My Eco Story
My Eco Story explores the intersections of ecology, psychology, and narrative. It seeks to mine the depths of the human heart and the expansiveness of the human spirit while honoring and co-creating with the more than human world.
Every month, My Eco Story takes you on an adventure with a variety of guests who share stories about their path to eco-consciousness, and how they use their talents, gifts and insights to evolve our culture, our systems, our cities and our imaginations.
We hope their passions are contagious, their stories compelling, and their ideas inspirational. Perhaps today’s guest will also motivate you to take action in some way. Meanwhile, My Eco Story aspires to open a portal for you to reconnect with nature, the Self, and one another.
My Eco Story
The Critical Role of Sustainable Urbanism with Author & Urban Innovations Consultant, Dr. Michael Mehaffy (Pt. 1)
There is so much that is fascinating about Dr. Michael Mehaffy and his work.
He's an international consultant in urban development innovations, an author of myriad of articles and books on architecture and sustainable urbanism, and he sits on the boards of three international journals of urban design.
He also developed a course in sustainable urbanism, which was later the basis of a Masters and Ph.D. program in sustainable urbanism at the University of Oxford.
Yes, there's all that and so much more. But what is most compelling about Michael is how he weaves his deep knowledge and breadth of experience into valued-filled and action-oriented philosophies that illuminate how everyone in society can prosper together.
And that is what is at the heart of today's podcast.
But how do we get there? How does sustainable urbanism help to create thriving cities, improve our health and heal the damage we've done to the planet? We need to understand the nuances and the complexities first.
In Part I of our conversation, we discuss:
- How cities are "kidnapped"
- The meaning of sustainable urbanism
- Why affordable housing is an essential component
- What pattern language is and why it's important
- What makes a 'good city? An equitable city? One that's prosperous for all its residents?
- Whether sustainable urbanism helps or hurts ecologically based efforts like regeneration and rewilding
We also talk about influential figures in urban design and theory, Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs, both of whom Michael has written extensively about in several of his published articles and books.
Lastly, we delve into the work of the Prince's Foundation and the International Making Cities Livable Conference (IMCL) organizations for which Michael has been–or currently is–the Executive Director.
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Links:
Michael Mehaffy Publications
Michael Mehaffy Wikipedia Page
International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) Conference
My EcoStory explores the intersections of ecology, psychology and narrative. It seeks to mine the depths of the human heart and the expansiveness of the human spirit, all while honoring and co-creating with the more than human world. Every month, my EcoStory takes you on an adventure with a variety of guests who share stories about their path to eco-consciousness and how they use their talents, gifts and insights to evolve our culture, our systems, our cities and our imaginations. We hope their passions are contagious, their stories compelling and their ideas inspirational. Perhaps today's guests will also motivate you to take action in some way. Welcome, I'm your host, Faun Finley.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:The idea of a good city, which goes back to Aristotle and the Greeks, and it's a pretty timeless idea. It should be back at the center of our attention. What is a good city? How do we build it? How do we sustain it? How do we make a bad city into a good city? This is what sustainable urbanism ultimately is.
Faun Finley:Dr Michael Mehaffy is an author and consultant in urban development with an international practice. He has held teaching appointments and research appointments in architecture, urban planning and philosophy at eight graduate institutions in seven countries. Michael is noted for his published research and professional articles on myriad aspects of sustainable urbanism. And that doesn't count his published work on architecture, computer science and philosophy, nor his articles in iconic journals such as Scientific American, the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek. He was the first Director of Education for the Prince's Foundation, something we'll talk about in this episode. Michael is now the Executive Director of the International Making Cities Livable Conference, which recently held its 2023 conference in the UK. We'll also talk about that.
Faun Finley:So let's get to it. Hi Michael, welcome to the show. Thank you, Faun. So happy to have you here. Before we dive into your story, I'm hoping we can talk about sustainability. On one hand, it seems like it's come into the mainstream. Climate jobs are booming, corporations routinely release annual sustainability reports and nearly everyone knows what a carbon footprint is. On the other hand, sustainability can be confusing and overly complex, and the word is often misused. How do you define sustainability and how can we unclutter it for our audience?
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:Well, I think sustainability is one of those words that's sort of good news and bad news. Good news because we all recognize that there's something behind it. There's something that we can all identify what we mean by the word. A lot of businesses, a lot of academics, a lot of people have gotten behind the term, and that's great in terms of policies and actions and ways that people can work together. On the other hand, it's one of those words that also has a confused meaning and can be dangerous because it's so nebulous. And, for example, what are we sustaining exactly? Are we sustaining business as usual? I don't think that's what people mean when they say sustainability. I think they mean we're sustaining the biosphere and the good things that we have, the quality of life that we have, the built heritage, perhaps creating new buildings that will also be part of the future built heritage. That's sustainability. I see the word really as more of a conversation starter than a clear word that has a purpose, the precise meaning. I think it's still a useful term.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:There's a lot of other words in that category too, like smart cities. What do you mean by smart cities? Or public space? It's a very, very important domain. Everybody seems to know what you're talking about when you talk about public space, but then, when you drill down, everybody has different ideas. What's important about public space? What are you precisely defining? Is it privately, on public space, even a public space, and all these other interesting questions. They're useful as entries into a larger kind of exploration of what we're talking about and what we need to do together to take actions.
Faun Finley:Let's jump into your story. Your studies and your career began with music. In architecture came a few years later. What was the genesis of that transition? Or was it more of an organic evolution?
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:In my career, coming out of high school, I really was drawn to music and music composition. I actually went to an art school and studied music there– California Institute of the Arts, the place where there's a lot of the Pixar people went and so on. Much as I loved music, it not only was a really challenging field to make a living in, but it also seemed like I wasn't doing something that the world really needed. When I was standing outside of the Cal Arts building, standing there with a sociology professor and we were talking about something that had come up in the class, and I said, Yes, yes, but what about this?" I was pointing to the sprawling environment. We were up on a hill and you could see the bulldozers creating these new sprawling neighborhoods in the Southern California landscape. I thought to myself this is really not a sustainable pattern, literally not sustainable, going back to that term the idea that what is unsustainable is something we should be able to recognize and amend our ways and so I was drawn to that.
Faun Finley:That strikes me as a story of a calling. So what happened next?
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:At a certain point I took an introductory class to architecture and I suddenly realized that, you know, why hadn't I thought about this before? You know, architecture does allow me to express my creative instincts and my desire to build and compose and structure things, whether it's music or building. They call it frozen music. You know that's what the Greeks referred to architecture as frozen music, so there was that aspect to it. More importantly, there was the sense that maybe I could make a contribution in an area that was more urgently needed.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:I happened to take this course from a professor who had been Christopher Alexander's student and Christopher Alexander is an architect and builder and professor, somebody who really focused on sustainable building, and he wrote a book called "A Pattern Language and a number of other books. I became very inspired by him. I went and studied with him, ended up working with him and collaborating with him, and that really began my whole career in architecture, as urban design, urban planning, from the scale of little gardens all the way up to the scale of cities, and all of it had to be addressed as part of an interconnected whole, because it ultimately is.
Faun Finley:You mentioned frozen music. Is there a connection between music composition and the principles of design, and did you bring some of your music composition to design and to specifically architecture?
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:I think I did. It was something that I certainly explored with Christopher Alexander. He explored, he had done the pattern language, which was very famous. But he said you know, I really didn't deal enough with the topic of geometry, of how things are structured, how parts and holes relate to one another, and that's really what composition is all about.
Faun Finley:Could you elaborate further, maybe give us an example?
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:Yeah, there are very similar principles and characteristics and properties you might say have to do with the symmetries not the left right symmetries necessarily, but other kinds of symmetries too, like translational symmetries and rotational symmetries and scaling symmetries, fractals and things like that. When something repeats, a motif repeats or it comes back and then it comes, goes and comes back. The layering, the interlocking of patterns, all those things. Those things happen in music, if you think about a great Bach piece, for example, where you have all this layering of complexity. The same thing happens in architecture, in human environments. You know where we have this really rich layering of space, for example, between a building and the street, and you have the cafe and the seating zone and the planters and the other things that form all these layers. So yeah, there's definitely a lot of similarities between the domains in terms of how they're structured and how we structure them and can structure them better than we sometimes do.
Faun Finley:When I was a student of photography, we had several assignments around patterns and, yes, cities are layered, aren't they? These layers you're speaking of, these geometries, fractals reminds me of pattern language, which you had mentioned earlier in reference to Chris Alexander's book. Can you talk about what pattern language is and why it's important specifically to architecture and the design of cities?
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:The basic idea of the pattern language goes back to Chris Alexander's PhD work at Harvard. He was a physicist, physics and mathematics student at Cambridge, england, before he went to Harvard and he had also gotten an architecture degree at Cambridge– an underachiever, I guess you can say. But when he got to Harvard he really set out okay, what are the basic principles of a design problem, how is the design problem structured, how are the parts related to the holes and how does that work in computer systems and in other kinds of technological systems? And so what pattern languages did was they said here's a methodology for you as a designer that you can take some of these patterns that are not just atomic things but they're interconnected with other patterns, and you can use those to create new patterns, new holes and keep the holistic structure rather than just a bunch of bits assembled together.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:Some architects that are that's too, too formulaic. You know it's a cookbook. We don't need that. We need creativity. We need to just be allowed to have the freedom to make whatever inspires us. Well, actually, that's not the way natural system work, obviously it's not the way technological systems work, and it's not really the way that human beings work at their best, because what we do as human beings is we. We respond to the context. So it's a design methodology that allows people to keep those holistic characteristics and, by the way, one of the places where it has been most effective is not architecture but software, and it has led to Agile methodology. It's like directly to Wiki.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:The guy who invented Wiki, Ward Cunningham, was using Wiki as a way of sharing pattern languages of programming. He thought of each Wiki page as a pattern in her in its own right. Jane Jacobs made the same point in " The Death and Life of American Cities" , where she talked about the evolution of scientific thought and the idea that we now have to embrace what she called organized complexity, which was this idea that it has a lot of density to it. It has a lot of interlocking, interconnecting elements that are part of a part of larger holes. They're not just little atomic structures in isolation that we can manipulate, like housing over here and jobs over there, or Streets for cars over here and path for pedestrians over there. We need the mixing, we need the critical mass and the and the you know the diversity.
Faun Finley:Jane Jacobs, such an important figure and I know she's been a huge inspiration to you. Would you share more in terms of the key themes and perhaps radical ideas she had and how they continue to inform and inspire your work?
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:I think Jacobs was one of the people who really, early on, grasp these insights from especially the biological sciences, but other sciences to, and other you know other studies of how natural systems actually work and apply them to cities and to the problems that we were having with cities at the time in the late 1950s and early 60s, and said look, we can learn from this. Here are some concrete lessons that we can take from this about how we're failing to deal with our problems because we're misunderstanding the kind of problem the city is. And she said that a city is a problem in organized complexity, like the life sciences. It's not just a couple of variables relating to each other in some simple formula like this many houses and this many jobs, and it's not a statistical average problem like, well, you just need to 10,000 people and you need to they all have an average income of this and the average employment of this. No, no, you've got to tease out specific networks of relationships. If you're going to get anywhere. You've got to get down into the details of how the variables are interacting in a web network, in a in a sort of rock paper scissors kind of way, rather than a simple linear kind of way.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:So yeah, she was a hugely important figure for me and decided a few years ago to use her book "Death and Life of Great American Cities" as our core textbook for a class that I teach at Arizona State called Sustainable Urbanism. It's really been gratifying to hear the feedback from the students. We've had something over a thousand or so. Almost universally they say I can't believe how relevant that book still is.
Faun Finley:There was a park that I noticed wasn't being utilized. The first thing I recognized was there's no edges, and I started deconstructing it based upon Jane Jacobs' analysis. And then there was another park. I'm not naming the parks I don't want to.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:Step on anybody's toes.
Faun Finley:Right, there was another park that was really vibrant and I noticed ping pong tables on the edges, there was a interactive fountain, and then they made some changes and they brought some of the activities like the ping pong tables, some golfing. They brought it deeper into the park and that really changed the dynamic. Yeah, and I'm like Jane Jacobs.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:What I love about Jacobs is that, of course, on one level she's very theoretical and philosophical, and these are big ideas about the nature of the natural world and the nature of organized complexity. On the other hand, she's incredibly practical.
Faun Finley:My favorite quote from Jane Jacobs is the "The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations."
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:She was a very keen observer and one of the things that she emphasized over and over again was look, you have to get out and observe. You know, it isn't that you don't have some theoretical framework, but you've got to have it open to observation and to new insights and to things that say wait a minute, that doesn't quite fit what I thought. Let's see if I can figure out what's going on here. And so that was something that she said over and over again and I think it's very, very important and very powerful.
Faun Finley:She was all about talking to the people before you start to build or create anything ne. On top of that diversity. Can you talk more about what Jane Jacobs meant by diversity and how important it is to the built enviro nment and to neighborhoods and how we live a day day?
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:Well, I think it's important to note that she didn't start out as a planner. She started out as a journalist. Journalists talk to people, journalists observe, they go to places and they try to write down what they see, and I think that's fundamental to understanding her insights and her contribution. She actually was hired by Architectural Forum to go out and write about how great some of these new urban projects were around the country. Something happened along the way. She said wait a minute.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:The people I talked to, who are the experts, are saying this is all great. But then, when I talked to the residents, some other reality there. They're saying oh well, they took something away from us and they replaced it with this other thing that is not so great. And she said really, tell me more. And what she discovered was that it's the diversity of people and their activities that create the liveliness. It's not the brilliance of some genius planner or architect who comes up with this scheme. Diversity of people and the way we think of it today, but also diversity of activities, diversity of building types, diversity of all kinds, is what really creates the yeast that makes cities what they are, that makes them such great, thriving places for human flourishing, not only for just the enjoyment of the city, but also the productivity of the city, the economic life and economic opportunity for everybody, not just for a few people or for the people that have it currently.
Faun Finley:So what has led to the revitalization of the city, and how does that differ from or play against gentrification?
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:I think it's a great point. One of the issues about gentrification that we get wrong is that it's not a linear phenomenon, it's actually a curve. I call it the Jacobs curve actually, because you can obviously be too impoverished. That's unacceptable for human beings not to have more economic opportunity and opportunity for quality of life and the benefits that everyone else enjoys or that others enjoy. On the other hand, you can be too far on the other side of the equation where you sort of tip over into a monoculture of the wealthy, and that's not healthy either, it turns out, because it's not as economically creative.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:You don't have the people who are coming up with radical new ideas. There's a lot more sort of complacency and let's just keep the status quo. You don't have the diversity of views and diversity of people and diversity of activities and the creative ferment. For example, in Manhattan, when you had Greenwich Village or the Lower East Side or these other places that, as they quote unquote, gentrified from an impoverished state, actually became very creative and very diverse and very economically thriving places, then they tipped over into the other side of the curve, into a monoculture of wealth, and now they are sad poster children for over gentrification and over monoculture of the wealthy.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:The goal, I think, is to keep that balance in the middle of that curve, maximize the diversity and maximize the range of incomes, maximize the range of activities and creative ferment and interaction. History shows us pretty clearly that is where you really get the sustained economic creativity and prosperity for everybody. You get people who can pull their way out of poverty and people who can have more opportunities to develop themselves in a wider variety of ways. That's what cities do, that's what cities are for, ultimately, and if we aren't letting them do that, then we're not doing a good job of creating our cities or maintaining our cities.
Faun Finley:I think Jacobs had the answer to that too, and that is affordable housing. What I saw when living in the San Francisco Bay area there was diversity, there were artists or just all kinds of influences coming together and making this really innovative space that had a lot of dynamism and energy, and people with money started buying into it. It's like, oh, now that that's an interesting place, I want to live there. I didn't want to live there before, I didn't want to contribute to it becoming interesting, but I want to live there now. And if there's no affordable housing mixed in, then it seems like that's where the curve starts to go back down. Right. Because then it becomes more homogenized, it becomes out of reach for the very people who help to create that kind of synergistic space. And I think that in so many places we still miss the boat on this idea of affordable housing that it has to be over there. Do you see the possibility of that changing?
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:Absolutely. Jacob did talk about this issue a lot, and I think what I take away from that is that it's really a kind of toolkit approach, if you will. There's not the silver bullets. You don't say, oh, what we need is an affordable housing developer to build that project over there, and then all the people who have low income are going to go to that place. No, what we need is a whole suite of tools and strategies that are creating many different, diverse forms of housing, including the housing for those who are least able to afford it, all the way across the income spectrum.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:Instead, what we've done is we've allowed certain tools and strategies like the tools and strategies that serve the interest of the top end of the spectrum, especially to run away and to basically kidnap our cities and turn them into places where they can park capital, these tall building projects that become safe deposit boxes in the sky, as they say. Where people say we need housing, we need housing. Ok, well, let's build these tall buildings and, by the way, most of the units are million dollars or more and guess who buys those? People who are actually living there full time. So we are really doing something terribly destructive to the fabric of our cities by taking those kinds of policies, those supply side policies, instead of recognizing that we need to temper that kind of growth and diversify that kind of growth into housing for other parts of the income spectrum and also treating the land in a different way, but perhaps doing community land trusts and other mechanisms that take the land out of the speculative economy.
Faun Finley:Those supply side policies simply create a battle for resources over what's left, which isn't good for society as a whole, nor is it good for the land itself.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:Yeah, land is a finite resource, so of course it's going to become a speculative commodity, and that's unfortunately what has happened in just the places where it's the most destructive the cores of our cities.
Faun Finley:I want to go back to this idea of kidnapped cities. I've never heard that term and it seems to capture what we're talking about right now in a nutshell.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:We're experiencing a tsunami of economic trends that are driving these problems and driving cities off of a cliff in a way, because affordability and it's not just in the cores of cities, of course, it's all over, in all parts of cities and towns across the country that affordability is becoming a crisis for the younger generation, for people who are not part of the elite, knowledge economy, etc.
Faun Finley:Which is most people we haven't really talked about what urbanism is. Can you speak to what it is, because I think most people associate it with major metropolitan cities but that's much too limiting isn't it?
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:Absolutely. Ultimately, it's any collection of buildings that has public space around the private space. It can be a hamlet, it can be just a couple of houses in the middle of the countryside. That's urbanism. It can be a village or a town or a suburb. Many suburbs are not urbanism, by the way, because they're just monocultures of houses or whatever.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:Because again, you have urbanism. Then you have this tissue of public space and private space. The public space is walkable and it's enjoyable to be out and to meet your neighbors and to have social interaction and exercise and interaction that produces economic benefits. There's some interesting research on that. Walking to your shops and services as well, that those things are not too far away, that really is urbanism and it happens at many different scales. I moved out of Portland a few years ago to be with my daughter and grandkids and I live in a little town of about 700 people and it's got a main street and it's very walkable. I walk to the post office and the cafe and so on. There's an Amtrak station about three blocks away from here, and that's urbanism. It's not just the big cities. Any scale of settlement can be urbanism.
Faun Finley:Then let's talk about sustainable urbanism. Some of what we've discussed about Alexander and Jacobs tells that story, but let's spell it out. What is sustainable urbanism?
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:I think we all recognize that there are aspects of our life today that are unsustainable Our use of resources, our depletion of resources. There are those who are technological optimists who say, well, we'll just figure out new resources, new ways to get resources, and we should be open to that argument. But I think we better not bet the farm on that. We need to have this interconnected fabric that we see in natural systems and ecologies, and in the great cities of the past too. By the way, what we're dealing with now, really in the legacy of sprawl and the legacy of our failed planning models, is this idea that we had no limits, that we could simply engineer the planet to infinite degrees of resource consumption and energy use and all the rest of it. We now realize that was not only wrong. The world is finite. The resulting world that we have built is destructive of all of our quality of life, our health, our well-being, our ability to thrive. Ultimately, we can continue to live this lifestyle of consumption, but it doesn't address, maybe, our deeper needs as human beings and our deeper social needs of society.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:I think that the idea of a good city, which goes back to Aristotle and the Greeks and it's a pretty timeless idea. It should be back at the center of our attention. What is a good city? How do we build it? How do we sustain it? How do we make a bad city into a good city? This is what sustainable urbanism ultimately is. It's a cutting-edge topic, dealing with our current crises, and yet it's also a timeless topic going back to at least 2,500 years, to the ancient Greeks and beyond them as well.
Faun Finley:I want to connect some ecological dots here. We rely on nature's ecosystems both to survive and to thrive. Does sustainable urbanism help us with this? How is it part of the solution, and does it complement or compete with movements to regenerate habitats and rewild landscapes?
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:I think it's very complementary actually, because if we build in a way that is sustainable, certain things flow from that. Building in a way that's more human scale, more walkable, more compact, not crowded together in an unpleasant way, because often there are places that are quite compact, that are wonderful, everybody loves. They spend a lot of money traveling to these places you know Paris and so on but having the ecological nature of the settlement itself as a place that is, first of all, not as intrusive on the natural environment and secondly of all, internally it's more conserving of resources and regenerating of resources, the way we make cities and towns and suburbs and settlements and houses and buildings is going to play a fundamental role in all of that, has to play a fundamental role because that is the place where so many of these impacts are generated.
Faun Finley:We've talked about the impact of cities on our quality of life, on our culture, on society at large and on the planet. We also established what sustainable urbanism is, and now seems like the ideal time to talk about your work for IMCL, or the International Making Cities Livable Conference. First, can you share how it began?
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:Yeah, it was started by my dear friend Suzanne Lennard and her husband Henry. They started it in 1985, and Henry was a medical sociologist from Vienna, Suzanne was an architectural scholar from Bristol, UK. They decided there was a need to bring together academics and policymakers and practitioners the sort of three legs of the stool, if you will who were all sort of in their own little silos and not connecting the dots between them about livable cities, about cities that allow people to flourish and be healthy and be creative and have opportunities in life and all the rest of it.
Faun Finley:The topic of this year's conference perfectly aligns with what we've been talking about. It is called the Ecology of Place from Understanding to Action. Can you, as their executive director, share more about the goals and purpose of this year's conference?
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:We understand a lot more now about what makes a good city, a healthy city, an equitable city, a sustainable city, but what we need is action. We need to implement that understanding and we need the understanding of what the ecology of place really is all about not only the natural ecology, but also the human ecology the way human beings interact and create opportunities for one another, how they grow the pie. They don't just have to fight over the pie, and that's what it's going to be all about. So we're really looking forward to a great conference.
Faun Finley:Grow the pie, don't fight over the pie.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:I love that. The next one is in October in partnership with the Princess Foundation and the former Prince of Wales, who I corresponded with briefly about that.
Faun Finley:We have to stop there.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:Yeah, it's kind of a surprising relationship.
Faun Finley:We are indeed talking about His Royal Highness, King Charles, is that correct?
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:His Majesty. Yeah, they call him, yeah.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:Oh, that's, right Well actually, it's very hard for me to get used to that. It probably is for him too, who knows. But the interesting thing is I went to work for him back in 2003, 2006,. And got to know him and admire him. Another person who I think is actually in many ways misunderstood, but a big fan of Christopher Alexander, a big fan of Jane Jacobs, deeply thoughtful about ecology in the broadest sense of the word, has put it into practice in many ways through the businesses and through the other amazing variety of organizations that he's created, and one of which is about the built environment the Princess Foundation. When we did the conference last year, which was in a suburb of Paris that has been transformed into a very beautiful walkable place, I had been talking to my good friend Ben Bogar, who is the design director of the Princess Foundation. He said let's do the next one in Poundbury, which is the development that Charles had commissioned and helped to plan, played a major role in making that project happen.
Faun Finley:Poundbury is celebrating his 30th anniversary, which means that his majesty has been doing this work for a minimum of 30 years, oh yeah, and I don't think most people realize that level of commitment that he has.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:Well, some people may remember that in the 1980s he wrote a book called "A Vision of Britain," which was a very well-received book at the time. The tabloids are unbelievably vicious, as I think everybody knows, and the whole thing about. He talks to plants and all this sort of stuff.
Faun Finley:I talk to plants. Everyone should talk to plants. Luckily for us, they love carbon dioxide.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:Right. I mean, a lot of his ideas are ordinary. It's like, yeah, okay, he cares about climate change, he cares about soil, he cares about the quality of food and health, and doesn't everybody? Well, back then he was seen as an outlier. Actually, he was a visionary, is what he was. So, as a result, he was bashed for weighing in on architecture and urbanism and this idea that, hey, we can do better, we can do beautiful places that people respond to, that are walkable and mixed, and all the things we've been talking about good urbanism, good urban form. And people said, oh, stick to your charity, polo matches, what do you know.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:And he decided to his great credit, I think, to say, okay, well, I'll actually try to do one of these developments, and maybe I'll do more than one, but I'll start with this one, poundberry, and let's see if we can accomplish some goals with this project. And I'll tell you, in many ways it's a very impressive project. It has 35% permanent affordable housing, not concentrated into projects, tower blocks or whatever, but pepper potted throughout the community that you can't tell, which is which it has several thousand jobs as well as several thousand residents that have been created there. So people are working in the community as well as living there. They're walking a lot more, they're using cars, but to a much lower degree than in typical UK suburbs, so it's moving the needle in the right direction.
Dr. Michael Mehaffy:Poundberry is a great case study and more than that it's a laboratory of a lot of different techniques and strategies and tools and approaches, and we can go there now and we can evaluate them. We can learn the lessons of what has worked, what has not worked, what can we apply to other places, and that's what we're going to be doing in October. A preview of part two. I think one of the key lessons about sustainable urbanism is the idea that we are not separate from natural systems, from ecological systems, and that our cities have to be in their own right ecological systems.
Faun Finley:I hope this conversation with Michael Mahaffey has inspired you to learn more about sustainable urbanism, but this is not it. There will be a part two coming soon. Visit myecostorycom for show notes, including links to Michael's books, imcl and more. Thank you for listening and thank you to my very special guest, michael Mahaffey. Stay tuned by following my EcoStory on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also follow me, fawn Finley, on LinkedIn. Audio editing and sweetening, along with my EcoStory logo and website art courtesy of Lorena Anderson, also known as yes, ws Logo designed by Lawrence Peterson. Ecostory theme music by LexiMusic, and I am your host and producer, fawn Finley. All rights reserved. Everyone involved with my EcoStory gives of their time freely. Please support their work if it resonates with you and remember please take good care of yourself and this amazing planet.
