Category: Talks

(New) Traditional Cities City Planners / Urban Designers City Solutions Talks Walking

4 ways to make a city more walkable

TALK

Jeff Speck, TED, October 2013

If you’re going to get them to walk, then you have to offer a walk that’s as good as a drive or better. What does that mean? It means you need to offer four things simultaneously: there needs to be a proper reason to walk, the walk has to be safe and feel safe, the walk has to be comfortable and the walk has to be interesting. You need to do all four of these things simultaneously, and that’s the structure of my talk today, to take you through each of those.

For more from Jeff Speck and his work as an advocate for walkable cities, click here.

City Solutions Colombia Government Agencies Leadership & Decision Making Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Talks Transit

Why buses represent democracy in action

TALK

Enrique Peñalosa, TED Talk, September 2013

Mobility in developing world cities is a very peculiar challenge, because different from health or education or housing, it tends to get worse as societies become richer. Clearly, a unsustainable model. Mobility, as most other developing country problems, is more than a matter of money or technology, is a matter of equality – equity. The great inequality in developing countries makes it difficult to see, for example, that in terms of transport, an advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport, or bicycles.

Biking Leadership & Decision Making Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Streets, Roads & Mobility Talks USA

New York’s streets? Not so mean anymore

TALK

Janette Sadik-Khan, TED, September 2013

And so, I think that the lesson that we have from New York is that it’s possible to change your streets quickly, it’s not expensive, it can provide immediate benefits, and it can be quite popular. You just need to reimagine your streets. They’re hidden in plain sight.

To learn more about Janette Sadik-Khan’s work on streets and transportation, click here.

Articles Books (16+ yr) Economists Global Leadership & Decision Making Meet the Urbanists: 21st Century Networked Cities Talks Urban Economics USA

The Triumph of the City

BOOK

Edward L. Glaeser, Penguin Press, 2011

Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace. The streets of Florence gave us the Renaissance, and the streets of Birmingham gave us the Industrial Revolution. The great prosperity of contemporary London and Bangalore and Tokyo comes from their ability to produce new thinking. Wandering these cities—whether down cobblestone sidewalks or grid-cutting cross streets, around roundabouts or under freeways—is to study nothing less than human progress.

For a talk by Edward Glaeser at UC San Diego summarising this book click here. For a discussion of Glaeser’s work on eliminating barriers to innovation for food trucks by The Urbanist, Alan Davies click here.

Ecologists Physical Geography Talks USA

New York — before the city

TALK

Eric Sanderson, Ted Talk, July 2009

But every time I would return from my trips I’d return back to New York City. And on my weekends I would go up, just like all the other tourists, to the top of the Empire State Building, and I’d look down on this landscape, on these ecosystems, and I’d wonder, “How does this landscape work to make habitat for plants and animals? How does it work to make habitat for animals like me?” I’d go to Times Square and I’d look at the amazing ladies on the wall, and wonder why nobody is looking at the historical figures just behind them. I’d go to Central Park and see the rolling topography of Central Park come up against the abrupt and sheer topography of midtown Manhattan.

For the Manahatta Project and beyond click here.