The Unfinished Metropolis

In an engaging conversation with author Benjamin Schneider we explore transformative ideas in urban planning culminating from a wealth of recent literature in the field. His book, The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City Building Revolution, is a compelling guide for emerging planners and those curious about the evolving nature of urban spaces. We touch on office to housing conversions, enlivening downtowns, a new industrial architecture, pre-emption and more as we grapple with how cities can revisit their roots of continuous growth and building. 

Show Notes:

• Further Reading:
  • All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity by Marshall Berman
  • The Decorated TenementsHow Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age by Zachary J. Violette
• To help support the show, pick up a copy of the book through our Bookshop page at https://bookshop.org/shop/bookedonplanning or get a copy through your local bookstore!
• To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/

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Transcript

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Stephanie: [00:01:00] Welcome back, Bookworms. I'm Stephanie Rouse. 

Jennifer: And I'm Jennifer Hyatt. 

Stephanie: And we're the hosts of the Booked on Planning Podcast. In today's episode, we talk with author Benjamin Schneider on his book, The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City Building Revolution. I think it's a really great book for emerging planners, people interested in planning that wanna get a broad understanding of the field because it touches on so many different topics that engage with cities like transportation, housing, downtown redevelopment, industrial building design.

It hits all of it and talks about a lot of books that have been published in the last couple years that we've had on the show. 

Jennifer: Yeah, every time I saw one of our previous books, or even some of the books that we have upcoming that we're planning on covering here in the near future, it really made me very happy, and it is a great overview of all of those books.

So I think it's really important to note Benjamin does a good job of providing a high level overview, and then [00:02:00] he cites out where you can go seek deeper information if a topic grabs your attention.

Stephanie: Yeah, that's a really great point. And also, if you want to learn more about planning and diverse set of topics, we are offering that next month October 12th and 13th, for our Booked on Planning Book Summit in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Registration is open right now through the end of the month. We really urge you to sign up by September 10th because we're really excited to partner with our closing keynote speaker, Ebony Walden, to be able to offer her book to anyone that registers before September 10th as part of your registration.

Jennifer: Heck yeah, a free book just for registering before September 10th. Everybody should get on that. And now we will get on into our conversation with author Benjamin Schneider on his book, The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City Building Revolution. 

Stephanie: Benjamin, thank you for joining us on Book Down Planning to talk about your book, The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City Building [00:03:00] Revolution.

Your book is the culmination of a lot of recent literature, many of the books you reference having been covered on the show in the past few years. What drew you to writing this sort of holistic city building book? 

Benjamin: Yeah, and that's exactly right. I was inspired by the urbanist canon of recent years starting with The Color of Law, Paved Paradise City Limits by Megan Kimball, the book about freeways and so on.

All these books that touched on these really important aspects of urban planning and how it has shaped American life and American history. And as I was reading these books writing about them, I was increasingly interested in the ways that they were all telling different parts of the same story about American cities no longer really meeting the needs of the people who live in them.

A lack of affirmative vision of how cities can be better than they are, better than the status quo and break out of a 1950s car-centric single family home centric way of doing urban planning. [00:04:00] So that was what I hope to accomplish with this book is a sort of comprehensive view of how cities can reach their potential and be forces for good in people's lives, looking at many different facets of urbanism, from transportation to housing to workplaces and businesses looking at how they all come together to be part of that solution.

Jennifer: Last year, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who was trying to understand a little more like, what it is that I do as a profession. And she's like, "Isn't there just one book that sums it all up?" And I was like, "Not really." But I did send her your book. Oh, thank you. I was like hey, I have a follow-up on that.

Here's that book that you asked for. Somebody actually wrote it." 

Benjamin: That's great to hear. Yeah. And that is what I was hoping is that people, not to undermine those other authors whose books are worth reading, but for people that are just dipping their toes into this field or want an introduction to some of these big issues I think my book is a good place to start.

And then if you read the book and happen to be more [00:05:00] interested in freeways, for instance, reading Megan Kimball's book would be a very smart next step. And I try to, cite these, these other authors throughout to signal to readers if you wanna go deeper on this particular issue, you should follow with that and go look at this other book.

But I'm very glad to hear that, Jennifer. Thanks for recommending my book to people. 

Jennifer: Yeah, of course. And one of your arguments is that the American city building transitioned from an era of rapid experimentation when we were building out our subways, we were trying out public housing, et cetera, to decades of what is ultimately institutional stagnation.

 So what would the tipping point be when American cities stopped evolving overall? 

Benjamin: Yeah, I think there wasn't a super hard cutoff, and certainly cities have evolved in the last half century, but I do think there was an inflection point in the 1970s when America was reckoning with the impacts of urban renewal and freeways, these city building projects that were very problematic in many ways and resulted in huge amounts of displacement, huge amounts of [00:06:00] environmental issues very unattractive architecture, unsuccessful business strategies as far as how to revitalize cities.

A lot of the urban renewal plans infamously that were intended to make downtowns more, more livable, more, more popular places to be did the opposite. They emptied out those places. So there was this reckoning in the '70s where basically broad swath of the American public looked at these efforts to remake cities in the preceding years and basically though that didn't work particularly well.

So what we should do is pull back and not have these visionary efforts to transform our cities to upgrade them for modern times and just live on the infrastructure we've already built. And there, there's some wisdom to that. I think certainly as far as freeways go it's a good idea to just use what we have and not build more freeways in the middle of cities.

And in fact we probably should have fewer of them. But, there are certain types of infrastructure that once you've built it, you've got it and you may not need more of it, but certainly when it comes to [00:07:00] housing, that's probably the most acute problem we've had where the great downzoning of the '70s that came in the wake of what people perceiving to be overrun development in major cities that significantly reduced the amount of housing that cities were able to produce following that point.

And that's a huge reason why we're now in a huge housing crisis in basically every major city and are also not able to build the kinds of housing that is the most sustainable, the most economically beneficial to cities infill housing, close to transit, close to downtowns. So that's an area where this kind of societal choice to stop building just has these very profound and vivid consequences, and that I think is really worth rethinking.

And fortunately that we are starting to rethink, at least on the housing front, but there are many more facets to building cities that, that work, that, that are livable, that are good for people that we need to be thinking about more too. 

Stephanie: thought it was really interesting the way you compared American cities to Canadian cities.

can't remember the exact quote, but I think it was Vancouver, but [00:08:00] essentially that they really haven't stopped city building, that they've continued to grow and change and develop in a way that is more sustainable and equitable than a lot of other cities have. 

Benjamin: Yeah I get pushback from my Canadian friends on this, but I do think as a broad statement it's true that Canada does represent this sort of path not traveled for American cities in terms of particularly transit build out but also to some extent housing.

 There's really interesting analogies. If you look at Vancouver, for instance, as a sort of analogy for West Coast cities Montreal is you can think of it as analogy to Washington, DC or Boston, and then Toronto being an analogy for New York and Chicago.

And then actually, e- even another subset is Calgary and Edmonton are mid-sized heartland cities, St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit, et cetera. All of those, those analogy pairs are, like, ways you can imagine American cities developing differently. And so if you look at, for instance, starting with [00:09:00] Vancouver in the, starting the 80s, they started building this really high-tech driverless subway and an elevator rail system throughout the city and then shaped their urban planning around that.

They built these clusters of towers around those, stations. And as a result, they have incredibly high transit ridership and and have grown a ton, have facilitated a lot more people living in Vancouver. Unfortunately, there, and in a lot of other Canadian cities, they still have really high housing costs.

So that's a, a nut they haven't cracked. But at least the transit side and the sort of urban form, urban development side of things is very illuminating. And you see it not only in those big cities, but as I mentioned, Calgary and Edmonton have quite good light rail systems relative to their size and also do transit-oriented development quite well with these little clusters of towers around stations.

All these little things that American transit systems tend to get wrong like not grade separating enough, not giving priority signals, not allowing development near the stations Canada has tended to do better around those, those [00:10:00] details. 

Stephanie: So speaking of transit and urbanism, you bring up a term in the book railroad urbanism, which I love.

 What is this and what's the potential for it? 

Benjamin: I think it's a good way of thinking about historic urban forms that you see, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest. I think it's easy to forget now when we don't have a lot of trains going through our, secondary and smaller cities.

But historically, in the early 20th century, late 19th century, those cities the only way to get there really was on the train. And the, the train station was a hugely important part of the urban experience. It was the, the gateway to the city. So the city leaders and business groups, lavished a lot of money on these places, made them very iconic.

And then the immediate vicinity of the train station, the, the downtown was such an important focal point of city life because it was, the half mile radius, the walkable radius from the train station was just so important. It was the place that the vast majority of people would be going to on a given day because that's where you could get to from the train station.

And so it [00:11:00] created these really dense downtown environments. I was in Utica, New York a couple years ago and was really struck by the, skyscraper urbanism there, these 1920s skyscrapers near the train station. And they're very beautiful. A lot of the buildings there have been demolished, but there's still a few of these historic buildings.

 And nowadays, of course, the street scene is a lot quieter. But you can imagine 100 plus years ago the whole kind of basis of the town's existence was that train station and everything kind of flows from there in terms of the urban development of the city.

Jennifer: So one of the existential crisises of almost every city at this point is the question of what do we do with our downtown now that commercial office towers are facing high vacancy rates and we have these changing working patterns. So what do you think are some of our more realistic ways of converting and repurposing our cores?

Benjamin: The office to housing conversion movement is really promising. I think it's borne a lot of fruit in some major cities in New York, in DC in Chicago, you're starting to see it too in San Francisco finally. It's kicking [00:12:00] off a little bit. that's the most obvious path, and I think that's a smart way for particularly converting the older office buildings, the, pre-war office buildings are, really lend themselves well to office to housing conversion because they've got the sort of narrower floor plates the larger number of windows and they often just tend to be, like, homier and more attractive buildings.

That's a really good starting place. And actually, in New York they've basically run out of those kinds of buildings to convert and are now moving towards some of these post-war mid-century buildings that are bigger and wider, and so therefore harder to convert into housing.

And we've seen a little bit of the, the challenges that come with that, with the Pfizer building incident a few months ago where there was a, a buckled beam on a major construction site in New York where they're converting the office building to housing. I think it still remains to be seen what, what happened there, but it can be hard to totally change the use of an office building into housing.

 And so maybe, it's indicative of some of the limits to that phenomenon. I think you can't just stake your entire downtown revitalization strategy on office to housing [00:13:00] even though that's an important part of it. And I think since I've written the book, office market and the sort of American work culture has, has swung more back towards the, pre - COVID norm of people going to offices on a more regular basis.

So I think the sort of crisis mode of we need to completely rethink downtowns has abated a bit. So that's good to see, I think. But the broader questions of, like, how to diversify downtowns, how to make them more than just nine to five districts, I think are really important. And so the housing piece is really is a huge part of that.

 But then I think the, part that doesn't get enough attention is the public spaces piece, making downtowns into places that can host large scale events concerts and food festivals, things like that. That's really such a perfect use of that space. Taking advantage of the, the proximity to transit, that you can bring large numbers of people together without cars and use that kind of critical mass.

 And then other kinds of institutions too, like hospitals, universities that's long been part of the, the playbook, but I think there's [00:14:00] more of an embrace of instead of building a wall of fortress kind of campus for those kinds of institutions, perhaps using the existing building stock or just thinking of those places as more embedded in the, downtown scene rather than there physically, but not really there as part of the, community.

Stephanie: So we've talked about how housing is really important and we need to relax regulations to make it easier to build housing. You mentioned some different strategies, like making it easier with elevator requirements, loosening those. And your book was published before the kind of epic housing legislation was just passed 21st Century Road to housing.

 Is that getting us in the right direction or is it falling short, there's still a lot we need to do? 

Benjamin: It's definitely moving in the right direction and I think there are some very wonky building code reforms there. One that I'm familiar with is the chassis regulation. This is a really in the weeds one, but this idea of a mobile home is basically moot in this legislation before any sort of manufactured house needed to be able to be put on a truck, so it had to have [00:15:00] chassis that enabled that and now you don't have to do that anymore. That was always like an anachronistic thing.

So getting rid of those kinds of rules that don't serve any purpose is an important part of what that Road to Housing Act is doing. There's some carrots and sticks in there in terms of pushing local jurisdictions to build more housing or to approve more housing. And those are really important.

I think it's gonna be interesting to see what they do how important are those carrots for instance, really wealthy jurisdictions that may not need the sort of federal grant money. They'd rather have less housing than more grant money that sort of thing. So I'm very interested to see one or two year out evaluations of how effective it's been, but it's very exciting to see that that bill passed on a bipartisan basis when basically nothing else is passing in Washington.

So I think that's a testament to how much people care about this issue and how urgent it is around the country, and that there is this desire for solutions. I think the bill presented some solutions, but I definitely view it as more of a starting place and cities and states really have to step up and they, they can't expect any [00:16:00] kind of, salvation from Washington.

There might be some positive moves, but it's really gonna be up to localities to figure this out. 

Stephanie: Yeah, you touched on that a few times in the book about how, especially in the climate we're in, that it really is up to local governments and communities to be able to create change in their own jurisdictions and not just rely solely on the federal government, that there is a role for them to play in passing legislation like this, creating federal funding programs.

the bill had a ton of different programs that don't have funding behind them, so I'm really anxious to see if in future appropriations, if we can get funding behind some of them to really make an impact, but it is up to local jurisdictions to really take the lead on this. 

Benjamin: Yeah, and I think states have more power in terms of providing sources of financing than I think has been previously thought about.

The Center for Public Enterprise is doing really interesting work on this, looking at these programs that are sometimes called revolving loan funds for housing. Cities and states have a lot of bonding authority It's almost like imaginary [00:17:00] money because it.

But not exactly, but you can, without dedicating general fund revenue to housing, cities or states can issue bonds and then use that money to give loans to housing developments who can then pay back themselves low interest loans back to the city, which covers the bond interest, and you have this sort of cycle of getting access to more financing than projects otherwise would.

And that's a really important frontier in a lot of places where there, are a lot of approved projects in the pipeline, but there isn't the financing to break ground. So that's one area that I'm watching in terms of cities and states pursuing an innovative policy that could make a difference.

 But then beyond that, there's, of course, the, more land use side of things, the zoning and permitting side of things that's been getting a lot of attention and there has been a lot of progress there in, in certain places, but there's still much more to do, I think, in many places to get land use zoning aligned with the objective of actually getting projects built.

Jennifer: So lately, a lot of attention has been focused on the word abundance but a lot of the idea behind the idea of abundance [00:18:00] is build, but you also make the argument that we should also be thinking about abundance as a need for new flexible housing types and not just the increase in unit costs.

So can you talk a little bit about that? 

Benjamin: I in, in the book, I point to the importance of all types of housing being really important. And I think, this is basically aligned with this idea of abundance, but it's, when we're talking about an abundance of housing it's important that housing reflect the needs of people at various points in their lives and just different situations in their life.

If you were to, say, build an abundance of single family homes in the excerpts of Las Vegas, which is basically the thing we've been doing for the last decades that is helpful for bringing down housing costs there and that has enabled a lot of people to purchase homes at an affordable price.

But for a young person, for instance, who doesn't have the, the money to buy a home and is looking to rent or looking to be there on a less permanent basis, for older people that don't need a 3,000 square foot home, empty nesters that model may not be appropriate. In addition to the [00:19:00] sheer kind of question of building enough housing in the right places to facilitate population growth and allow people to live close to jobs, close to opportunity, family, et cetera it's really important to also think about a diversity of housing types.

And that's, I think, one of the fun parts of my book is looking at the different architectural typologies that have historically produced that in American cities starting from the single family home being kind of the basic unit of housing in America, but then the various kinds of missing middle density that cities have traditionally had, bungalow courts and six flats in Chicago brownstones in the northeast and then moving up to, more mid-rise, high-rise typologies.

One thing I've been getting more excited about in recent months since the book was published is the opportunities for small lot, high density infill housing building, up to six to eight stories or even more on a 25-foot lot, the kind of thing you, you really only see in Manhattan now, but I think there's a lot of potential in other expensive cities to really make better use of those [00:20:00] narrow urban lots.

And single stair building reform is a really important part of that. Just changing codes such that you only need one stairwell taking up maybe 10% of the lot as opposed to two stairwells taking up 20% of the lot. It allows you to do a lot more with a small lot and use that real estate for housing rather than the interior mechanical core of the building.

And so yeah, single stair is something I get into quite a bit in the book too.

Stephanie: So steering the conversation away from housing to industry, most industrial buildings today are these kind of really sad concrete or metal block buildings, blank walls not something that you'd ever want to convert and use in another way. You describe a need for a new urban architecture of industry that's versatile, reusable, and even beautiful, which is essentially how we were building them in the late 19th, early 20th centuries.

We have thousands of examples of conversions of these industrial complexes into housing and other creative workspaces. can't really imagine some of the industrial buildings in the 90s getting reused in this way. So what does it look like to return to [00:21:00] this kind of design, and is anyone doing this today?

Benjamin: Yeah, the, the short answer is I don't exactly know what it would look like, and I'm not really familiar with anyone doing this kind of work, but I think it's a really important kind of though exercise for designers and planners and anyone who's interested in the long-term thinking and planning about how cities should evolve just having this baseline expectation that the thing that a building is built for may not be what it's going to be used for over the duration of its lifespan.

And I think in more recent years, more recent decades American urbanism has gotten to this very disposable mindset that, you're just gonna throw something up and it might last 20 or 30 years kind of as long as the the tax depreciation schedules suggest it will last when in fact, that's just not how.

Most buildings last far longer than that, and are used and converted into something else. New businesses move in sometimes they become another kind of use. Just having that awareness of the the potential reusability of a building feels really important. I'm not sure how that can be [00:22:00] legislated or pushed on a policy basis.

 It's hard to force anyone to think about 50 or 100 years down the line. So that's a tricky question. One thing I've been watching that I think is encouraging is building industrial infrastructure at a higher density than just like the single story warehouse in the, exurbs that, takes up many acres of indoor space.

It's bad for the environment to just have these sort of buildings taking up a ton of land. If you could stack that square footage you're taking up a lot less land and you're starting to see a little bit with some of the newer industrial buildings in big cities.

They're not particularly attractive looking, but they are at least making better use of that space. There's this one warehouse in Queens that is like a high rise that was just built a couple years ago, and you see it occasionally on the bridge between Greenpoint and Long Island City.

And it's not very beautiful, but it is cool to see that there's just this need to, build industrial buildings that fit into the urban context and provide a [00:23:00] lot of utility, presumably, but are doing so with a very small footprint o- of land. I think that's an important starting place for, like, how to build industrial architecture that is more versatile, more efficient, more kind of part of the urban fabric rather than just a standalone temporary thing that just has no concern for what's around it.

Jennifer: So we are seeing a lot of major shifts in state legislature starting to preempt local codes to force housing growth. so from your perspective, where does state level intervention work best, and where does it risk undermining communities sensitive local planning and regulation efforts? 

Benjamin: I think a, a very successful starting place has been ADUs.

 That's something that is often controversial when it's introduced. And for your listeners who probably know what that is, but ADUs are, small backyard cottages or garage apartments that convert a small piece of an existing house into another unit. That's been very successful in California and on the West Coast to legalize these little dwellings in more [00:24:00] single-family neighborhoods.

 And once those are passed, the uptake tends to be pretty quick and people are very eager to actually build these things. In many cases, there were already many illegal ADUs in dense neighborhoods that there's just a desire for those kinds of small, flexible accommodations that the, the zoning before the legalization just didn't allow.

So legalizing this form of housing that people clearly want and need is really important. And I think the tide has turned such that those kinds of policies are not that controversial. they don't really change the look of the neighborhood because the additions are small.

 So that's a great starting place. The, states that haven't legalized ADUs are behind the curve. It's a really easy win and a way to add density and diversity in suburban areas that basically has very little political downside as, as far as I have ever seen in terms of the actual implementation.

 So that's, I think, a good starting place and easy win. An interesting question that I think is emerging in California in particular, where this, this conversation is the farthest along is. Where does this question [00:25:00] of preemption end? I think it is broadly very important for states to force cities to approve housing and build housing.

But the sort of extent of that in California has gotten to a place where there are certain cases where basically developers can build almost anything anywhere to any sort of heights. that's an important corrective we need to move more in that direction, but I think there should be some basic guidelines around building size and density that are allowed in a particular area. And then within those guidelines, developers should be able to build broadly what they want, what they can. But right now, California, I think, is still toggling those things.

There's some dramatic examples out there right now. The towers In the Marina District in San Francisco that have been proposed I wrote an opinion piece in the SF Chronicle about this trying to square, my very pro housing views, which I think there absolutely should be housing there.

It's a great place for high density housing. But the way that the state density bonus law is written in California basically means the developer can sculpt the, project that they [00:26:00] wanna build there up to any height that they're able to fit in the number of units that they are allowed at that site.

So I think that's maybe not the best policy. There should be some limits on the height and bulk and, volume of a project beyond just the sort of unit count formulation. And in fact, that's how some other California housing policies work. There are some objective standards connected to height, even with the bonus allowed by the new policy.

So that's like a, a nitpicky thing. Most cities and states are not at that point yet. But eventually I think as, housing policies start to get better and more liberal in terms of allowing more housing to get built, there does come a point where you wanna start thinking about some very basic limits and rules around what goes where we're in this kind of moment of rupture where we're changing the old housing policy paradigm and moving into something new.

So there's gonna be some kind of trial and error and experimentation and, eventually there will have to be, there'll be some new rules, but I think we're still figuring out what those ultimately will [00:27:00] look like. 

Stephanie: I think it's been really interesting watching these debates play out in different states, Nebraska being one of them, of local jurisdictions resisting anything that would be considered preemption, even if we agree with what would be implemented.

We think it's good planning policy, but it's a slippery slope and we fear that if this was approved, then that just gives the state more license to enact more and more regulations that preempt what local municipalities can do. And so there's a backlash fighting against principles that we otherwise would support.

So it's very interesting watching that play out. 

Benjamin: Yeah, preemption is such a, a fascinating area. And in, in red states often is used as a cudgel to prevent cities from enacting more progressive policy. I think the examples I was just referring to of housing level preemption is the exception in the broader universe of preemption where I would argue that's a progressive outcome that the state is mandating from on high.

Usually it's the opposite direction. And it's very tricky politics and this is beyond my expertise, but there's just this, I think, [00:28:00] never-ending dance in American governance of, cities exist legally and governmentally at the pleasure of the state but people expect to have representation at the local level and have their views reflected in the local policies.

 And so I think state level policymakers need to be cognizant of that and they absolutely should be pushing for the things that they wanna see at the state level, but then being aware of how that comes across at the local level and finding a balance that can hopefully appease both interests.

Stephanie: So we need more diversity in buildings, people, activities that create thriving downtowns. We've touched a little bit on downtowns. You mentioned it's not iconic skyscrapers in stadiums, these silver bullet projects that cities try to go after. So how can we actually get there? 

Benjamin: Yeah, I think it's really an all the above approach.

Putting all your eggs in the basket of a stadium or a museum is a, I think a mistake a lot of cities have made in the last 30, 40 years or so. And it's just not enough. If you [00:29:00] go to downtown St. Louis, for instance, you've got some nice stadiums, you've got the arch, but then the rest of the downtown is really struggling.

part of that comes from, again, the office to housing conversion phenomenon is a really important piece. St. Louis has a little bit of that. Most cities now have a little bit of that at the very least. So that's a start getting some of that 24-hour life in cities. And then, making sure that the commercial building stock is not just for corporate offices too, I think is really important.

that should always be part of the downtown milieu and is an important piece of downtown economics, but it's just not the only type of work and business that, that happens now. There's retail level businesses are really important and often get short thrift in the downtown conversation.

 And then, more manufacturing or light industrial work food agriculture even, like, all these things could have a place in downtowns and historically have, when downtowns had a lot more industrial pieces to them in the pre-urban renewal era, a lot of those buildings were demolished during urban renewal, but downtowns were more mixed [00:30:00] use before urban renewal.

And so I think using that historic vision of downtowns as these just really chaotic places of experimentation of kind of representing the full spectrum of the kind of work and life that happens in the city, all of that can and should happen in the downtown. I mentioned education and healthcare, other really important parts of life civic institutions making full use of public space and parks and using streets for entertainment and festivals and things like that.

 All of that. Anything that happens in cities should be happening in downtowns and policy should, make room for that.

Jennifer: So finally, looking into the future, if we successfully move past this last century of urban design habits, what does a fully finished or adapting modern American metropolis feel like today? 

Benjamin: an important point is that they're never finished. And so we'll always have new challenges to address via city building.

And I think that's a really important point that we lost sight of, that there's [00:31:00] this sense that American cities had built enough and we're done and, we never need more housing, we never need more infrastructure. the transit systems as we knew them, we're always gonna be good enough for what we need going forward.

So I think that thinking is a really important thing to break out of as a starting place. But I think, looking to the, the future we're starting to see sort of the green shoots of this and it's a lot of the things we've talked about in this conversation. Downtowns that are more than just nine to five corporate zones that have a lot of the civic life of the city moving back into that space rather than being pushed into more outlying areas.

Transit systems that are well-funded and in a position to expand to actually compete with the self-driving car revolution that's underway. in the short term, that's a lot of bus lanes to just get transit vehicles out of traffic. And in the long term thinking about grade separated transit infrastructure that actually gets people between destinations faster than a car ever could, because you're not dealing with intersections or traffic.

 we build almost none of that anymore, [00:32:00] and so that's something that's really important for another phase of city building. Looking at our urban highways and deciding which ones we need tearing down the ones we don't that started to happen a little bit, and under the Biden administration, there's a program to look more deeply at that.

The Trump administration repealed that. Those kinds of programs that really think critically about transportation infrastructure and repurposing it are really valuable. And on the housing front, I think more low density neighborhoods that start to be peppered with ADUs, with town homes those kinds of missing middle housing typologies that's a very quick win to get more people to be able to live in these desirable areas people of different generations families intergenerational families living in close proximity to one another.

 And then I think importantly, it's really time in cities like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston we need to see some, some serious cranes in the sky. It's time to actually put our money where our mouth is and build a lot of housing in the places where the prices are the most expensive.

So I think that would be, [00:33:00] hopefully in, in 10 or 20 years you're starting to see significantly different and larger skylines in our major cities that reflect a lot of housing being built. I could go on, but that's hopefully a good starting place of this, this vision.

Stephanie: Essentially, we just need to implement the concepts in your book and all this other - Exactly, 

Benjamin: yeah. 

Stephanie: Great books that have come out recently. Always our last question, as this is booked on planning, what books would you recommend our listeners check out?

Benjamin: Burman's, All This Solid Melt Into Air, is a really great urbanism book that I think melds kind of urban theory and literary theory and cultural criticism, and I think, offers a perspective on the evolution of cities that is, very left-wing in terms of wanting, cities to be for everybody, but also very embracing of change and relishing the dynamism that cities produce and have always produced.

And I think that's a really important perspective that, that doesn't really get articulated that, to create an urbanism that is for everybody, it's actually really important to have that dynamism, that [00:34:00] openness and the rapid change. I think the sort of status quo perspective is that leaving things as is the way to make cities better for those with the least.

And I think that recent history has proven that doesn't really work. And so Berman really shows how that's in a sort of literary historical sense there is another way that the dynamism can be really important for ordinary people. . Another one that I've really been enjoying recently is The Decorated Tenement, which is a book about immigrants builders in New York City in the late 19th century who the book basically completely upends the conventional wisdom on tenement housing.

And it suggests that the, tenement builders were starting to build much more livable, humane housing actually before the, the tenement laws came in. And there was this sort of feedback loop of people in immigrant communities in New York starting to demand better housing standards and builders responding to that.

And the most vivid ways that manifested actually is in the [00:35:00] ornaments on tenement buildings. So if you walk around the Lower East Side in, in New York, you'll see these buildings with really elaborate cornices and window treatments, and those were actually tenements. Those are buildings that people like Jacob Reese found to be very inhumane.

And often the interiors were not the greatest, but - 

 early generation of urban worker housing, this, that was often wooden houses and very informally constructed, these were way better than that. And the, the ornament itself represented this kind of desire for upward mobility in these communities but was lambasted by the reformers as being this sort of crass kind of poser sort of stance by people that almost didn't deserve to have beautiful buildings.

This book explains all of that and gets into the tensions of how historically housing needs were met and how the powers that be refused to allow those solutions to, take fruit. 

Stephanie: Very interesting. And a take on tenement housing that I was unaware of. 

Benjamin: Yeah. There's been a little bit of a turn on tenement housing that is worth looking into [00:36:00] deeper.

I think obviously, there were a lot of problems with it, but I think some of the, the reactions to those problems were worse than the problems themselves. 

Stephanie: Benjamin, thank you for joining us on Booktown Planning to talk about your book, The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City Building Revolution.

Benjamin: Thank you.

Jennifer: We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Benjamin Schneider on his book, The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City Building Revolution.

 You can get your own copy through the publisher at Island Press, an imprint of Princeton University Press, by supporting your local bookstore or supporting the show through our page at bookshop.org/shop/booked on planning. 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. [00:37:00]