. And I think city building sometimes.
- [03:44]
Conjures up an idea of like a grand 20th century planner, but so I was kind of interested in like, how, why you chose that framing and what, what you're hoping to do by like reintroducing the term.
- [03:56]
Benjamin Schneider
Yeah, well, I wanted to bring together all these subjects, you know, covering housing, transportation and downtown development, commercial development. And I was struggling to find a good frame to encapsulate it all. And I stumbled upon this concept of city building that I felt was a good way to kind of give myself an umbrella to work under. And it was striking, as I did the historical research for this book, how much the built environment of today in American cities really does feel like it was conceived of and built in decades long ago. You know, many of the ideas behind the car centric road network and transportation system we have in America, they date back to the 1930s, to the era when Robert Moses was at his peak. The housing ecosystem is very 1950s. The post war suburban boom still kind of dictates the patterns of housing development. And then, you know, the state of American downtowns is very 1960s. It's really the. The urban renewal era is still hugely evident in American downtowns in terms of the, you know, the enormous commercial buildings and not that much else happening in downtown settings. So I kind of wanted to understand why it felt like these things had kind of, these decisions had been made many decades ago and then the sort of built forms remained that way. And as I dug deeper, I really came to believe that we're in need of new ideas and new built forms to supplant some of these really outdated both ideas and physical structures in cities.
- [05:55]
Timmy Correjo
You already hinted a bit at this. With the different decades you mentioned, the US cities seem to be.
- [06:04]
Stuck in. Could you talk about how, as you argue in the book, the US used to have these different cycles of reimagination or reconstruction. Could you maybe name a few instances or one emblematic one of how US cities, in response to technologies and social change and economic cycles, used to rebuild themselves and then maybe begin to introduce some of the. When this seemed to stop in your story, in what you just described, there were different terminal points for different policies as well.
- [06:48]
Benjamin Schneider
Yeah, well, at one interesting starting place is housing. Looking at American urban history, you've got the sort of urban row houses of the 19th century that morphed into tenement housing for lower income people. And that was sort of the standard housing typology for through that century. And then as tenement laws came in and forced, you know, better building codes and just more habitable situations that sparked a huge drive of innovation in American housing design. So that's, you know, in the early 20th century, that's when you start to see the triple decker in New England or the bungalow court in Southern California, the two flat or six flat in Chicago. And these are really ingenious kind of vernacular housing typologies that emerged in response to the need to decongest tenement districts and to help provide housing to a growing middle class of urban residents. And.
- [08:00]
There'S this, what we now call missing middle housing. That's when missing middle housing kind of emerged. So it's, it's impressive to see kind of how like those kinds of forms that we love today can kind of, they're, they're not like things that popped out of nowhere. They, they had this basis in a need of the, the community at that time and the, the building community kind of found these solutions that worked really well. And then unfortunately by like starting in the 30s, moving through the 50s and 60s, those kinds of housing typologies were broadly illegalized in the regions that I just mentioned. And basically single family zoning won the day. And we fast forward to our present day where basically the only kind of urban development, housing development in particular that's allowed in most cities is either suburban sprawl on the fringe or a very select neighborhood sort of designated redevelopment areas that are often gentrifying low income neighborhoods where we build five over one style apartment buildings. And so we've lost this sort of, this willingness to build these in between housing typologies throughout every kind of neighborhood.
- [09:21]
To really serve the housing needs of the masses.
- [09:26]
Timmy Correjo
And we can get a bit more into.
- [09:29]
These topics with housing and land use.
- [09:34]
Well, one final bigger picture question I was interested that, and for listeners who haven't had a chance to look at the book. Yet you really do take the reader on a tour through the US and also internationally with references to a lot of other cities and countries, approaches to urbanisms that you suggest the US has much to learn from.
- [10:04]
I'm curious if you could reflect about what do you see.
- [10:11]
What, at least in my opinion, has been this growing interest among urbanists, or at least a new generation of urbanists of international examples of urbanism. And, and maybe a listener might say, like, okay, you cite Singapore or Vienna or Copenhagen as examples. What can the US really learn from these places given how vastly different it is on a social and built environment and political standpoint?
- [10:41]
Benjamin Schneider
Yeah, well, and Timmy, I know you've thought a lot about this, so you maybe have even deeper perspective than I do question, but. Well, for, for one thing, I think it's just really valuable to kind of call out American myopia and exceptionalism. I think there is a tendency in the US to just sort of assume that the way things are done here is the way things ought to be done and the way they've, you know, that everyone else does it and it's just, it's so not the case. And in fact, in urbanism, America is. This is a horrible outlier in, across almost any metric you can think of, whether it's like pedestrian fatalities, whether it's, you know, the kind of modernization of our, of our trains and transit systems, housing supply per capita, pretty bad statistic for America compared to many other countries.
- [11:33]
So that's a big part of my project here is just like exposing people to the fact that things are different elsewhere. And you know, maybe it's certainly not going to be possible for us to do things exactly as they do them in Singapore or Vienna. But it's at least valuable to know that those other models exist. And I would say the more technical.
- [11:57]
Aspects of urbanism, that's where the copy and paste model can be more doable, more effective. Like for example, if you're talking about transit technology, if there are these technologies that are being developed in France to build automated trains, you know, we, we may not have the sort of political alignment to fund that kind of thing, but we, if once the funding piece is there, I don't think it would be such a stretch to suggest maybe we should just copy that technology, you know, in its entirety and just use what they use technologically in other places. The same could be said for like modular building construction. I think those, those technical pieces are things that Americans should be much more open to really heavily borrowing from other Countries. Because I think that isn't such a stretch necessarily to just use those parts of those techniques that have been developed elsewhere.
- [12:58]
Timmy Correjo
Yeah, those are a lot of, I think, good points. And I am quite interested in.
- [13:07]
Lessons from other places and the way that what parts can be reassembled, if you will, in the US and how that adaptation process happens. And I think the book does succeed in the project of introducing the reader to a lot of interesting models from around the world, which it's then on some of the people who you profile to try to put that into practice. And they talk about that as well in the book. So moving into the core of the book.
- [13:41]
The book is sort of divided into three main parts. Live, which is about housing. Move, which deals with transportation and transit, and then Work, which focuses on downtowns and urban development.
- [14:01]
So kind of sequentially starting with the housing aspect of the book, I was interested in.
- [14:11]
The way that you kind of excavated some of the history of the different.
- [14:18]
Ideologies and architectures that have become prevailing in the US you sort of reference the suburban lifestyle dream.
- [14:32]
And then later on you also sort of talk about an anti apartment bias in the US.
- [14:41]
Starting off from this kind of high level premise. Could you sort of just talk about the way that.
- [14:47]
Certain building typologies in the US became either valorized or stigmatized and sort of what the history behind that is?
- [14:57]
Benjamin Schneider
Yeah, well, it's really a social and ideological history as much as an urban or economic history. And what I call the cult of the single family home, borrowing from the term the cult of domesticity.
- [15:14]
As I see it really begins as early as Thomas Jefferson and his valorization of the yeoman farmer and kind of an anti city view that he held. And that strain I think you see moving into the Transcendentalists, Henry David Thoreau living in his cabin on Walden Pond and then very closely aligned with them, the Hudson River School painters who kind of created this pastoral image of nature that in the 19th century was kind of a radical idea that nature could be this place that is.
- [15:53]
You know, comfortable and safe and someplace you could kind of be your true self in. These were new ideas that were emerging and they were reflected in the built environment in designs by Frederick Law Olmsted, not only his park designs, but many of these early suburban communities that he actually he created the blueprints for. One of which I visited and talk about in the book Riverside, Illinois. And it's interesting to look at how you can really see these kind of.
- [16:31]
Aesthetics and ideas in the built form of Riverside. The Curvilinear streets are really meant to be naturalistic. And.
- [16:43]
The number of trees is meant to kind of create this impression of living in a park. You know, there are ornamental gates that suggest that you're moving into kind of this. You're moving beyond the city into this sort of pastoral environment. And then of course, there are, you know, the very large homes on very large lots that signify this sort of country estate way of life. And Riverside, Illinois is kind of the Platonic ideal of the single family home neighborhood in America. And all sort of subsequent single family home subdivisions kind of flow from that. And you can, you can see how those same ideas persisted. And, you know, some of those ideas, I think, are unobjectionable. But what starts to become problematic is that as I write in the book, people came to see that this garden needed walls, that this sort of the ideology of single family homes need to be protected from outside influences. And very often that meant racial segregation and exclusion. It meant preventing businesses from starting up to kind of ruin the pastoral atmosphere of these places. And generally kind of conveyed this sense of timelessness that once a neighborhood was developed in this way, that it would never change. And I think those ideas have had a lot of negative consequences. Moving towards the modern era.
- [18:12]
Timmy Correjo
I have been to Riverside, actually, when I lived in Chicago, and it is, as you described, it's a very.
- [18:21]
Curious little suburb which is connected by regional rail. But once you get off the regional rail, well, that's part of why I.
- [18:28]
Benjamin Schneider
Picked it as a place to. To study. There were some other such places that Olmsted designed and his peers, but Riverside happens to be one of these ones that is transit accessible, so I was able to get out there relatively easily.
- [18:45]
Timmy Correjo
So you sort of have talked a bit about this.
- [18:50]
Ideological aspect and then the cultural aspect. I'm also interested if you could speak to the material and financial pieces.
- [19:01]
There's a whole financial architecture that gets developed, as you describe in the book, and drawing off of a lot of scholarship.
- [19:12]
Whether it be the color of law or race for profit, that kind of talks about the way that.
- [19:19]
Financing of homes and government and private policies contribute to both the development of these housing typologies that have been like the single family home ideology, but then also some of the social and racial exclusionary aspects. Could you speak a bit more about the way that this was embedded, really, not just as a cultural thing, but also into policies and housing production frameworks?
- [19:49]
Benjamin Schneider
Yeah, the. The financing of single family homes and. And of housing broadly is. Is such a fascinating subject. And the, the single family home boom that happened in the wick of World War II was a heavily government subsidized endeavor where, you know, the government set up mortgage banks that basically provided a backstop to builders that ensure they would not lose money on their giant post war suburban subdivisions if they followed a specific development formula which included single family zoning. It actually interestingly included.
- [20:28]
Street network design where there were a lot of cul de sacs and streets that looped back on themselves, which created this template that we now know of. This, like how suburban subdivisions are supposed to be laid out. The death of the street grid basically came by way of these policies. And then of course, racial segregation was written. Not exactly written, but it was, it was an implicit agreement in these, these laws that the builders that were creating suburban subdivisions were not going to sell to black people. And, you know, that's the story that's told in the Color of Law, basically, that the government not only, you know, allowed segregation, but actually entrenched it through some of these policies. And you can see how it's very intimately tied up in the financial piece. That's where.
- [21:17]
The government was able to wield its might is by determining who got access to this easy financing and these loan guarantees. That was how it spread racial segregation on a whole new scale from what existed in the urban neighborhoods of the time. Yeah, on all I can, I can speak further about, you know, the financing piece, but I'll let you go go deeper in the direction you want to go.
- [21:46]
Commercial Voice
Coca Cola for the big, for the small, the short and the tall. Peacemakers. Risk takers for the optimists, Pessimists for long distance love for introverts and extroverts. The thinkers and the doers for old friends and new Coca Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca Cola at a store near you.
- [22:17]
State Farm Advertiser
This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast. Smart move. Being financially savvy. Smart move. Another smart move. Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor. State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.
- [22:48]
New Balance Advertiser
At New Balance, we believe if you.
- [22:51]
Commercial Voice
Run, you're a runner.
- [22:56]
Benjamin Schneider
However you choose to do it.
- [23:00]
New Balance Advertiser
Because when you're not worried about doing.
- [23:02]
Benjamin Schneider
Things the right way.
- [23:05]
New Balance Advertiser
You'Re free to discover your way. And that's what running is all about. Run your way@newbalance.com running.
- [23:17]
Timmy Correjo
Yeah, that was, that was very helpful and.
- [23:25]
Kind of related in a way of it's an embodiment of a more under the radar or hidden ways that the built environment is constrained or is produced. Could you talk about, I think people may have, maybe you could also still touch on this, but people may have heard about zoning and the impediments that zoning creates into certain urbanist principles. But you also talk about building codes, which I think is an area that's a bit more novel.
- [24:01]
And people may not be as familiar with talking about.
- [24:08]
New ideas like single stairs, elevators that are less prevalent in the US and just like other concepts like ecodistricts. Could you talk more about why you think American building codes are holding the US cities back and the types of housing that could potentially be available if these were rethought?
- [24:33]
Benjamin Schneider
Building codes are a really interesting frontier for housing policy advocates, as you said. Zoning, I think, is a much more widely understood subject, especially in recent years. But what a lot of advocates are seeing is that building codes are actually in some cases just as big of an impediment to significant levels of housing development. And I think that's not an accident. If you look at the history I have in my book, some quotes from Lawrence Valor, who was.
- [25:04]
Ostensibly an affordable housing activist in the early 20th century, but really his focus in his policy advocacy was instating single family zoning and kind of marginalizing apartment buildings as a housing typology. And he talked about in his public statements how we need to basically make fire codes, fire standards, so stringent that it becomes impossible to build apartment buildings. And that's more or less what happened in many cities. And that kind of way of viewing building codes continues to this day, that there are these very specific rules around building materials, around setbacks, room sizes, a lot of utility regulations that are in many cases well meaning. But you know, with the passage of time and modern kind of building techniques and materials aren't necessarily serving the original health and safety purpose. And then some are just not accurate ideas about connected to the spread of disease or the need for certain levels of sunlight. Those are not connected to public health as we understand it today. And yet many of those kinds of same codes are still on the books. So I think, yeah, there's a movement now to really examine building codes whole cloth and look at what do we actually need to keep people healthy and safe. And what are these rules that in some cases were really adopted in bad faith to just marginalize apartment buildings or that were based on, you know, archaic ideas about kind of how people should live. And also I should add in many cases, very moralistic ideas about, you know, the, the flow of people coming in and out of apartment buildings being, you know, incentment to vice or something like that, you know, or the, in many cities it's illegal for unrelated people to live in the same house, which is a crazy kind of regulation that, that still exists in many places. So, yeah, that's. Zoning is important to help build more housing in America, but these building codes are arguably just as important.
- [27:30]
Timmy Correjo
And so this last few minutes have helped introduce the listener to a taste of what's in the book about some of the impediments.
- [27:41]
And we've been fairly high level or doing a survey view. But I think a real strength of the book is that you also look really specifically at how.
- [27:52]
Actors in cities in the US are engaged in some purposive changes that they're trying to enact. And could you maybe briefly talk about.
- [28:07]
Some of the characters you introduced in the book in Berkeley or in Seattle, whether it be some of the zoning changes or the Seattle social housing developer proposal and the concept of social housing to sort of at least give a taste of what are some of the.
- [28:28]
Novel proposals that urbanists in the US are seeking to explore?
- [28:32]
Benjamin Schneider
Yeah, well, I'll start with Berkeley, where I spoke with City Council member Terry Taplin, who has a really interesting personal story of dealing with housing instability and how that led him to kind of rethink a lot of these, these same rules. We were just talking about single family zoning, a whole host of other policies that was making Berkeley a very Nimbyish City. Between 1970 and 2000, the city built about 800 units of housing. And what Taplin and his colleagues on the Berkeley City Council did is kind of upend that, that regime of NIMBYism. And in 2022, the city built 800 units of housing more than they built in in the course of three decades. And that's been the trend in recent years. The city's been building a lot more than it has because leaders like Taplin have, have created the conditions for building to actually happen. And the result has been that rents have been pretty flat in Berkeley for the past almost decade, past seven or eight years, whereas over the 2000s and 2000s they were going up in double digit percentages every year. So it's been a, it's an interesting success story that's rooted in, from Taplin's perspective, really righting these historical wrongs of these These policies that were put in place clearly for exclusionary purposes that we just don't need anymore. And not only are they, you know, historically shameful, but they're, they're very literally holding back the community in the present day. And the Seattle example is a very different one, but I think another really interesting model of how to correct these deficiencies inherent in America's system of housing policy. And there advocates led by Tiffany McCoy have passed a couple of ballot measures in recent years to create what they call a new social housing developer. Basically it's a new public entity that is an independent kind of public benefit corporation that has a mandate to develop mixed income housing in the city of Seattle. And it's based on these European models like in Vienna, where these public or social housing developers have these large portfolios of housing that is mixed income that's closely embedded in the urban fabric. And that at least the hope is kind of corrects for some of the deficiencies of public housing in the U.S. the lack of long term financial stability and the urban design issues that have come with public housing. And so the folks in Seattle are just one example of this much larger movement of social housing, or what's sometimes called mixed income public development, where governments and agencies are getting much more involved in housing development after a long lull, where the public sector really wasn't doing that, you know, since the 1970s when, when President Nixon ended public housing construction. So it's, it's early days for this movement, but there's a lot of really exciting experiments like what's happening in Seattle to, yeah, to get government entities building affordable housing.
- [31:46]
Timmy Correjo
Again, from my observation, while there are certainly some ways that the zoning reforms that you mentioned.
- [31:58]
Can be working in concert with some of the public development.
- [32:03]
Because a social housing developer.
- [32:08]
Needs zoning allowances to be able to build some of these new developments. So I think there are interesting synergies, but at the same time, I think there are sometimes fairly distinct ideologies or starting premises about what's wrong with housing and how can it be improved between those who take more of a yimby or zoning reform line and some of those who promote social housing. I am simplifying. There's obviously a lot of diversity in people, but for the sake of the question, I'm curious what your thoughts are on this potential tension in perspectives or this potential difference among approaches of housing advocates in the US and what your research has made you think about how these two approaches do or don't reconcile with each other.
- [33:12]
Benjamin Schneider
But you're absolutely right, that there's definitely tension in American housing policy advocacy circles kind of between these two views that you, you articulated. The, the YIMBY perspective of relaxing zoning policies to just allow more housing to happen. And the, the, what sometimes gets called FIMBY public housing in my backyard, the, the leftist view of really emphasizing or exclusively developing, you know, low income housing. And this is something I've covered a lot in my journalism. I, I've spent way too much time kind of learning the ins and outs of these competing perspectives. And I think over the years, one thing I've, I've believed and, and what this book, I think has shown me even more clearly is that the divide is, is much narrower than I think it's painted in kind of social media conversation around these issues. As, as you said in your question, you know, the, in order to enable social housing to be built, you need the zoning reforms and building codes that allow housing to actually get constructed. And you know, what I, what I saw in my research for this book is that the, the atmosphere of American city building right now is structured such that you can't build much of anything. So whatever your vision is for how cities should grow and evolve, there needs to be this kind of fundamental level conversation of like, how do we let cities grow and evolve? What are the mechanisms we need to enable cities to change for the better? And then from there I think you can have somewhat more detailed conversations about like, what, what does that vision look like? But first you have to have this reckoning of like laying the groundwork for change to even take place.
- [35:08]
Timmy Correjo
Yes. And.
- [35:10]
As I'm sure you know.
- [35:13]
And listeners who are.
- [35:18]
Maybe overly online is one way to put it, the book Abundance really kickstarted a lot of these discourses and debates that have already been simmering for a while.
- [35:31]
Could you, I think we could like move from housing to the transportation portion of the book now. And you already mentioned in one of your answers about the role of the FHA in creating these.
- [35:51]
Kind of eliminating the grid and the suburbs or kind of mandating these cul de sacs or.
- [35:58]
Lack of connections among streets. But I was interested if you could talk more about.
- [36:05]
The strode, which was a term you use in the book. And maybe people, almost certainly, if they live in the US context, have been on one, but they may not know what it is. Could you kind of talk more about what is a strode and how it's emblematic of some of the issues that you've, that you've observed with the way that American transportation policy is operating.
- [36:29]
Benjamin Schneider
The built environment the street design is such a underrated piece of transportation policy. You know, we think about public transit, we think about developing new subway lines and rail lines, but the street is this just fundamental unit of transportation, of community life. And it's so often an afterthought. And I think the stroad is the perfect encapsulation of that, of the treatment of streets as just completely disconnected from the human experience. And basically a stroad, to define it briefly, is an arterial road with two or more lanes of traffic going in either direction and speeds above 35 miles per hour. And you can kind of picture basically the classic suburban BOULEVARD in the U.S. it's probably, you know, close to or even more than 100ft wide. Some of these, these roads are, have speed limits 50 miles per hour or above, very sophisticated kind of turn signals at intersections and lane movements. And then the kinds of businesses that are zoned for this kind of environment tend to be, you know, very auto oriented. Fast food restaurants, gas stations, motels that have a lot of driveways. So there's a ton of in and out interaction. The road itself is incredibly porous vis a vis the sort of activities happening outside of it. And all that translates to an environment that is incredibly unpleasant and unsafe for pedestrians or bikers or people trying to walk, to catch the bus to exist on, because you've got to watch out for cars pretty much at every point. There's a driveway every 20ft. And then when you want to cross the road, you might need to wait two minutes for the signal. You know, there might be a very minimal crosswalk, if one at all. And you know, when you're walking along the road, the speed of the cars going by is practically freeway speeds. And unsurprisingly, these kinds of environments, these stroads, are where the vast, significantly disproportionate amount of pedestrian fatalities take place. They're very, very dangerous places. And they're closely connected to the people who find themselves walking on these roads are very often tend to be people with no other transportation options. They're the lowest income people, the people with the least transportation options. And that too is reflected in these pedestrian fatality statistics. So the stroad is, you know, one of these shameful kind of American urban design phenomena that is just so closely connected to the inequities in American society, the violence in American society, and the lack of livability in so many neighborhoods.
- [39:34]
Timmy Correjo
That was a really great summary.
- [39:39]
And on that foundation you also start to talk about in the book the various ways that advocates and Urbanists are fighting to reallocate space on streets, whether it be complete streets concepts and how streets can be redesigned. Could you talk a bit more about what does that look like? And how.
- [40:06]
Those conflicts, which often also incorporate contestation over parking.
- [40:17]
And then kind of is emblematic of the intersection of housing and transportation. Could you kind of just talk about how this.
- [40:27]
The folks trying to change streets, what are the forces of opposition and how are people navigating those going forward?
- [40:36]
Benjamin Schneider
Yeah, well, complete streets is a really helpful.
- [40:40]
Kind of North Star for advocates. And it basically just means providing space for everyone to be safe and have. Have a place of their own on city streets, you know, having safe sidewalks and, and crossing crosswalks, bike lanes where, where those, you know, fit into the broader bike network or on busier streets, bus lanes.
- [41:08]
This is sort of the new vision of what streets in America can look like. They're not just one monochromatic row of car lanes. They've got different zones, different sections for different modes of transportation to operate effectively and safely. And that's made more vivid in the places where these kind of things have their own paint color. So often you see red painted bus lanes, green painted bike lanes. That really vividly illustrates how streets can kind of be redesigned to give these different modes their own, their own place. And it is a hard political conversation in a lot of places. Interestingly, in some of these more suburban areas with a lot of stroads, those rights of way are already so wide that in many cases it's less of a controversial issue to build a bike lane. But the challenge then is how do you make that bike lane feel safe when you've got 50 mile per hour traffic on the road? So there's a trade off there. Narrower streets, just by definition, are safer and more pleasant to be on for pedestrians and cyclists, but there's less space to give there. So there's some interesting solutions that go beyond kind of complete streets per se, which are more like, sometimes called like greenways or neighborhood slow streets, where you just calm traffic broadly and that automatically creates kind of a safer, more shared right of way for pedestrians and cyclists to coexist with cars.
- [42:53]
New Balance Advertiser
Meet the computer you can talk to with copilot on windows. Working, creating and collaborating is as easy as talking. Got writer's block? Share your screen with Copilot Vision to help spark inspiration and use Copilot voice to have a conversation and brainstorm ideas. Or maybe you need some tech help with Copilot Vision. Copilot sees what you see. Let Copilot talk. You through step by step guidance so you can master new apps, games and skills faster. Try now@windows.com copilot.
- [43:22]
Commercial Voice
Experience a membership that backs what you're building with American Express Business Platinum. Enjoy complimentary access to the American Express Global Lounge Collection and a welcome offer of 200,000 points after you spend $20,000 on purchases on the card within your first three months of membership. American Express Business Platinum there's nothing like it. Terms apply. Learn more@americanexpress.com Business Platinum.
- [43:51]
At Capella University.
- [43:53]
Learning online doesn't mean learning alone. You'll get support from people who care about your success, like your enrollment specialist who gets to know you and the goals you'd like to achieve. You'll also get a designated academic coach who's with you throughout your entire program. Plus, career coaches are available to help you navigate your professional goals. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo and.
- [44:26]
Timmy Correjo
Still within the transportation.
- [44:31]
Topic.
- [44:33]
You kind of talk about. Well, I guess there's two parts. We can talk about subways and then we can move to passenger rail for a little bit. But on the subway front, you really talk about the the lack of ambition in US cities, about expanding subways for many decades and expansions that do happen.
- [44:58]
Have been limited, have not incorporated some of the most cutting edge technologies such as.
- [45:07]
Automated trains and other approaches. Could you talk about some of the.
- [45:14]
The history as well as the contemporary issues as to what seems to be holding US Cities back from reinvesting in stronger transportation, stronger transit systems, and specifically subways. And I think cost is one big thing that you focus on.
- [45:30]
Benjamin Schneider
It goes back to the early days of public transit in the US where in America, as compared to some other countries.
- [45:40]
Public transit, the streetcar networks of the early 20th century were all just about all privately developed. And so from the start they they weren't understood as public goods that the public should be investing in. And even when these networks kind of came under the aegis of of the public sector in the 50s and 60s, that's when this idea of public transit really emerged in the US.
- [46:06]
That was sort of a bailout. The idea was that the public would kind of preserve a skeletal version of those kinds of transit networks, but wouldn't kind of preside over ambitious levels of expansion. And there have been some exceptions to that viewpoint over the years. The Washington Metro And BART in D.C. and in San Francisco are pretty ambitious major transit projects that were built in the post war era. But for the most part this, this same idea has persisted that transit is basically this thing that you maintain in a modest state. It's not something that is meant to be significantly invested in, in terms of expansion. It's not connected to a broader vision of city building where extensions are connected to new neighborhoods, as is the pattern, you know, everywhere else, and how these networks originally got developed. And so that, that I think, lack of ambition in regards to transit development is I think, another kind of thing that's, that's baked into American political culture and that I'm trying to challenge here that, you know, there's so much to be gained by building new transit lines and better transit lines and connecting transit to a broader urban development strategy. You can kind of imagine if America's relatively recent history was, was not necessarily designed around freeway extensions and suburban sprawl, but transit extensions and urban style growth, that would be a very different outcome. And it's not too late to try to do that sort of pattern, at least more so in American cities.
- [47:58]
Timmy Correjo
And on the passenger rail side of things, there's been long standing hope of a high speed rail network in the US.
- [48:11]
People may be aware of the fits and starts that have happened in California. There's also been maybe more under the radar developments in Florida, some proposals in Texas of all places. So could you maybe talk a bit about the kind of curious fact that while the US at one point was really leading in passenger rail, nowadays it feels like such a, a backwater in a certain way. And then what we might learn from some of the more contemporary efforts that are what's going right and what's going wrong there.
- [48:52]
Benjamin Schneider
The passenger rail history in the US is a little bit of a, of a mirror of the streetcar history I was describing. Where passenger rail was, was thriving, relatively speaking, as this private industry in the early 20th century. And as that business model collapsed.
- [49:12]
There was never sort of an adequate public sector replacement. And what we got was Amtrak, which is, you know, an important kind of baseline, very minimal system that still provides some passenger rail, but again, was never sort of empowered to be a particularly ambitious.
- [49:33]
Agency that came anywhere near kind of restoring the extent of passenger rail that used to exist in the U.S.
- [49:42]
But you know, this story is not all doom and gloom. The last couple decades for Amtrak have been much more successful, much more ambitious. The ridership is like 50% higher now than it was 20 years ago and actually continues to hit historic highs. In the last couple years, a lot of that has been the Northeast corridor, which has gotten a good deal of investment. You know, the Acela service started in 2001, and that is while not world class high speed rail, I would say a pretty good railroad by international standards. And it moves a lot of people, serves really important destinations and could be so much better, could be a lot faster and more more regular and less expensive, but is still a great starting place to show that passenger rail can work in America. It can dominate a travel market. And so that that insight, I think has been spreading. And other regions have been contemplating high speed rail and higher speed rail. Obviously there's the system in California that's under construction. There's the Brightline Florida system, which is what's known as higher speed rail, getting up to 125 miles per hour, that is very successful in terms of its passenger ridership numbers, but has had a lot of issues with safety because those tracks run through the heart of South Florida and have very little fencing or grade separation, which is a huge issue. And again a product of the lack of investment in rail infrastructure that has happened in the US and there's more high speed rail proposals out there. There's the Texas Central project between Dallas and Houston. There's long been talk of a Cascadia network between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Canada and Seattle, and then the Chicago area. There's a lot of active planning around high speed rail in the upper Midwest. So there's a lot going on there. Certainly that vision is threatened by the Trump administration, which is not sympathetic to this form of transportation at all.
- [51:49]
But broadly speaking, the trajectory of passenger rail in the US has been more positive in recent years. And I think there's some interesting developments on the horizon.
- [51:58]
Timmy Correjo
And the last question I have on the transportation section is about the history of urban freeways in US cities.
- [52:12]
The consequences these have had on marginalized peoples and some of the both how some of the thinking in state departments of transportation has or has not shifted over the decades since the heydays of.
- [52:33]
Mid 20th century city building or city destruction, depending on your perspective. And, and then I think within that or as an ancillary question.
- [52:47]
I'm also interested, I think this kind of also is a good way to talk more squarely about the.
- [52:55]
To propose for city building. Again, I think some people's first concern is that this is like Urban Renewal 2.0 in a negative sense. We perceive purposefully have put a lot of structures and regulations in place to prevent the very destructive things that happened in the urban freeway scenario from happening again. And as you answer this question, I think it would also be interesting for you to maybe respond to that potential worry that somebody Might have to this argument for more robust city building.
- [53:33]
Benjamin Schneider
Well, city destruction is the right term for what transpired with the development of freeways in the mid century era and connected with urban renewal more broadly that maybe we'll get into more talking about downtown development. And I think for people, younger people today who weren't around, not even younger, but people who are younger than 60 years old did not witness this era, it's pretty unfathomable how much destruction, self inflicted destruction took place at the hand of the federal government, broadly and state governments when these freeways were being built. I mean the before and after photos of freeway corridors and interchanges are.
- [54:19]
Deeply disturbing. I mean it looks like there were bombs that were dropped on these neighborhoods. And what, you know, I found as I was researching this, and this is not a new insight, but I think that the scale of it for me was striking, was just the extent to which black neighborhoods were targeted by freeways. I mean it was very explicit project. It was viewed by white policymakers as a means of kind of killing two birds with one stone. You know, you get a fancy new freeway and you basically move black people out of the sort of downtown central city areas or maybe just sort of the, the effect in practice was just eliminating a lot of the vitality of, of low income neighborhoods and destroying a lot of businesses, destroying a lot of community institutions and just sort of stripping life away from, from these neighborhoods. So it's a huge tragedy and a huge error on the part of American public policy that I think we're still kind of reckoning with.
- [55:23]
And to the second part of your question, I think it's very understandable that there's this whole kind of apparatus of protective measures to try to prevent that sort of thing from being perpetrated again. And I think certainly in the, in the case of like building new freeways, those are really important. And, and displacement broadly when, as it, as it comes to urban development, I think is something that should be avoided. And it's really good that there's some mechanisms to prevent that as much as possible. And you know, just to put it in perspective, at the level of displacement that was taking place during the freeway development era, at least half a million people, half a million homes were leveled by freeways between 1950 and 1970, housing at least a million people. So just thinking about that scale is. Is important.
- [56:14]
Why I think city building is still important despite that history is that I don't think we've as part of that reckoning. I think it's not enough to just Leave things as is. I think we need to then think about what are, what is the shape of the built environment that actually affirmatively kind of corrects what we've done wrong and kind of provides space for people to thrive.
- [56:40]
In ways that we now understand are like, much better than a community riven by a freeway. So some of the most ambitious city building projects that I think American cities could consider are full freeway removals and rebuilding the area that those freeway right of ways took out. And there's interesting models, particularly in Portland, Oregon, the Albina Vision Trust.
- [57:05]
They're not contemplating a freeway removal, but there's a planned freeway cap over this section of i5 that destroyed a huge part of the Albina District, a historic black community in Portland, and now a community group there that the trust is imagining how to like, build a black community on that freeway cap and on the adjacent areas. That's a really exciting, you know, kind of community driven vision of city building that again, I think is really affirmatively trying to correct the wrongs of the past, not by leaving things as they are, but by building something better.
- [57:41]
Timmy Correjo
Perfect. And now to the last section of the book, Work and Downtowns. This one had a bit, at least from my reading, it had a few things going on compared to some of the first two sections. And so maybe if you could just kind of at a high level, sort of skim what made you want to group the ideas that you had in this last section together and some of the higher level arguments and then I can ask a few more specific questions.
- [58:19]
Benjamin Schneider
Yeah, I think partly coming into that final section, I. I wanted to have a little more fun and be a little more creative with the sort of writing that I was doing. So the chapter on malls is a little more narrative driven. There's. There's a part about how the show Stranger Things kind of reflects the history of malls in America. And you know, it's tricky, especially in like a post Covid era, to talk about work and commercial environments because they're. So.
- [58:53]
This, this notion of like work being this sort of very separate thing from the home is increasingly going away.
- [59:01]
And I tried to reflect that in this, in this section. And I think partly that might be what you're. You're responding to. It's. It's a little confusing because it's the work section, but a lot of what is talked about is housing and like, how do you add homes to these environments that have historically been strictly for work alone? And then the final chapter in this section is about industry, which is a really Underappreciated subject in urbanism, but a hugely important part of the built environment and increasingly so in the US Context for a variety of reasons that I get into. But that's another thing that I just felt was really important to at least touch upon and reckon with. I think there aren't a lot of easy answers for how to integrate industry for, you know, how urbanists should think about the types of industries that dominate in the American economy at this point, whether it be AI data centers or military development, which is still very much a big part of industry in the U.S.
- [60:05]
But nonetheless, you know, these are real phenomena that we need to reckon with and like, think about how they are part of the, the built system. So, yeah, it's, it's. That section is maybe a little bit more all over the place, but I think that's reflective of the nature of work and commercial and industrial development in American cities.
- [60:26]
Timmy Correjo
That's really helpful. And I think the first, more specific question continuing from the discussion of urban renewal, that also is just as you hinted, very relevant to the downtown conversation as well. Could you sort of talk about briefly, like, what was the impact of urban renewal and these sort of grand civic projects on the urban downtown landscape?
- [60:57]
Benjamin Schneider
I think it's really helpful for urbanists today. Anyone who's walking through a downtown environment in an American city and you see a big blocky office building that takes up a whole block or like a civic center with the sort of group of uniform neoclassical buildings, and you take note of that and then think about when that was built and when the downtown kind of initially emerged as a phenomenon, as a place, or actually think of a parking lot too. If you see a parking lot in the middle of a downtown, it's the same story. That structure, or in the case of a parking lot, lack of a structure was not always there. You know, these downtowns, when they were developed in the 19th, early 20th century, they were very densely packed with buildings. And to create space for these mid 20th century structures, they need. There needed to be a massive amount of demolition of the historic streetscape. And that's really where urban renewal kind of, that urban renewal did that at a, at an unprecedented scale in American cities. So the big wide skyscrapers you see, the parking lots you see in a downtown, those are direct products of urban renewal more often than not. And there's, I think, a decent understanding of the social impacts of urban renewal that I touched on, I think, with our discussion about freeways. But there's also really significant kind of architectural and urbanistic Consequences too, where in many downtowns where you once had dozens of businesses and storefronts, very mixed use kinds of environments, where there were shops on the ground floor, housing up above, those were transformed into these corporate monocultures where you've got the one big tower, its associated parking garage, maybe a little sandwich shop or a print shop at the ground floor. But basically, you know, certainly not the types of businesses that could serve residents of a neighborhood. So that that's one of these consequences of urban renewal that we don't talk about as much is just that the downtown landscape became much less livable, much less neighborhoody, to make space for these business oriented corporate settings that today we're realizing aren't particularly appealing and not particularly resilient in the face of shocks to the way we work.
- [63:37]
Timmy Correjo
So just on that phrase, shocks, I think you have chapters that deal with shocks to the urban downtowns and commercial spaces. You also talk about shocks to.
- [63:52]
Malls and the ways that they're dealing with this. Could you maybe talk about proposals in both of those directions?
- [64:00]
Benjamin Schneider
Yeah, broadly, the most exciting reimaginings of malls and downtowns are all about making them more mixed, use more kind of livable places for people to spend time beyond just going to work. And I think malls in particular are. Are interesting because they have an opportunity there to really inject some urbanity, some kind of civic life, some walkability, into suburban areas that really lack those things. And you're starting to see a few proposals pop up in different areas around the country, some of which are actually under construction and really happening, to basically transform the classic 1950s mall into like a mixed use urban neighborhood with shops on the ground floor and housing up above. And it's a really promising trend, I think, to kind of take these very poorly utilized areas with so much parking lot.
- [65:04]
A business environment that's often struggling because many malls are not attracting the crowds that they once were. And then using that space to also start to address the housing crisis and provide these sort of civic centers. Is the wrong word, but centers of civic life to areas that really lack them.
- [65:24]
Timmy Correjo
Yeah, that I think has been a very interesting. The ways that both the mall and the urban downtown, both of them sort of representations of certain paradigms of work or leisure and recreation, are both having to be potentially reimagined in the contemporary moment.
- [65:52]
So.
- [65:54]
We can't go into. There's even more interesting things, as you already kind of alluded to, about industrial policy. I would certainly recommend readers of the book to look into that section.
- [66:11]
Well, maybe not dwelling specifically on that I am maybe curious about.
- [66:17]
What would you say that these are all, to what extent do you think that these are all ideas that the bigger coastal cities in the US are going to be focusing on? Or do you also see this as having resonance for mid sized cities like in the upper Midwest or the plains states and what have you, Oslo?
- [66:41]
Benjamin Schneider
In the book my focus is more so on big cities and their challenges, but it's also meant to be this kind of wide ranging tour of American cities and the challenges they face. So there are definitely a lot of lessons for.
- [66:58]
Smaller cities. You know, every, every place can make its streets much safer with better design. And you know, that's, it's just like such a straightforward life saving change that, that any city could put into place to just slow traffic, give pedestrians places to be that are safe and bikers places to be that are safe. That just totally transcends geography.
- [67:25]
And then, you know, this piece about industrial development I think is in many ways more relevant to smaller cities and more peripheral cities on the edges of big metropolitan areas where there tends to be more industry these days. There are unique challenges that come with.
- [67:46]
Being in a community that sort of includes industrial activities there. And they're not easy answers to solving those things. But I think broadly.
- [68:00]
There are solutions there in terms of making industrial activity less space and land intensive, such that, you know, it, it has just a lower impact and fewer immediate neighborhood neighbors. Nowadays we build industrial structures at a single story for the most part. The big white boxes you see, you know, spreading out to the horizon, the data centers and the fulfillment centers and manufacturing plants. But we think about historical industrial architecture. Think of SoHo in Manhattan, you know, Fulton Market in Chicago. These are places with multi story industrial buildings that have actually since been repurposed. They've found a new life as residential or office space now that sort of the economies of those cities has changed. It's pretty hard to imagine that happening with some of the big white rectangles out on the edge of cities. So I think returning to the wisdom maybe of the multi story, maybe multi purpose industrial facility could be worth contemplating for the architects and urbanists of industry. You know, how do we make sure these buildings are not fast fashion architecture? They're places that can have a new life as the world and the neighborhoods around them evolve.
- [69:26]
Timmy Correjo
That's a really good way to I think close out the work section and just broadly speaking, thank you so much for your time. I think we're about to wrap up now, but I had two more questions. One which I just Thought of on reflection, you take the reader through a lot of different interesting anecdotes, characters, and I'm sure there was a very long list that you started with. I was curious if there was anything that was forced to hit the chopping block as you were, as you were publishing that you kind of maybe wanted to reflect upon.
- [70:06]
Benjamin Schneider
Yeah, I mean, I wanted to go deeper into.
- [70:11]
Strip malls actually. That's sort of this, this area. Yeah, the sort of the mall environment. This is a bit of a California thing too, and I'm from California. But the mall environment in the sort of urban grid context, the little, you know, maybe 5,000 square foot, l shaped strip mall that I think is an interesting kind of iconic urban space in California in particular, sort of an incubator of small businesses and yet has this kind of disastrous urban form that's really unsafe where you've again got like cars pulling off of the road up onto the sidewalk into these lots where people are also walking.
- [70:59]
So yeah, I'm intrigued by the culture of strip malls and the sort of types of businesses that emerge there and.
- [71:09]
How that seems so anathema with the urban design that is so hostile to, to human life with all the cars pulling in and out. So that's something I've written about a little bit before and wanted to include more of. But it ultimately felt a little bit California specific because yeah, the. And maybe strip malls is the wrong word, but like mini malls is more what I'm talking about. That's, that's a really interesting urban typology that is, is fascinating to me. But I didn't get to talk about as much.
- [71:38]
Timmy Correjo
I guess that's the second book.
- [71:41]
The last question that we always ask our guests is is there anything that you're working on now that the book is done with or any other projects that you would like to share with listeners?
- [71:55]
Benjamin Schneider
Well, I'm pretty deep in the book promotion phase, so not working on too much else immediately. But I think one thing that I would like to work on more and cover more is.
- [72:08]
Kind of returning to the aesthetic register of urbanism, thinking about if in fact.
- [72:20]
American society is going to pursue city building in a more significant way. How do we ensure that new buildings.
- [72:29]
Are beautiful and are appealing to people and are reflective of the sort of values that we, we have today that we're trying to imbue the city with, as opposed to the values of the 1950s that we are now kind of still living. Living with in way too many ways. So yeah, I'd like to think more and learn more and write more about.
- [72:54]
What the aesthetics of new buildings, new urban environments, ought to look like to reflect our time and our needs better.
- [73:03]
Timmy Correjo
Great. And I've been speaking with Benjamin Schneider, author of the Unfinished Igniting the City Building Revolution, just published by Island Press in 2025 a couple weeks ago. I highly recommend readers that found this conversation interesting to find a copy of the book at their local bookstore. Thanks so much for speaking with me today, Benjamin.
- [73:31]
Benjamin Schneider
Thanks, Timmy. Appreciate it.