To fix that problem, we're going to need to rethink what our cities and towns actually look like. They are, but they've also isolated us from each other. My big takeaway? Our cars may be a lot of fun. Thank you to Vishaan Chakrabarti, Joann Muller and Destiny Thomas for joining me this week to help me understand how our cities became so devoted to our cars and to imagine what our lives could be like if we redesigned them around people. So you will see people and neighborhood assets that you never noticed before. And I also think for anybody who has never traveled the city that they live in on foot, anyone who is a pedestrian or a regular pedestrian will tell you that it's a completely different experience than the experience that you have in the car. And then I think also the more obvious thing which happened was like the al fresco dining is imagining what it looks like to live our inside lives outside for the purposes of better health outcomes. And the idea behind that is, in a pandemic, definitely people need more space to be able to travel and children need to be able to play outside, either on the sidewalk or in the street without the danger of speeding cars. Slow streets was and still is a program that residents on a block or maybe a couple of city blocks, they all put their signature on this paper where they're asking to basically close the street to through traffic so no cars can come down the street unless the cars belong to one of the residences on the block and unless it's an emergency vehicle. That created a subsidized system of why everything from schools are better in the suburbs to the fact that it's cheaper and so forth. Bill, to mortgage interest deduction, which were primarily targeted at suburban homeowners to redlining of mortgages. There's a huge number of things the government did for building the highways to the G.I. Well, that's not just like a series of market forces. So the thing is, when people look at me today and they say, well, I live in the suburbs because it's cheaper. And you start to see subways feeling unsafe. And so you start to see this huge racial segregation happen. So African-American families, even if you're middle class, you can't go live in the same suburbs. So now you've got government subsidized highways, you've got all sorts of government interest and fossil fuel companies, and you've got redlining of mortgages. There's huge corporate interest here, right? Because when you move people from dense, small apartments in cities to suburban homes, you have this hugely consumer society that makes the economy just explode because now all of a sudden you need lawnmowers and you need maybe two cars and-Īnd by the time you get to the civil rights movement, you start to have a huge racial component to this, which is what we refer to as white flight. But there's also another couple of factors. That's why the bridges are so tall, because they wanted to be able to move nuclear weapons around. It is to help diffuse the population in the event of nuclear war. And so it's out there to do a couple of different things. Our cities lost a massive amount of population after World War II because Eisenhower passes the National Highway and Defense Act. One thing to keep in mind is that most of our major cities before World War II, from 1900 till roughly 1950, were denser than they are today. There's a Cold War going on, and there is a very, very serious concern about nuclear war. We have a whole complex industrial machinery to build these things that we built during World War II, and now we've got all these factories set up so we can build mass production in terms of automobiles. So what happened? World War II happens and a couple of major things happen all at once. Because what happens is, prior to World War II, we have some sense of suburbanization both in the UK and the US, but it's pretty limited and car ownership is really very rarefied. I simplify things a lot, but World War II is the accelerant.
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