DB|BD Season 12 Premiere: Designing for the Unknown – The Future of Cities is Climate Adaptive with Michael Eliason

Welcome to the 12th season of DB|BD. This season we are Designing for the Unknown. 

Michael Eliason, founder of Larch Lab, is an architect, researcher, writer and urbanist, and architect based in Seattle He’s a self-described activist for dense, livable, affordable, and sustainable cities and the author of Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities. 

In the aftermath of the fires in Southern California, Michael helps host Ellen McGirt understand how we can build or rebuild communities to anticipate the significant climate changes imperiling our world and make us healthier, happier, more connected people. 

“It’s really just having a broader understanding that the way we have designed our cities and neighborhoods for the last 50 years is not conducive to these places where people can thrive and adapt to a changing climate,” Elaison says. “…when we start to look at mobility and climate and community amenities and housing and affordability in a more comprehensive way, we can create the cities that we always talk about wanting to have but can never really seem to induce through our current kind of status quo.”

Among other things, Michael shares how a German co-habitation practice could revolutionize American society and how Los Angeles could use their built infrastructure to protect themselves from future fires- while potentially reversing gentrification in the process. 

On this season of DB|BD, we are Designing for the Unknown. Ellen McGirt asks visionary designers how they navigate uncertainty- whether it be technological disruption, global crises, or shifting cultural norms.

Michael’s book Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities

Larch Lab

Jane Jacobs: Neighborhoods in Action

Henry Graber on Tokyo’s approach to fire resistance

If you liked this episode, be sure to revisit S11E3: The Healthy Materials Lab says Everyone Deserves a Healthier Home

Follow The Design of Business | The Business of Design on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. 

Transcript

Ellen McGirt I grew up on West 107th Street in New York City, and our 10th floor apartment felt like it was part of a little village all its own. I’d fall asleep every night as the Kim’s teenage daughter practiced her classical piano in the next apartment. Billy, the building handyman, became my hero after I got a toy toolkit for Christmas, and he let me tag along on his repair rounds to help with my plastic hammer and screwdriver. I could walk to school on my own. I ran errands for my mom, who sent me to see Marie at the grocery checkout. She taught me to count change. I’d buy my Nancy Drews every week from Mr. Adlow in his Hallmark shop. I’d even play on the sidewalk with kids from nearby buildings while the doormen kept watch. It wasn’t a fancy building. We were just working folks and families and neighbors. But we knew each other. Now, my husband grew up in rural Wisconsin, in a small town surrounded by dairy farms. And as different as that sounds, it was kind of the same vibe. Herds of boys under 11 were in bike riding distance of each other in school. Most folks had a small business or service, my husband’s family had a gas station and garage. And that was life. Working families and neighbors who knew each other. Now there are lots of ways I could take this story, but for the purposes of this conversation, I’m thinking about fire. 

Jonathan Vigliotti, CBS Sunday Morning This entire mountainside is covered in flames, the wind pushing them up to 50ft into the sky. All week long, the same scene repeated itself. In just 20 minutes a flicker exploded into a 200 acre monster, fanned by 80 mile per hour winds and fueled by bone dry vegetation. 

Ellen McGirt I watched, like all of you, the massive fires unfold across Los Angeles, including neighborhoods like Pacific Palisades, Pasadena and Altadena, a beloved multigenerational Black neighborhood, devastating loss of life and property, but also community. And of all the things we lost in the fire, one thing is starting to really haunt me. The fact that I’m no longer convinced that we have what it takes as a society to build or rebuild communities to anticipate the big climate changes that are already here and also make us healthier and happier and more connected people. That’s why I’m so glad that Michael Eliason is here, not just to talk me off the ledge, but to explain how to build a better one for everyone. Michael is a researcher, writer, urbanist and architect based in Seattle, the founder and principal of Larch Lab. He’s worked mostly in Germany and the Pacific Northwest and is a self-described activist for dense, livable, affordable and sustainable cities. And to me, he’s calling for a redesign of the American dream. Because my husband and I may have grown up in neighborhoods that function as a community, but our kids, not so much. I’m Ellen McGirt, and welcome to the 12th season of The Design of Business|The Business of Design. And this season we are designing for the unknown. Welcome, Michael, and thanks for listening to my story. Does any of that resonate with you? 

Michael Eliason I think it’s really good. The the aspect of our community is, oh man, it’s it’s especially post-pandemic, like it feels so different than even, you know, five, ten years ago. Bringing up a lot of feelings. 

Ellen McGirt Feelings are good. Feelings are good. Why don’t we start with just the very basics? Talking about Larch Lab and your approach to architecture and design. 

Michael Eliason I moved to Germany in 2019, we kind of intended that it would be forever. The reason that we moved there was we wanted the quality of life that that we had had. My wife and I met in Freiburg, Germany in 2003, 2004, and we kind of wanted to recapture kind of the the quality of life that we had, you know, talking about community and walkability and, and being car light and car free for most of our adult lives has been pretty, pretty foundational to who we are. And so I moved to Germany thinking it would be forever. The pandemic hit. We came back. You know, being in lockdown, homeschooling, work from home. It was kind of a really, really weird place. And I had this space to think about, like what I wanted to be working on again as an architect and realized that a big reason that we moved to Germany, I wanted to be doing more passive house building, so I wanted to be doing more mass timber buildings. I wanted to be closer to more forms of community oriented housing, Baugruppen which are kind of like self-developed urban housing and cooperative groups that come together and build their their homes collectively. And in the process of where I was working, kind of realized that’s kind of the direction I actually wanted to go in again. And so Larch Lab was founded as a an architectural studio. We do a little bit of urban planning, consulting with folks, a little bit of Think and Do tanks or, you know, doing a lot around research and writing and advocacy just for building places and imagining places that are more community oriented, that have a really good social and economic mix of residents. Right. It’s not just working class, it’s not just upper class, but we can all kind of live together in a community, and we can do so in a way that’s conducive to walkability, that’s conducive to knowing your neighbors and being cognizant of the fact that climate is changing. Our building codes and our buildings aren’t really designed for this. And trying to pivot towards an environment where we can start to adapt to these situations. So it’s really kind of paramount to to why we got started. 

Ellen McGirt So you mentioned Baugruppen. Did I say that correctly? 

Michael Eliason Yep. 

Ellen McGirt So tell us more about that because I just learned about it when I was doing research for this. And it’s really fascinating. 

Michael Eliason So Baugruppen are basically self-developed co-housing and it can be it can be rural, like you could just have a couple of people who come together and develop their own, like rowhouse property. Or it could be dense. There’s some mid-rise and sky rise buildings in Germany that are 40, 50 or 60 units. It’s people that just kind of come together, usually over a shared set of values. They’re co participating in the design of the project. Right. And so like you know usually you have slightly smaller units or homes than you would you know as in like a detached house or a row house. But you’re making that up with more common space, right. So instead of, you know, having this huge apartment and using it all to yourself, you’ve got a slightly smaller apartment, but maybe you have a guest suite so you don’t have to have a large apartment, right? So that you have a place that family and friends can stay when they come visit. You can have music rooms so your children can go into the music room and it’s sound isolated and they can practice and not like, feel awkward about having to practice in front of other people, which is some of the situations that we’ve had to deal with. Or just, you know, a bike room, a community, a communal dining and kitchen space. It’s really about kind of creating these buildings where you get to know everyone. And as you know, as you’re aging in place, it’s multi-generational. It’s accessible. We kind of have a little bit of that in our situation right now. We’ve got an older couple who live above us, we’re in a a house has been converted into two units and we’re on the ground floor. And so during the pandemic, like my youngest kid, when we were working from home, and he wasn’t quite doing home schooling yet because he was in kindergarten, in first grade, he could go out and hang out with with our, our, our neighbors. And he was able to have those connections, which I think, you know, have been really, really important to not just like fostering his own sense of like self and, and identity, but just like community and keeping those interactions and, and and and also just an ability for us to like check in on them and see how they’re doing. And so it’s kind of taking that concept and, you know, putting it in a larger multifamily building. 

Ellen McGirt So are there small changes that people can make besides just being, I don’t know, aware of each other and friendly with each other that would help create that environment. Or do you really need to start with an architectural plan? 

Michael Eliason So you don’t need to start with an architectural plan. I think it’s good to have someone on the team who’s a little bit familiar with development. And cities like Hamburg in Germany, they have a department that actually facilitates Baugruppen. So they’ll they’ll help people form groups. They’ll connect people who are looking for groups to existing groups they can connect them with, like the infrastructure for planning and developing that, so like a project manager and an architect. They’ll help them find banks and connect to them to finance for their development, which is another big, big hurdle, especially here in the US right now, because our interest rates are so high and often cities will even provide land either at cost or at a reduced cost to these groups. They realize that having families stay within the tax base of the city is not just good for the city’s economic health, but it’s also better for the climate. You know, these families aren’t moving out into the suburbs and then having to drive in every day as well, you know, there’s a lot of cities that are very proactive about kind of fostering these kinds of communities. But for us, it’s really been the the finance has been the biggest hurdle. And in cities like Seattle, where the cost of land is already high or the cost of construction is constantly increasing, we’ll probably get construction tariffs, tariffs on construction projects here at some point as well. And then just the cost of financing itself is really, really high. So the financing is actually the the bigger hurdle I think like starting a group and identifying like what values you want to be or we want to be bike friendly, multi-generational, climate adaptive place where we can live affordably and with people that we, you know, know and want to be engaged with could be like our value. And so, like, we can have a big bike room and maybe there’s like 1 or 2 cars and they’re shared amongst all the other people who live there, rather than everyone having their own car because we own a car. We didn’t for a long time and we never use it. So it’s like, why just let it sit there when other people could use it as well? And so it’s it’s really about leveraging kind of those, those networks and community to kind of create these places that just facilitate, I think, a better way of living. 

Ellen McGirt So in 2024, you published your book, Building for People, about how we should be building and planning in the climate emergency. And it sort of struck me, as I’m thumbing through it and listening to you, that this is sort of a Jane Jacobs like moment where we’re actually trying to galvanize people to think through at a very structural level, what we value, what we care about, and how we can protect ourselves. So how was this book received? And also, how do you handle climate skeptics? I mean, they still walk among us. 

Michael Eliason So the the book has been pretty well received, I think I’ve only gotten a couple of critiques that we’re not, like, even 100% positive. They still had like positive aspects to say. A lot of it has been more like cultural, like there are cultural barriers to the things that I want to do. And there are also technical barriers, like a lot of buildings in in the US, multi-family buildings. It’s it’s like living in a hotel. So you’ve got a corridor down the middle and units on either side. Because the buildings are so deep, we’re still operating within the framework of a block system, and so there’s not a lot of courtyard space or open space or space for kids and community. And in a lot of Europe, those floor plan depths are regulated to a much greater degree. So in Seattle, we have buildings that are 80ft, 100ft deep. The typical depth of a building in most of Europe is going to be somewhere between 35 and 55ft, so we’re almost double what that is, right? And so like if you think about, you know, the space on a block, if, if a bigger chunk of that middle area where the courtyard would be is building, then you’ve got less privacy, you’ve got less space for climate adaptation. And the key that really unlocks a lot of this is the way that they design their buildings. It’s not one corridor down the middle with units on either side, but several stair cores that kind of come up around the building and a couple of a handful of units per floor kind of radiating around that. And if you think about it, like in New York City, like the brownstones and the tenements are kind of in that same, same character, but like, these are modern and fireproof. And, you know, they have big windows and none of the issues that that those buildings did in the, in the early 20th century. 

Ellen McGirt So one of your superpowers seems to be that you’re able to navigate building codes in multiple countries, in multiple languages, which seems like a pretty interesting thing to be able to do. For example, you say that the root cause of the banality of U.S. architecture is stairs. I mean, you mentioned other things, of course, but the stairs thing really made me laugh out loud. 

Michael Eliason Yeah. So the stair thing was kind of this fundamental shift in the way that we think about buildings. The way it works in the US is if you have more than four units per floor, or you have a building that’s taller than three stories, you need two stairways, two means of egress and a corridor connecting all of the units to those stairways. What this kind of does is it’s like a roundabout way of inducing these larger and larger buildings. And so when you look at redevelopment and a lot of the US, let’s say you have a block face that’s got 6 or 7 different buildings, well, you know, because of that two state requirement and the economics of construction and finance, pretty much all of those businesses on that block face are going to go and you’re going to get one big building, and then the urban planners will be like, oh, that building is huge and gross. And so they’ll play these games and it will pop out the facade will modulate the facade or we’ll put a different materials on it so it doesn’t look like one big building. But everyone knows it’s one big building. It’s one massive building. It’s you know, it’s really difficult to get away from that. And so it really, as architects, it becomes just a game of like, oh, what can we do in the facade to make this building look different than this building. Like it’s not fundamentally a different way of of planning housing. But in like the European context, those six parcels on that block face could they can be combined into one and be treated as like six separate buildings, or it could actually be like six separate buildings, six separate entities developing them. Maybe you’ve got market rate condos next to affordable housing, next to co-housing, next to student housing or something, right? So that at that block level, you just get a very fundamentally different way of like living in the city together. So the stair issue just became like this way of realizing that the way that our, our cities were developing and redeveloping was just fundamentally different from the rest of the world. And so part of part of the research for the book was trying to figure out, you know, why that was, what were the interactions? What were the requirements that that really led to this? And then it just opened up so many other kind of avenues. It’s like, okay, I’m already talking about this. I should bring in Passive house because this should be the minimum standard for buildings in the era of climate change. And and to your question around the climate, climate skeptics, my, my default is just not to engage with climate skepticism. Like there’s, there’s probably gonna be a lot more coming out of the administration the next couple of years. But I think it’s you know, we’re kind of trying to be forward looking. We know things are changing. Not just are we trying to make places that are climate adaptive, but we’re also trying to make places that are just better to live in, that have a higher quality of life, that are more conducive to living in community. And, and so for me, I think that’s, you know, that’s kind of the jewel of what I’m talking about, like the climate adaptation is good too. But if I just talk about the other stuff, then, you know, maybe we don’t have to talk about the climate adaptation stuff. We get bogged down in the details of that. 

Ellen McGirt But as I hinted in my opening story, if there was any opportunity to really take some of these wonderful ideas and put them into practice at a at a pretty significant level, it’s in Los Angeles. So if I’d given you a magic wand, which would include all the financing that you would need and all the like minds that you would need, how would you begin to think about rebuilding that part of the country to be more wildfire resistant, obviously, but also just happier and more connected?

Michael Eliason So I think the big one is it’s going to be a long process. It’s not going to be a short process to redevelop and rebuild, and I think a lot of people will just take the mindset of like trying to re build what they had. And then in looking at how other places have redeveloped over after fire, it’s, you know, what is it seven years after Camp Fire and I think 40% of the homes, 40% of the people who live there are not going back. 

Ellen McGirt Oh, wow. 

Michael Eliason And so like that sense of, yeah, so that sense of community long term is really difficult to manage. The insurance that people have often won’t cover the cost of rebuilding. And so just the economics of like how to stay in that place become really, really difficult. And so like if you think about a place like Altadena, you know, all of the value of those projects was in the value of their lands. I’m guessing a lot of people in not just Pasadena, but the Palisades, were under insured. And so it’s there’s this huge question around, like just the economics of how all of these spaces get redeveloped. But what I think would be really, really fascinating would be maybe you just go like block by block level and let’s say there are 30 homes, you know, on a block. And there’s this really interesting process that I read about in the book that the Dutch use. They basically collect all of the lands from a certain area, and then they’ll do this urban design, urban planning framework and then give the same value of the land back to those residents, and then they can build, you know, whatever they want. And so, you know, part of the process is we have this parcelization of these blocks. Maybe there’s a way to, you know, make it so that there maybe some blocks are just row houses, but some blocks could be like this really wonderful, you know, cooperative communities. Maybe there are residents who want to use their land for good and they want to, you know, we’ve been talking about trying to do this in Seattle, like, how can you use the value of your land to de-gentrify places that have gentrified so that families that have been pushed out of the city have the opportunity to kind of move back? I think like that would be a really fascinating way to do it. The question around fires is, you know, it’s going to be an ongoing issue in LA. The chaparral is going to be constantly drying out. It’s also an issue here in Seattle where our forests are drying out, and so many of our cities sprawl into the forests. So it’s a lot like Northern California and the Bay area in those regards. One of the really interesting things that I was reading after the LA fires, were the city of Tokyo has these really old historic neighborhoods with like one and two wood buildings, right, like houses. And in Japan were were made of wood for centuries. And so like they would have these massive urban conflagrations that would come through. And, you know, these buildings are small, they’re wood and paper, and it would just tear through these communities. And so they started building on these major arterials, these six, eight, ten storey concrete buildings that have like fire barriers between them that come down and the buildings themselves become like the firebreak to protect the residents inside it. And so, like, you know, that’s another thing that could be really interesting is like, how do we use our built environment, you know, to protect these kinds of places? And, you know, I’m an architect. I feel like I’m pretty cognizant of like a lot of, you know, really important things that people are doing around climate and, and all of these other aspects, and I had never heard of this until Henry Graber wrote about it in an article after the fire. And I was just like, wow, this is amazing. Like people, I mean, we have experience with fires in cities, right? It’s not it’s not this, this thing that we’ve never, you know, seen. And so it’s I think it’s really important that we start to think about ways that we could kind of when we rebuild, not just have buildings like individual houses or whatever, that can adapt to this, to the effects of wildfire and wildfire smoke. But also, you know, maybe we can use our built infrastructure to, to protect those places that are are more at risk. 

Ellen McGirt So for anybody who’s listening, who is going to sit at a table with someone who’s different from them about the built world, whether they’re on a task force for their building or they’re going to a community meeting, they’re talking to their local representatives. What are some of the better questions they can ask, other than just what’s up with my property taxes? I don’t think you can do much about stairs that are already in place, but maybe there are some other things we could ask. 

Michael Eliason I think a big one is just empowering people to understand that, like the built environment isn’t constant. Sprawl did not exist 50 years ago, right? And now sprawl is a constant in the US. 

Ellen McGirt Oh, that’s a good point. 

Michael Eliason And so there are other ways of living and maybe there are better ways of living. And so, there are places that may differ, may be different, and maybe that’s not for you. But like, I think empowering people to advocate for these things is really important. Co-participation in the EU is like a big part around cities and urban planning. But it’s not just an issue around cities, right? Like rural areas are, people are fleeing rural areas. There’s a lot of affordable housing, but there’s also a lot of houses that aren’t in in really good shape. There aren’t a lot of jobs. And so young people are leaving there for the city. For me, it’s how do we empower people to to be their own developer or to work with their own community to make places better? You know, going back to Jane Jacobs, that was her whole thing was like eyes on the street, getting community to come together, understanding that people can enact change. And then, you know, having hopefully leadership that will help facilitate that change. I think it’s really, really important. But like so many of our cities are, they’re struggling. They’re not focused on these kinds of things. And like I said, that’s a huge question about how we move forward. And it has massive societal implications as well. 

Ellen McGirt I want to ask you about poor and under-resourced communities who typically live in hotter parts of cities, who are in buildings, affordable housing with inadequate materials. We we dug into this last, last season quite a bit. Often fenceline communities, they’re near some sort of facility or factory that’s spewing out dangerous chemicals. What do we need to know about that? Are there? I’m not asking for a quick fix by any means stretch of the imagination, but is there anything we could think about that would make a difference going forward? 

Michael Eliason The urban heat island issue is one that we never thought we would have to deal with in Seattle, and I think the reality after we had the heat dome in the pandemic, it was like even Seattle and the Pacific Northwest are going to have heat events. And when the heat dome hit, I think it was 1,600 people between Oregon and British Columbia, you know, succumbed to the the effects of that heat. 

Ellen McGirt Wow. 

Michael Eliason We even in Seattle, need to be prioritizing this to a much greater degree than we should. And the primary things around that, it’s trees, it’s vegetation, you know, green roofs, depaving hard scapes. And so maybe that means, you know, we’re if we have this really wide street, maybe it doesn’t need to be six lanes wide. Maybe it can be four lanes. And we add space for trees, and all of this stuff like interacts in this really intriguing way that like when you start, you know, prioritizing nature and making nature inclusive places, the urban heat island effect starts to go down. In relation to public health, like you’ve got better air quality, there’s less noise pollution, you’ve got birds that you can start to hear, right. And so for me, I think it’s like rethinking our cities. And a lot of that is going to be tearing out paved places and putting in, depaving parking lots of streets and putting in nature in Paradise, is really a big a big portion of it. With relations, with relation to like issues around like living in toxic environments. Like the biggest one is source control. Just get rid of the toxic environment. I realize that we live in a society where that doesn’t really take place. And so it’s it’s finding ways to retrofit places where at least when people are in their home, they’re not being polluted. And so for me, that’s, you know, some kind of facade retrofit, better windows, a ventilation system within the building so that when people are inside and they’re breathing, they’re having fresh filtered air rather than recycled polluted air.  It’s critical that people are breathing clean, fresh air and have clean water.  A lot of that is, is funding. It’s government funding and without. Government funding, those things aren’t going to be happening. 

Ellen McGirt I have to ask about AI because we live in 2025, and I’m asking people in the grocery store what they think about AI. We all must talk about it. I’m curious if you see other tools, AI, how it’s how it’s going to be impacting your profession, design and construction professions, whether there is good news, whether this is alarming news, and how you how you see these new tools being helpful. 

Michael Eliason I’m not a huge fan of AI and looking at the energy impacts of what that entail. And you know, recently someone talked about plugging in new coal factories to power AI. Like it just completely blows my mind that that we would even need that. And supposedly will cost billions and billions and trillions of dollars to to do. And then a couple of organizations in the last two weeks have kind of disrupted that without needing much cost or energy to produce AI. I think one of the areas that might become really interesting in architecture is just optimization. And so like finding really quick ways to like, modify, like if you have a standard kit to parts of design, like how that could readily be adapted to different sites. And, you know, presumably the AI would then be able to do like the, you know, the load calculations. Okay, your your beam gets longer, so it needs to be a little bit deeper because the load is bigger and those kinds of things. But beyond that I’m not really I’m not really sure. 

Ellen McGirt Okay. I’m going to send a clip of this to community leaders, to elected officials, to anybody who’s in charge, who’s living in what’s now clearly a climate affected community. What should they do? 

Michael Eliason I think the big one is read my book. The big one is really to understand that. Like when we start to prioritize nature and public health and affordability. So many of the issues that we’re dealing with in silos, I think, are easier to address because like the issue around like climate mitigation and climate adaptation has so many co-benefits that, like all of these other aspects, start to become even more powerful in how they operate and work. And so I think it’s it’s really focusing on, on all of these aspects kind of comprehensively. It’s not it’s not just, oh, we’re only going to focus on maybe climate adaptation, oh we’ll plant a couple of trees on this street. It’s it’s really just having a really broader understanding that the way that we design our city, the way that we have designed our cities and neighborhoods for the last 50 years, is not really been conducive to these places where people can thrive and where people will be able to adapt to a changing climate. And so when we start to look at things comprehensively and we have comprehensive plans in the US, but that they don’t even take transportation into account, so it’s funny that we call them “comprehensive plans”. But like when we start to look at like mobility and climate and community amenities and housing and different types and typologies and affordability is in a more comprehensive way, like we can we can create the cities that we always talked about wanting to have, but can never really seem to induce through our current kind of status quo. 

Ellen McGirt I hear that and, you know, as I’m listening to you, you’re so good at this, and I’m so glad you came. And have a wonderful weekend. And thank you. 

Michael Eliason Yeah, thank you so much. 

Ellen McGirt This season, we’re ending every episode with a new segment we’re calling The Business of Design. It will feature either a short interview with or a story about a designer who exemplifies design’s power to shape the world for good. This week we’re going back to where I started on the vibrant streets of my hometown, New York City, and give the mic to a woman who, as Michael mentioned, really understood the role cities can play in a happy, healthy planet. Jane Jacobs was a Canadian-American author, journalist, activist and urban thinker who fundamentally changed how we think about cities. She is best known for taking on the formidable Robert Moses in the 1960s and winning, stopping his plans to bulldoze neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan for an expressway nobody wanted. But Jane’s real genius wasn’t just in what she fought against. It was what she fought for. She saw cities as living, breathing ecosystems. Her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities completely upended the sterile, top down urban planning ideas of her time. Instead of tearing down messy neighborhoods to build highways to the suburbs where blocks of big, shiny towers. She championed the wisdom of dense, walkable communities where people actually wanted to live and gather. She was way ahead on climate and environmental sustainability too, which makes her the perfect muse for the challenges we face now. She died in 2006, but she’s still relevant today. Here she is in an undated video produced by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where she argues that in order for cities to thrive, they have to have their own heart. 

Jane Jacobs A heart is not, and disembodied things that you just set down arbitrarily, like choosing a shopping center site. It has to have an anatomy that runs into the neighborhood. And the anatomy, the clue to it is what you always hear when people talk about a hangout, “Oh, it’s the corner store or it’s the corner bar.” There’s always that word corner. Now, over time, if the heart is successful, it’s going to change. Taking a neighborhood that exists, already, and maybe they’re not very attractive, and maybe they’ve only got poor people in them and maybe they’ve only got immigrants in them. But thinking, what can we do here to keep these people here and to make them feel that they’re valued? So they’re quite not expensive, but thoughtful things that can be done to show it isn’t a second or third class place. Tree planting, traffic taming. Putting in markets at the right time. That’s one thing that would be meaningful and hopeful for the future. 

Ellen McGirt The Design of Business|The Business of Design is a podcast from Design Observer. Design observer was co-founded by Jessica Helfand. Our show is written and produced by Alexis Haut. Our theme music is by Warner Meadows. Justin D. Wright of Seaplane Armada mixed and mastered this episode. As always, thanks to Sheena Medina, Sarah Gephart, Rachel Paese, Richard Fields, and the entire Design Observer team. And for more longform content about the people redesigning our world, please consider subscribing to our newsletters, The Design of Business and The Observatory at DesignObserver.com.