Booked on Planning
Booked on Planning
The Cities We Need
What makes our neighborhoods feel like home isn't just the buildings that surround us but the countless human connections that happen within them. Author Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani spent decades exploring this phenomenon by asking residents to guide her through their neighborhoods, showing her the places that matter most in their daily lives.
Her approach revealed something profound: places we might walk past without a second glance often contain rich histories and social significance for community members. Take the electronics store in Brooklyn where, years after the owner's death, his cricket-playing friends still gather every Thursday afternoon around a table in the back room. The store remains untouched, merchandise still on shelves, functioning as both informal memorial and vital community space. When planners see only a "redevelopment opportunity" in such places, they miss the essential community functions these spaces serve.
Ready to reconnect with your neighborhood's everyday places? Listen to our full conversation with Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, then visit your local bookstore to pick up "The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places."
Show Notes:
- Buscada is Bendiner-Viani’s interdisciplinary practice, which creates vital spaces for dialogue to foster more just cities through art, strategic planning, and research.
- Get a copy of the book from the publisher MIT Press or check out other ways to buy from the authors website
- Author Recommended Reading:
- American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland by Robert O. Self
- Palestinian Walks by Raja Shehadeh
- The Road to Dalton by Shannon Bowring
- To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/
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This episode is brought to you by Confluence. Confluence is a professional consulting firm comprised of landscape architects, urban designers and planners. Their staff of 70 plus includes 39 licensed landscape architects and AICP certified planners. Confluence is comprised of energetic, creative and passionate people who are involved in making our communities better places to live. They assist clients on a wide range of public, educational, institutional and private sector projects. You're listening to the Booked On Planning Podcast, a project of the Nebraska chapter of the American Planning Association. In each episode, we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked on Planning. Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked On Planning. In this episode, we talk with author Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani on her book the Cities we Need Essential Stories of Everyday Places. This book tells the story of why connecting with the people in our neighborhoods and cities is so essential and the importance of ensuring these everyday places continue to exist of ensuring these everyday places continue to exist.
Jennifer Hiatt:As an introverted person who has turned toward the convenience of grocery delivery and online shopping, this conversation really helped me realize that I have actually been missing all of the small interactions of daily life and how important taking time to interact with people every day and creating those connections to everyday places really is.
Stephanie Rouse:During our conversation with Gabrielle, I was reminded of a conversation with Shemichael a few episodes back on his book Meet Me at the Library, because that is one place in cities that we can rely on to provide the space for everyday interactions and to help practice the skills of engaging with others in a low stakes way that will prepare us for the harder conversations that need to be had.
Jennifer Hiatt:It's a really great connection. Not only is this book an important reminder of all the place work we all engage in every day, it is actually just simply very stunning visually. The photographs remind you that even the most random place can play an important role in someone's life. So let's get into our conversation with author Gabrielle Bendino-Riviani on her book the Cities. We Need Essential Stories of Everyday Places.
Stephanie Rouse:Bindi Narviani on her book the Cities we Need Essential Stories of Everyday Places. Gabrielle, thank you for joining us on Booked on Planning to talk about your book the Cities we Need Essential Stories of Everyday Places. Your book is built on work that spans decades where you asked individuals to take you on neighborhood tours and show the places that have meaning for them. You tell these stories through photographs, which makes your book really a beautiful read. Can you tell us what prompted you to start this and why you've continued it over the years?
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on the show and for really engaging with the book and also I think it's exciting. One of the things that's been exciting to me about this work is connecting across a bunch of different disciplines, and so it's very exciting to be having a conversation specifically thinking about how these sometimes very individual stories might have bearing and impact on thinking about planning. So just to kind of give you an overview of where the book started and the project started is so I've been very interested for a long time in people's relationship to everyday places, to neighborhood kind of how they feel a sense of belonging and place all of that kind of work. And I think I also come to this work as you say, the book is both photographs and text and I come to it as both an urbanist and environmental psychologist, but also as a photographer psychologist, but also as a photographer and one of the ways that I first actually started doing any of this work was thinking about making photographs of places and of cities. And you know I thought, well, I can photograph places that I know, but also I'm interested in understanding new places, maybe that I don't know so well, and you know I was like well, certainly anyone can take a photograph of anywhere, but I was interested in understanding, well, like, what are the things that I don't see or the things that I don't know are important that I might not necessarily make a photograph of if I were just seeing it through my own perspective? So I started to ask people this I first started doing these tours actually on the Lower East Side in New York, not too far from where I grew up, but also working especially with teenagers, and so it was interesting for me to see the places that we kind of overlapped in things that were important to us and the things that they showed me that were completely different than what I would have, you know, seen or known as being important.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:So I continued doing that kind of asking people for their tours, really starting, from a photographic point of view, in London and then in Buenos Aires and then eventually coming back to New York and doing this work in Brooklyn, and most of the work prior to Brooklyn had been in neighborhoods that I didn't live in, maybe neighborhoods that I worked in or had some connection to, but not right where my house was. And in Brooklyn I was really interested in the neighborhood that I lived in. I had grown up in New York very dedicated New Yorker but not in that neighborhood, and so in some ways New York is this like huge cosmopolitan city, and in other ways it is like so provincial that you are like well, I know my little neighborhood, but who knows what the rest is right.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:And so in some ways, being in another neighborhood than the one I had really known for so many years, that felt really important to me to be able to say, oh, some of this is familiar to me, but also there are stories here that I don't know, and how can I be a good neighbor? How can I know this place? I had formed all these connections by doing all this other work previously and formed a real love for these places that I thought, well, it was such a good feeling, kind of walking around these places that I didn't live, but knowing all these stories and then feeling so dedicated to them that I thought, you know, it's quite important to do that where I live. So that was one of the ways that the work started, and I also started a PhD program at the same time and really sort of started doing that work to say, like well, I want to really bring this kind of urban analysis and photographic practice together to think about, like well, how can these stories that people tell me, this making of creative work, how can all of that tell us something bigger about cities and what you know, what meaning we make in those cities.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:And so that was sort of where all of this came together and, as I say in the book, it started really right around September 11th 2001 in New York, you know not an insignificant date, which was, incidentally, my first day of grad school, so not necessarily the most auspicious start but it really made me think a lot about why these things that were small, these things that surrounded us in kind of our everyday lives, that those were the things that were kind of going to help us get through and that helped people feel a sense of care and taking care of each other in our city, and so that that was like kind of a galvanizing moment for thinking about what was at stake in the work.
Stephanie Rouse:I love the way you said that you could have gone into these neighborhoods, taken the pictures yourself, but you wouldn't have captured things that residents that live there every day probably would have pointed out. And I think as planners we tend to do that too often for whatever reason. Time sake that we just go out and we'll take pictures, we'll analyze what it looks like, but we don't actually go on any tours or have neighborhood residents lead us through and say, yeah, that's a cool building and all but this one over here that you wouldn't probably have noticed is actually way more important to the community.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Right, and I kind of knew this from doing these sort of smaller pieces of work in other places where things I had no idea that they would be important had huge stories behind them and huge, important not just for one person but for many people. Kind of to see people's overlapping stories of one place, that wouldn't necessarily have been the thing that drew my eye but you know, trying to make a photograph of it later, I had all these stories in the back of my head to try and tell through the photograph, to sort of show like why this sort of insignificant looking space is actually so important.
Jennifer Hiatt:So, as you've mentioned, you've you've done smaller projects in other areas, but here you chose two neighborhoods Mosswood in Oakland, California, and Prospect Heights in Brooklyn Not your neighborhood, but your home. Why these two cities? What drew you to them and what lessons have you learned from comparing these stories? Because they ended up blending so beautifully together?
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:So I should say I started doing the kind of the work that became this book, started in Brooklyn, spent about five, six years working on that work, and then had moved to California and moved to Oakland, where I also had some family connections as well. But I had known that I had wanted it to be a comparative work. So eventually this work became my dissertation. So I was always thinking about it both as creative practice and as research practice, and I think that doing comparative work is really an important way of doing research. I think one place can unlock something about the other if the comparison makes sense. Where I was looking for a comparison to New York, in some ways there's a way in which, writing about New York, it can seem like its own thing, like well, whatever that story is, it's so specific to that place it can't be extrapolated to be anything else, and I didn't want that for this work. It seemed really important that it was more about well, like you know, the stories that people have been telling me over this time. Yes, they seem very specific to Brooklyn and to New York, but at the same time they also seem like, I think, the work that people are talking about these places doing for them personally as people, as they're building their sense of belonging, building their sense of community. That has to be happening in other places and what does that look like somewhere else? In thinking about a comparative work, oakland, I think, started to really make sense for me, in part because you know there's sort of some parallels, just even physically, there are sort of second cities or boroughs to a kind of you know more famous city across the, across the water, from Manhattan or San Francisco. As I started to kind of look into the kind of histories of both places and to see how you know actually kind of the histories of American urbanism pre and post war really impacted both of those places. Similar things impacted both places but the kind of what it looked like was different. So you know, redlining and urban renewal and all of those things played a big part in both neighborhoods but the kind of physical outcome was very different. Right, or like urban renewal was not used as much, or certainly was to some extent, for highway building in East Coast cities, but very significantly was in West Coast cities, you know those kinds of things maybe, but it was also, you know, more used for housing on East Coast cities or kind of bigger kinds of developments here, but I could see that the impacts of those policies and those histories really had shaped both neighborhoods.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:As I started to think about, you know, not just comparing two cities but comparing these specific two neighborhoods and I was really interested in once I started to think about both, comparing Passback Heights and Mosswood. They have histories of being between almost like intermediary spaces and redlining in some ways that resulted in them being maybe more diverse or kind of people. A lot of people in both neighborhoods talked about kind of mixedness. A lot of people use that term as being important to them as part of the identities of both of these neighborhoods. At the time I would say some of them have changed a bit, but that piece started to make sense like well, then there's these really interesting parallels that people themselves are seeing from lived experience. These are similar things that we value about. I was hearing sort of similar things being valued about both neighborhoods and so as I started to do that work, it started to see more and more that they were a relevant comparison.
Stephanie Rouse:And with them being so relevant, easy to compare, you really fluidly flipped back and forth between cities throughout the book, instead of having here's the chapter on one city and then we're moving over here to this city. Why did you choose this approach to storytelling?
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:that it is much as I love both of them and much as I love both Oakland and Brooklyn. It's not really a book about those places, but about the idea behind what the places that people took me to in both cities or both neighborhoods, what those places do for those individuals and how very shared those experiences are and were. I certainly struggled a lot with thinking about, well, how does this book get organized and structured? How do they go back and forth? Do we sort of tell the history of one and then the history of the other? But it's not really a book that's like here's the history of Oakland, here's the history of Brooklyn and Oakland, right, it's really about what are the things that individuals in these two neighborhoods are telling me are significant to their lives and their capacity to be in community with other people, and so I wanted to start to be able to see comparisons across the interviews and the walks with people between two places. And I would say also one thing that's quite different between two places is that you know more people drive in California. Everybody in Brooklyn took me on a walk like an actual physical walk.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Difference between two places is that you know more people drive in California, right, everybody in Brooklyn took me on a walk like an actual physical walk In Oakland.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:It varied, you know, sometimes people would drive me around, sometimes people would walk or a combination of those things, and I also wanted to kind of grapple with that, those different ways of being in space.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:But to say, you know, people were seeking out similar kinds of things because they had a shared need that had to do more with what many people kind of need from their communities. I think one of the things that's important about being really specific more than being general is that I think actually intense specificity helps other people find themselves in the story, rather than trying to tell a story that is like everything is everything you know. If sometimes you can find specificity and something similar to your own experience in a highly specific and highly human story in a way that maybe you wouldn't have, if it kind of stepped up one level, that it got more general and so that piece of kind of using specificity at this granular experience level, that was very important to me and so that felt like, okay, well, you can put those experiences from two places in conversation with each other and that actually could maybe even open it up to more people to be able to see themselves inside this book and inside these stories.
Jennifer Hiatt:And if your grad program had an auspicious start with 9-11, this book also had its own sort of interesting start through the COVID-19 pandemic, which is ultimately a time where we all were just desperately also trying to connect with people, and you can connect to a lot of people through the story that you tell here. So how did starting a book writing process on connecting people during COVID shape how you thought about the book?
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's the thing that helped me shape it into a book. So, you know, I'd been working on this for like over two decades by then and had been thinking you know, how is this a book? How is it? It had been an exhibition, it had been my dissertation, there had been many articles, but I kept thinking I think this has a bigger public audience. I want to put the pieces together so that it's not sort of here's the piece that's an academic article, here's the piece that's the visual work by itself. I wanted to be able to figure out how the whole project came together and even how's this not just the visual work by itself? I wanted to be able to figure out how the whole project came together and even how's this not just the Brooklyn work on its own or the Oakland work on its own, but how are these things really deeply in conversation with each other? I had finished my first book the year before, in 2019. And that book had come out and I've been really thinking about how we could use that book and use this kind of to foster conversations about affordability and about housing and about community development. It's about a kind of 50-year fight for affordable housing on the Lower East Side. How could I use all these things and kind of a creative practice to get people talking? And I really got into 2020 thinking this is going to be the year that we really use this work for really creative conversations in person and really, you know, coming to grips with it in the place, and it's going to be transformative and I'm so fired up for 2020.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Clearly, that did not happen as I was at home you know, the stories from Brooklyn and the stories from Oakland have been living in my head for so long and as I was home, you know, with my family, with a young child, and feeling like what are the parts of why this all feels so wrong? You know, like March and April of 2020, how to take apart the deep levels of sadness that you know, I knew I was feeling and a lot of people I knew were feeling that it both obviously this kind of threatened death, but also that it was so lonely, and not just that you couldn't. You know, yes, like I didn't see my parents, but I could phone them and I could talk to them, but I couldn't see just the people in my neighborhood I started to see like, okay. Well, actually I miss these people whose names I don't know, like this sort of chit chat thing. I'm missing part of that. And why is that?
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:And I started to think back to all the stories that people have been telling me in Brooklyn and in Oakland and I thought I'd thought for a long time that these people were incredibly wise. But then I was like, okay, their stories are helping me unlock why this moment is so painful. And it felt like, okay, now I know kind of why and what's at stake and why it matters to tell these stories now, because it seemed like they could help explain all of the parts of this to everybody. And so that was really what helped me galvanize this into a book, and because it feels like you know, when writing a book, it does really matter that you know what's at stake. It's not just important that you think it's interesting, but like why does it matter to the world?
Jennifer Hiatt:You know what's vital about it, and so that, I think, helped me see that Since COVID, every time, like I, have a small interaction with the barista that hands me my coffee, you think more about that and so, as I was reading your book, I kept thinking about I think it was in Brooklyn the grocery store that makes sure you have your groceries like they'll deliver to you. You just have to know that, all of the little connections that had to be built for a grocery store to be willing and able to do that, if that grocery store opened during the pandemic, that trust would have never been built and that would have never occurred.
Stephanie Rouse:So I kept thinking about all those small interactions as reading through A key element of your book is the idea of placework, and not necessarily a common term, at least in the planning world that we use day to day. Can you describe what you mean by doing place work?
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things in writing the book and in putting kind of all of this research together. I had a long time to kind of look at these stories and these interviews and to try and sort of parse them in different ways to understand what it was that they were telling me. They say a lot of different things, but the thing that it started to be very clear, especially across both places, was that it was a kind of work that the places that people took me to were doing and were doing for them individually, and so I felt like it was quite important to be able to name that right, because I think sometimes when you spend a lot of time working on the everyday, on one hand it can feel like it's everything, it's so vital, it's so important, and then it can feel like it is nothing and it's throw away and who cares? And you know it's not the big shiny thing and there's no headline to it. But then the back of your head, you're going, but actually no, this is very, very important and kind of central to how people actually feel about themselves and how they feel connected or disconnected to other people, and that is genuinely very important to much larger things, and so I think one of the things that I wanted to be able to identify was what was it that people were telling me about? Why were they taking me to these places? And I think where that term came from for me was that what people talked about was that they were talking not just about you know, I like this place because so and so works here, but they were talking about how this place and the people who ran it or facilitated it, how that place did important work for them in their lives. And so to kind of reframe it a little bit as not just about this kind of place or this specific place or what this place looks like or its kind of historical preservation value, but the work that was happening inside of it for people's lived experience and how to name that. And so for me, that's really what that terminology of place work is to try and be able to see not just also kind of the use value of something right.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:So, like the supermarket, for example yes, it sells food and people need food and that's obviously very important but also in their willingness to deliver their you know, the way that they greet people. All of those things are all these other intangible things that really have nothing to do with the fact that you walk out of there with food, but that you also walk out of there with a sense of place, a sense that you're part of something larger, that you care about what happens to them and they care about what happens to you. All of that is much larger kind of work. That is like society building work. Right, that helps us all see that we are actually not these atomized, separate little beings, but that we are connected and what happens to one of us really does matter to each other, right To us to somebody else, and so that was part of what I could see happening in these places that people took me to. So that kind of work of really society building work, but that happens and is experienced on an individual level.
Jennifer Hiatt:Oftentimes that work has enduring legacies, and my favorite story out of the book that you shared is actually about an electronics store where the owner had unfortunately passed away, but his friends still regularly gathered at the shop, and this gathering was so essential that death couldn't even displace it. Can you share how that story came to you and then how you chose to portray it in the book?
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:So that was really one of the first tours that I did in Brooklyn with my neighbor Neville, and I had asked Neville he had lived in the neighborhood for a long time and I'd asked him to if he would, you know, be willing to take me on a walk around the neighborhood. And he said yeah, sure, okay, and so we walked around the neighborhood and he was telling me stories. He'd been there for probably 30 years and he'd raised his kids there. He had a lot of kind of extended friendship relationships and he took me to a lot of those places and he talked about what it was like to try and start his own business. He also had a kind of electronics repair business and he talked about also what it was like to be a West Indian immigrant to New York and building kind of relationships and building connections. Where did he find his people and like what was it that they did? He took me to a bike store because he was like, oh, we race each other in Prospect Park every weekend and let me tell you I always win Right. So he would tell me all of those kinds of stories.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:And then one of the last places, as we were sort of circling back close to where his store was. He said, oh, this is a really important place to me and it's kind of all boarded up at the front, but it had all these painted electronics brand names across the front. And he said, oh, you know, we always used to meet here, and on Thursday afternoons, and you know, at two, and oh, today's Thursday, do you want to go in? And I was like, oh, okay, sure, and so he knocked on the door and we let him in and we went back into this electronics store that was like old and quiet and dark. All the shelves were there, everything was there on the shelves, but, you know, nobody was in the store. And right at the back, kind of there's an open space, kind of behind, where the rest of the shelving stopped, you know so a group of guys sitting around a table with a bunch of you know, aluminum trays of food, and they're like, oh, neville, come on in. And they were also like who is this with you? What are you doing? And so kind of being invited into that was very, very special to me and really something that I valued.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Kind of being invited into that was very, very special to me and really something that I valued, because I and one of the things that I felt was so actually important about a lot of the stories that people told me was I felt like people were giving me something of huge amount of value, really something precious, either in the things that they showed me or the ways that they told me stories, and one of the things that in making a book and even thinking about how the book looks and how their space for their stories and space for the photographs, that I wanted to make something that was like respectful of those stories, that could hold them in a kind of beautiful way that would really give them the respect and honor that they deserve. So I thought I would just read a little bit of the story that he told me. He said my friend who was in the same electronics business like me died and they closed the store with all his stuff inside. He was a cricketer in the West Indies and his friends who were his old cricketers they always used to meet every Thursday around that table have their drink. Two years ago he passed away. They still meet every Thursday afternoon, still the same way. He went to the hospital for a checkup and they found something and they operated and when they operated he died. See, everything's still here. The store hasn't been touched. If I need anything, I'm short of anything. Instead of buying it, I get it from him, and I'll say that one of the things that was so really powerful was that when I turned this work into kind of a public art and dialogue project just the Brooklyn work in 2015, I made a series of guidebooks from some of the people's stories and Neville's was one of them and I put three of the places and three of people's stories about them and, as part of that project, I would lead these kind of creative walking tours or participatory kind of walking tours, so everyone on the tour would get one of these guidebooks.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:So they were in charge of that person's story for the afternoon, and then, when we got to a place that was on that person's tour, I would ask that person to say oh, you're in charge of Neville's stories. Okay, well, we're standing in front of what used to be the electronics store, and so I would ask them to hold up the photograph of what it had looked like. So by then, it was, you know, more than 10 years later, so that place was long gone. It's now a manicure, pedicure place, and so for them to hold up that image and to read Neville's story and kind of voice Neville's words back in the same place to other people, really building kind of also a sense of care and kind of empathy for other people's stories. So it was important to me to kind of have these things also be read aloud back into the space. And you know, reading that particular story aloud, you know kind of physically in front of that place, was always one of my favorite ones.
Stephanie Rouse:I also really love that story because I think it shows just how important it is to do this kind of work, because, as someone that's just walking by in the street doing an inventory, you might look at a building that's all boarded up and say this is a perfect redevelopment opportunity, but not understand what an important space it is for this group of individuals that meets there regularly and maintains their community in that way.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Exactly, and I think you know it's difficult, where you can't keep everything kind of fixed in amber, Everything can't just stay, but it does help unlock, like well, how do you then, even if this space becomes something else, how do you kind of continue to make space for their gathering? What does that look like? How do we really value these things that maybe don't have a name or, you know, kind of are more informal, but they're doing this very, very important larger place work that helps us all build this sense of society and community and sense of belonging and that that is so vital to kind of the larger project of, like you know, being human. How do we value those things?
Jennifer Hiatt:We're having a bit of a theme on Booked On Planning. We've had a run of gentrifying books overall. Seeing it laid out in about four or five books that we've read in a pretty short amount of time actually really has pulled out to me that you know, buildings we should preserve as much as we can but, like you say, you can't lock everything in amber. But the real problem behind the redevelopment work often is that we don't think about those spaces. How do we protect an area for somebody to hang out with their friends Thursday at two in the new neighborhood that's also being built? Because you have to balance out. You know new people do come in neighborhoods, turn over, but how do you protect that Thursday at two situation? It's very interesting and hard to kind of work through.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Yeah, I think that's such an important point and I think it's one of the you know kind of in that idea of like what, how do we start to better define what community preservation looks like, so that you know it's not only focused on physical space, but that we look at, kind of you know, what is the work that these places were doing or the things that they're enabling? How do we A look closely enough to understand what is happening and then also to think about, well, why is it important to preserve those spaces for people's relationship building to happen? And then what does it look like to actually genuinely keep, to really keep that preservation in mind, right? What does that look like to do that work and to really put value on that, to say like this is something that is essential. It's not a kind of well, things change and it's nice that you had that for as long as it lasted. Like that Do we shift that mindset and I think that becomes a really important piece of doing this work.
Stephanie Rouse:Doing placework is really, I think, integral to thriving, healthy communities. What is the loss of placework due to communities? How does it damage them?
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Unfortunately, I kind of think we're living in that world right now.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:I mean, I genuinely think that, on one hand, you know, this is not something that just happened, it's been happening for quite a while, and so the both the atomizing of people into kind of very much more individualistic sorts of spaces, or really like individual spaces, or digital space, or these like more and more and more highly selected spaces, or only very private spaces Part of that, I think, is what we you know it was very extreme during COVID, or that you could see like well, I'm not with strangers, but I think some of those things have been happening for quite a while, either between kind of the general sort of pull back into a more private life as Americans, but also, you know, as you say, around gentrification, the ways in which kind of these spaces in which people doing nothing or spending very little, those spaces have been at risk for a long time and there's been a real loss of them over time.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Like we kind of really need places where people can just be and sort of do nothing productive, while understanding that that does something very productive for a larger sense of society.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:But I think that that's part of like in losing those spaces that do this place work, where people feel a sense of belonging, where people build their like capacity, they build their muscle to talk to strangers and negotiate with people they don't know, and see other people as real. I think you end up with societies where people are increasingly less able to do that and so other people's problems and the impact on other people's lives seems less real, and that has huge impacts on our democracy, right. It has huge impacts on the way that we see our society. It has huge impacts on these very, very big things in terms of you know, what does it look like for real equity across this country? I feel like, in some ways, that the loss of these really small places or these kinds of ways of where police work happens, that that's one of the things that contributes to that and that seems incredibly dangerous.
Jennifer Hiatt:In the book you say that housing considerations in the US are about physical capital, not about creating that stability and humane place to live and play. So how can we start shifting our perspective in the US? You know we've been talking a lot about housing too, and how maybe we should think about it as infrastructure, like a road, as opposed to an investment opportunity. But what are your thoughts on this?
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Yeah, I mean it is really interesting, I think one of the things that I think about. I mean I think about the work that I did on Lower East Side right, which was essentially about a 50 year fight for affordable housing and a failed urban renewal site which to some extent succeeded but also kind of came out with a fairly mediocre outcome. But it took that much work and that much of people's lives to come up with something that is okay, right, and just to see how many things really work against people's interests and people's capacity for building, you know, longevity in place, affordability in place, all of those things to see all the many things that we're really fighting against people. So it feels like shifting the way that we think about that is very, very important. You know, kind of within the United States as a country I think we're fairly bad at building long-term affordable housing that we see that as kind of like a nice to have or something that you know is kind of almost like a gift rather than something that's like well, having stability is something that is beneficial to everybody, right, and I think that shift to say where everyone is stable, then that makes all of us more stable and to understand that all of us are impacted by that, like we want everyone to be in stable housing. That would be a much better world for everybody concerned. So I think that's a big piece of it to kind of start to think that way and to start to think about that way that we are all very deeply interconnected and it feels like a kind of throwaway kind of comment, but it really is a mindset shift that I think is required.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Many of the places that people took me to on these tours are small businesses, right, and small businesses themselves are really at risk, as much as affordable housing is at risk.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:You know, small businesses are often at risk, right, and so what are the things that we do to support small businesses?
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:All of those kinds of things are maybe more tactical kinds of decisions that we could be making to say, yeah, we value longevity in place, we see the place work that you do, right, you sell groceries, but you also do all these other things for this community, right, and doing that is a huge value. Both of those two things are a huge value. So being able to see that as part of the way that we think about what preservation looks like, I think becomes really important. But I do think the biggest thing is like how do we start to really see each other right, to see each other as what happens to you matters to me. Right, not in a like because I'm so nice sort of way I mean it would be great if that was how we felt about it but even in a selfish way, like, genuinely, your lack of rights of healthcare, of housing that genuinely hurts me too, like that. To be able to see that and make that visible, I think, becomes really important for us as a country.
Stephanie Rouse:And one of your sections in the book discusses small talk and how it can help create community. Can you explain how this works?
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:One of the things that people talk to me a lot about both was about kind of the chit chat that happens with other people. As I started to try and figure out how to organize this book, one of the things I actually did want to pull up was that one of the things that came out from people's stories was almost like had nothing to do with other people. It was like really about themselves, how they were, like finding themselves in public, that their sense of self and who they are and even their ethos and the world was being worked out in public. But it was a very private thing. So the book is organized around both the kind of like what it does for an individual and what it does for a community. That sort of structure is something that's fairly new for me in terms of looking at this work. So the first chunk is really about that thing of like what is it to build your sense of self, but in public, like that we need to figure ourselves out, not in private but in public, navigate with other people and I think the small talk thing it does, sort of both things that people sort of sometimes figure out how to see who they are by the chit chat with somebody else. But then there's also this kind of I talk about it as like this kind of casual talk. But then there's sort of also this maybe longer term talk, right, some of it is just how's the weather? Kind of talk. Is actually this really humanity affirming sense that we are both here in the same place together? Right, you and me we're here right now. We're experiencing this whole thing. Whatever it is that's happening right now, this is real and we're experiencing that together and that work seems very, very important. Like it's the chit chat that does that. Right, you didn't say anything of any meaning, like the words themselves were not meaningful, but the what work it did for those two people is very meaningful. And similarly, I think there's the you know, one of the my tour guides talks about it as talking trash right. Like that, that thing is an important way of kind of working out and grappling through different life experiences, but through humor and by sense of a kind of shared. There's some sort of sense of shared safety right In being able to engage in that together. There's something by doing that you explore all kinds of things in this kind of potentially even slightly trans regressive way, but that it's safe to do that right. Like that's something that's really valuable. A lot of times it requires a person who maybe runs a restaurant or whatever it is and kind of I talk about it as people who kind of facilitate place work in a place. Like there's usually somebody who kind of holds it. That makes it okay to do that in that space. I really value those people too. Like that's really special work that people do Not everybody can or does do that. So I think there's that piece of it. But I also think there's this piece in Oakland.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:I remember Tualde talking to me.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:He took me to a donut shop and he said the thing that was important to us about the donut shop was that he said well, you know, when I was newly immigrated to the US from Eritrea, that this was where people who were fairly new immigrants would meet.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:And you know, eventually we started to help organize for independence thousands of miles away. But what we did in this place was just sort of chit chat and become friends, just to be able to have a place where you could sort of sit and be and chit chat with people and to think about the fact that sort of this casual talk wasn't like they were doing anything important, but it was a kind of space to be it was a donut shop, right, nothing big and exciting about it but they but also kind of a benign neglect where the donut shop was like fine, sit there, whatever, it's fine that it could allow through this really casual talk, something that had huge impact later on. So this kind of casual chit chat can build to the kinds of trust that you then need to build a political movement right that those sorts of things don't happen without this kind of baseline of interpersonal trust and that very often it's these kinds of interstitial or very everyday kind of spaces where that happens. And some of that is through that kind of casual chit chat stuff.
Jennifer Hiatt:The final lines of the book really struck me. It's if we want to be human, we need place work. Without it, we can't get the cities we need. I know we've covered a lot of what place work is and why it's important. But really importantly like, how do we start embracing the humanity needed to do the place work? How do we start talking to each other again?
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:That's a great question. I think it is maybe seeking out those places. I mean, I do think in this particular moment, maybe it requires real effort to really seek those places out and to sort of put oneself out, to try and be in places where there are strangers and like to be in conversation with other people. And I think people have gotten into these habits, you know, either because online shopping is easy or because people have lots of hangovers from COVID of, like what you kind of got out of the habit of doing in person and maybe now you do online, right, or a variety of things that kind of slowly have chipped away at us. And I think in some ways, it's like what does it look like for each of us to really try to push ourselves back into that, to try and do more of that? And what does it look like to say, okay, you know, I'm going to recognize that talking with people I don't know is actually really important and valuable, and in doing that, I think people will really feel like, oh, and also I feel so much better afterwards. Right, it will have kind of a kind of knock on effect where people feel like, oh, actually I want to do that again. So I think there's that piece of the kind of very individual thing of like you know what people could do that way, but I do also think it's kind of an insistence and a pushback on AI as one thing, or this idea that a technocratic solution will be the thing that saves us all, and I think a real pushback on that is very, very necessary, right, but that is not going to be what saves us. That's not going to be what helps us build a stronger society. It will be people engaging with each other and people practicing the capacity to like listen to each other and talk to each other, and that thing of realizing that you need to be able to practice.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:I think one of the things I think a lot about with this whole book and a lot of the stories people told me was that, you know, a lot of what I could see happening was that people were talking about very low stakes kinds of engagements with other people chit chat about the weather or whatever it is, or you help somebody. It's a pretty low stakes kind of engagement. But if we are not practiced at doing those things, we have genuinely very large things that we all need to be facing right Thinking about democracy, thinking about climate change. How do we face those things that really matter to kind of the futures of our society like that are genuinely, you know, life threatening. We have to have low stakes moments of practice, because when the stakes get higher and higher, if you haven't kind of done that work, it's going to be very, very hard. And I think doing that practicing of building capacity to listen and building capacity to talk which seems so basic but I think is genuinely necessary, you know, is really a big part of that.
Stephanie Rouse:And as this is booked on planning, in addition to your book, which we recommend all of our readers check out, what other books would you recommend?
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Oh my gosh, there's so, so many, but I was thinking about three and kind of understanding all of this that it's quite important to think about both nonfiction and fiction and also, you know, actually kind of creative practice. So one book that really has been so important, a touchstone for me and certainly for the way that I even started to really think about why Oakland could be, you know, kind of to understand and unlock some of the things about that city, is called American Babylon, race and Class in Postwar Oakland Amazing book by Robert Self. Highly recommend it. So more on the more academic planning, history analysis of cities, really brilliant analysis of how inner cities and suburban development are not two separate subjects but are really deeply interlinked and we have to see those two together.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Another book that I totally different world would recommend, that it's also really been a touchstone for me for many reasons, but also even just around what it is to walk with somebody else and to see a place, is a book called Palestinian Walks by Raja Shahadeh, brilliant book of essays about his experience walking in Palestine over a many year period. His personal stories, his connections to place. All of those things are like a huge part, I think again, of like well, what does it look like to make a place feel real and to really understand the kind of what's at stake there? Incredibly beautiful book, one of my very favorites.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:And then a third book is a book I just finished this morning. Actually I thought it was so fantastic. And also again she has a little acknowledgement and talks about it as place-centric fiction and I was like, yes, that is excellent. It is a book called the Road to Dalton by Shannon Bowring. It's a fictional story of a rural North Maine town. Story of a rural North Maine town. Just brilliant depiction of people's interactions with each other, things that are said and unsaid, but also the way that place really helps shape these stories and people's connection.
Stephanie Rouse:And disconnection with each other. We always love it when our authors finally give us some fiction books, because we do love to read nonfiction, what our podcast is based on but we also love a good fiction book too.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:It's a great book and I was so mad I didn't buy the sequel when I bought it. So I mean I was really ready to move on to the next one.
Jennifer Hiatt:I was just gonna say it looks like there's more than one, so that's exciting. Love a sequel.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Part of why I was interested in being part of that book, but also even in kind of thinking about the specificity of the ways that I was thinking about Oakland and Brooklyn, and one of the things that's been so valuable to me in talking with people has been to say somebody said to me well, your book's called the Cities we Need. Does that mean that you don't like town? And I was like, no, that's not what I meant. But because I think that there's this thing as to say this need, this need for place. Work really cuts across looped experience. It cuts across the kinds of big cities and smaller towns that we live in and to say that is a human need. How do we see that and how do we see similarities across rural and urban spaces, that those things become so necessary, and how do we see that as a shared kind of question around planning?
Stephanie Rouse:And I think that'll help break down some of the silos that we're in of why I don't relate to you, because I'm rural, you're urban. We don't have anything in common.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Yeah, absolutely.
Stephanie Rouse:Well, gabrielle, thank you so much for joining us to talk about your book the Cities. We Need Essential Stories of Everyday Places.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:Thanks so much for having me. It was wonderful talking with you both.
Jennifer Hiatt:We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Gabrielle Bendian-Riviani on her book the Cities we Need Essential Stories of Everyday Places. You can get your own copy through the publisher at MIT Press, or click the link in the show notes to take you directly to our affiliate page. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate, review and share the show. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time on Booked, on Planning, Thank you.
