Talking Headways Podcast: Critiquing the Language of Planners

This week, Robin Rather of Collective Strength joins the podcast to talk about missteps in the planning profession — including how things go wrong with language. Robin shares how she got to thinking about urban issues and why she believes current planning practice is stuck in the 1990s. We discuss the often jargon-filled language the profession uses, taking a paragraph from Austin’s current zoning code rewrite to illustrate.

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Talking Headways Podcast: Peak Experience with Jarrett Walker

By Jeff Wood |
Jarrett Walker of Human Transit fame joins the podcast this week to talk about how to communicate transportation and planning concepts to the public. Jarrett tells us about the importance of humanities majors in transportation professions, why NIMBYs feel the way they do, and how we can think differently about the language we use to discuss housing and transportation.

Podcast: The Anatomy of an Urban Cell

By Jeff Wood |
This week, we're joined by planner Robin Renner, author of "Urban Being: Anatomy and Identity of the City." Robin talks about how living in a number of places around the world got him to think differently about cities — and how urban areas can be improved.

Talking Headways Podcast: Moneyball for Transit

By Jeff Wood |
Laurel Paget-Seekins joins the podcast this week to talk about her days as a transit activist in Atlanta, what Santiago, Chile, taught her about transit networks, and her current work on data collection and dissemination as the director of strategic initiatives at the MBTA in Boston. We discuss the MBTA’s data blog and dashboard, how the agency […]

Talking Headways Podcast: Charlotte’s Urban Web

By Jeff Wood |
Mary Newsom of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute joins me this week to discuss everything Charlotte, from its beginnings as a crossroads of Native American pathways to its current incarnation as a fast-growing metropolis. The enormous growth of the region, she says, includes a recent surge of suburban subdivisions that were lying in wait during the recession. Transit is expanding in Charlotte, […]