An Interview with Vishaan Chakrabarti

On planning, urbanism, and Jane Jacobs.

This interview with Vishaan Chakrabarti, the founder of PAU, was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeito for franknews. Originally published on 5.10.2018

Okay, let’s begin. Would you introduce yourself?

I’m Vishaan Chakrabarti. I’m an architect and city planner, trained in both. I founded my practice, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, or PAU for short. I also teach at Columbia.

What does planning as a profession look like?

It’s evolved. City planning dates back to ancient China and ancient Greece. It goes back millennia. It’s always had poetic and pragmatic aspects to it. A lot of Roman cities had different ways in which they felt humanity related to the cosmos and would lay out cities according to that. Similarly in China, in which cities were laid out in Cardinal directions, were related to the way in which people interpreted their relationship to deities. City planning has a very, very long tradition.

If you go to a city like Rome, you'll see layers and layers of planning that happened under Pope Sixtus VI, and in more modern times, axis that have been cut through the cities, and that ended up influencing post-enlightenment city planning. Haussmann and ultimately Robert Moses. There is a lineage. And all of that lineage was largely top-down. 

City planning was always thought to be a somewhat authoritarian enterprise until Jane Jacobs came along. 

How so? 

She was really the person who revolutionized this idea of cities being planned by the communities that live in them and not having top-down structures that would tell them where highways would go.

There are both good sides and bad sides to that story. There are questions Jacobs never answered. For instance, how do you build big infrastructure under that model? Jacobs did not give us any kind of tool kit for how to fix Penn Station or the subway lines because some of that takes governmental planning and agency. It is not all going to be done by communities.

Jacobs also never answered questions about how there are a lot of communities that don’t want people of color living in them. Are you supposed to listen to the community in that instance? That really plays out in the affordable housing battle and through federal housing guidelines. Communities are supposed to take their share of affordable housing, and most cities actually fight that.

Look at what happened in California. Jerry Brown tried to pass this thing that said, if a certain neighborhood is within proximity to a mass transit line, we need to build density there, and we need to build a certain amount of affordable housing there. And it got defeated largely by a progressive state legislature because of this idea that communities would lose control.

To me, it's not necessary to come down on one side of that argument or the other but to understand that it's an argument — that this idea of community control isn't the be all end all in terms of answering every problem we might have.

Where that really comes to the tip of the spear is climate change. Climate change is completely changing the way we think about, not just city planning, but landscape planning, regional planning, how we are stewards of the planet. A lot of that stewardship requires an adult way of discussing what is rational, in terms of using that land, and often flies in the face of direct community control.

For instance, building density around transit stops, that's an easy one. When Katrina happened, people said, why should we rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward? It’s an area in harm's way. Yet no one seems to ask that question about suburban subdivisions in California that are in harm's way of wildfires or landslides. Or Fire Island. I've seen entire houses washed away in the Hamptons. If you go to a lot of those California hillside communities, in the wealthy parts of Berkeley, or Oakland, what it costs to provide water or fire up there, are not rational land-use patterns.

How does one balance this idea? That it should not be all top-down authoritarian, yet we're not going to get at a lot of the problems associated with climate change unless we have a more rational way of using the land. That is particularly true in a world that's urbanizing very rapidly.

You have some 200,000 people a day moving to cities, mainly in the Global South. If all of those folks choose to live the way a few hundred million rich people choose to live in the West, the world is screwed. The numbers are really quite clear on this. So, I think this is part of why I do what I do.

I think a lot of people in the affiliated fields, like architecture, planning, landscape architecture, environmentalism, are driven to go to work every day by this set of concerns. Again, going back to the ancients, how humans design habitation has an enormous impact on the planet, and on every ecosystem. We are at this inflection point. 

Do you think there’s been enough progress since Jacobs’ book came out?

The larger issues since Jacobs wrote, are not so much at the community level. The real problem is at the academic and pedagogical levels. I think city planning departments have largely become a mess.

They don't know what they’re about anymore. That's changing slowly, but it was a field that really went into doldrums in the 70s and 80s because of all the stuff that Jacobs fought against. Robert Moses, urban renewal, all of that was seen as politically incorrect. People couldn't be city planners as you would traditionally think of them, physical planners: blocks are here or there, highways, transit systems. Jacobs completely cut the feet out underneath that paradigm. The problem is nothing replaced it.

When I went to school, I studied planning before I studied architecture, and I was interested in physical planning, and that is part of why I went into architecture because I had to keep pushing the idea of understanding the physical environment, it was really not PC. I went to MIT for City Planning, and I can’t remember how many people were in our class, but I would say maybe 15-20% were studying physical planning because it was considered verboten.

Do you think academia is still stuck? Do people think it is not PC to be a planner?

Again, it is changing. For example at Columbia, there is a built environment portion in the program now. I think things are changing. What you notice between the architecture and planning students, is most planning students are not taught to be speculative.

What I mean by that is, in architecture and landscape architecture, it is still very common that you’re given a site and asked, what would you do? You are asked to speculate. But planning students are taught to ask, what does the community think, what does the data show you? Those are all incredibly valid questions, in fact, that have permeated architecture and landscape architecture as well.

Most students work on a research basis rather than think they can invent the world on a blank piece of paper. Speculation, in terms of design-thinking, is what allows us to imagine a future that doesn't exist. And that is incredibly important.

Think about bike lanes in New York City. When the bike lanes and Citi Bike were first introduced, people thought Janette Sadik-Khan was crazy. I don’t know what the numbers are right now, but the modal share is pretty high.

Look at places like Brooklyn Navy Yard. It has 7,000 jobs and it's 25 minutes away from the nearest subway station. I think Citi Bike has created a whole new modality of how people move around a place like New York City. That to me is speculation, it’s saying, what if...

I’m not interested in autonomous vehicles for the technology as much as thinking, how can we design the streets differently? If AVs did learn how not to hit people, could you design a street completely different? In terms of the curbs, parking, how the curb cuts for wheelchairs. Think about New York City two days after a snowstorm, it’s just a nasty mess. That has a lot to do with the way our streets are designed. Keeping pedestrians safe from vehicles operated by people. Those forms of speculation are incredibly important because we have to design better cities because we have to attract people to live in denser circumstances around mass transit because we clearly have the data that shows those people have a much lower carbon footprint than their suburban counterparts. We have to create a much higher quality of life in our cities than we have today. That's going to require a lot of intervention.

There's a lot of data telling us that Uber and Lyft are actually increasing the amount of traffic we're seeing in our cities. I’m a huge mass transit advocate. People ask, why do you need mass transit if you have Uber? Do you know what Uber is doing? Both in terms of traffic, and in terms of air pollution?

We have to continue investment in mass transit. It's just fundamentally inefficient to use a 12- foot lane for vehicles with one or two people in them. When we can carry hundreds of people in that same lane.

We have to be careful with technology. Technologists are interesting. They think because they've invented something super cool that it’s a panacea. And oftentimes it can make things a hundred times worse. We redesigned the world around the internal combustion engine in the 20th century, largely to very poor effect. Our cities were much more interesting, wonderful places to be, pre-internal-combustion-engine world. There's a reason gobs of tourists go to Rome every year and not to Houston.

You really can't build very interesting cities if everything is based on the turning radius of an 18 wheeler. 

How do planning and politics exist with each other?

Progressives think it’s only the right-wing that’s anti-government, but the left-wing is pretty anti-government too. The thing is if you completely distrust the government, how is planning supposed to operate?

When I worked as Manhattan Director in the Bloomberg Administration, it was one of the hardest jobs I ever had. It was fascinating. But you’d go to some cocktail party and people were like, oh you go home at 5? Because people just assume anyone who works in government is a lazy ne'er-do-well. That is just as prevalent among progressives.

It's fascinating to me. I often tell young students to go work in government for a while. Go find out how the world really runs. It’s amazing how much you can do in terms of fixing things if you want to try to fix things. But it’s also amazing how much resistance there is across the political spectrum to the idea that government does anything.

Without it, where are we? Who’s supposed to run the subways? Are we going to turn it all over to private hands? Is that the solution? I don’t think so.

I think Mr. Zuckerberg, if nothing else, has proven the problem with turning our lives over to private companies.