This week on Talking Headways, we're joined by architect Vishaan Chakrabarti to talk about his book The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy. We discuss the goldilocks density, defining urbanity, the ennui of young architects and much, much more!
Check out Chakrabarti's piece "How to Make Room for One Million New Yorkers," which appeared in the New York Times last December. His work also appears in Vital City, a New York City-focused online journal dedicated to urban policy.
Scroll down below the audio player for an edited excerpt of our conversation, or click here for an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the entire conversation.
Jeff Wood: Yeah, it makes sense. And it gets me to the next idea, which is this idea of "urbanity," right? Thinking about that word in a way that separates the discussions between whether rural is better or urban is better. You’re framing and repositioning of the word itself.
The quote that I took out of the book specifically is, "Today we build metropolis, not urbanity."
Vishaan Chakrabarti: Correct. What I wanted to do is separate the idea of urbanity and urban from size. If you just ask a random person on the street and you say, what do these words mean to you — urbanity, urban — or even if you look it up in the dictionary, you’ll usually get some version of two things sometimes amalgamated.
One is that it’s about snobbery. There’s something cosmopolitan in a bad way about the elite. The second is that you’re talking about, really, like, big mega-cities, and again, sometimes those two things get conflated. I wanted to really disassemble that because I think it’s a super important word in large measure because if you look at human history as a species, and the pandemic has borne this out, we have organized in communal environments since antiquity.
The book has this big timeline that tries to explain this, that across the world, and it wasn’t just for commerce, it wasn’t just for barter, in fact, most of the cities that we think of today that were built in antiquity, ancient Beijing, ancient cities across Mesoamerica, they were largely built for spiritual reasons, power, cultural reasons — things that extend well beyond barter, right?
And so what you start to understand is that, as a species, and with the majority of us as bipeds, we interact in physical space. And that’s something that we actually have chosen as a species to do. So post-pandemic, people didn’t go run and move and work to a mountaintop, we’ve seen people move out of big expensive cities.
We’ve seen those people move into less expensive urban environments. Right now, Kansas City and Nashville and Austin and San Antonio — all these places are boom towns. These people want some form of an urban life, right? But not necessarily in cities they can’t afford. And so urbanity is defined in the book as both a spatial and cultural condition where people basically have different cultures and classes collide in space.
That’s basically the definition and the idea is that can happen in a small rural town or it can happen in a big city. And there are big cities that is a metropolis but is not very urban. And so, just because it’s fun, I like to take Copenhagen to task. Because as I’m sure you’re aware, Copenhagen has been this like vaunted paradise of planners for, like, as long as, well not as long as I can remember, the last 10 years or so.
And it’s everyone bikes to get their kale and all of that. And I go to Copenhagen, it’s a lovely city. You talk to people there and you’re like, where are all the immigrants? I literally had a senior city official, we’re riding the metro, and I asked this question and he literally looked at me and he said, "Oh, they’re very happy. They live in a neighborhood over there." And without any sense of irony. And I’m like, this place isn’t urban, not by my definition. Because to me, it requires the grit of what I call, in the book, "positive social friction," the idea that people who look different, pray different, and maybe most importantly, think differently from one another, collide in space.
So I use the example of Tokyo, which does not have a lot of foreign born people in it, but Tokyo is a city of, like, subculture, like, crazy subcultures, and they all interact and have this friction in space. And to me, this is fundamental to what makes a city feel alive and serendipitous and special.
It always cracks me up when you see these lists of 10 most livable cities. And it’s Stuttgart, you’re like, really? How come 8 million people live in New York and, 19 million people live in Mumbai? There’s a lot of wealthy people in these big "unlivable cities" around the world that could live anywhere, but don’t move to Stuttgart.
No offense to Stuttgart, but my point is just, there seems to be this weird idea that in order for a place to be livable, you’ve got to crank the urbanity dial down. What the book is trying to advocate is that, no, actually, what we need in our society today, especially given the divisions that social media has wrought, is face-to-face contact of difference.
To me, what beguiles me about cities is the idea of difference. That we see people who, again, maybe look different or pray differently, but also just like they dress differently. They have some fundamentally different attitude about how you exist in the world that makes you think and makes your mind grow and challenge your assumptions.
The rich complexities of culture — I don’t think we talk about that in this space of, let’s have 30 units-an-acre and make sure that the bus rapid transit can get there. Like, all that’s important. But to what end? And it’s not just some carbon emissions per capita end. And that’s important.
But that’s almost a kind of byproduct the cultural condition that people are seeking, and it’s funny. I really struggled with the subtitle of this book and it’s “designing for nature, culture and joy." And so that was decided, I don’t know, six, eight months ago. And then suddenly the book comes out in this environment where everyone’s been coconut pilled.
Jeff Wood: And everyone’s talking about joy.
Vishaan Chakrabarti: Yeah. And everyone’s talking about joy and this is a very good thing for book sales, hopefully, but like the larger point is that I think we’re just at this moment, we’re coming out of the pandemic, coming out of the murder of George Floyd, coming out of really tough things that our society’s gone through and no one is trying to downplay their seriousness, but if you don’t have joy in your daily life, don’t have some sense that your life is going to be experientially better, the empirical stuff means less and less, right? And so this is why the design of experience, at least for me, is critically important.
The last thing I’d say is we are starting to see data on that point. Like the book mentions this extraordinary book called The Good Life. It’s the longest study of human happiness that’s ever been done. It’s been done at Harvard. It’s a longitudinal study. It’s happened for generations. And it comes out with this conclusion. I’m vastly oversimplifying, but basically, if you control for a bunch of variables like smoking and things like that, that both happiness and longevity are associated with strong social connections.
And so my question then becomes, how do we design a built environment that is conducive — and I use that word very specifically because sometimes the right will glom onto this stuff as some weird globalist plot to control how people live, but I use “conducive” to how people live and can make healthy connections. They choose to or not. That’s up to them. But can we create platforms? And to me, that always starts with the street. The street to me is the most basic building block of the entire human endeavor. And the problem is we think about streets as something built for cars, we have sidewalks that date back millennia in human history and in urban form.
And so again, it’s that first place where people make contact eyeball to eyeball and experience serendipity and difference. And that then extends to plazas and parks and the doorways of buildings and public space inside of buildings. But to me, it always starts with the street. And so that’s where the book starts, too.