What keeps me up at night
In 2018 I was invited to speak at the Aspen Ideas Festival. I was on a panel with several visionary architects to discuss the possibilities of leveraging the power of design to improve communities. Towards the end, the moderator Peggy Clark asked us, “what keeps you up at night?” The following was my short response, focusing on the need to redesign cities (ending at 46:30 - for the full panel discussion, watch here):
The need to redesign and reimagine cities still causes me sleepless nights. I’ve since shared similar thoughts at various other conferences, but the response was always minimal. The topic of sprawl is too uncomfortable for people. We are okay focusing on specific solutions like green technologies and transportation alternatives, but are reluctant to examine the root cause of so many problems: our sprawling land use. As soon as I mention cars, people tell me that I, a European, just do not understand America, and that cars are such an integral part of our identity, that imagining the future with fewer cars is sacrilege.
I am still convinced that reimagining cities is one of the main tasks of our time, and that it will take all of us to make it work. Sprawl brings workers too far away from the city centers in which they are employed. Commutes are longer, meaning we spend less time with our families. Greenhouse emissions skyrocket because fuel consumption for these longer commutes pollutes our air, our water and our communities. Single family dwellings waste valuable space and real estate prices have risen to untenable levels for so many of us. The solution is not to push further into the wilderness to reclaim forests for new, cheaper homes. Instead, we hope to fold back into the sprawl we’ve created to better utilize our land with multi-family dwellings, city centers where workers don’t have to commute to work, and hospitals and access to healthy, local food sources aren’t miles away from our homes. If we don’t do this now, we must start asking the question, ‘where does it all end?’
To do my part to address the problem, and to help me sleep better at night, I started a small think tank with writers, architects, designers, planners, educators, legislators, and filmmakers. We think that the solutions are primarily cultural, and that we, the people, need to do the work to ‘stop the sprawl’. The change we want to empower is cultural and spiritual. This is a ‘bottom-up’ approach where ordinary citizens present and model a quality of life we’d like for ourselves and for our children. Once politicians realize the groundswell of momentum from their constituents, they will sign on in support.
We are currently working on a proclamation which will incorporate all of our ideas into a unified whole, written with simple, jargon-free language that all can understand.
If any of you are interested in joining our think tank to stop the sprawl, please reach out to me. The more people we have, the easier it will be to affect change. I hope you realize the importance of this moment, and please, my good sleep depends on knowing we are working hard to make a difference.