naomi wolf or whatever, it is to be various bookstores like this all over the country and now my book to raise town hall in seattle, towels books to your here, politics & prose in d.c., when in new york, one in boston. frankly i'm not trying to go to more bookstores because it's hard work to travel over the place. now i have two kids and everything changed. it is that, got friends in san francisco who want to see me. another some good hucksters in san francisco. what you have here is very special. i want to acknowledge a couple groups if you're interested in urban design issues in this area, the group to talk to first base enu cascadia for new urbanism and i'm sure you can find them online, but they're concerned about the issues of the talking about tonight and descriptive for 20 years has in pushing these issues forward the strongest. i want to acknowledge the mayor who i'm so glad he is your mayor because i've been following him and working indirectly for many years and seeing great things he's done. i'm sorry you couldn't either tonight. but i'm sure there's different opinions in the room. it's a democracy, but he's someone someone i admire tremendously. i went to his knowledge the national charrette to do, but i'm actually under a storyboard. the only as a dude in a row forward -- they reinvented a return to the traditional neighborhood as an alternative, but they also created the planning methods, a design method, which brought back and updated to the highest possible level the above maximum participation of citizens in the planning process and the national charrette and to tube tastier in your city is the group that works frankly internationally to share this technique. so you have a real resource break here that you may not know about this fantastic. what i'm going to do tonight because i'm sure you'll find my reading gripping because the book is so fascinating, but reading can get old, so i have a short reading and then a slightly longer reading. i'll start with a shirt that introduces the book. i'll talk a little bit and then do the longer reading and then i have a rant planned and we'll see how that goes. but i make sure there's time for questions as well. so this weekend. and i should say, i just finished recording the book for audible.com, which was really fun. it's funny because i was a dj in college and i found it a tricky thing to do. i'm the one hand you're reading your work seen it to sound like a professional planner you are. on the other hand, reading a book is, second to engage in the want to have the best choice on the most mellifluous delivery. to the degree are slipping into that our lives under undermining the credibility of the plan. am i after reading a book with fan who has to maintain credibility. tonight i'll try and walk that line is so. prologue. this is not the next great book on american cities. that book is not needed. an intellectual revolution is no longer necessary. what characterizes discussions on cities these days is not a wrongheaded essay lack of awareness about what needs to be done, but rather a complete disconnect between the awareness and the action of those responsible for the physical form of our communities. we've known for three decades how to make livable cities after forgetting for for coming it was somehow not been able to get off. jane jacobs who wrote in 1961 over the planners by 1980, the planners have yet to win over the city. and you're all interrupt myself to say it's another natural occurrence at the very cities that it places like powells, were invited to give talks are precisely the cities that do not need this book. and it is the places that don't have pedestrian culture, the intellectual community that supported if a site paulos, it is those places that, you know, that's not who i'm writing the book for. and we'll talk about this in as an minute as they continue to prologue. but what you may not know if you spend your time in new york or boston or d.c. or portland are pretty much the outcome is certainly san francisco, these are not normal american places and not talk about that a little more. so if you feel like i said say this, we do have that figured out. just realize how weird you are in the context of the rest of america. sister large cities coming to us. if you make in your home in new york, boston, san francisco, and by the way they were so angry last night seattle. i kept mentioning portland over and over again. a second essay really emerges kind of camaraderie, although to the rich thing. it is kind of in between. but as so your, there's so much data about portland because of the intelligence collected their fetishes have to talk about it all the time. if you live in come you can have some confidence things are in the right track come at these locations are the exceptions. in small and midsize cities where americans spend less committed daily decisions of local officials are still more often than not making their life source. this is not bad planning, but the absence of planning for decision-making disconnected from planning. planners are so going for so many is that now the you're mostly right, they are mostly ignored. this book is not the planning profession, nor an argument for more planning per se. instead it's an attempt to simply delineate what's wrong with most american cities and how to fix it. this book is not about why cities where or how cities work, but what works in cities and what works back in the best cities is walk ability. walk ability as an end and a means as well as a measure. of the physical and social rewards of watching our many, walk ability is most useful as the contributes to urban vitality and most meaningful as an indicator of the vitality. after several decades redesigning pieces of cities, trying to make them more livable and successful, i've washed my focus merit to this topic is the one issue that both influence and embody most of the others. get walk ability right in so much of the rest will follow. the discussion is necessary because whether intentionally or by accident, most american cities have become no walk in his own spirit absence of any mandate, city engineers were shipping the twin gods of smooth traffic and ample parking at turner downtowns into places easy to get to, but not worth arriving not. outdated zoning and building codes often imported from suburbs have matched the uninviting streetscape with antisocial private buildings, completed a public promise unsafe, uncomfortable and boring. if americans opt for more urban lifestyles, are up in the city centers that don't welcome the return. as a result, a small number forbert seeking cities outlook hawaiian shares suburbanites empty-nesters with the wherewithal to live wherever they want almost midsize american cities go hungry. after providence, can represent tacoma complete with austin, chicago and portland? are realistically how can cities provide citizens the quality of life that makes them want to stay? bothers many answers to the question, perhaps none has been so thoroughly that collected as to sign and a comprehensive collection of simple design fixes could reverse decades of counterproductive policies and practices and usher in new area a straight face. can embrace his breaks enhancing transit in making downtime and attract you to a broader range of people. each one individually makes a difference together to transform the city in the life of its residents. even new york and san francisco will still get things wrong, but they will continue to push the countries best and brightest unless there is a more normal cities can learn from their successes while avoiding them is takes. planners are counting on typical place is because america will be finally ushered into the urban century, not a few exceptions the collective movement among everyday cities to do with cities to pass them i would just bring people foot. so that's the perla. the story for me begins in 1987 when i was hired by bill leonard. where are you, bill? and got to know about andrés gillani. who has heard them speak? so you'll recognize a lot of things today at strawn from andre spirit is given to me in so many on this as well. andres gave a talk extend this town versus perl. he basically discussed differences between modernist automotive oriented suburban planning and traditional neighborhood planning. i heard this talk and immediately i said this is the best story i've ever heard. the reason is the best stories because i knew in my heart. i knew i hated sprawl, didn't like the spaces in framingham, the newer parts, the golden triangle. there is have names like that. and they knew that i loved traditional neighborhood and their farms and allowed in the countryside are consolidated are going up into cities and these are better places to be, but i understand what had caused them to become different and in fact when the veil is lifted and i understood it was now possible to build new places along the lines of these older places, that was a call to action for someone going to architecture school who would've been happy designing patterns of the rich for a career, the idea that there was lurcher social ramifications are designed that it impacted their lives in a dramatic way became the basis for my work. all through school i stayed in touch, graduated in 1993 and basically make the pilgrimage to mecca, which is miami, believe it or not. for their office have been located natascha you andrés had admired most of what has frankly made my career. the other big epiphany i had was this has to be a work and suburban nation come i pitched in the idea, can i go straight this book you? i know how to rate and these ideas are great. at first they didn't respond. then i kept saying we don't see the value, we don't understand why it's necessary. there we go from town to town in place to place to preach the gospel about why streets need to be narrower and uses next and how transit is good and biking is good. then we'd win over the populace and then we go to the next city and we have to start all over again. i was late and she people remember we taught you this last week, but it wasn't denver. in the salt lake city and we were starting all over again. the purpose was to spread the message and had a big impact in doing that got me my job at the national endowment for the arts, which i'll talk about a little bit ahead in this talk. sources said the perla, i never thought of myself as a workability guy. i'm a designer and designers don't normally talk about stuff like that. but i found it was the heart of so many discussions we were having that i started focusing my lectures on what makes walk ability. as giving a lecture to ceos for cities. the nonprofit, hired, brought in by cities, wealthy philanthropists, big foundations , large institutions, corporations and government get-together, higher ceos who happen to be more competitive, attract corporations from other cities are away from our suburbs, which the state is a much bigger issue as you're probably aware. omar often, how can i get her kids to stay? have committed or green kids to say that wealthy people seeing their see their children make grand rapids or wherever they're going. it's like designing a house. the program and layout. so for a city it is to have a convention center? winter sports facilities, but that was their expertise, but they relates how these things can to each other in the design that brings people between the sphinx to meet each other in the street is very important. so i lectured to carroll's organization and afterward she came up and said that needs to be about. i think that sounds familiar and that started this process. the process is similar. because when a bookstore like to check about than a can of the object, which is important. like suburban nation, i took four years and just write everything because i do a certain amount of staff, but in particularly planning there so many practices scattered all over the place so in order to properly present this book, i have to share to the people i got great stuff with. this isn't going to be a long list of things, but the guy whose car park and entirely figured out is a guy named don shoup at ucla. he's written a 732 page 12, both called the high cost of free parking. that's one chapter in this book. chris weinberger africans has written an amazing book called the option of urbanism that shows why everyone is going to be wanting to move into cities now. it's a chapter in the book. jeff mapes, port and son jeff mapes wrote peddling revolution, which along with the bicyclist manifesto at the most amazing books that discuss the entire issue of urban cycling and a comprehensive wonderful way. that's a chapter in this book, saturday. they combine that with what i learned in from outside the national endowment for the arts only two days. the only other thing i have to say, which is the people you might find interesting. what makes this different from the other books out there is that it tries to be everything in one package and it's written in a way to recta towards not professionals that are, that lay audiences which i hope is evident as i'm reading this is not professionals shirking. this is written to excite our people. but the other thing is i got an awesome publisher. look at the cover of the book. it's beautiful. but that no expenses spared at any point from the three style edits and four copy edits and six covers remade before you pick this one an amazing publicity department that got me on weekend edition and all this stuff, which means this book has potential to be a tool for spreading the message. that was supposed suburban nation are not the goal of this book. it's as little trauma will fly into your air space and try and do it so many of us have been trying to do in person, but that's how you write books. we hope this is a vehicle for spreading the word. so now i slightly longer reading and then i'm just going to talk some more. i've chosen this reading called the general theory because it talks about what the book is made of. that's a city planner in the lands for new places and plans for making places better. since the late 80s i worked on 75 plan for cities, towns and villages, new and old. a third had been built or are well underway, which sounds bad, but it's a decent batting average in the scheme. the music had a fair share surprising physalis opportunities to learn from my mistakes. in the middle of the work i took off for years to the design division of the national endowment for the arts. and they shot him in a program called the mayor's institute on city design, which the city leaders together with designers for intensive planning sessions. every two months in the united states and other eight and designers, lock ourselves in a room for two days and try to salvage mayors mispricing design challenge. as imagined working side-by-side with a couple hundred mayors, one may at a time could be greater design education in anything it done before or since. they specialize in downtown someone higher to make a downtown plan elected and if there with my family, preferably for a month. there's many reasons to pursue a city where you plan it. first it's more efficient in terms of travel and meetings, something that can become expensive. second to get to know a place to memorize every building, street and block. it gives you the chance to get familiar with locals over coffee, dinner some people's homes, drinks the neighborhood's pads and chance encounters on the street. these non-meeting meeting for most of the real intelligence could collect it. these are all great reasons, but the main reason to spend time in the city is the place for the citizen. shuttling between a hotel and meeting facilities and other citizens do. the tickets of school, drop by dry cleaners, step out for lunch, hit the gym or pick up groceries, get them some song and considered even sure after dampier. friends who take enough for a night on the main square. these are among the normal things non-planners to penetrate the them, too. a couple years ago while working on a plan for lowell, massachusetts, sold high school friends join us for dinner and merrimack street, the heart of the lovely 19th century downtown. a group consisted of four adults, one toddler in a stroller and my wife's pregnant belly. across our restaurant related for the late to change. lost in conversation. maybe a minute passed before we saw the push button turned signal requests, so we pushed it. the conversation advance for another minute or so. finally we gave up and she wants. at the same time make car creamed around the corner 45 miles an hour and a street that had been widened to ease traffic. the resulting near miss for shelley left no scars, but will not be forgotten. stroller jaywalking is a fair share way to feel it a bad parent, especially when it goes awry. the only consolation was this time it's in a position to do something about it. the favorite deserts him on the road with my family, this time in rome. the new baby in a sling and toddler alternates between a stroller in his own two feet, depending on terrain in this frame of mind. it's interesting to compare experience in rome but the one below one the experience of walking in most american cities. for my first glance seems to be an hospitable to pedestrians. so many things are wrong. at the streets and sidewalks, pavements and even invited, handicapped ramps largely absent. those are steep and frequent. i hear there are seven any damage in the drivers. here we are, tourists and locals alike making their way around on her toes yes, but enjoying every minute. this obstacle courses somehow a magnet for walkers by readers is one of the world's top 10 walking cities. roman striver fraction of the mouse that americans do. a friend of ours who came here to work in the embassy bought a car when he arrived. now sits in his courtyard, a target for patients. this tumultuous landscape which feels any conventional measure friendliness is a walkers paradise. so what's going on here? certainly competing for foot traffic pressed into service as the city began to assert advantages. the lonely planet ranking is my function of spectacles and pedestrian comfort. the same monuments arranged in a more modern american way but hardly compete. think las vegas this this walk scored 54. the main thing that makes rome and other winners, venice, boston, barcelona, prague, paris and new york so walkable is what we planner scott hatteberg, the everyday collection of streets, blocks and buildings that timeline units together. despite its technical failures, rome cedric is superb. the fabric is one key aspect missing from the discussion in most places. this is because the discussion has largely been about creating adequate and attractive pedestrian facilities rather than walkable cities. there's no shortage on the subject in a fledgling field of operability studies that focuses on impediments to pedestrian access and safety, mostly in the toronto suburbs. the efforts are helpful but inadequate. same for programs such as the famous five piece of the 80s, bricks, banners, worms that now grace many abandoned downtown. lots of money and muscle had gone to improving sidewalks, crossing signals in trash cans. but how are these in convincing people to walk? it was about creating safe pedestrian zones, why did 100 main streets pedestrian ices 60s and 70s failed almost immediately? clearly more talking than just making decent produce these for you. to pedestrians and extremely fragile species. the canary in the coal mine in urban livability. under the right conditions the creature thiessen multiplies. creating conditions requires attention to a broad range of criteria, some are easily satisfied, enumerating and understanding as a project for a lifetime. i've made up mind and is forever a work in progress. it's presumptuous to figure it out, but since i spent time trying i recognize it's worth communicating what i've learned so far. since it tries to explain so much i call this discussion the general theory of operability. the general theory explains how to be saved. period abacus to satisfy satisfy four main conditions. it has to be useful, safe, comfortable and interesting. each quality is essential and i'm alone is sufficient. usefulness both aspects are located close at hand and organized in a way that one can search them out. safe means the street has been designed to give pedestrians a fighting chance against being hit by automobiles. they must not only be safe, they feel safe, even tougher to satisfy. comfortable means the sheep streets to living rooms in contrast to wide-open spaces, which usually fail to attract pedestrians. an interesting unique buildings in science and of humanity abound. these conditions or were you thinking about a series of specific rows further organized into what i call the 10 steps awoke ability. these are explored later or together they add up to a complete prescription for making cities more walkable. we must understand the city is not just a nice idealistic notion, rather simple and practical minded solution to a host of complex problems we face as a society. problems of daily on in our nation's competitiveness, public welfare and environmental sustainability. for that reason the book is less a design treatise than an essential call to arms. why we need so badly is the subject of the next section. so what you essentially have is a two-part book. you have the three reasons why we need marketability, which are wealth, health and sustainability and then the 10 steps which are for example step one, put cars in their place, mixed uses comic at the parking right and my transit work, et cetera. i will not talk at all because they're in there for you and their little more technical about every one of them is described in great detail with anecdotes that make them interesting. what i want to rant about its iranian you need it so badly. so like most of my new colleagues, i'm a designer and i care about design and i've always thought about these things from the study when you view. the fuller sense is that the best, but feel the best, with places make the happiest that for most of us got into this. then we started to notice because the first new community became known as this poster child for this whole anti-sprawl movement and we heard about the social reasons, enemy of sprawl unlike a social participation. how society and in these environments as the bonds weren't as strong as they were in traditionally organized places. these are arguments for a long time. design, aesthetic and social arguments. but then a big change has been 15 years ago, the economy started talking. nobody listens to planners. which is shouting in the wind about why we feel certain things are certain ways. but i will miss them so me say say this'll make you poor and this make you richer. the.or started saying, these communities are killing us, which i begin to and finally even more recently the environmentalists figured out the city was the way to save the country and the countryside. those three issues, none of which original research on our parts form the basis for having a much more legitimate and arguable support for city life over suburban life. so what are they? the first question to ask is where do people want to be in america? in portland is a prime example. during the 90s, journal and neil population increased by 50%, which was five times the rate. educated no one else went up so much ire because of the environment he and offered. .. >> i watched shows, all suburban tv shows. oh, wait, "hawaii 5-0", "streets of san fransisco," you know, crime advocacy -- television shows. there was lucille ball, and the presence outside the light well of the kitchen dining. what did the kids -- what did the millenials watch? "friendsfriends," and "sex in te city." my complacency, living in the suburb and idolizing was replaced by longing, wanting something they did not have, and that's a reason why these people are so much more oriented towards cities. richard florida talks about how kids don't want cars anymore or don't want to own homes anymore because they are seen as burdens and limitations. as long as they are connected on the hand held, they want to have as much freedom as possible. they want to be able to bike, as you know, and they want to take transit so they don't need to use the car. they are moving to cities, but cities that offer them this lifestyle, not the cities that require them, as we say, to have the automobile as a device. what's the single largest demographic moving to cities? their parents. the front end boomers. 1.5 million of whom are turning 65 every year, and that will be the case for the next 20 years or so. they don't want a yard. they don't need a big house to clean and heat. they certainly don't need schools, and the millenials are not thinking yet, they will be, but not yet thinking about schools, and they are looking for what was identified as a nare rally occurring retirement community. my parents left massachusetts two years ago and moved to lexington center, massachusetts, which is, you know, loaded with three different hair salons for my mom and tons of restaurants and coffee houses that they can access walking. you know, on foot. you know, this tendency in america that the elderly person who should not be driving refuses to let go of the car keys is they know the minute you take their car keys, they cease to be viable members of society in a driving society. the first identified was the upper east side of new york, a nice place where old people who have money choose to live because that offers them tremendous lifestyle. these places are not available, i mean, we have not been building them for 50 years. for example, in atlanta, only 35% of the people who want to live in urban communities that are walkable can afford -- can find them and afford to live them. it is described as the next great economic boom. they have to sell houses first; right? get out of the old house, but they would rather be in the city, and the ones of means, of course, have disposable income, no kids, exactly the kind of customers you want for your stores and part of your tax base in the city. joe courtright, also based in portland, has done a lot of research into what that means. he took walk score, based in seattle. do you know about walk score? raise your hand if you know about walk score. pretty much most of you. that rates each address in the world, i guess america, i don't know. it's google maps data in terms of walk about. joe did a study finding that -- depends what city you're in, but every walk score point is worth, on average, out of a hundred, worth $2,000. every point on a hundred-point scale, which figures in dc an empty lot in the city is worth $200,000 so there you go. people are paying more for these places. the premium for walkable housing veer vus drivable housing is about 50% in seattle, 150% in denver, 200% in new york, which is the highest, so in new york i they pay three times as much for the exact same square footage in the city rather than outside the city. true is same for the office rents, not the same ratios, but in the dc areas, the rates jump 27% higher than the office -- than the best office rents outside the city. more and more people want this and they want to pay for it. if your city has it for them. the other great discussion with a separate people called "walkability dividend" is what happens to the community when people get to drive less? money spent on motoring, 88% of it leaves the economy and most goes overseas and to places where people do not like us very much; right? portland is the only american city i know that has the statistic that basically stops lengthening commutes in 1996. there's a couple really smart things that other people didn't do. while most american cities were reaming out streets and building more highways, portland created a skinny streets program you may know about. while most american cities were accumulating an unending, you know, spare tire of suburban sprawl, portland incorporated a serve and growth bound ri. while most of these didn't give a whip about bicycling, portland made, i think, about a $300 million investment in 20 years. people are shocked when i say, 20 years ago, port pland did not look different from any other city in terms of biker, and they invest thed of the cost of one-half of a clover leaf. those cost twice as much as the entire biking investment over the past 20 years. as a result, now, portlanders bike 15 times as much as the rest of the country. decisions were made that caused your vehicle miles traveled to peak in 1996. as a result, now, you all drive 20% less than the rest of america in equivalent sized cities translating into four miles or 11 minutes a day. joe translates those four miles into 1.5% of the gdp and the 11 minutes to another 2% of the gdp. 3.5% of the gdp is now not being thrown away wean being shipped to other places because of the decisions that you have made. what are you doing with the money instead? you're known as having the most roof racks in america, the most independent bookstores, the most strip clubs in america. they are all exaggerations, but they point to the fact that you're consuming recreation than anything else. you spend more on alcohol than anyone else in america, making you glad you drive less. [laughter] it's a different society, a little bit, because of the choice that you've made. where you spend most of the money? probably in your housing. housing is about as local an investment as you can make. it's a real boost for the local economy. there's the final economic reason which finally, like, physicists, like molecular physicist turned attention to cities as theoretical exercises saying what type of urban form causes more productivity and what type of or bon form causes less productivity? those who study it are convinced of what we know if our hearts, which is the reason cities exist is that when we come together when we are productive. it's tenial liesingly difficult to prove that what makes us stronger. ed talks about that a lot. david brooks talks about how when someone gets a patent, they are required to say or asked to say what other patents influenced you. it's always within 25 miles of the patentor. malcolm talks about how the french impressionists were friends, hung out in the same bar, all drank the same absinthe, you know, movements are collective, and they are made by people who are in proximity. people talk about, you know, in europe, if you're in a european capital, you can get five meetings done in a day, not a problem. if you are are in atlanta, you can get two meetings done in a day just because of the time you traveled further and faster, but you only had time for two or three meetings. there's all reasons why cities make us competitive and that they are attractive and people want to move to cities in the near future. there's more households now with dogs than children, and that's going to continue to be that way for a long time. the next 30 years, that's a dominant trend. that's the economic argument. i'll go faster with the other two. the best day to be a planner in america was july 9th, 2004 when dick jackson, howie frmkin, and lawrence frank had a book called "urban sprawl and public health." that book put technical meat on the sociological bones we argue about saying in no certain terms that suburbs are killing us, and here's why. cities can save us, here's why. by far, the greatest aspect of the epidemic, or of our health challenges in america is the obesity end deem i think. it's not that obesity itself is the problem, but the problems it leads to, principle among them diabetes that consumes 2% of the gross national product. a child born after 2000 has a one in three chance in america of being a die -- diabetic. they will live shorter lives than their parents. that's not a huge surprise to you probably. we've been talking now for a long time about the wanders of the american corn syrup based diet and 40 ounce sodas people drink. only recently have studies been done comparing diet and physical inaffidavit. one of them in england called gluttony versus sloth. another doctor at the may owe clinic put patients in electronic underwear, set a certain regime, studied their weight, pumped calories in, and then some people got fat and other people didn't, and expecting some sort of, you know, metabolic factor at work or a genetic factor at work, the only thing changes for the people was the amount of daily activity. go a step further. look at books like "the blue zone," have you seen the -- i forget the first name, dan in "the blue zones," and where do people live the longest? you see what nay do, including drinks red wine, and it's in a book, and you sell millions. number one rule? move naturally. don't with a weekend warrior or ask people to exercise. they stop. find a way to build normal motion into your everyday life as part of a work routine. who will change their work routine so they go from being a, you know, an accountant to a lumber jack; right? that's not going to happen. they say, well, you know, bike to work or, you know, walk to the store. the one thing that book asks is that in half of america you can't bike to work or walk to the score because you live of a highway the store is off of; right? it's about how we build our communities. in the short run, it's where you choose to live, and that's a choice you make. there's nowhere more obvious than in the other big discussion when is car crashes. car crashes are funny because on the one hand, we naturalize it. oh, that's just a part of living that there's a one in 200 chance i'll die in a car crash and one in three chance i'm seriously injured in a crash. that's part of life. nothing to do about it, or, alternatively, we feel like we're in charge of the fate on the road. , you know, yes with grued drivers, avoid accidents, and 85% of the people in the hospital recovered from accidents they, themselves, caused and rated themselves as better than average drivers. that's going on. the fact is it's not the same all over the world, and it's not the same all over america. we have a rate where 14 americans out of a hundred are dying every year. in fact, if our entire country were to share new york city's accident rate, we would save 24,000 lives a year. there's a big difference between urban living and suburban or rural living in terms of that aspect of our lives. again, the short term, we can build places -- in the long term, build places to be safer, but long term, live in urban environment. dick jackson asked the question in chai environment, what city are you likely to die in a pool of blood? that's how he puts it to the audience, and they compared murder by strangers, crime to car crashes and added the two together, and portland, vancouver, and seattle, and all three places, 15% safer in the inner city than the suburbs because of the combination of the two. we move to the suburbs for the safety of the children; right? finally, asthma, who talks about asthma? four teen americans die every day from asthma. that's not a huge amount, but it's three times the rate of the 1990s. it's due to automotive exhaust, entirely. i mean, 90-whatever percent. pollution is not what it used to be. the sickest places in america are those who are most car dependent. in phoenix, you got four months out of year that you -- that healthy people shouldn't leave houses because ever amount of driving going on. what's the solution? again, the city. finally, the most interesting discussion may be is the environmental discussion which has turned 180 degrees in the last ten years. you know, if you look at the -- even within the global warming discussion, you talk about carbon foot prints and the project matching our carbon footprints. you know, red is bad. green is good. look at the united states, and it's like the night map, like the satellite night sky of the united states. hottest around cities, cooler in the suburbs, coolest in the country; right? that measure of c02 per square mile. in 2001, scott bernstein said what happens instead of measuring c02 per mile, but per person or per household because there's a certain number of us and we can pollute more or less. if you look at it per household, red and green flip, absolutely change places. by far the healthiest place to live is in the city. manhattan burn a third of the fossil fuels of people in dallas, for example. they use a third of the electricity. why? they heat and cool neighbors; right? apartments are touching, but even more importantly than that is mostly the less driving they are doing. transportation is the greatest single cricketer to most civilians greenhouse gas. the biggest choice to make, you know, when i built my house in washington, d.c., i cleaned the shelf on the stainability store with the solar panels, solar water heater, the super insulation, the bamboo flooring, i have a wood burning stove that a log burning in the stove contributes less co2 than the environment if it were to decompos in the forest naturally, but, of course, i have the energy saver light lightbulbs. those change an entire house to those bulbs saves as much carbon in a year as moving to a walkable neighborhood saves in a week. the whole green gizmo green gadget discussion, you know, what can i buy to be sustainable? that's the wrong discussion. it's where can i live and how can i live to contribute less? the answer, again, is the city. this is fundamentally the opposite of american ethos. you know, from jefferson on. cities are not for the moral and health and freedom of man. if we continue to pile upon ourselves in cities like europe, we'll take to eating one another as they do there. [laughter] that was jefferson. that's continuing and continuing, and it made sense back in the 1700s when we had the whole country to spread out on and biggest by-product of transportation was fertilizer. that's not the case now. it's a longer discussion. all three of these are longer discussions, but they are national crisis. we have a national economic crisis. it's only going to get tougher. there's a national health crisis bankrupting us, and as proved a couple weeks ago, global warming is affecting us dramatically. we're not talking about stopping it now, but mitigating it. the less we have, the better off we all are, and the more we're an urban society, the more we can do to solve these problems. it's the center of our challenges as a nation. that is what i wanted to tell you tonight. i thank you for the attention, and i will now welcome questions. [applause] >> yay, you mentioned many things that portland does right. what are some of the things we could do better? >> oh, i was waiting for that question. [laughter] you guys do such a great job, and i have to say i'm not an expert on portland. never worked here, an expert in limited cities i've worked in. i do have the impression, i say this with great trepidation, i do have a concern that your advocacy for bicycles and your construction for bicycles is another form of highway engineering, and that a lot of your streets are being redesigned by specialists with a single minded focus on bicycles that may be underminding walkability, and i'll be specific. when you remove parallel parking from -- talk how great parallel parking is. it's a barrier of steel that protects the sidewalk from moving cars. it's a potential conflict that causes driving cars to slow down because cars pull in and out. delivers people to sidewalks, not at their destination creating walkers. you cannot have a business survive in almost any american city without it right in front. i don't think there's a street in portland that can support retail without parallel parking on the curb out front. truly supported. when you remove the parallel parking from a curb in order to insert a bicycle facility, you're, in some ways, trading a alternative form of transportation that many people use for an alternative form of transportation that everybody uses that you're taking away, all right? i understand, and i know that here in portland, the bicycle facilities are laid in in coordination with a regional bicycle plan so that there's an understanding of certain streets serving certain purposes. what i'm hearing, and maybe not accurately, but what i'm hearing is that the mandate to insert bike lanes is becoming, in some ways, more comprehensive and taking away parallel parking in places where it doesn't necessarily, where it shouldn't go away. i welcome -- you know, the one thing characterized all my talks so far is that no one disagrees on me with anything. that's dull. please know i'm willing and able to hear the other side of this. i just worry, though, i mean, you got the best transportation planners in america, so i hope i can be forgiven for giving them a hard time, but transportation planners optimizing transportation are specialists, and they are not necessarily working in the interest of the general issue, which has to do with our people out on the street and our shops and businesses succeeding. that's -- you know, that's about the only thing i can find fault in. over here? >> [inaudible] >> wait for the microphone to be on c-span? >> do you think part of the deal with the bikability in portland and walkability in new york is that new york is a giant city, and you're not going to, you know, throw the bike in the back of the truck and bike in somewhere. whereas, in portland, you can bike many, many places, not as heavy traffic, not a big deal. don't you think that's a general trend? a smaller city like a portland has more biking and larger city like new york has more walking? >> i think, you know, new york made great gains. you hear the statistics about new york, and you're like, wow, there's so many more bicycles in new york than there were, and you go to new york, and you hardly see bikers because they are doubling nothing, but, in fact, it's better than that. you see bikers. it's growing every year. it's significant. the only bikers in new york used to be the dangerous ones, delivery guys knocking you off the sidewalk or as you walk off the curb. i think, you know, new york is increasing the biking in a way that it will become -- i have a lot of friends in new york, and bikes is the main way around. those who want to bike, and particularly with the separated preference bike lanes inserted there, there's going to be a market increase in the number of bikers. the point about biking, and you are the growing example, but we see it all over the place. we see it in long beach, california. we see it in minneapolis where it's freezing. it's that as a planner or designer, you're weary to say, "build it and they will come." that's said a lot of times, and it's wrong. the experience in america with bike lanes is absolutely a build it and they will come situation. you have bicyclists wanting to be real bicyclists waiting for the facility, particularly the nervous ones among them, waiting for the separated lane to make the choice made here in portland to join that group to, you know, i used to -- i used to advocate a lot against bike lanes because they made streets wider, and back then, no one biked anyway, but i changed tunes on that because of what i seen happen here. >> [inaudible] >> he asked if big city and small town are different? i never thought of it and weary to discuss things i have not thought of. there's a logic in what you are saying, but i don't think bigger cities are prohibited from becoming big biking cities. a mid-sized city, from a davis, california, the best in the u.s. in terms of percentage to portland and minneapolis, it's easier; right? there's such a connection with nature here. before too long, you're on a trail, and then you have the real recraigsal -- recreational experience which is fantastic. next question. this seems unfair to the people of the back, but i was told not to make the microphone guy move too far. >> you spoke of the infrastructure that stimulates driving and a little bit about bicycling structure. i want to look at the physical infrastructure of walking and complete streets, and i wonders to what extent do public restrooms stimulate active living, healthy aging, childhood fitness, and walkability. this is not mentioned in planning literature. >> or in my book. public restrooms have a pretty dismal history in the u.s. of being maintained. i think whenever you propose something as a planner, you have to think about those getting it built and who takes care of it. the tradition in the u.s. with exceptions like chicago and other big cities, have well-maintained public restrooms that help people stay out in the public realm longer. there's a separate argument which is that wouldn't we rather see people going in businesses buying a coffee in order to use the restroom? i was turned down in a restaurant in brooklyn, would not allow me to give them money to use the bathroom because i didn't have time to have a meal, but most businesses, most communities that don't have public restrooms, you see a benefit to local businesses in that people come in and then patronize the stores because they feel they owe something. there's two sides to that. we have not done much thinking about it. >> not much research done, and i encourage you to do some since there are also public spaces and parks and whatnot where walkability are transected by transportation oriented walkability where those are needed. >> well, thank you. >> right behind you there. >> hi, jeff. mary -- >> nice to see you, mare. >> yeah. the largest industries in the portland metro area, at least those that are part of the traded sector that we really promote are places like intel and nike which are not particularly walkable for most employees. most employees i know live here in the pearl. >> yeah. >> okay. >> you have something similar with what's happened in san fransisco which is a lot of corporations are out in the belt -- >> yeah? >> the city, which used to be where you go to work is now where you leave to go to work. >> yeah, well, to finish the question, i asked when urban land institute gave you the chance, one of the vint of intelligence, whether they were going to follow the example of amazon and others recently located big campuses in much more walkable urban environments. >> right. >> and, no, in fact, they, instead started to put billions into building the campus in hillsboro, and it's a very -- i'm wondering, are you finding many other examples of large industries that are, in fact, building urban campuses thinking about the kind of things that you're talking about here? >> well, it is hard to build a campus in a city where a campus is already built. you see companies moving jobs in town. united airlines, for example, moved a ton of jobs, thousands of jobs, from suburban chicago to downtown chicago. it's trickier to -- you can't start fresh. i think what you see, and, again, talking about trends, and trend start slowly, and they move slowly, and it's always, you know, looking at what now is opposed to a couple years ago, and there's market changes, and market changes create markets, but i think that the main reason -- one of the main reasons why american corporations all go from the inner cities to the suburbs, that's where they go to live, and suburbs follow them, the companies follow them. i think as more and more people live in the cities, we start to see companies follow them back to the city. there are, and most american cities, there are undervalued, gray field industrial areas where it is possible. it's called the south lake union district in seattle, there's a great example. the pearl district studied you and did what you told them to do. amazon moved there, and one of the bill gates foundation moved there. they built a streetcar there. it is a trend we're seeing. it's not one to change immediately, tomorrow. yes? right there. >> hi. mary. one of the things that i think happens in every city is a big elephant in the room, and i think that's our freeways. you have the freeway to boulevard issues that's the interest in promoting, but i wonder if you have examples of places in the world that turned that around, con convinced people it's viable and exciting to approach that because it parallels the barriers to walkability and seems like nobody wants to talk about it. >> i want to talk about it. >> good, thank you. >> the congressman had a big campaign because the one reason is their chief now is john norquist, former mayor of milwaukee, who made his name killing a freeway and worked on the tear town of a freeway in milwaukee. i neglected to do tonight what i say i do in the book, which is everywhere i talk, i talk about induced demand and how building roads creates just more traffic. that's proven. no one doubts it more. it's in the book. no one doubts it other than every engineer i work with every day in every city. the leadership of the profession has admitted that if you add 10% more road capacity, in a year, 4% is gone, and in a few years, all will be gone because people adjust behavior to use that. interestingly, as mary knows, it works in reverse too. when the west side highway in new york was falling down, had to pull it down, and when the freeway in san fransisco was falling down, and the central freeway was down, everyone feared a carmegddon, and what's going to happen? they just went away. it's how the mayor brought that to the mayor's institute saying we have to replace this thing. what do we do? tear it down, replace it with a boulevard. he said, yes, and build a tunnel? we said, no. you don't need a tunnel. here's why. he went back, and even though he was a great environmentalist, he did not allow salt on the roads for snow removal. we did not convince him about indeuced demand and lost the election on that issue, but it's complicated and building the tum anyway, and i still don't buy arguments for that, but what's amazing is that if you look at san fransisco is that highways, you know, bull cards create real estate value. you make a boulevard, and everything around it is valuable elevated, you know, multilevel elevated highways destroy those. what you found in central freeway is blighted properties not worth anything became valuable and tax dollars went to the city, and the city paid for the work now ten times over. what i say in the book is if you have elevated expressways crumbling or when they start to crumble, tear them down. if they are not yet, maybe you shouldn't bother, except, look at possible tax revenues that might pay for it if you do it right away. it's a hard sell. there's a number of counterintuitive realities how people behave, especially surrounding cars. almost entirely surrounding cars that make it hard to do things. the biggest surprise, for me, that's in the book, was that the cities with the most congestion have the least pollution. that, you know, do i have to say it again? you sit in traffic and see the air waving from the hundreds of exhausts of all the cars and say can the planet survive this? you know, it's horrible. you see ads, and there's one in the book, where engineering companies say, if we were to build more highways to replace crowded highways, think about all the pollution we could stop because of the congestion that's there. you study city after city after city, inverse proportion between traffic congestion and amount of pollution. if you remove congestion, you get people driving more miles, essentially, because the only constraint to congestion is congestion. the only constraint to driving is congestion. if you remove it, more people come. you do not pave the true costs of motoring. that's the secret behind the discussion. we pay a fraction. real cost. the real cost of motoring, and we don't pay for the social costs of motoring. i love cars, but, you know, there are limits. this is probably -- one more question and we'll call it a day. not -- in the front. >> speaking of cars, portland has seen a lot of introduction of housing on the east side along the trance it areas with little or no parking. how does that translate into walkability? >> this is an issue in washington, d.c.. the question -- what is the relationship between -- the portland doing something, and most introducing affordable housing that's on transit lines so that the people who live on it don't need to own cars, and, actually, not requiring that housing to provide cars, which, of course, is pillar number one of high cost of free parking is if you stop making an artificial floor for the amount of parking people have to provide, the free market will determine the amount of parking people have to provide and do it more properly than any government agency can do it. in dc, it's happening. new buildings coming with much less parking than they would have otherwise, and they are signing leases with tenants where they promise they will never park a car on the street, but it's hard to enforce. as i know it's happening here, local residents are worried and fighting it. they imagine that these people moving into the apartments bring cars, park on the streets, and compete for the parking spaces. there is a theoretical suggestion that this is not a problem. there's a real fact that they are worry -- worried about it, and may, indeed, happen. it's important to have a management -- it's a management question. i do not believe, as, you know, walk friendly as i am, i don't believe that we need to take away anyone's existing parking to make these places function at their best. if you were to -- again, i don't know the details here in portland, but if you initiate the proper kind of parking permit system for those people with spaces on streets, get a permit that allows them to park on the street, and the new people moving into new no-parking buildings don't get that permit, that's a way to give them the peace of mind that their parking remains there. i don't know. i'm not a parking expert. bring in don from ucla. that's what i learned about by studying his work, but the key to making transitions is not a design key. having no parking by the metro transit is a good solution, but it's a magnificent solution. i know you disagree with me, so it's a great place to stop. thank you so much for listening. i really enjoyed it. [applause] for more information, visit the author's website, jeffspeck.com. >> it's quite true that a people's history is the result of howard synthesizing the work of a great many other historians. what had happened in the 1960s with the counter culture was that, you know, a whole new generation of young historians had come up, and they were, in essence, reevaluating all aspects of our past. >> biographer on the life of a story and activist tonight at ten eastern on "after words" on c-span2, and look for more booktv online. like us on facebook. now, robert felt, author of "all in the family: realignment of american democracy since the 1960s," booktv sat down with him in rhode island exploring the literary and culture of the area with the help of our cable partner, cox communications. >> "all in the family" is a prehistory of the culture wars. it's an explanation for why in the last two generations our politics have been dominated by questions of women's roles in society, gender, sexuality, and the family. it really tries to explain how it is that since the 1960s in the last half century, american politics were transformed by debates over the family. this has been central to how americans think about politics, whether they are on the liberal and left side of the political speck -- spectrum or right side of the political spectrum. one of the things i talk about is how the american family was essential to a liberal politic between the new deal of the 1930s and the 1960s. this is something i call "breadwinner liberalism," the idea that american families required some assistance, some support, social security is perhaps the best example, but there are others, and that for a good three or four decades, a critical feature of liberal politics was a commitment to a particular kind of nuclear family, and, especially a male breadwinner nuclear family. what happened is in the 1960s, that liberal commitment went into crisis. they experienced a profound crisis because of the social movement that challenged that family from the left side of the spectrum. think about the civil rights movement, feminism, the various feminisms of the era, and, eventually, the gay and lesbian rights movement and other social movements that challenged the idea that there really is one male breadwinner model of the american family. when liberalism experienced those challenges, it went into a prolonged period of political crisis in the 60s and well into the 70 #s, and it's that critical historical moment that the conservative movement steps into the breach with liberalism in crisis and proposes a kind of new model of the american family, one that does not require comake support or economic assistance, but one that requires moral protection so the book really tells the story of the politicized american family going from the family that needs support economically to one that needs protection morally. that's how a characterize the shift from a liberal political culture to a more conservative political culture. the critical difference between the liberal, the previous -- the pre-1960 #s liberal model of the family and the post 1970s conservative model of the family comes down to, as one might expect, the role of the state. the role of our collective empowerment through the national government, the role that that plays in our lives. in a liberal model of the family, families require some modicum of basic economic, basic economic security, and the government, the national state and state level governments play an important role in providing resources to families, providing social safety nets and so on. that's part of the family itself. for conservatives, the idea of a family that needs not economic protection but rather moral protection, that's speaking to a very different role for a government; right? this model, government -- government's job is not to support families economically, but to prevent them from experiencing or from coming into contact with an immoral society. something like, i mean, take the example of reproductive rights or abortion, perhaps the most critical example. for many conservatives, this is simply an immoral process, an immoral act, and government's job should be to prevent it, and that -- that is a legitimate role for government as conservatives see it. the reason the 1960s is so important to the story is it looks a little like this. if you think about the liberal politicians, the notable liberal politicians of that earlier era, someone like franklin roosevelt, kennedy, lyndon johnson, these were political figures who believed in what we now would call the traditional family. they believed in a male breadwinner family, largely the male -- largely the male responsible for supporting the family economically and so on. that was really still part of the liberal idea, and that idea was challenged in the 60s, particularly by feminism and by the gay and lesbian rights movement, but, also, in an interesting way by the civil rights black power movement who essentially said that model of the family is heterosexual, patriot call, white, and so on. it doesn't represent the full bredth of american families and the way americans lived their lives, and that was a deep challenge to liberalism itself, and it's one of the per sip at a timing events or precipitating forces that creates this crisis in liberalism in the 1960s, it's not, by any means, the only one, but it's a major one. one of the most interesting examples that i used in the book, and i think one of the most critical hinges of this transformation that i trace is arguments over subsidized child care in the 1970s, and here we really see a battle between the forces on the liberal left over definitions of the family and forces on the emerging, but really not yet powerful conservative rights. this happened in 1971, congress passed a comprehensive child development act, a comprehensive child care acted that provided large subsidies for child care in the united states, and it was in response to a very strong grassroots political movement that proposalled child care as essential to the lives of working women. congress passed it. it was sent to president nixon's desk for signature, and it was the first real moment in national politics that we see an eruption of grassroots response on the right. the nixon white house received thousands and thousands of letters. pat buchanan, an adviser to nixon in those days, understood that emerging grassroots movement, communicated its message to nixon, and the message was subsidized child car threatens the traditional model of the family. it threatening the traditional idea of strong mothers and strong mother hood and the president should veto it. in fact, nixon did veto that child care act in 1971. that's a very interesting moment, one that doesn't usually register in our memories of the era, but it's a turning point in politics. another critical hinge of this transformation that "all in the family" tracks takes place really in the late 1970s when we see the birth of the sowled pro-family or family vams movement. that movement came immediately out of the opposition of the equal rights amendment and the fight of a conservative acts -- activist who people are familiar with, still activist today in a lot of ways, and her opposition to the equal rights amendment helped to gal galvanize a movemt that named itself the pro-family movement, and then that movement which ultimately was the so-called family values movement was critical to the reagan coalition that came together in 1980. the lens of the family turns up some startling and surprising discoveries as well. something like the vietnam war which we do not ordinarily associate with the politics of the family, there's a whole chapter of "all in the family" about the war, and the way that battles over manhood and the responsibilities of men became critical to the way americans argued about vietnam, and if you think without it, it makes sense. on the one hand, there's conservative americans or americans who saw themselves as deep patriots in 1970s, and they believed that men's responsibility was to be drafted, go into the military service, serve the country, to stand when called as it were. there were other americans who believedded that a man's duty was to stand up to what they perceived to be an immoral war; right? there was a moral calling for men to resist the draft and what they saw as immoral war. the debates over vietnam at the level of the individual family came down do what was a male citizens' real responsibility. how does that play out in the political arena? i wrote "all in the family," i think, in some ways for two reasons m one is a deeply personal one, and one is a more pronaftional one. the deeply personal one is that i'm a child of this era, of the 1970 #s. i came up in the shadow of all of the fights and struggles, and in many ways, the reprecushions of the struggles that shaped me growing up. i had a very intense dire to understand what it was that shaped my childhood and my patients and shaped the world in which i grew up. that is the personal reasons. the professional reason is that there's many studies of the 1960s and 70s and 1980s that these are often treated separately. the 60s has its own kind of cast. it's a period of liberal rebellion, radicalism, and the anti-war movement and so on. there's not a lot of studies that tell the whole story of the 1960s to the present through the single lens, and the lens of the family works well in organizing and helping us understand the way that american politics has changed since the 1960s. the argument of "all in the family" is unique, but it really builds on the work of a generation of historians. as a professional historian, this is how we produce work. we stand on the shoulders of our colleagues and other scholars, but strike out in new directions. all in the family is based on really a generation of work op the welfare state, on gender and sexuality, and, also, a generation of conservatism, but "all in the family" takes a lot of that work, adds original research i spent five years doing, and it strikes out in a new organizational framework or provides a new frame work for understanding the last 50 years of american politics. the research in the book extends from the memo and the presidential archives, presidential libraries of every president since jfk, and i've done extensive research in the files and documents and collections of a grassroot politics, everything from the national organization for women, various gay and lesbian rights organizations to the national association of evangelicals, a really important evangelical christian organization so i've done research in over 50 collections using 200 individual collections to amass research for the book. going into the research, if anything surprised me, it was actually the extent to which the family was a central political metaphor, a central political icon for liberalism. i went into the project expecting that i would find the family to be central to a post 1960s conservative politics, but what surprised me was how central the family was to a liberal politics as well. that was something i had not really anticipated, the power and strength and compelling nature of that image of the family within liberalism in the middle decades of the century. whether we're still in a pattern of political debates about the family, i think is a very interesting question. this past election in 2012 revealed, at least in the republican primary that the so-called culture wars are present and still have a very compelling grip on part of the electorat in the united states. studies since 2012, the election of 2012, polling that's been done, especially with younger voters, reveals that the culture war issues, wars over family, over gender, over women's roles, over sexuality, that these have a less compelling grip on that younger generation, that they are not as moved by the questions. so one does have to wonder whether this is something that will recede to the past or continue to have in our politics these fights every two or three years. if there was one thing that i would urge viewers to take away or rairds to take away from the -- readers to take away from the book is the way in which something as elemental to everyone's life as the family and the way we organize ourselves in terms of families, that this can actually be a really contribute -- critical lens for understanding much deeper and broader political trends and political turmoil so that if we use the family as a kind of historical lens and focus on the period from the 1960 #s to the present, the last half century or so, that lens can tell us a lot about how we, as a country, move from a relatively liberal political era to a much more conservative political era. now, whether that's changing, we're here in the shadow of the 20 # -- 2012 election, it's too early to tell, but the last generation or two of american politics have been dominated by a conservative orientation of the whole political -- whole political culture, and i think using the family, something that we're all familiar with and comfortable with as a lens can really tell us a lot about that transformation. for more information on booktv's recent visit to rhode island and many other cities visited by the local content vehicles, go to c-span.org/localcontent. >> here's a look at books published this week. >> b.c. tv at the national press club, authors tonight, and joining us now is author arun written a book called "first cameraman". what's the association with the obama campaign or the obama administration? >> well, in 2008, on the obama campaign, i was the first videographer, something i carry ied into the first two years in the white house. the last cycle, i did not work on the campaign formally or at the white house. i worked in the new and strange murky world of super packs and pacs and independent expenditures. >> talk about the campaign in 2008. how were you hooked up with the president? >> well, you know, there was an ad on craig's list -- no, that's not the case. there was a place of right place, right time. a friend of mine was working at cnn as a documentary producer. that's a more normal path into politics, as much as i was interested, i was a fiction filmmaker, not first on anyone's list. she knew i was passionate about politics and wanted to get involved, brought me in, and then i hit it off with the senator and traveled, you know, inside the bubble. >> how long did you do anything? was it 24/7 for you for awhile? >> you know, especially in -- on the campaign, it really felt like 24/7. i was living in chicago, but i was there two or three days a month. it was pretty 24/7, but it's scaled back at the white house because the president is really someone who values having dinner with daughters and family, and so at dinner time, usually, a reasonable chance he would do family stuff. >> who has all the video? >> all the video is at the white house. it's interesting because it goes into the archives where none of it is allowed to be erased according to the presidential records act, anything done service to the president has to preserved for posterity. if he swears by accident or it's out of focus, all of it goes in the archives and available to the public after the end of the obama administration. ..