SPEAKER_04: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Some companies are big, others are small. To Robert Half, their hiring needs are equally huge. At Robert Half, our specialized recruiting professionals elevate their expertise with proprietary A.I. tools to transform candidate discovery, assessment, and selection. Whether sourcing talent locally or in any geography that works for you, Robert Half can pinpoint hard to find candidates in finance and accounting, technology, marketing and creative, legal, and administrative and customer support. At Robert Half, we know talent. Learn more at roberthalf.com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. There's this idea in city planning called informal urbanism. Some people call it do-it-yourself urbanism. Basically, informal urbanism covers all the ways people try to change their community that isn't through city planning or some kind of official process. If you think about it, this probably happens a lot where you live. If you put up a homemade sign warning people not to sit on a broken bench or that a parking meter isn't working, that's DIY urbanism. If you put out a set of cones or a chair to reserve yourself your own personal parking spot on a public street, you are a bad person. But that is also DIY urbanism. Gordon Douglas has written a whole book about this idea. It's called The Help Yourself City. It looks at all the ways people are taking matters into their own hands, both for good reasons and for incredibly selfish ones. He's local to Oakland so he came in here to 99PIHQ and we had a great conversation all about the joy and chaos of DIY urbanism. And we started out by talking about one of the most perfect examples of the good kind of DIY urbanism. A municipal failure that led to a DIY intervention and then to real permanent change. The Hellgate Bridge in Queens, New York.
SPEAKER_03: Well, so the Hellgate Bridge is this kind of enormous feat of engineering that was built to be one of the single strongest sort of structures in the known world at the time that it was built. I read once if all human life ceased to exist, it would still stand for some hundreds and hundreds of years with no maintenance whatsoever, right? The Hellgate Bridge is also a big kind of clunky old piece of infrastructure. It's a railroad bridge. It had started to leak and crack and have little maintenance issues. Not the sort that were going to cause any danger to anybody, but it was leaking all over the place down under its viaducts where normal New Yorkers were going about their days in Queens walking under these old archways. And in particular, a lot of folks in this part of Astoria noticed that there was this kind of scum, they called it, some sort of effluence kind of coming down out of the leak in the bridge. That was probably just kind of rainwater runoff trickling through a century of steel and other sort of stuff. And rust and made it kind of nasty.
SPEAKER_04: And it was gross and it was running across the sidewalk.
SPEAKER_03: And so when it froze, it was super dangerous and slippery. And when it was warm out, it was just gross and green and kind of slimy. A handful of neighborhood folks got together with a couple other people and basically built a small bridge to go over this effluence.
SPEAKER_04: So it's a tiny bridge underneath the gigantic bridge just so pedestrians can walk over this river of scum that comes off of the bridge. Which they call the Astoria Scum River Bridge.
SPEAKER_03: And like how wide are we talking about this?
SPEAKER_04: The bridge? Oh, the Scum River. I think it probably varies, but I think an athletic person could leap over it.
SPEAKER_04: And so why wasn't the city handling the Scum River? Like who was responsible for the Scum River?
SPEAKER_03: Well, so there was a bit of, as is often the case with this kind of stuff, there's a bit of a lack of clarity in terms of who's responsible. Because some railroad company built this thing, along with the early public works folks of New York City and all that. And then that street down there is the problem of the New York City Department of Transportation. So I think there was no clear answer. I also don't think that it was clear even who you might begin to complain about something like a leaky bridge to. And it caught a little bit of attention. It was actually very quickly responded to by the local councilman who wrote a letter thanking them for their good citizenship. And in fact it was repaired quite quickly and has ceased to be an issue and the DIY bridge was dismantled. Right. And so this so embarrassed Amtrak that they decided that they were going to fix it. And they did.
SPEAKER_04: Whatever repairs, which were probably minor, that were needed, were made.
SPEAKER_03: The city council was pleased to have affected some change and made some people's lives better.
SPEAKER_04: And then they dismantled the bridge.
SPEAKER_03: And then Jason and Poster Child and the other kind of folks who had done it dismantled it. Yeah. So you call these kind of interventions informal urbanism.
SPEAKER_04: But for informal urbanism to exist, we have to talk about the rise of kind of urbanism in general. So how new is the concept of urban planning in an urbanism sort of context? You know it's really hard to pin a date on some of this stuff.
SPEAKER_03: But we know that planning as a sort of professional vocation comes around along with a whole bunch of other professions in 18th and 19th centuries as cities kind of become more organized and science in general becomes more kind of rationalized. And you could look at ancient Rome and find analogs. And certainly there were aspects of planning always. But the idea that we might have a professional planner goes back to sort of 17th and 18th centuries as we started to deal with kind of chaotic cities. And the way that the planning profession understands itself is even more recent as a reaction to the sort of chaos of the late 19th century city. You know the London of Dickens right these massive complicated in many ways terrible places right where there was a great deal of inequality and a great deal of suffering. So planning as a profession especially in the American context emerges as a kind of response to social problems in the city and the idea that we can kind of rationalize this. And so then you have it becoming increasingly professionalized you have the first sort of programs to train urban planners in the in the early 20th century first official programs in urban design as recently as like the 50s and 60s. And so while the city has always been this organic complicated human made project I think it does become increasingly professionalized in the 19th and 20th centuries the idea especially in the global north especially in North America. It became kind of increasingly surprising that somebody might take something like this into their own hands right because it had become such somebody else's job.
SPEAKER_04: Do these interventions happen because there's a lack of planning or because there's bad planning or what brings this on.
SPEAKER_03: People are out there living their lives in real public spaces real urban spaces in ways that a city planning department can't hope to. Yeah. Even if everybody lives in town right like they don't they don't walk the same streets the same way everybody does they don't think about whether this curb is a little too high for a kid on a bike to get up. Yeah you know it's a complex system so it's like hard like you can't really fault someone for not knowing every permutation of a complex system.
SPEAKER_04: Right. Yeah no totally and I mean the vast majority of this sort of infrastructure and stuff that planners work really hard to get built including quite progressive pieces of you know bicycle facilities and things like that are are wonderful and can't get done by me and my neighbor and a shovel.
SPEAKER_03: Right. But. But there's also stuff that people notice. I mean one of the things I mentioned kind of quickly is there's a street in Brooklyn near where I used to live where trucks were constantly parking on the sidewalk. In fact that happens all over Brooklyn. It happens all over many cities. But if you're on a narrow street and you are making a delivery you might think like actually the best move for me here is going to be to pull up onto this sidewalk to unload all my crap and not block the street anymore. But it was damaging the sidewalk and bothering pedestrians and whatever. And so somebody who I eventually tracked down worked in one of the local stores there had just made a sign that looked as professional as you can do with paint you know with your own materials. They just said no parking on the sidewalk. Right. And it looked exactly like the one the city would put up if it were except for that it wasn't on vinyl and it was like you know it was just on cardboard or something like that. But they weren't trying to do anything cute. It was just an effort to stop people from parking on the sidewalk. And I see tons of that stuff and it does get cute sometimes where they'll put DIY instead of the department DOT for the Department of Transportation. That was what some of these folks in Los Angeles who were painting their own bike lanes were doing.
SPEAKER_04: And so who are the people generally carrying out these kinds of interventions?
SPEAKER_03: I think that anybody living in a neighborhood has maybe some moments where they feel like oh I could fix that or maybe I should fix that. And I don't want to I am always careful to sort of remind people I'm speaking to that we clean our streets ourselves right we sweep out front of our business if we're a business owner or we at least are supposed to keep up a sidewalk and do that kind of stuff. People put up signs in their neighborhoods about locks cats.
SPEAKER_03: And people do tons of things to make their neighborhoods themselves. They also write graffiti all over the place and create roadside memorials and do all sorts of things like that. And I think that that stuff is just widespread across all cultures and classes and whatever. But I did find that most of the people creating the sort of visible do it yourself urban design interventions those that really seem to be reflecting urban planning ideals and the sort of things that the city might really should be doing. City might not agree that they should be doing it but people view it as the sort of thing a city could do even if you can tell in one glance that the city had nothing to do with it because it looks so scrappy. It's trying to kind of do that. Trying to make a statement of its existence is making a statement. Sure. Yeah. The more and more people I talk to who are doing this. Once you get beyond people who are maybe just kind of repairing a pothole in their front yard or something like that I found that the vast majority of people doing this looked like me. They were predominantly white. They were predominantly male. And a lot of them had backgrounds in design and planning and or at least some sort of professional education. And the additional point that I would make here is that a lot of them as a result of all that and other things had quite a bit of privilege that they were kind of aware that they had that I think whether they were thinking about it explicitly or not makes it a heck of a lot easier to go out and feel comfortable at 3 in the morning painting a bike lane down the street or climbing a light post to hang up a sign. Let alone impersonating a public works employee with an orange vest and wearing a hat and doing all this kind of stuff that many of the folks I interviewed did. Once you hit that kind of level of active kind of DIY urbanism practice on the streets they were overwhelmingly wonderfully intelligent and well-meaning but very sort of privileged and somewhat hubristic folks.
SPEAKER_04:
SPEAKER_04: You could interpret that two ways. One is that you could go this represents a type of privilege that people should be mindful of. You know the hubris that you mentioned but also I think it's incumbent on people with privilege to take action when that's what privileges should be for rather than just resting and profiting. So you could take that as the other alternative. For the most part when we tell these stories of tactical urbanism and formal urbanism they're fun and they kind of have a quality of being sort of just good unalloyed good. You know fixing the Scum River problem is great but interventions can have sort of a solipsism and selfishness to them. Could you tell me about the bus stop in Seattle?
SPEAKER_03: So that's a great example of somebody who was in a sense well-meaning. The story is that this man I know was living in Seattle and had begun to notice that trash was piling up at the bus stop outside near his house. And he was frustrated by all this garbage and constantly feeling like he had to clean it up or walk over it and he realized that you know the city had failed to provide a trash can at the city provided bus stop. So he's emailing the city and calling the city but after months and months of hearing nothing and realizing and to his mind there was just no chance they were ever in a response to that. So he went out in the middle of the night with a bolt cutter and just cut off the bus stop and threw it in the bushes. And this is just like one of these like kind of eight foot poles that just says bus stop.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah bus number whatever. It wasn't like a bench or a little shelter or anything. It's just a pole that had a bus stop number on it. Right. So he cut the whole pole down and threw it in the bushes. You know he pointed out to me that for instance there was another bus stop not too far up the road.
SPEAKER_03: Why wasn't it his impulse to put a trash can there?
SPEAKER_04: That's a great question. So I asked him that. I said well why if you were going to go to all this trouble why not.
SPEAKER_03: And he said oh I thought about that. He had a whole design he was going to get a little like a chicken wire thing kind of wrap it around the door. But he he pointed out probably quite rightly that the city would not know it was there and nobody would come empty that garbage can out and so he'd be still stuck emptying out his garbage which you know you could argue is better than removing a bus stop. So he removes the bus stop. The bus stop stopping there which is amazing to me that the that the bus driver is looking for those cues in the environment and doesn't know to stop there if there is no sign.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah I mean it's not like I don't I don't believe they stopped immediately but I think over time.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah but then you know the city came in and put another bus stop in and he decided not to remove it.
SPEAKER_04: I mean the kindest act which might be too onerous and I don't want to empty city trash either is to put a trash can there and then empty the trash can. But that type of act strikes me as a privilege taken too far.
SPEAKER_03: Sure I mean there are also I mean to take a more extreme example there are people who paint red curbs gray to create parking spaces for themselves right. Put trash cans on top of fire hydrants to create parking spaces that appear to be legal. I spent quite a bit of time learning about these variety of Malibu homeowners who have been trying to stop people from using the public access to the beach in Malibu through all sorts of stuff that is essentially the more antisocial equivalent of all the stuff we've been talking about there. They're putting up gates they're putting up signs that say private beach they're hiring private security.
SPEAKER_04: But a bike lane is like you were putting it there for the benefit of hopefully lots of lots of bicyclers but blocking off a beach in Malibu or painting your own private curb right is really just for yourself. Yeah it is. I mean some of these interventions are even more complicated in terms of just like being you know either selfish or selfless I mean another one of these that I thought was really interesting was the DIY bus benches in Los Angeles that they're put there to fix the lack of public seating because a lot of the times advertisements pay for the public seating in the places that the population doesn't have as desirable to advertisers then there's no benches. And so they put in benches but that's complicated because it's not a matter of just putting in benches you actually have to take care of benches. Yeah that's right and so I should say it's now the case that there are some stipulations of like where if you're an advertising company you have to put benches.
SPEAKER_03: But yes huge amounts of Los Angeles are these kind of long stark hot boulevards where people rely heavily on the bus and there is no shelter no seat no nothing. Again all across the city people have built these benches. They're just places to sit while you're waiting for the bus. Sometimes they're just literally a chair that somebody has hauled out there or maybe found in the trash and put there. But yeah you know the point the problem with this and this goes back to just how complicated all this stuff is and whether any of these things can really be purely altruistic because once you have put something out there. Good old fashioned urban planners have to deal with it or good old fashioned street maintenance people have to deal with it. I also spoke to a lot of planners for the book and they would say you know the problem with this is that somebody is going to get a splinter in their butt at some point. And then it's going to be our problem right or whose problem at the very least if it's not our problem it's got to be somebody because this thing is going to slowly deteriorate over the winter. And the concern would be that there's not a lot of forethought. There are people out there who also just do DIY maintenance. I talked to one guy who goes out and fixes playgrounds all over the place for no recognition whatsoever. So maybe they could get together. But I think we could have a matchmaking service. That's right. And at the same time that is one of those often uncelebrated things that good old fashioned bureaucracy gets done just like ideally I mean more in some cities than in others. But theoretically the city is maintaining public infrastructure.
SPEAKER_04:
SPEAKER_04: Do sometimes these DIY interventions and what someone wants in the city and then another person wants in the city come into conflict with each other?
SPEAKER_03: So certainly I think oftentimes these things will be more reflective of one person's priority than another which is kind of again not that bureaucratic planning is perfect but at least it's ostensibly has a democratic process behind it right. For instance kind of my favorite example is in also in Brooklyn Bedford Avenue right which is one of the longest streets in New York City and had one of the longest bike lanes in New York City on it. And at a certain point it passes through the predominantly Hasidic community in South Williamsburg and the Satmar Hasidim didn't like all of the people biking through this neighborhood for a variety of reasons but pretty clearly and I think not. They didn't try to disguise this as something else. Said they didn't like that there was a lot of scantily clad young hipster types biking through their neighborhood. And they were able to get that bike lane removed for those blocks through South Williamsburg which of course incensed those in the more activist cycling community who threatened all sorts of things including a naked bike ride through the neighborhood which never actually materialized. But there was at that time a great deal of tension. This was seen as a real kind of affront to the cycling community which I think you know politics aside it was truly a major bike route. But it was gone and it was taken away legally due to the political pressure from the community that it went through. And so then you had some do it yourselfers out there in the middle of the night trying to restripe this bike lane. And they then were apprehended by the Shamrim which is the I would say DIY police force of the Hasidic community. Yeah who I mean in that community is full of DIY for lack of a better word efforts from local signage which I've seen just on all levels signage about how to park properly in the neighborhood like encouraging people to park efficiently so there's many spaces possible. I've seen that to stuff that's more controversial. There's been articles written about signage that goes up that instructs say women to walk on one side of the streets and other kinds of cultural things that are happening in that community. So their own neighborhood police force actually stopped these do it yourself bike lane folks and held them until the NYPD could come and people were arrested. And so you really did have kind of like a DIY on DIY situation. There is to the best of my knowledge there's still no bike lane through those blocks of South Williamsburg on Bedford.
SPEAKER_04:
SPEAKER_04: Gordon Douglas and I talk about the uptick in DIY urbanism and the lessons cities are taking from the movement. After this. USA for UNHCR the United Nations Refugee Agency responds to emergencies and provides long term solutions for refugees in places like Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan Sudan and many more. UNHCR supports people forced to flee from war, violence and persecution at their greatest moment of need. Every day displaced families struggle to meet basic needs like providing meals and clean water for their children. For many the last few years have been the hardest. The global repercussions of war in Ukraine leading to steep rises in the cost of basic commodities like food and fuel combined with the climate crisis and COVID-19 formed a triple threat. Because of the commitment of their compassionate donors UNHCR sends relief supplies and deploys it's highly trained staff anywhere in the world at any given time. UNHCR is able to deploy within 72 hours of a large scale emergency and jumpstart relief and protection assistance help deliver urgent aid. Your support can provide life saving care and hope for a better future. Donate to USA for UNHCR by visiting UN refugees.org slash donation.
SPEAKER_04: When you're working on the go. How can you make sure the confidential information on your laptop screen is safe from wandering eyes 3M has the answer with the new 3M bright screen privacy filter using nano louver technology 3M bright screen privacy filters deter visual hackers while providing a 25% brighter experience over other privacy filters. In fact, it's 3M's brightest privacy filter yet the perfect balance of screen clarity and visual privacy. It's a new type of privacy filter built for an era where our screens or wherever we go. Try the new 3M bright screen privacy filter and stop worrying about confidential or personal information escaping your computer screen. Everything that appears in your screen is for your eyes only. Visit 3M screens.com slash brighter to get your new 3M bright screen privacy filter today and work like no one is watching 3M screens.com slash brighter. Chances are you're listening to 99% invisible on your phone, probably while you're on the go. Think of all that you do on your phone the moment you leave your front door, whether it's looking up directions scrolling social media, or listening to your favorite podcast, it requires an amazing network. That's why you should switch to T-Mobile. T-Mobile covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else and helps keep you connected with 5G from the driveway to the highway and the miles in between, because your phone should just work where you are. It's your lifeline to pretty much everything you didn't bring with you. So next time you head out, whether you're taking a trip or going to work or just running errands remember T-Mobile has got you covered. Find out more at T-Mobile dot com slash network and switch to the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else. Coverage is not available in some areas. See 5G details at T-Mobile dot com. Why is it, do you think, that we've seen a kind of uptick in informal urbanism and do you think it says something about the way our cities are now? So I think that there are two things at play.
SPEAKER_03: One is perhaps a more organic natural reaction to how professionalized urban space had become. Simply people recognizing that not everything can be handled by this very professionalized state planning apparatus and they see stuff that they can fix. What's tied to that I think is at least over the last 10 years but even more so over the last kind of 40 we've seen a lot of ups and downs in the physical health of our cities. You have moments of this stuff in the 60s and 70s when cities were really being neglected and that's when some of the early examples, especially things like guerrilla gardening, come about in the context of a ton of vacant lots and a ton of vacancy. And again in the 2008 housing crisis and financial crisis and recession, that's when I was doing a lot of my research, was kind of on the tail end of that. I don't think that it's all a reaction to cities having no money and not being able to do it but that is a broad trend. And now in a strong economy cities don't have the money that other entities have and they have to rely on things like advertising companies to build their bus shelters. And I think that brings me to the sort of second point which is that we live in an era in which we have sort of decentralized a lot of this stuff or neoliberalized if you will a lot of our public services and a lot of the basic responsibilities for getting our cities to run and to look nice. And we rely on a developer to build a park and we rely on a developer to fund a school or whatever because we can't tax ourselves properly and we don't have the services ourselves. We don't have the resources to do it as cities. And so it kind of doesn't matter about the broader economic situation. We're just in this kind of neoliberal moment. Do it yourselfers are kind of in some ways perfect neoliberal actors. It's easy to view them as these kind of great community oriented grassroots good Samaritans. But they're also just individuals doing what they think is best and what the state isn't doing. And so they're taking it into their own hands. And that's kind of inspiring but also like the perfect example of a very individualistic society in which the state is not doing anything. And they don't have any more oversight than like a corporate developer doing some big development. And we always bemoan this idea that the state isn't regulating development enough or something like that or at least those of us on the left in planning do. And yet this is kind of a similar situation. It looks a lot smaller but there's certainly no more democratic oversight over any of these folks doing this kind of stuff. Right. You have to sort of address or you have to assess each individually if like if it conforms to your values.
SPEAKER_04:
SPEAKER_04: That's right. And that's a huge point. I mean I think we do really have to assess these individually and that's why I think that this question of kind of legitimacy is kind of more important than the question of whether or not something is formal or informal or legal or illegal.
SPEAKER_03: It's just whether it's an appropriate fit. And that's squishy. That's very difficult to deal with in planning. Right. For sure. We can begin to figure it out when we talk to people and that's why community participation is so so important whenever we're reshaping urban space publicly or formally or informally.
SPEAKER_04: Could you talk about how the formal structures of urban planning taken some of the lessons of individual interventionism to create spaces differently than they maybe used to. Like I felt like I've noticed this there used to be like what a public square was and it was very it's like columns and marble and stuff and now it's folding chairs. Have you seen the results like feedback into the formalized urban planning community. Yeah I think that's absolutely the case. And it's another part of your answer of kind of why are we seeing an uptick in this now to the extent that we are.
SPEAKER_03: I think it has less to do with there being some moments than that these tactics and in particular these aesthetics of kind of DIY culture have become very trendy and mainstream. So for instance you have really I think mainly positive urban trends toward walkability livability pedestrian public spaces complete streets and in particular trends like tactical urbanism. At every scale but all the way up to New York City's Department of Transportation employing the ideals of tactical urbanism and the aesthetics of tactical urbanism to change say Times Square from a big complicated road intersection to a very different pedestrian plaza. Right. Can you for someone who hasn't seen Times Square recently could you describe what is in Times Square right now.
SPEAKER_04: Sure. So actually right now it is becoming increasingly formalized so kind of back to your question of what it looks like. But it is now a large pedestrian plaza.
SPEAKER_03: There is a little bit of access allowed down a very narrow Broadway that's mainly good for delivery vehicles and bikes. And now just an enormous public plaza surrounded by enormous screens and advertising and all the other stuff that Times Square is about. And it really started with like folding chairs and very simple but city sanctioned intervention. Totally.
SPEAKER_04: And it was it was the DOT doing it.
SPEAKER_03: But they took this act first and ask questions later attitude of like because they knew there was a ton of opposition and they just went in there shut it down. And we see the same thing in San Francisco with the pavement to parks program. The huge proliferation of parklets now everywhere San Jose Oakland Oakland's own Latham Square was briefly attempted to be transformed in this way. Right. Could you describe the Latham Square example.
SPEAKER_04: Sure. It's a triangular flat iron sort of situation where there's a there's a very flat iron esque building in a triangular piece of land where telegraph splits away from Broadway in downtown Oakland.
SPEAKER_03: And there has been a public space there but there was this idea that they ought to shut down about a block of telegraph so that Broadway could continue straight and a new pedestrian space would open up right there. And this was actualized here in Oakland and the resulting plaza had all the kind of trappings of these contemporary tactical public spaces that we're talking about. It had a lot of reclaimed wood kind of aesthetics. It had a lot of Adirondack chairs or folding chairs of some sort. This is where you would imagine to see the ping pong table that's been brought out as a public amenity the piano that's been you know randomly appeared in a place for people to play. It's part of this broader trend of creative placemaking that is increasingly dominant in urban planning and placemaking. And I think that the spirit of tactical urbanism remains incredible which is quite simply let's act quickly and cheaply to prototype something awesome and then try to get it made more permanent. But the kind of aesthetics that have gone along with it that borrow a lot from DIY have become kind of what these places are supposed to look like. So that parklets now up and down Valencia and San Francisco have this very similar aesthetic. Most of them have bike parking. Most of them have reclaimed wood. Most of them have some sort of planter kind of a situation. They also basically serve as sidewalk cafes more than as public spaces or at least they have that potential. And I think that potential is so realized that I don't even know like there's one in the sort of gourmet ghetto area of Berkeley in front of Salls. I think of that as seating for Salls.
SPEAKER_04: But it by definition cannot be. It is a public space that anyone can sit down at. But the visual cues of that space are not that anyone can actually sit down in that. That's right. And I think that's one of the problems of the aesthetics of these types of interventions that are done by the city is that they yeah they create more public space. But what they define as the proper use of the public is coded into the language of the way the space looks to me anyway.
SPEAKER_03: On the other hand I think the cities are learning a different lesson which is that the aesthetics of this stuff are increasingly trendy. And as you pointed out they look like places of consumption not a true public space which like for better or worse a true public space is a place that I can roll up with my shopping cart and just sit there. If that's all I've got and I can throw up protest and I can I don't know do all the other stuff that you're supposed to do in public space. And if they don't look like that and they serve much more to just catalyze local economic development or sell overpriced coffee. Then that's not the best lesson I think for how we should be remaking our public spaces.
SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much for talking. I really enjoyed it.
SPEAKER_04: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_04: Gordon Douglas's book is called The Help Yourself City. Get it. You'll like it.
SPEAKER_04: Ninety nine percent invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube and Kurt Kohlstedt. Music by Sean Real. Katie Mingle is the senior producer. The rest of the team is senior editor Delaney Hall, Sharife Yousif, Avery Truffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Lee, Sophia Klatsker, Joe Rosenberg and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 K A L W in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. Ninety nine percent invisible is a member of radio topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radio topia. FM. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 P I org. We're on Instagram and Reddit, too. But we have links and pictures to the DIY urbanism projects we talked about on this episode at 99 P I dot org. Radio topia.
SPEAKER_02: From PRX.
SPEAKER_04: Great sleep can be hard to come by these days, and finding the right mattress feels totally overwhelming. Serta's new and improved perfect sleeper is a simple solution designed to support all sleep positions with zoned comfort, memory foam and a cool to the touch cover. The sort of perfect sleeper means more restful nights and more rested days. Find your comfort at sort of dot com.
SPEAKER_00: Your heart is at the heart of everything you do. And if you have heart failure, there's interest. Oh, so Kubitro, Valsartan tablets. It's a prescription medicine that treats adults with long lasting heart failure and works better when the heart cannot pump a normal amount of blood to the body. Don't take interest. Oh, if pregnant, it can cause harm or death to an unborn baby. Don't take interest with an ace inhibitor or Alice Karen.
SPEAKER_01: Or if you've had angio edema with an ace or Arb, don't take with Alice Karen or within 36 hours of taking an ace inhibitor. The most serious side effects are angio edema, low blood pressure, kidney problems or high blood potassium. Angio edema is swelling of your face, lips, tongue and throat that may cause death. If it causes difficulty breathing, get emergency help. Ask your doctor about interest. Oh, to learn more, visit support that interest. Oh, dot com or call 833-446-6699 for pricing.
SPEAKER_00: Visit interest. Oh, dot com backslash cost. If you can't afford your medication, Novartis may be able to help.
SPEAKER_02: You've been dreaming about the dress. Come find the one at David's Bridal. The most glamorous designer wedding gowns are now 15 percent off. Bridesmaid dresses that fit beautifully start around ninety nine dollars. Whether you need a veil, jewelry, shoes or even lingerie and shapewear, it's all at David's Bridal. Take 20 percent off outfit making accessories for a limited time. Stop by your local David's Bridal store or shop David's Bridal dot com today. Terms and conditions apply.
