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Conversations about Creating a Culture of Activity: Profiling the people, places, programs, and policies that help to promote a culture of activity within our communities.
Transcript exported from the video version of this episode - Note that it has not been copyedited
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:19:29
Blaine Merker
There's a wind all around in it and it starts spatially. You know, it starts by kind of the neighborhood is sort of the rails that we put our behavior on. And so we we create those conditions and then our other choices then run on them later. You want to make you want to make that running of behavior super easy in the direction that you want it to go.
00:00:20:00 - 00:00:21:00
Blaine Merker
You don't want it to be a struggle.
00:00:21:09 - 00:00:54:23
John Simmerman
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Active Towns Channel. I'm John Simmerman and that is Blaine Merkur, a partner and director and head of climate Action at Gehl, and he is based in San Francisco. But Gehl, of course, has offices in San Francisco, New York and headquarters in Copenhagen. I am delighted to share this with you. We're going to be talking about a whole bunch of different topics, but ultimately we're talking about cities are for people and the importance of taking action now for our health, our well-being and also climate.
00:00:54:23 - 00:01:09:09
John Simmerman
So without further ado, let's get right to it with Blaine Merker. Blaine Merker is an absolute pleasure to have you on the Active Towns Podcast. Welcome.
00:01:09:09 - 00:01:11:10
Blaine Merker
Thanks so much for having me. It's really great to be here.
00:01:11:29 - 00:01:15:27
John Simmerman
So Blaine, I'd love to have you just introduce yourself to the audience. So who is Blaine?
00:01:17:13 - 00:01:46:22
Blaine Merker
Well, thanks, John. I am. I'm a landscape architect by training and a sort of radicalized urbanist by life experience. And I have had some funny twists and turns in my career that took me from kind of professional design to activism to entrepreneurship and, you know, starting some different companies and organizations. But the thread for me has always been streets.
00:01:46:22 - 00:02:09:11
Blaine Merker
It's been public space. It's been kind of being an active citizen and participant of the cities that I've lived in and trying to unlock that experience for other people as much as I can. So I sort of feel really lucky that I've been able to do professionally what my what my passion is, which is really creating cities for people.
00:02:09:21 - 00:02:21:26
Blaine Merker
And I do that currently in a professional role as a director and a partner at Gail. We're an urban design and strategy consultancy and we get to do work all over the world and it's really fun.
00:02:22:15 - 00:02:51:27
John Simmerman
Yeah, Yeah. And Yen is, is obviously a huge inspiration for many of us and me, myself, you know, it's like this book, you know, which came out in 2010, you know, some 13 years ago, was really part of the inspiration for me to found my nonprofit Advocates for Healthy Communities, which I did a year later in 2011, and then launched the active Towns Initiative in 2013, So a decade ago.
00:02:52:20 - 00:03:21:24
John Simmerman
So I've been kind of like, you know, doing this and talking about this, my filter that I kind of run things through is through a lens of how the built environment encourages healthy, active living. So that's my formal training is as an exercise physiologist and and working in disease prevention for the first 15 years of my career. And then, you know, making that shift back in basically in 2010, really starting to focus on the built environment.
00:03:22:05 - 00:03:37:07
John Simmerman
And one of the things I didn't know about you until, you know, I started prepping for for our little interview here today was that little activist side of you and was this history. So talk about Rewire. I mean, this is this is good stuff.
00:03:37:07 - 00:04:06:07
Blaine Merker
Yeah, this is such a fun chapter in my career. And it sort of has a long tail of of influence on my my professional work and just great people that I got to know and worked with over the over the years that I that I co-founded and ran rebar. So, you know, what you're what you're showing here is probably Reba's most well-known project called Parking Day.
00:04:06:07 - 00:04:30:18
Blaine Merker
And I'll back up by saying that rebar is is in was a art collective and design studio that was founded in 2004 2005 by some some folks who just kind of got together and cared about streets and wanted to do projects that there really wasn't sort of a client for it, But we felt like we're urgent. This is coming out of grad school.
00:04:30:18 - 00:04:56:07
Blaine Merker
For me, I was I was studying landscape architecture at UC Berkeley and kind of getting into my my final year, starting starting to graduate, got a job as a landscape architect, doing urban design and part planning in San Francisco. And while this was happening, some friends and I got interested in just doing installations in public space. The first one in the city that we did was called Parking Day.
00:04:56:18 - 00:05:18:27
Blaine Merker
We we just had this notion that a parking space was a bit of untapped real estate, you know, real estate was super expensive. You could rent a parking space ten by 20 feet for like $2 an hour. And we thought, is there you know, is there any rule that says you can't put something other than a car in that parking space?
00:05:19:06 - 00:05:36:26
Blaine Merker
So we kind of ran through a few different ideas and we landed on this idea of a park because it was really legible and easy to imagine. And we we built a public park in a parking space. So that was kind of the first iteration. And you put up the manual there. So people started contacting us from around the world saying, Can you come do this in our city?
00:05:36:28 - 00:05:56:10
Blaine Merker
We were contacted by folks in Germany, in Australia and Italy. We'd spent the sort of last $500 we had building this temporary park in San Francisco. And so we published a manual, kind of an open source how to and what was really interesting about that is it just took off. People started building building parks in their in their cities.
00:05:57:06 - 00:06:15:27
Blaine Merker
That kind of led to what a lot of folks are maybe more familiar with, which is the Parklet movement. And that that really started in San Francisco. We had folks from the planning department come and approach us and say, how do we do this? All year? We helped craft the the ordinance with them and the pilot program that developed the first parklets in the world.
00:06:16:02 - 00:06:29:24
Blaine Merker
And so now you you kind of walk around any other city or abroad and you will see you will see parklets around and we don't rebar and no longer has anything to do with them. They're just they're they're created by, you know, folks in those cities.
00:06:30:11 - 00:06:35:24
John Simmerman
And this this manual, is it still accessible? Can people still access this?
00:06:36:27 - 00:07:05:18
Blaine Merker
It is. If you go to my parking day dot org, you can find the manual, you can find a map, you can find resource is for participating in Parking day. So we actually set one day a year on Friday in September, and it's posted on the on the website when you can participate. And we wanted to kind of focus global participation on that one day so people could really have a sense of like the, you know, the excitement and see it all happening and tour around their cities.
00:07:06:02 - 00:07:33:11
John Simmerman
Yeah. And what's really extraordinary about this and I talk about this a lot on the Active Towns podcast is it's one of those initiatives. It's it's something that I refer to over and over and over again as the software. The hardware, of course, is the stuff that we build and we have out in the physical environment. And we can put a pin in a map and say, Hey, we've got a park over here, we've got a pool over there, we've got a protected bike lane running through this area here.
00:07:33:26 - 00:07:57:23
John Simmerman
And and that's the hardware, that's the infrastructure. But something like this is the software, it's the engagement activities, it's the awareness programs and policies that we can, you know, implement that can not only activate the hardware, but it can also change the perceptions and change the the the dynamic of of how we see our streets and how we see our public spaces.
00:07:58:06 - 00:08:23:14
John Simmerman
And so I love it. I think that that's just it's fabulous and and again, I had no idea that that you were part of that. I obviously have known about it and have participated in it and have filmed it in various cities and locations. But good, good stuff, man. What a great a great, you know, hard, you know, start in terms of in this world and then making that transition over here to you too.
00:08:23:14 - 00:08:28:02
John Simmerman
Gael Or I can almost say. Gael Architects that used to be. Gael Architects, now it's Gael.
00:08:28:15 - 00:08:53:00
Blaine Merker
It's just we, we drop the architects, we just go with Gael because you know, we, we sort of realized a few years ago that architects is a little exclusionary. It's a little, it's a little design, it's a little maybe too specific to design anything. Just, just as you mentioned, we're interested in the hardware, we're interested in the software, we're interested in a strategy that kind of work organizes design at a very high level.
00:08:53:00 - 00:09:16:15
Blaine Merker
So, you know, I think this this, this slide here, which is focusing on public life, this is really what we're trying to design and enable, and that goes far beyond architecture. So that's why we dropped that word and we're just. Gael So public life, you know, is sort of what our, what our mission is about creating, you know, the life that we make together in public.
00:09:16:15 - 00:09:52:02
Blaine Merker
And I just love what you said about sort of sort of revealing the, the agency that we all have in making that. I think we kind of walk around our world thinking this is just how it is. I don't know, the engineers made it this way. This must be how it's supposed to be. And what that, you know, the project that I was involved in with rebar for over a decade and now with Gael is trying to sort of reveal the world as a place that we make actually, and we can shape that hardware if we become aware of it and that hardware then shapes our behavior.
00:09:52:02 - 00:09:54:09
Blaine Merker
So it's this kind of a cycle.
00:09:54:21 - 00:10:19:28
John Simmerman
Yeah. Which is a big part of, of the book. You know, when we look at the book Cities for People, you know, that's a part of it and it's part of, you know, Jen's story, too, in terms of, you know, being a classically trained architect and then really having, you know, sort of the input from his wife, you know, who had the psychology side of things and going, wait a minute, you know, And so it's a beautiful story.
00:10:19:28 - 00:10:41:17
John Simmerman
And if anybody if you haven't had a chance to read that book, I mean, it is a classic. Yes, it is 13 years old now, but it's phenomenal. He has older pieces of work as well. But I think it really came together quite beautifully in that particular Island Press edition, because it's full color and it really, you know, brings you brings it to life.
00:10:42:00 - 00:11:05:12
John Simmerman
And there's so many great memories that I have of the end and one liners that he has. I mean, I just mentioned it the other day was a one liner that he had in Contested Streets, which was a documentary way back when, probably again, probably almost ten, 13 years ago. And there was a couple of great one liners in there.
00:11:05:12 - 00:11:27:15
John Simmerman
But one of them that I repeat often is him expressing the joy of knowing that every day when he wake up, the city was just a little bit better than it was the day before. And then another quote that I love from it might have been from that movie or a different location was a quote of how incremental change can actually add up.
00:11:28:01 - 00:11:52:19
John Simmerman
And he was talking about how in Copenhagen they were trying to, you know, decrease on street parking by about 2% per year. And if you do that year after year after year, it's so little that it doesn't, you know, garner much resistance. And, you know, you don't get that sort of knee jerk reaction of of of of nimbyism and and change and fight.
00:11:52:27 - 00:12:20:02
John Simmerman
But at the same time it if you're consistent with that change, it really makes a big difference over time. So those two two quotes really have stuck with me. There's others like the scale of buildings and not getting too high, which we can get into later, but it's really foundational obviously to the firm. How is Yeah, plus that my son was in 2018, so it was prior to the pandemic.
00:12:20:02 - 00:12:39:14
Blaine Merker
He is doing great and does, as far as I can tell, does not stop touring and speaking and being in the world. I think he he he gets a lot of energy from being in front of an audience. And and one of the things that you you mention about him which is totally true is he's he's kind of unfiltered.
00:12:39:14 - 00:12:57:13
Blaine Merker
And even though he's got a script that he's been on for 50 years frantically about is very simple. He he's a little unscripted, too. And he says he really says what's on his mind. So he ends up with these these great kind of quips that are maybe some of us are almost too polite to say in planning circles.
00:12:57:13 - 00:13:30:06
Blaine Merker
But he just kind of says says what he what he thinks. And I think that's part of the power of his message. But he said, you know, he stepped away from the practice that Gael the company entirely he's now he's now fully retired. And so really one of the the projects that we're in right now is, is transitioning this, this brand and this organization which is so identified with him and so building on his legacy and lifting up the new leadership that we have, which is, you know, we've got I think, seven or eight partners now.
00:13:30:06 - 00:13:45:11
Blaine Merker
We've got a team of about 140 people in three offices. So we are a new company that is that is much bigger than the union and doing incredible work all over the world and trying to get that that message out there is kind of the next iteration of the story.
00:13:45:24 - 00:14:07:17
John Simmerman
Yeah, and it's such a great legacy. And I know that he is incredibly proud. And again, 300 plus cities around the world, y'all are doing work in and looking at the fact that, yes, you've got the Copenhagen office, the main office there, and then New York and San Francisco now is just still at the San Francisco or is he going to the Copenhagen?
00:14:08:08 - 00:14:30:24
Blaine Merker
Jeff is in Copenhagen and Jeff is. Yeah, Jeff Jeffries. Sam is in Copenhagen. He's he's he lives there and he married a Dane and they have a family that I go visit whenever I'm there. And I, I look at his house with sort of envy and wonder a little bit. It's kind of like suburban Copenhagen. It's like a long ride, you know, from the office.
00:14:30:24 - 00:14:50:25
Blaine Merker
But he get to his his house and it's just this like modest collection of sort of two story homes with this car free or car light kind of one are connecting them. And, you know, I'll say like, Jeff, where where are your kids? And it's like, I don't know. His kids are like, you know, yeah, nine, nine and 11.
00:14:50:25 - 00:15:03:21
Blaine Merker
And like, I don't know, they're just in the neighborhood, you know? And I'm like, God, I would I would be arrested if if my kids were just in the neighborhood. But of course, for him, you know, it's about neighbors taking care of the kids and they're they're very safe running around.
00:15:03:21 - 00:15:20:12
John Simmerman
Yeah, Well, I mean, and that's that's part of one of the themes that we have here. I mean, this is kind of what they how they they grow up. You know, they're they're at this stage and and they're out and about in, you know, absorbing all of this. And then before you know it, you know, they are free range kids.
00:15:20:12 - 00:15:42:09
Blaine Merker
And actually, John put that picture back up again because the with the kids because these those kids are are my kids actually. Oh, well, I just just wanted to share it. Just wanted to share this, which is that, you know, I go to Copenhagen a few times a year to to be in the office, and I had the opportunity to bring my two boys with me last summer.
00:15:42:09 - 00:16:03:09
Blaine Merker
And part of that was I wanted to radicalize them with the experience of being in a city that was made for them. And and so they just, you know, I got I ran into this this cargo bike and just kind of pedaled them. I spent like a week pedaling them around the city and they thought it was super fun.
00:16:03:24 - 00:16:46:29
John Simmerman
Well, it's a classic Christiana bike manufactured right there in in the little enclave of Christiana, which is super, super cool. Yeah. And that's the same company that manufactures the the Trisha bikes that cycling without age uses and does good good stuff. And so I guess that's one of the things that I'd love for us to talk a little bit about is when we are actually successful at building cities for people, it becomes much more empowering so that, you know, this type of lifestyle, this type of mobility choice becomes much more practical and pragmatic.
00:16:47:28 - 00:17:14:09
John Simmerman
And one would even say possible. You know, sometimes what happens is in in other car oriented cities, you know, a bike lane gets slapped down or whatever, and they say they're be happy. It's possible you can do it, but it's certainly not inviting and welcoming. And when it becomes inviting and welcoming, truly people oriented, we're able to start to see some behavior change.
00:17:15:17 - 00:18:00:25
Blaine Merker
That's right. And, you know, I chose these photos because I love doing this whenever I go to Copenhagen. This is this is right outside our office. And so I'll just, you know, come down and just just photograph people biking, because what you see is you see a few things. You see really a human centered operating system that is sort of unquestionably consistent, that there is a certain amount of space designed for cyclists, there's a certain amount of clarity to it, but it's also not precious really, and it's not sort of like we have this kind of highly engineered approach to streets and there sometimes you'll see, yeah, the bike lanes got to shrink down a
00:18:00:25 - 00:18:17:07
Blaine Merker
little bit or it gets bigger and there's an opportunity in to it, which is, you know, you have these the Danish cycling engineers are kind of saying, well, make it as good as you can. And if you can make it for wide enough for two people to ride side by side, let's do that because people like to talk.
00:18:17:12 - 00:18:38:12
Blaine Merker
And and then you'll see, you know, a little bit of asphalt. Maybe they get slapped down to just ease the dismount from a curb into a area of parking or a driveway. And, you know, that's sort of added after the fact. It's just slapped down. You would never see that in the US because that would have to get into the construction drawings.
00:18:38:18 - 00:19:00:00
Blaine Merker
I don't think it's in the construction drawings in Denmark. It's it's in an engineer's or a public works person's head that, hey, you should watch how people use the street. And if you see something happening, it's this idea, this incremental improvement, right? If you see something happening, if you see human behavior starting to nudge in a particular direction, you know, help it out.
00:19:00:00 - 00:19:06:10
Blaine Merker
It's as John would say, it's it's cheap to be kind. It's cheap to be kind to people. You know, all you need is a little bit of asphalt and some time.
00:19:07:06 - 00:19:20:25
John Simmerman
Well, what you just said there, you know, brings up this, you know, photo and, you know, you're observing human behavior and seeing what the user experiences. And, you know, this is a classic, you know, desire line photo.
00:19:22:13 - 00:19:47:29
Blaine Merker
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, so the the engineer and, you know, I'm trained as the landscape architect, right? So I'm counting myself as part of the problem. You know, we we think we've got the answer. You can't believe how many different times designers talk about I will do it this way to make people do this right. And the, you know, the Gael mindset really tries to be the users always right.
00:19:47:29 - 00:20:16:14
Blaine Merker
If, if somebody chooses to invest in an action with their energy and behavior, it's because they're rational and they have calculated that it is either the safest or the most enjoyable or the quickest thing for them to do, and that matters. And then we as designers need to sort of look at that and design accordingly. So that's and do it with data if we can, by association.
00:20:17:01 - 00:20:46:11
John Simmerman
Well and data and observation. And that takes us again right back to some of the roots of, of Yan's work in terms of, of going out and just observing public life and really understanding how people behave in the public realm. I think he also wrote a book about that, too. This I want to bring it back to active transportation since this is the active towns.
00:20:46:11 - 00:21:11:09
John Simmerman
But I guess so one of the things that caused me to reach out to you and and have this conversation was the it was a couple of different things. One, it was a it was basically a post that you had that, you know, brings back this image in my mind. I can't remember if it was on Twitter or if it was on LinkedIn.
00:21:11:12 - 00:21:31:18
John Simmerman
And specifically there was two of them, but this was one of them. It was this one here. And, you know, you're making the the point here. I'll let you make the point. It's written here. But, you know, go ahead and riff off of this and and drive home what you were trying to articulate here. I think it was about a motorcycle.
00:21:32:11 - 00:21:55:04
Blaine Merker
This is this is funny. And it's funny that this is the one that you picked up on, actually, because this is me using LinkedIn, which is, you know, the sort of MS-DOS of social networking is not the most sexy one. But I was I was just trying to organize people in my neighborhood to weigh in on the redesign for this greenway, which is called the Aloni Greenway.
00:21:55:04 - 00:22:23:24
Blaine Merker
This goes through Berkeley, Albany and elsewhere in the in the East Bay of San Francisco. It's part of part of really a great, I would say a great potential Greenway network here in the East Bay. And what makes it so, so special. As you can see, there's kind of a viaduct off to one side. It aligns with the BART system, which means that it catches a bunch of, you know, regional high capacity commuter rail stations.
00:22:24:09 - 00:22:56:15
Blaine Merker
And to me this is magic. This when you are able to get a active human scale mobility sort of superhighway of a greenway intersecting with regional transit, you're unlocking both the neighborhood and the region at the same time, not using cars and you're building in healthy commutes to work, you know, because this is about a third of a mile away from from the train station that I use to get into the city to office.
00:22:57:03 - 00:23:23:01
Blaine Merker
It's virtually co-located with the downtown San Francisco financial district. And yet it's this kind of like suburban active Greenway. So there's something really special here. And this is where my kids learn to bike. This is where we go out ads where I run every day. And I honestly, you know, couldn't really see it for years, you know, of living here and then suddenly realized that there was this jam and I was organizing people.
00:23:23:01 - 00:23:44:05
Blaine Merker
I posted this on LinkedIn because I was organizing people to say, Hey, we have a chance to invest some money in this. It's about to be upgraded. We need to treat this like we would treat a regional highway with the dollars and attention that that would get, because this is a it's a human scale piece of infrastructure. It's also a piece of climate infrastructure.
00:23:44:09 - 00:23:53:17
Blaine Merker
It's really special. And we should sort of engage and people have and and that design is underway right now, and I hope that we get a really great upgrade to that.
00:23:54:01 - 00:24:09:18
John Simmerman
Yeah, Yeah, that's good stuff. Yeah. And, and you can see why it, it sort of reminded me of of this image here. You know the not that image, this image. Come back here, guys. There you go. That image somewhat.
00:24:10:05 - 00:24:33:01
Blaine Merker
Gets a green way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is just a regular sort of, you know, Saturday afternoon run and on the green way. And it's packed with really, I mean, I think really packed with kids, with older folks, with people exercising. And there's this kind of it's, you know, it's an entry point, I think, for people to have a human centered experience even in neighborhoods that aren't.
00:24:33:13 - 00:24:38:17
Blaine Merker
So it's it's you know, you really see this is where people feel safe to take their kids out.
00:24:39:07 - 00:25:02:08
John Simmerman
Well, and it seems to me and you can correct me if I'm wrong, because I may have a wrong assumption here, but it seems to me that there is a level of connectivity in the lower left here of the photo here. Looks like it's very cohesive with the neighborhood. So are you able to get a meaningful depth to and from meaningful destinations using this greenway.
00:25:03:15 - 00:25:29:03
Blaine Merker
You are and it crosses so it crosses a number of sort of, you know, high streets and shopping streets along the way. You know, as I said, because it uses an alignment of the the rail, which is active. It's quite connected that way too. I will say honestly, in the US, I think we sort of are in this partitioned mindset.
00:25:29:03 - 00:25:50:21
Blaine Merker
We think about bike infrastructure and we think about transit infrastructure and we think about shopping streets, but we don't always connect the dots. And when you hear when you hear a, you know, a Danish person or a Dutch person often talking about cycling, it's not such a special thing, Right? We saw that in the pictures, you know, in the clothes that people were wearing in those photos.
00:25:50:21 - 00:26:15:10
Blaine Merker
I mean, some of them are like going to a meeting. Some of them are, you know, just kind of it's a little bit messy and casual because they're not biking. They're not actually like, I'm going to go for a bike ride. They are. Yeah. They're saying I am going to go be a person and shop. And cycling is is an extension of just being and getting around the city and really being a pedestrian.
00:26:15:10 - 00:26:19:29
Blaine Merker
Actually, it's more like being a bastion than it is like, you know, something else. It's kind.
00:26:19:29 - 00:26:20:28
John Simmerman
Of it's pedestrians.
00:26:20:29 - 00:26:23:06
Blaine Merker
And cyclists and. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
00:26:23:17 - 00:26:52:00
John Simmerman
Yeah, that's true. And plus it's it's the you know, this is an image of the snake there in Copenhagen, you know, the winding bridge and you know, it's is a critical connector of getting people to there's a movie theater there, There's also some residential over there. And and I think where you are also heading with that is that you know in in the U.S. frequently we see this and we see these facilities.
00:26:52:11 - 00:26:58:15
John Simmerman
And oftentimes we think, oh, recreational opportunity. Yeah. And in.
00:26:58:17 - 00:26:59:13
Blaine Merker
Our exercise.
00:26:59:21 - 00:27:23:19
John Simmerman
What's really, really brilliant about the Danish approach and the Dutch approach and in many cases the German approach is that they're they're like, it's this and it's this. In other words, yeah, you can totally use this for recreation, but the connectivity and the cohesiveness to meaningful destinations has been baked in. And so it can be both. It's an activity asset, as I like to call them.
00:27:23:19 - 00:27:37:18
John Simmerman
That also happens to be a critical connector to meaningful destinations on a day to day basis. And so then you do see the images like again on the bottom left here of just normal attire going about one's daily business.
00:27:38:09 - 00:28:01:14
Blaine Merker
I think that's so right. And, you know, my experience of of of Nordics cycling and and Dutch cycling is really that it's it's practical first it's always about connecting destinations and sort of helping people get get on in about their daily lives and the actually the the beautiful cycle bridge on the right hand side is is an important connector.
00:28:01:14 - 00:28:23:24
Blaine Merker
But I don't think that is the vibe of most of the infrastructure in those countries. I mean, they have some wonderful things, but really the vibe is more the lower left. If you're just going to add up by quantity. And so that's it. It's just it's informal, it's practical. And then every once in a while you get these kind of like amazing pieces from the structure to make to make connections.
00:28:24:22 - 00:28:52:15
John Simmerman
Well and invite the top left. I mean, that's a great example of some infrastructure there in Copenhagen, which is really serves as public space. And if I remember correctly, that's a long a believe an old abandoned railway corridor where you see all sorts of it's both a cycling route, but there's also these pop up parks and installations. I shouldn't use the word pop up.
00:28:52:15 - 00:29:08:04
John Simmerman
I mean, they're well established by this time, but they emerged over time and evolved over time of being. It is a linear park or series of parks as well as a transportation corridor for active mobility.
00:29:08:28 - 00:29:33:14
Blaine Merker
Yeah, that's right. That's a well known park design called Super Keelan that I mean, one of the things that's special about that particular spot is it's a kind of a multi multicultural, multiethnic neighborhood in in Copenhagen, Ann Arbor. And it's it's really a quite diverse place. And I took this picture the last time I was there and they were just happened to be a band playing.
00:29:33:14 - 00:29:55:05
Blaine Merker
And then people went up on the Hill and were kind of watching it. And I ended up having a bunch of sort of fun conversations with different folks. It wasn't I wasn't there to see that. It just that was what was happening. And, you know, there's enough kind of integration with the public realm that a piece of transportation infrastructure is sort of in synergy with the public space.
00:29:55:05 - 00:30:19:06
Blaine Merker
There's enough room, you know, sort of expands and there's enough room to have a band set up randomly without a permit to just kind of gather people. And then meanwhile, you know, the cycling is still happening. So it's again, it's not like the cycle infrastructure is one thing and the public realm is another. They're they're really merged into one sort of living room of the urban life.
00:30:19:22 - 00:30:40:12
John Simmerman
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's one of the things that I say over and over and over again is that, you know, streets are for people. Streets have been around for literally thousands of years, ever since we've been coming together in villages and and human habitats. And so it is kind of like that, that concept of. Oh, yeah, that's right.
00:30:40:13 - 00:30:53:29
John Simmerman
You know, streets I mean it's it's part of our our our public realm. And in fact, I believe you've got a slide in here. Streets are like 80% of the public ground, correct?
00:30:55:05 - 00:31:26:27
Blaine Merker
Yeah, It's sort of it varies by city, of course, because of course it's got its own its own block structure. But I mean, to me, sort of I think this was this is a statistic that I ran into, I think back in grad school that there was an analysis done by someone at UC Berkeley that had sort of tallied up the amount of space in cities and how much was streets and how much was buildings and it you know, it turns out that streets, I think when you when you pull this up, I'll check my memory here.
00:31:26:27 - 00:31:56:21
Blaine Merker
But it's you know, it's a quarter to a third of the cities. Space is streets. So, you know, just just the city itself is significantly, in fact, mostly it's probably the single biggest use of any any particular use is streets. Right. And then if you if you take all that space together, it's actually quite a bit more than all of the other spaces like parks and plazas that we sort of traditionally think of as public space.
00:31:57:03 - 00:32:19:06
Blaine Merker
So for me, this was kind of an eye opener. I mean, you know, here's this thing that is our shared comments, you know, in cities. And we've somehow kind of agreed that it's okay, that it's devoted to just one thing for the most part, which is movement. Yeah, here we go. You know, so 20, 20 to 30% of the city is its streets.
00:32:19:06 - 00:32:42:00
Blaine Merker
And then that taken together, that 20 to 30% is 80% of its public space. So, you know, I think just how do we bring that same attention and sort of intention to the design of that space as we do to our parks and recognize that movement is an important thing, but it is not the only thing and it it feeds other activities.
00:32:42:00 - 00:32:54:21
Blaine Merker
And certainly automobile movement is it's just one kind. And I think, you know, our commons should be sort of shaped by people not necessarily given over just to the domain of experts to tell us what to do with it.
00:32:55:06 - 00:33:17:15
John Simmerman
Yeah. Yeah. So speaking of the domain of experts and and then thinking about all this kind of stuff, the other post out on LinkedIn that caught my attention that you put out there was basically you sort of applauding. But at the same time calling out a couple of electric vehicle manufacturers who shall remain nameless because I'm not going to put that post up here.
00:33:17:26 - 00:33:59:08
John Simmerman
But you were basically, you know, just kind of calling them out, saying because they were acknowledging that electric vehicles are not going to save us from the climate challenge that we have. And you were like, Yeah, hey, congratulations for admitting that that did it. Look forward to seeing you in the Ebike market. So let's use that as a transition point to talk a little bit about the work that you are actually actively doing in terms of climate action and within, you know, within Gail And in most importantly, what you were pointing out, I believe here is that yeah, we need to be thinking about active mobility in this equation.
00:33:59:08 - 00:34:03:03
John Simmerman
We can't just think about the electrification of our our automobile fleet.
00:34:04:03 - 00:34:36:12
Blaine Merker
Yeah. So this is so important because the reason that I posted that and I think the original post came, came through in the Micromobility newsletter, So I'll give them the hat tip for, for calling it out. Was it, you know, a couple of electric vehicle manufacturers actually did a lifecycle assessment of their electric vehicles and sort of the way I understood their, their, their report was that if you just electrified everything and you know, there's a there's there's a movement out there called Electrify everything.
00:34:36:22 - 00:35:06:28
Blaine Merker
It's it's the right answer. We should electrify everything. But if you just electrify the movement of two ton hunks of metal, you kind of eventually get into this sort of doom loop where you have to it. There is so much energy intensity in in building those two ton hunks of metal that you are unable to actually get to net zero through the electrification of our electric of our vehicle fleet.
00:35:07:04 - 00:35:27:24
Blaine Merker
And so if we just sort continue on the path that we're on, I mean, we should have electric vehicles, electric vehicles, we should absolutely make all vehicles electric, but we cannot get to a net zero for the planet. We can't keep to the 1.5 degree target in any way by keeping the same number of cars that we have now.
00:35:27:24 - 00:35:33:26
Blaine Merker
And so this was an acknowledgment that these companies made those like, hey, we love selling these things, but like this actually is not the solution.
00:35:34:06 - 00:35:57:21
John Simmerman
So I think that's a great thing to exemplify. And I see the same thing is that, yes, we do need to electrify the fleet, but we need to shrink the size of the fleet. In other words, we need less motor vehicles out there. We need more people being able to have environments such as this that can help us encourage active mobility.
00:35:58:05 - 00:36:31:24
John Simmerman
And I think that's such a key part of, yes, places are for people. Public spaces are more than just transit, more than just moving through. But yes, you know, activity and movement does need to happen. And so we need to have that balance. And so we end up seeing, you know, designs such as this where we do have a place for the storage of motor vehicles and we're going to we're going to leverage that storage of those motor vehicles on the street and call that protection.
00:36:32:13 - 00:37:07:21
John Simmerman
They're going to be parking protected. And then you have your your active mobility zones of, you know, the bike. You've got, you know, the slow human zone of walking. And we've got, you know the tree area here. If I were to redesign this, you know, and as a landscape architect, you would probably predict what I would say. I'd probably want those trees to be on the other side, you know, and and kind of get even more protection over there for, you know, the people on bikes or better yet, let's plant two rows of trees.
00:37:08:08 - 00:37:32:08
Blaine Merker
Absolutely. And you know, I included this because it's a it's a very typical design in Copenhagen. And one of the things that sort of is part of the design ethos there is this predictability that you you always have a kind of a gradient from mechanized to protective, that you put your most, you know, your slowest or most vulnerable users against against the buildings.
00:37:32:14 - 00:37:52:24
Blaine Merker
And then there are these kind of layers of of speed that emanate out from that. And, you know, one of the things that doesn't show up maybe super well in this photo is there is a curve, right? So between the bike lane and the end parking, there actually is always a curve, which is tough for us to get in the US because of our our ADA requirements.
00:37:52:24 - 00:38:00:20
John Simmerman
So it's a lower curve though. It's slow compared to the U.S. compared to ours, which are typically 6 to 7 inches. Yeah, that's a much lower. Yeah.
00:38:01:00 - 00:38:20:17
Blaine Merker
So, you know, on the climate topic, I mean you, you, you sort of turn this there and I should mention to the other world that I have a gal is I am the head of climate action, a gal which is just a kind of a you know, I'm not I'm not the expert in everything climate. I'm not in charge of all things climate.
00:38:20:17 - 00:38:50:01
Blaine Merker
What I am is the the connector. And I think sort of the direction setter and the accountability holder for us to connect our human centered design of cities and neighborhoods to climate action. And this is really building on this this hypothesis that we've had for a long time and I don't think have really been explicit about that. There's something about human centeredness that actually does equate to lower emissions.
00:38:50:13 - 00:39:14:05
Blaine Merker
And what I'm really engaged in right now is trying to quantify that and make it really explicit how those two things are tied because we are in a in a world now of we need to we need to count carbon, unfortunately. And I don't think we can just kind of wave our hands as urbanists or active mobility advocates anymore and say it's it's it's probably the best thing for the planet.
00:39:14:05 - 00:39:16:12
Blaine Merker
We actually need to show how it is.
00:39:16:24 - 00:39:39:28
John Simmerman
Yeah. And you kind of have split this up into, you know, how we move, how we consume and how we build. And we do need to be changing and thinking about all of these areas. Obviously, I focus a lot on how we move, you know, from an active mobility perspective. But ultimately you also have to think about change, how we build and where we're living.
00:39:40:09 - 00:40:01:24
John Simmerman
And, you know, that whole built environment. Because if your land use patterns are such that you know where we are building and how that is structured, you know, it makes it very, very difficult. So looking at the typical North American suburban context of, you know, very, very far distances, it makes it that much more difficult to have transit be a viable option.
00:40:02:12 - 00:40:31:00
John Simmerman
It can be unless you have lots of those really cool pathways underneath those viaducts, it makes it very difficult to use active mobility, such as as bikes in E-scooters, although I will say that we're starting to see a really a sea change of opportunity with electric as this bicycle is being able to help us travel longer distances, then we really kind of considered in this realm, you know, just even five years ago.
00:40:31:00 - 00:41:02:12
Blaine Merker
Absolutely. And, you know, we I think there's tremendous potential for sort of the cycle superhighway e-bike infrastructure, like combining these long distance with with electric electric electric bikes and really just kind of changing the commute because this is often I think the commute is the one thing that is pretty hard to deal with as a as a local transportation issue because people work where they need to work and people work regionally.
00:41:02:18 - 00:41:25:20
Blaine Merker
And, you know, you may be able to shift someone's, you know, shopping shopping routine to maybe a local store, but it's very hard to tell someone or you have to work in your neighborhood. You know, that's just like not that's not really viable. So we really need to think about, I think electric electric bikes, great sort of cycling superhighways.
00:41:25:25 - 00:41:56:02
Blaine Merker
You see these in Denmark and the Netherlands and in Germany now much more. I think these greenways that they were showing have a real potential to be that. And then the other piece is transit and sort of having regional transit be connected to those cycle superhighways is just a magical unlock. All of a sudden you've got regional mobility, you know, that is active and human centered and you're not asking anybody to do something impossible, you know, which is be late for work.
00:41:56:18 - 00:42:24:01
John Simmerman
Yeah. One of the things that I'd love to, you know, kind of do is, is talk a little bit more about I just mentioned it in passing there of the built environment and more density into our everyday life and and having it be sort of in that context of softer density or gentle density. And in fact to promote another book here.
00:42:24:01 - 00:43:03:23
Blaine Merker
We've got a lot of books at Gallaudet that we Yeah, this is yeah, this is my colleague David Simm, who who worked on this book for a couple of years at Gehl. And we actually used I mean, this is sort of, you know, David put this together as, as a combination of decades of thought about how to take some of the principles of, you know, really that we sort of had applied to public space, which is like humanness and watching how people really use space and kind of the the the gentler details that make a city kind and try and apply it to density and housing.
00:43:03:23 - 00:43:24:07
Blaine Merker
So, you know, this this is the same these four diagrams are the same amount of density, right? You can you can have density in so many different ways in our vocabulary, in the US, around density, we sort of understand the single family home and then we understand the top left idea, which is a sort of as high as.
00:43:24:10 - 00:43:26:04
John Simmerman
It may be, and maybe the top right.
00:43:27:03 - 00:43:33:28
Blaine Merker
And maybe, maybe the top right. But this is, you know, when you get people kind of who are afraid of height and density, this is the image that they have. Right.
00:43:34:06 - 00:43:37:05
John Simmerman
Especially this right next to their single family home.
00:43:37:07 - 00:43:50:05
Blaine Merker
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And I can I can talk to you about what we're dealing with here in Berkeley around, you know, densification in single family neighborhoods. It's it's a it's a really loud live and scary conversation for a lot of people.
00:43:50:05 - 00:44:19:27
John Simmerman
I mean, it's it's alive and scary conversation that's happening everywhere. I mean, it kind of bubbles up in terms of that even here in in Austin, Texas. The reason why our land use code reform never went through is because of just what you just said, is that that gut reaction, that fear and some of the misinformation that gets that spread, that what we're talking about is either of the two on the top there, you know, either the left or the right, without any appreciation that you know.
00:44:19:28 - 00:44:27:19
John Simmerman
Oh, by the way, you know, maybe that bottom right guy. Gosh, guys, you know, that's that's kind of Paris, you know that.
00:44:27:21 - 00:44:44:27
Blaine Merker
Exactly. Yeah. And it's a sort of I guess the the thing I want to be an evangelist for here and I think David would say this, too, is is you can have your cake and eat it. I mean, so actually if you if you sort of go back to the to the last image there. So, you know, the top is this kind of maybe a typical American.
00:44:45:03 - 00:45:14:19
Blaine Merker
It's like parking, you know, parking lot, apartment building. Right. Which is you've got a you've got a vertical access core in the center and then you've got light on one side. You've got the two units to off to either side. People don't like living with light on one side. The reason we one of the reasons we love single family home so much more identify with them is that they they have light on two sides so every room kind of feels airy and there's actually a more dense urban form that gives you light on two sides, which is thinner buildings and courtyard blocks.
00:45:15:00 - 00:45:48:20
Blaine Merker
And I know that you've had other guests on the show that have talked about this, too. And it's it's, I think, something that we're moving towards, just starting to explore in the U.S. California is reexamining its it's building code to allow for some of the changes that would unlock light on two sides buildings. But I guess, you know, there's a few interconnected ideas here, which is that, number one, dense amenities strung along streets and bike lanes and our mobility system, those dense amenities make the transportation system work.
00:45:48:24 - 00:45:57:29
Blaine Merker
When you have something like this, you can you can put the best park in the world in the center of a sea of asphalt, and someone will drive from that house. You know, over on.
00:45:57:29 - 00:45:59:25
John Simmerman
The lower left, we have to drive to.
00:46:00:00 - 00:46:02:25
Blaine Merker
Park, which is why we just don't want, you know, for well, you.
00:46:02:25 - 00:46:24:16
John Simmerman
Know. Yes. And anything else. I had that conversation, you know, in talking with the Trust for Public Land about their ten minute, you know, Park initiative is that everybody should be within, you know, a ten minute walk out of a park. And it and I kind of said, well, at will and or also, you know, within an easy bike ride, too, which was kind of a you know, look at that.
00:46:24:23 - 00:46:52:06
John Simmerman
And then let's have those parks have had these places not be places where you feel like the only way you can get there safely is is by driving there. And, you know, are these parks, you know, situated in such a way and these open spaces and green spaces, etc., situated so that, you know, there's amenities there that can accommodate somebody showing up on a bike, you know, is there a place to lock the are there, you know, other comfort facilities there?
00:46:52:14 - 00:47:19:10
John Simmerman
But really, you know, getting to your point here of what we're talking about is this gentler density of create eating. You know, this is a blending of both architecture and landscape architecture things, human dynamics, because we're creating a sociable city. And this is what was really, really exciting about that book. And it's it also this is how it manifests.
00:47:19:10 - 00:47:35:29
John Simmerman
This is what it looks like when you start to understand that, you know, it's all about creating more livable, high quality, so more sociable, which, oh, by the way, are also good for active mobility. And oh, by the way, are also good for the climate.
00:47:36:25 - 00:47:56:12
Blaine Merker
Yeah, and good for, you know, small business and good for people hanging out and getting to know each other. I mean, this is a photograph that I, I like to call this sort of a magical adjacency, which is that you've got a place to to get a beer over on the right. It's a little little shack with like beer and snacks.
00:47:56:23 - 00:48:14:04
Blaine Merker
And then there's the picnic tables. There's no one driving on this this road in between. Although I think you can drive on if you have a delivery, you can drive on it, but it's basically a sort of safe street. And then you've got a park. And so, you know, as a dad of two young kids like to run around, they do not want to hang out and sit with me while I talk to my friends.
00:48:14:04 - 00:48:30:20
Blaine Merker
They want to go run. I want to sit and talk to my friends. So there's this magical thing that happens if you're if you're me as a sort of middle aged dad drinking a beer is that I can watch my kids and they can be safe and I can have an adult conversation in the US. So this is in Denmark and in Copenhagen.
00:48:31:22 - 00:48:54:00
Blaine Merker
In the US, what we have are these kind of atomized versions of this. Like we've got that park that you showed last slide and then you've got the bar which is somewhere else, or the beer garden, which is somewhere else. And then you've got, you know, you're you're sort of socializing and doing different things with different people, all happen in different places and you have to drive to each one of them.
00:48:54:13 - 00:49:05:02
Blaine Merker
So I think the magic is when you put things that you sort of don't necessarily belong together or may be in zoning together on the plan and then you can just stay longer and it's a much nicer experience.
00:49:05:23 - 00:49:37:26
John Simmerman
And to be clear to, you know, this this particular type of facility, the larger parks and the recreational fields and sport facilities, those totally exist in in the Netherlands and totally exist in Denmark and all these other locations. And so you're going to have these larger types of environments know that exist out there. The key is, is that you can get there by transit and you can get there by biking as well as many people can get there by walking, too.
00:49:37:26 - 00:50:19:14
John Simmerman
So but what we're really talking about here is this mixing of having more opportunities in this gentle higher density, which supports active mobility and having more opportunities for some greenspace and smaller parks, really brings back the whole Parkland idea to trying to reclaim yellow asphalt and trying to de pave, if you will, and maybe building things into you know, if you have infill development, you know, things, maybe you're tearing down a whole bunch of, you know, old structures or whatever and rebuilding you can use sort of this concept that we see visualized here.
00:50:20:18 - 00:50:40:19
Blaine Merker
I think the key is bringing safety, especially for, you know, for kids or if you're sort of socializing with people in your immediate neighborhood, bringing that sense of safety and enclosure and protection from traffic to a very accessible location. So, you know, this is a courtyard view. I think this is an Airbnb that I was I was staying in recently.
00:50:40:19 - 00:51:05:12
Blaine Merker
And, you know, you'll see in the sort of in the courtyard is where there is this great green space in a lot of these these these courtyard ring blocks and you know, big parks are important. You want to be able to get there, you want to build a bike there. There's there's also a scale, this kind of missing middle of landscape scale that we're missing in our cities in the US, which is where do you what do you socialize with your neighbors?
00:51:05:12 - 00:51:25:21
Blaine Merker
You know, in a single family home environment, it's your backyards. But then when we look at sort of high density in the US, there's often not a lot of communal space that's very usable or very safe. So I think what's what's what's really important here and I mean this is unlocking a space with almost zero mobility. You just walk out your door and it's right there.
00:51:26:09 - 00:51:33:13
Blaine Merker
But that's you know, that is a climate action actually. You know, any park that you don't have to drive to is a positive journey. Yeah.
00:51:33:28 - 00:52:03:05
John Simmerman
And what's really, really interesting too, about this is for some people, their resistance to change and the NIMBYism to densification, even gentle density is there. They're like, you know, no, you don't understand. We love our house, are single family home with the backyard and the privacy that we have. And so it's we're not saying that, you know, you need to do that and everybody needs to do this, but you just mentioned it in terms of missing middle.
00:52:03:05 - 00:52:37:22
John Simmerman
The point is, is that, you know, in many communities around the globe, we have not been building that missing middle step, something that where you're able to have some gentle density, you have an environment where you can share some collectively within your little pod, you know, you know, some communal space, which is really kind of cool. It reminds me a lot of Ross Chapman's pocket neighborhood, you know, designs and the reason why those are so incredibly popular is because you have a cluster of of housing around a central area.
00:52:38:02 - 00:53:02:26
John Simmerman
It creates neighborliness. You still have layers of privacy so that you can still, you know, be able to separate, separate yourself when you need a little bit more privacy. But you also have a little bit more a social cohesive oneness, which is so incredibly helpful for health and wellbeing, especially the loneliness epidemic that we have in so many of our car centric societies.
00:53:03:24 - 00:53:28:17
Blaine Merker
Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, that's just the power of those kind of weak ties to make you feel seen and know that if you don't walk by someone's window, they might start to wonder about where you are and if you're okay, you know, not everything has to be deeply intimate friendships or, you know, bonds of like deep reciprocity.
00:53:28:17 - 00:53:51:10
Blaine Merker
There's there's a there's a huge role for neighborliness. And when we see people kind of, you know, aging out of their suburban bigger house and trying to figure out where to go, they don't need all that space. What is the what is the environment that's going to to now kind of keep them hooked into society, which, you know, people people live longer in old age when they feel more socially connected.
00:53:51:17 - 00:54:07:13
Blaine Merker
And by the way, as you know, there's this great reciprocity between those folks and kids, young families coming up who can I mean, have, you know, neighbors across the street that are retired and their kids are out of the house and I'll ask them to watch my kids for a few minutes. You know, I mean, that that is magical.
00:54:07:13 - 00:54:25:07
Blaine Merker
And gosh, it's so much more human and fun to do that than to try and, like, get on a website and look for a babysitter. So, you know, there's there's a wind all around in it and it starts spatially. You know, it starts by kind of the neighborhood is sort of the rails that we put our behavior on.
00:54:25:10 - 00:54:37:23
Blaine Merker
Right. And so we we create those conditions and then our other choices then run on them later. You want to make you want to make that running of behavior super easy in the direction that you want it to go. You don't want it to be a struggle.
00:54:38:06 - 00:54:59:08
John Simmerman
Yeah. Yeah. And you channeled, you know that, right? In these photographs, you have both some of the elderly folks there in the image as well as some of the youngest. And I would even go so far as to say that, you know, in this type of an environment, in this gentle density sort of environment, you're able to have a whole stratification of those connections.
00:54:59:08 - 00:55:23:15
John Simmerman
Yes, you do have sort of the lighter ones where you're just like, you know, oh, I haven't seen him in a while or something like that. I kind of equate that to also the the the lighter version of connectivity and connections that we have when we're walking and biking and using transit. You know, it's it's like it's it's you know, I recognize.
00:55:23:15 - 00:55:45:06
John Simmerman
BLAINE Yeah. I don't know Blaine's name, but I recognize that dude. You know, he's always familiar strangers. Yeah, he's your stranger all the way up to the stratification of, you know, you start to get to know your neighbors a little better and you may, you know, end up having a in the central courtyard, you know that together. And that's that, you know, takes it to that whole nother level.
00:55:45:20 - 00:56:09:10
John Simmerman
And you also see in these images here to the infrastructure and the stratification starting to be built in to help support active mobility. So you have your your little, you know, bike garage here that's been put together for the residents so that they're not feeling like they have to drag a bike up into their apartments or their condos or their apartment.
00:56:09:10 - 00:56:37:13
Blaine Merker
And, you know, that image on the left, what's going on there is in that courtyard, there is a there's actually a parking garage underground. So there is a place to park the the stairwell. An elevator into the building pops into the courtyard. It doesn't pop into the building. Right. So in an American apartment building, the elevator from the parking garage would take you right up to your your your floor and your door.
00:56:37:13 - 00:56:55:06
Blaine Merker
And so you don't have an opportunity to see any of your neighbors unless they live on your floor. When you go up in this in this design, you actually need to come through the courtyard. You pass the bikes so you get this, you know, this social journey into the into the in the building and maybe maybe don't meet anyone.
00:56:55:06 - 00:57:19:21
Blaine Merker
Maybe you do. But I think there's sort of this recognition that it's important to have a public entry where you can see people. It's not all about efficiency. And, you know, there's nothing there's nothing wrong with walking outside for 15 seconds. You know, it's it's you know, the tradeoff is worth it. So these little details like that are just like we you know, we could learn so much from them.
00:57:19:21 - 00:57:36:20
Blaine Merker
And I think it's it's really about kind of starting from this place of, yeah, we're trying to maximize for density. We're trying to make, you know, get a lot of people into this building. We're also trying to optimize for sociability, too. I think if you approach it as a as a designer with that in mind, it starts to point you towards towards certain decisions.
00:57:36:20 - 00:57:56:23
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I actually do want to go back to, to this series of photos because there's there's two more that I want to emphasize and it is kind of this kind of exemplifies that interaction that we were just talking about where, you know, these chance interactions, you know, can happen very, very organically.
00:57:56:23 - 00:58:20:16
Blaine Merker
Yeah, that's right. This is this is some variance from I think Sweden. And then there's I think the the the one in the lower right might be in Germany or Austria. But you know, it's just it's important to think about informality and and sort of there's a few things happening in these humble photos which is you're actually sophisticated in terms of the design.
00:58:20:16 - 00:58:41:04
Blaine Merker
But you know, there's a private space and there are these cues to where the private space transitions and there's a transition zone. And then the interior of the courtyard is a controlled semi-private space. It's some of them are open to the public, some of them are not. But it is a you know, it's signaled as a community space.
00:58:41:04 - 00:59:03:12
Blaine Merker
So as humans, we're very attuned to who we know and who we don't know. And that needs to sort of be reflected in the built environment. So you can think of all of these these building edges and courtyards as being technology for fostering and maintaining good, you know, social relationships, good community relationships. We need boundaries, right? We know we don't want to.
00:59:03:25 - 00:59:24:05
Blaine Merker
I mean, one of the things you do see a lot of us apartments is, you know, you have sort of a token decorative courtyard, sort of a sort of a smoking porch or, you know, Juliet balcony right off of, you know, and it's not very private. You know, it's maybe the who wants to live like right, right there, you know, in full view of everyone.
00:59:24:05 - 00:59:40:11
Blaine Merker
So you do need some some delineation of that of that private realm. But it needs to be permeable, too. And I think there's something really magical about being able to go kind of right from your dining room outside and then go grill like, you know, outside with your neighbors.
00:59:41:02 - 01:00:05:03
John Simmerman
I'm grinning ear to ear because these are literally the same words that Ross Chapman used in in the video that I produced highlighting pocket neighborhoods and talking about those layers and that transition in the permeability and, you know, the sociability that goes with that. So I'll make sure I put a link to that video in this this, you know, podcast episode as well.
01:00:05:22 - 01:00:07:29
John Simmerman
Talk a little bit about what we're looking at here.
01:00:08:22 - 01:00:29:11
Blaine Merker
Yeah, this is an image of Bow oh one in Sweden and the open door there is to my my colleague Abe of Esther Mark's apartment. And when I'm when I'm in town I usually, you know, when I'm in Copenhagen I usually call up and invite myself over for a beer and a swim in the in the ocean next to her house.
01:00:29:11 - 01:00:46:08
Blaine Merker
And I just, you know, I just like this photo because it's it's just simple. I mean, it's there's not a lot going on in it. I mean, there's a cap, but you can drive on the street if you can believe it, if you if you want to get you know, if you want to unload a sofa or something, you can get it down there.
01:00:46:12 - 01:01:13:07
Blaine Merker
And it's like super hard to drive down the street. And I asked Eva one time because she's an architect, and I think she actually worked on this project back in the day. And so one is a maybe we can we can put a link to the to the project in the show notes or something. But it's it's a seminal sort of exposition neighborhood that was designed in Sweden to kind of test out a lot of these ideas around around new building types and courtyards and community.
01:01:13:18 - 01:01:36:04
Blaine Merker
And I asked I asked Eva, you know, what how did you guys get this Through the fire department and she's like, It was hard, actually. We had to clip the buildings in different places and but we just kind of knew we wanted really small streets, so we just worked really hard at it and anyway, you know, she just leaves the door open and neighbors walk by and it's her kids kind of run around out there and stuff.
01:01:36:04 - 01:01:41:18
Blaine Merker
So it's it's all about having this like super informal space outside your house.
01:01:42:17 - 01:02:00:20
John Simmerman
I'm so glad you mentioned that about the, you know, the fire department and all that, because oftentimes it just gets kind of, you know, oh, it's a Europe, they can do stuff and we just can't do it because, you know, our fire departments won't let us do it. And and it's like, oh, well, you know, it's like, no, sometimes it's hard for them to do it, too.
01:02:00:20 - 01:02:24:07
John Simmerman
And you have to, you know, have that negotiation and those compromises that take place. But yeah, we honestly, we shouldn't be designing our communities and our streets, you know, for the size of the equipment that we have, we probably should be looking at ways to be able to do the opposite. Yeah. And like the pieces that we want and need and then look at the equipment.
01:02:24:14 - 01:02:45:14
Blaine Merker
Yeah, I you know, I am I am here in Berkeley. We're having a controversy about putting bike lanes on a on a shopping street. And there are tough questions about, you know, the fire equipment that can go down the street. And of course, that becomes a wedge issue with people who oppose bike lanes for all kinds of funny reasons.
01:02:45:26 - 01:03:04:28
Blaine Merker
You know, it's it's politically impossible to say we're not going to, you know, let a fire truck come down the street. Right. I mean, it's that's sort of it is it is kryptonite for for bike lanes. You don't want to get into that territory. But I think one of the, you know, the trickier conversations is like, look, bike lanes are a public safety issue, too.
01:03:04:28 - 01:03:30:10
Blaine Merker
You know, one is an acute you know, emergency access is an acute safety issue. Bike lanes are a systemic long term safety issue. A lot of the calls that fire trucks are actually going to serve are injuries on our streets. So we got to link up these conversations. And when you talk to fire officials, you know, for the most part, actually, these are people who are deeply committed to saving lives, protecting people, protecting protecting communities.
01:03:30:10 - 01:03:46:11
Blaine Merker
So, you know, that's that's very much the starting point. And I think we're we're still we're wrestling with the reality of bigger and bigger fire vehicles, you know, which just makes the equation harder. But it should really be about, you know, a general public safety conversation.
01:03:47:04 - 01:04:11:06
John Simmerman
And I'll give a shout out to, you know, our fire chief here in in Austin. You know, he came with us on a study tour to the Netherlands in 2019. And, you know, we went out of our way to stop at several of the fire stations there in the Netherlands. And, you know, he had, you know, some hard questions, you know, about the size of the equipment, the number of people that they were able to deploy to a call.
01:04:11:26 - 01:04:30:29
John Simmerman
So ultimately, the bottom line is, is that, you know, where there's a will, there's a way and we can be able to, I think, downsize the size of our streets and create more people oriented dimensions, more human centered dimensions so that they're safer and more inviting for everybody.
01:04:31:07 - 01:04:50:03
Blaine Merker
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and hey, never we should never lose sight of the fact that we are usually having these tough conversations about geometry in the U.S. by working around parked cars. So there's there's almost always, you know, eight or nine more feet you can get for the fire department if you get rid of if you get rid of parking.
01:04:50:13 - 01:04:57:09
John Simmerman
Right, right, right. Well, we've come to our end. What have we not talked about that you really want to leave the audience with?
01:04:59:05 - 01:05:29:02
Blaine Merker
Well, you know, I. I am currently thinking a lot about how all the things we just talked about enable a certain emissions profile for for residents of cities and, you know, if you maybe we can we can put a link to this in in the show. You know there's there's a great study that was posted in The New York Times a few weeks ago, kind of showing the carbon intensity of different neighborhoods.
01:05:29:02 - 01:06:07:11
Blaine Merker
And the you know, the spoiler alert is that, yeah, if you if you live in a dense, walkable neighborhood, your carbon footprint is a lot lower than someone who doesn't. I mean, I think we know this, that the modeling data actually really shows that and UC Berkeley team same research organization that is behind these maps looked at what is the number one policy that your city can implement to lower its carbon footprint and for most dense areas with transit that policy is infill or transit oriented development and reducing VMT.
01:06:07:16 - 01:06:32:01
Blaine Merker
It is more than heat pumps. It's more than changing your diet. It's more than even in some cases electrification, which is obviously all this is a both and yes and all these things. But when we think about priorities, when you think about the levers to putting behavior on rails and getting it to go where you want it to go, behavior is a huge lever.
01:06:32:01 - 01:06:58:16
Blaine Merker
It's a huge scaling lever. Right? We need to be thinking about neighborhoods and neighborhood design and mobility design as as one of these big levers. So, you know, I think this this is it's a it's a huge opportunity to kind of overlay two winds on top of each other. We can create neighborhoods that are safer, more fun, make us happier, make us more connected, healthier.
01:06:58:16 - 01:07:24:15
Blaine Merker
All those things that we know we know walking and cycling do for us. And we can be showing the way to a more climate positive, lower emissions future. So to me it's like, why wouldn't we be doing both of these things all the time? It's it's a clear win. And that's kind of the argument that I intend to keep making out there over the next few few years in this kind of urgent moment where we need both of these things to happen.
01:07:24:29 - 01:07:45:05
John Simmerman
Yeah, Yeah. So I'm listening to Greta's book right now, the climate Book, and obviously we just got a report out this week, not a very good report on the climate issue. Do you want to address that at all? Because I feel as if we're sort of like hacking at at the branches of evil and not getting to the root of the problem.
01:07:45:05 - 01:07:51:24
John Simmerman
And we're not moving with the sense of urgency that we really need to be moving at.
01:07:51:24 - 01:08:17:17
Blaine Merker
You know, it's tough. I mean, I we all we all are looking at what's happening and realizing that we are not making the progress that we need to be making at the speed we need to make it. And I, I don't have an easy answer to that. I think we all come to this this kind of reality that's in our heads that, you know, maybe keeps us up at night.
01:08:18:08 - 01:08:52:26
Blaine Merker
I, I see colleagues who are changing careers like monthly. You know, I hear about another colleague who's trying to move into the climate space because they are just asking themselves, So what am I doing? What am I doing with this with this unique moment in human history where our actions matter so much? So, you know, I don't I don't have I don't have the answer of how to make this move faster politically at the sort of level that it needs to happen, you know, in the US and globally.
01:08:53:11 - 01:09:22:24
Blaine Merker
But I personally feel that we you know, I want to be sort of working with every fiber of my my being in the way that I know how, which is designing neighborhoods and just sort of aligning that with what needs to be done. And I think that that actually kind of sends a message culturally to our community when we see people doing that, when we see like, Hey, there's not that time to be doing anything else, like you should still do what you know how to do.
01:09:22:24 - 01:09:36:08
Blaine Merker
I'm not going to change careers and become an atmospheric scientist, but I am going to sort of go deeper and commit myself more to this idea of active, active streets and neighborhoods because it's what I can do. It's how I can help.
01:09:36:26 - 01:09:58:07
John Simmerman
You know, and I'll say this on behalf of, you know, the content that I'm creating, I don't typically lead with climate issues. You know, here on the Active Towns channel, I usually lead with, you know, images of, you know, positivity and and that this is possible and we can move forward. But I will say this we need to move with much more of a sense of urgency.
01:09:58:07 - 01:10:19:21
John Simmerman
We need to make things happen. And if we have to, we can we can do what. We are seeing here on the screen in these images, we can move lighter, quicker, cheaper. We can make this happen very, very quickly. What we're talking about here really is redefining space that's already been paved and we're just making some tweaks to be able to do that.
01:10:19:26 - 01:11:01:23
John Simmerman
You can always come back later and make it beautiful from the architect's perspective and from the landscape design perspective and from the water quality management perspective, We can bring in your rain gardens later in permeability. We can do all these things later, but we need to move quickly and we're running out of time. So I think that, you know, ultimately I know how hard it is because block by block, you know, you've got endless meetings and things and people are rightfully so concerned about what happens in their in their spaces, their public realm, their streets, their parking spot in front of their home.
01:11:01:23 - 01:11:28:17
John Simmerman
These are all concerns and legitimate concerns. And in some neighborhoods, some communities that have been, shall we say, you know, disinvest in and ignored or even had, you know, bad things happen to them by the government, they're very distrustful of things happening from upon high and then coming down. But we need to see change of movement happening, leadership from above, but also from the ground up.
01:11:28:17 - 01:11:51:10
John Simmerman
And so that would be my you know, sort of, you know, motivational pitch to this episode to close this out is, yeah, we do need to move quickly and we do need to speak up as members, our community get together with your neighbors, start talking about these issues and start, you know, thinking about ways that we can do this kind of stuff in a lighter, quicker, cheaper manner.
01:11:51:10 - 01:12:24:19
Blaine Merker
Yeah. And I think it it's it's you know, you get so many different benefits for different reasons when you when you do make those changes. And I think, you know, bringing in the climate, the climate argument, it helps convince some other people maybe that weren't on board before. And that's that's my hope is that we can by showing how, you know, safety, happiness, exercise, can action overlap with climate action, you're making the tent bigger and you're giving you're giving sort of more wind in the sales than than there was before.
01:12:24:19 - 01:12:30:04
Blaine Merker
So I look at that as a good thing and just kind of bringing kind of more people into the conversation.
01:12:30:04 - 01:12:34:10
John Simmerman
I love it. Blaine Merkur, thank you so much for joining me on the Active Towns podcast today.
01:12:35:05 - 01:12:38:01
Blaine Merker
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been great and I really enjoyed it.
01:12:38:08 - 01:12:53:13
John Simmerman
Hey, thank you all so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Blaine Merkur and if you did, please give the thumbs up. Leave a comment down below and share it with a friend. Most importantly, share it with a friend. We do need to spread these messages and if you haven't done so already, I'd be honored to have you subscribe to the channel.
01:12:53:13 - 01:13:15:29
John Simmerman
Just click on this subscription button down below, ring the notifications bell right next to it so that you can customize your notification preferences. I have another episode coming up real soon. So until then, this is John signing off by wishing you much activity, health and happiness. Cheers. And again sending a huge thank you to all my active town's ambassadors supporting the channel on Patron Buy me a coffee YouTube super.
01:13:15:29 - 01:13:34:10
John Simmerman
Thanks. As well as making a contribution to the nonprofit and purchasing things from the active town store, every little bit adds up and it's much appreciated. Thank you all so much.