Hi, Emily.

Hugh, you're listening to Ted Talks daily, the world's cities are engines for culture, knowledge and community these days. They're at the center of public health and racial inequity crises. At the same time, how could they be built back from these upheavals, but in a better way? How should they be engines for inclusion? Architect Bishan Chakrabarty has some ideas, and it's all about putting people at the center when we design solutions for our cities. He's in conversation with Ted 20-20 with TED Design curator Chee Perlman.

Hi, I'm Sally Russian, while a host of a new podcast from Ted called PIN Drop. Every week you'll travel to a different location around the world, get lost in a new vibe and tap into a surprising idea.

Next to Mexico City, a real life superhero who dresses up as a luchador to protect citizens from traffic that's been dropped from Ted Chicot pin drop on Apple podcast Spotify or wherever you listen.

So when we launched the Build Back Better interview series, we knew we wanted to take a hard look at how we might build back our cities after the pandemic. Now we're still in the midst of a health crisis, but our streets are no longer empty canyons. Instead, they're filled with protests and the urgency of healing our urban fabric has only been magnified. I'm pretty passionate about cities. I tend to prefer to live in them. I see them as our engines of culture, commerce, knowledge, community.

But I also ask how can they also be our engines of equality and inclusion?

So we have someone here today who's thought about these questions his whole career. Bishan Chakrabarty is an architect, is urban, he's an educator, and he was the director of planning in Manhattan in the aftermath of 9/11.

So he has seen crises before. He's the founder of this architecture firm. And in just a few weeks, he'll be taking the reins as dean of Berkeley's College of Environmental Design. So, hello. Welcome, Michel.

Hi, how are you? Good to see you. Oh, I'm so happy to see you. Welcome. I imagine you're in deep thought about so many things right now, but give us your sense of what you're thinking about cities in terms of how they are struggling and how they might recover from both a health and an equity crisis that we find ourselves in. Sure.

You know, after 9/11, there are a lot of forecasts made about what would happen with cities. And people said cities would be over, skyscrapers would be over. And a lot of those forecasts didn't age very well. And so I think rather than forecasting about what cities might be, I think we should talk about what cities should be coming out of, what are really these dual challenges of a pandemic on one hand and longstanding structural racism, on the other hand, that the Black Lives Matter movement has really made it so clear to the world.

And and if you think about those two challenges, they're interrelated because the impacts of the pandemic have not been equitable and communities of color in particular have suffered disproportionately. And so I think coming out of this in our cities and I think our cities are everything you described as these engines of culture and commerce. But I think we need a new narrative, a new social contract for the way we think about our cities. And I think, you know, right now people are going to naturally tend towards this austerity model.

They're going to say, well, we're going to go broke from all of this. And so we have to pull back and investing in our people. And I think that's exactly the wrong thing to do. We need a new narrative of generosity, not austerity. And I think we need to focus on the equitable, the sustainable and the attainable prior to this crisis and these crises that are upon us right now. You know, people that we now call essential workers communities of color.

We're not having equal outcomes in our cities. Our cities were working very well for the prosperous and not working at all for people in other parts of the economy and really critical parts of our world in our culture. So if we wanted to craft a new urban equity agenda, what would that look like? What would it entail? And I think about three components. One is the idea of having equitable health and housing. And we can talk about how those things are interrelated, sustainable urban mobility, and really changing the way in which we move around our cities, particularly as it relates to climate change.

70 percent of carbon emissions come from buildings and cars often rooted in our cities. And so we can have an extraordinary impact at scale in terms of the environment and climate justice. And then finally, the idea of attainable social and cultural resources.

And I think if we focused on those three things equitable housing and health, sustainable urban mobility and attainable social and cultural resources as ideas for policy coming out of these crises, that we could craft a new urban equity agenda to show that that's really it sounds like you're thinking on all cylinders about this.

But let's just start with housing, because, you know, cities before the pandemic, you know, most people could not afford to live in decent housing in many of our major urban centers. And housing costs were skyrocketing.

And that actually meant that the essential workers that we now recognize, we need to have it mixed in with the entire city fabric, our living further and further away and further from their jobs. And I just wonder, from your point of view, how do we start to reset that balance?

Sure. It's a critical question. Obviously, everyone prior to this dual crisis spoke about gentrification and that became a concern across cities globally as cities kind of recovered from the industrial era of the 1970s became more attractive places to live, but then in turn became unaffordable. And I think we're presented with a false choice in terms of this narrative that we are either the impoverished cities of the 1970s where we have no tax base and there's horrible crime or so forth, or the cities that we just experienced, which are cities of kind of bourgeois banality where cities have become so prosperous that the very things that made them attractive became monocultures.

And we were not only losing the housing for essential workers and communities of color, as you mentioned, but also losing the spirit of what we all love about cities in the first place, which is the diversity and the exclusivity that makes cities interesting and have positive social friction. I think, first of all, we need to think about how could housing policy change in the future. Now, if remote working becomes something that is much more prevalent, we may, in fact, in many of our cities, see a drop in demand for office space.

And if that occurs, it could very well be has been done in other places, like in lower Manhattan, where we can convert older buildings into affordable housing, supportive housing for formerly homeless people. Because what we need to break out of is the fact that the essential workers you're talking about, what leads to homelessness is the fact that most people in cities are rent burdened, which means they're spending more than a third of their income on housing costs. And so we need an activist government to intervene in that and to be able to say, well, you know, maybe some of that older office could become housing.

And also most cities have brownfield sites, rail yards, other places where we could build mixed income, affordable, attainable housing. And that will lead to better public health outcomes because housing is health. You cannot have a healthy society if people are under housing stress or have homelessness going on. You know, one of the things that I've been thinking about is we're all talking about how retail is transforming. And we're, you know, maybe we'll see fewer chain stores in cities like New York.

And and maybe instead of those chain stores, we could use those empty storefronts for educational or social purposes, pop up libraries, pop up universal pre-K or classrooms, you know, things that still give our street life vibrancy and activation, but not without relying on chain stores and instead relying on social infrastructure and educational infrastructure. That rather than, as your question talks about school zoning, that we bring the mountain to Mohammed, that we actually distribute in a more diffuse way around our cities the educational infrastructure that people need in their communities, which includes, by the way, things like vocational training and senior education.

So we create a kind of cradle to grave educational system that's a kind of street infrastructure across our cities. I think that's possible in a world in which we're going to see fewer chain stores.

Bishan, I mean, I think you were talking about something that we are very keen to figure out in our in our world. But if you are speaking about a new urban equity agenda, are you also speaking about a different kind of budget allocation? Like how does that get done and how do we avoid that? Well, I think we have to talk.

You know, financiers talk about equity and debt, and I think we need to talk about social equity and social debt. And, you know, we've seen what happens when there is an economic crisis that leads to austerity and austerity often just leads to more cycles of hardship, more economic ruination. And that is not the path we should take here. So we probably will need to borrow some more money and actually put debt to good use to build the kind of infrastructure of opportunity that I'm talking about.

But we also need to acknowledge that our cities are wealthy places. When I was Manhattan planning director, New York City's budget was about forty three billion dollars. The budget we passed last year in New York City was almost double that. And that's been pretty much of a global phenomena. And so if you look at whether it's London Breed in San Francisco or. And Hidalgo in Paris, the mayors around the world are understanding you have to invest in your people, you cannot have a massive retraction at a time of social need.

And so we're going to have to find a way to pay for it, both through some deficit spending, as well as looking at the industries that are thriving and saying whether we can pay higher taxes. For some people I know I could pay higher taxes in order to have a more equitable world that I'd gladly do. So, OK.

I wanted to actually switch to the topic of transportation because that is so much a part of our infrastructure.

It's also obviously so much a part of what our cities are driven by, whether it's the amount of pavement we have now on our streets, the accessibility we have to public transportation.

I wonder, though, in the context of all of that, are we going to see the rise in the use of a private car because people are going to be fearful about being in that public space?

Well, this is a great question. It's a big concern. Many people are concerned that as certain cities recover, we're going to see widespread use, widespread use of private automobiles. And, you know, mass transit was not the problem here. And I think both density and mass transit have been painted with a rather negative brush when it comes to the covid situation, because there are places that are quite dense that have survived the covid crisis much better than a lot of the cities in the West have, despite the use of mass transit.

And so mass transit can be made to be safe. But I think what we really need to do is step back and look at what happened, which is, you know, most of our cities have about 30 percent, a full one third of their land committed to roads. It's a staggering figure to think of a third of Tokyo or a third of New York being committed to roads. And then the majority of that road space is used by private vehicles today.

And I think we need to completely rethink that equation. And again, in the spirit of equity and ecology, we use that public space in terms of express buses that could be space so that you had more social distancing on buses while you needed them because you had many more of them. Walking and biking has proved to be a very effective means of transport in the corporate environment as long as people are keeping their distance. And I think, you know, in terms of both the ecology, in terms of urban human connectedness, all of that is so much more possible if we stop using roads solely for cars and especially private cars, because the problem here is not a technological problem.

It's a spatial problem. If you look at how much space a person in a car takes up versus a bicycle or a pedestrian, I don't care whether the car is autonomous or electric or whatever it is, it just takes up too much space per person. And that's what we need. We have the space in our cities to move around in a much more efficient, ecological, timely manner and in a way that's much more pleasant for people in terms of quality of life if we simply give more of our streets over to people as opposed to cars.

Tell me, what are you thinking now in terms of how dramatically office life will change? Do you feel like things will ever be back to some version of what we used to know, or are we really setting a course for something new?

Well, a lot of people are obviously concerned about this. I know that as an architect and, you know, in my studio, we're itching to get back to the office. We know that there's an opportunity cost to working this way. But at the same time, you know, there may be people who have really difficult commutes. They and their CEOs might have kind of aligned the goal of saying the employer says, I don't really want to pay for that cubicle.

And the employee says, I don't really want to commute to their cubicle every day. And so I do imagine that over the long term, this is going to reduce some of the commutation. And so I think it will be a mixed situation. But I do believe that a lot of industries, we still need that face to face serendipitous contact that sparks innovation and sparks creativity. And so I still fully believe in that. And I fully believe that that will be part of why cities recover from all of this.

But, you know, I think the other thing to say about that is that I'm in the middle of writing my next book. And there's so much interesting history associated with how cities changed in the course of pandemics, sewer and water infrastructure, light and air standards from between, you know, from tuberculosis to cholera to the bubonic plague and the Spanish flu. It all changed the form of our cities. And this will, too, but hopefully for the better, but also in a way that, you know, builds upon our desire for human connectedness.

I have just one more question for you, which is.

You are embarking on now your new role as dean of architecture school, and I wonder, what is the pedagogy going to look like? How is it changing?

It's on my mind constantly, obviously, as an incoming dean. You know, Berkeley is a big public university in my undergraduate body, 41 percent of my students are first generation. We have a lot of diversity and inclusion. We're going to get a lot more diversity and inclusion, I hope, in the coming years. And those students will go out and become our future leaders. And it's in those students. I mean, they ask me really tough questions about how we're going to diversify our faculty and diversify our pedagogy.

And I think one of the big questions that a lot of the students have is what's their instrumentality and all of this, how do they take what they learn and become urban planners, landscape architects, architects who really change the narrative and change how we implement policy on the ground? You know, Berkeley is obviously right next to Oakland, and there's just so much to do in terms of listening to that community and working with that community. Our good friend Walter Hood has been doing that for decades.

And I just think that Berkeley is one of these places as a big public university that really gives me hope because of the students and the faculty and what what passions them. And I do think pedagogy will change as a consequence of all of this, because we have to look at everything through this frame of what is equitable, what is sustainable and what is attainable. But I think we do know that unless there is a different sense of representation in terms of what our government is, how our government can can be reformed, and everything from criminal justice reform in terms of how we police our streets, that that none of this can come to pass, that we need diversity and representation.

And also, again, I think we need to rethink our narratives and not constantly fall in the trap of of, you know, what we've been living in for the last 50 years. And instead think about how do we get a much broader sense of representation and have the self governance that the, you know, that our democracy's promised us. And I think unless you have that, you can't institute the kind of urban equity agenda that we've been talking about.

Yeah, that's that's a lot of new thinking for the architecture fields. But we welcome that vision.

I think you're absolutely in the business of building back better. I think that your ideas and your initiatives are more more needed now than ever. Thank you.

Thank you. PR ex.