This week, we’re joined by Nico Larco, director of the Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon to talk about his new book (with Kaarin Knudson), The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook. Let's face it, most of what we do in the United States is just a Band-Aid for a lack of urban density.
You know the drill: The audio player is in blue below. Below that is an excerpt of the conversation. Of course, if you want an unedited AI-generated transcript, you can click here.
Excerpt:
Jeff Wood: You've been working on this for about 10 years. Is there something that sticks out in your mind?
Nico Larco: Oh my God, there’s so many, like, "Oh wow, that’s how that works. Oh, here’s these opportunities."
One thing is this whole question of equity and health. And it's interesting because when I first started developing the framework, there were only four outcome goals and equity and health was not one of them. I only had a vague understanding of how the built environment really impacted equity and health. And I thought, "Well, most of that’s probably more on the policy side than actual physical design." And thanks to some fantastic conversations I had with people, which really opened my eyes and I was like, "Oh, my goodness!"
That was 10, 12 years ago, but now it’s much more common to see how much the built environment is really impacting our abilities to be healthy, have access to healthy foods, have access to work, have affordable places that we can live or simply being able to get out of poverty.
The second one — and I’m almost embarrassed to say this because it seems like so obvious — but putting this all together, I was working at TU Delft in the Netherlands and then also at the think tank that I still work for, and you know, and for anyone who’s been to the Netherlands and who’s interested in like, you know, planning or urban design or any of these types of topics, you know, you walk around and you’re just like, "Oh, my goodness. This is like everything we’ve ever been told could happen in the world. And here it’s happening!"
I mean, there’s tons of cycling. There’s mixed use. There’s all this fantastic transit — just like everything. And I was living there for about a month and it finally hit me — again, it’s a little bit embarrassing that it took me that long, but it hit me — density. Density is the reason this works so well. Density lets everything happen.
I’m not saying that density guarantees that all these fantastic things happen, but density allows so many things to happen.
And you know, I had this thought one day when I was actually cycling in the Netherlands. I was like, "Most of what we do in the U. S. is trying to put Band-Aids on a lack of density." A lot of things that we’re trying to do are just because our land use is wrong and we’re trying to find ways to make the thing work anyway. And there’s a lot of gymnastics involved in trying to get this thing to work.
So I have a huge conviction that came out of this: density has to be the thing that we really work on — and not just for the transportation topics, but for stormwater, for ecology and habitat, land-use, equity, and health. Density just helps all across the board.
Jeff Wood: It’s so crazy because collectively as a country we seem so resistant to it as a general rule, but it’s so important for everything. And I’m wondering why we have this like reflexive pushback against that idea of density, except for in a few places.
Nico Larco: It's a lot of different things. Take the suburban way of development that we have here — there’s a lot of different reasons that that happens. Part of it is cultural, right? By now, it's been instilled in us, everything from car culture to, you know, the backyard barbecue or this ideal of small town, even though somehow it’s kind of developed into a suburban sprawl.
And a lot of that came from popular media and a lot of actual push from the federal government through policies that have helped reinforce those things. We have a whole economic engine having to do with auto-oriented culture, which has pushed us toward those things, and also this vilification of urban areas. And I have to say that it has started to soften a little bit, but before that urban areas were to be shunned, right?
And then there was this big shift and renewed interest and rejuvenation of cities and people really understand like, "Oh my goodness. I love having all these amenities. I love having access to all these events, people, moments, and being in the car less."
The National Association of Realtors does a survey every year asking, "Would you rather live in a single family home or in multifamily housing?" And across the board, everyone said single family home. And this was a huge impetus for builders to say, "We should build more single family housing."
But in 2013, for the first time, they changed the way they asked the question, which became, "Would you like a neighborhood where you could have single-family homes or multifamily housing, but with much smaller lots that was walkable and bikeable. And you could actually walk to a local cafe or amenities nearby. Or would you like a large lot, single family home neighborhood where you have to drive everywhere?"
I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it was something like 50 percent said they wanted that. And when I read that, I had to sit down. I was like, "This is a huge unmet demand in our country. We are not building the thing that people want." And you also realize that the built environment that we have, in part, comes from a lot of stuff that’s been built before, right? The urban environment kind of persists — as does all the mechanism that helped make those things happen.
We’ve created something that really points towards single-family home, auto-dominated, even though the survey showed that that’s not what people want.
