The Private Side of Public Work | Exploring How to Make Cities Happier, Government More Innovative, & Science More Accessible
Summary: Urban planning, government, art, architecture, design. These impact the way our cities look, the way we feel, the way we live our lives. On this show we pull back the curtain and delve into the Private Side of Public Work. We ask the uncomfortable questions that need to be brought into the open to make our cities, companies, buildings, our governments, and ultimately our lives, run better.
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- Artist: Ingrid Heilke: Urban planner and federal government decision scientist turn
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Stop and smell the roses! Or…whatever native flower is in bloom. It’s an easy thing to take for granted. The US Environmental Protection Agency is responsible for much of the joy and comfort that we Americans take for granted. Today, Tammy Newcomer-Johnson and Joel Hoffman give us the inside scoop on The US Environmental Protection Agency. Hint: It’s probably not what you think it is.
The court system is by nature designed to be slow to change, dependable, predictable. Yet the courts are charged with tackling challenges that don’t stand still. Courts have evolved tremendously over the centuries to adapt, even as we think of them as relatively stable and un-moving. Today, William DeLisio provides us a window into how he has effected positive change within the court systems by introducing risk and growth, in fair measure of course.
All of us must work our way through the empty page, the blank screen, writer’s block, confusion, chaos, and doubt. Although each instance of creativity is singular and specific, the creative process is universal. Artists, architects, poets, inventors, scientists, and others all navigate the same stages of the process in order to discover something that does not yet exist. Like a storm, the creative process slowly begins to gather and take form until it overtakes us—if we are willing to let it.
“From pulp magazine origins to recent cinematic triumphs, superheroes mirror our culture. Uniquely American and reflecting enduring values, these characters are a window on inspiration and aspiration defining our society." Today, Dr. Julian Chambliss of Rollins College explores the real and imagined city through superheroes and the pages of comic books over the course of the last century.
If you could experience a city from 95cm – the height of a 3-year-old – what would you change? Urban95 asks this bold but simple question of the world’s city leaders, planners, architects, and innovators. Urban95 is rooted in the belief that when urban neighborhoods work well for pregnant women and young children, they also tend to nurture strong communities and economic development.
Water is in every cell of our body. Factories, cities, and forests all depend on it. Practically invisible when we have it, yet catastrophic when we don’t. We humans have a long history of fighting over water. Joe Whitworth sees a better way than idealism and finger pointing. His approach - quantified conservation - blends environmental and economic metrics to produce transaction-based strategies to realize environmental, social, and economic gains.
Hip-hop architecture. Is it a paradox? Or is it inevitable? On the one side: structured formality by necessity. On the other: a powerful counterculture defying formality. Sekou Cooke puts hip-hop within the historical context of other cultural movements and their influence on architecture. He suggests that as a dominant cultural movement of our generation, hip-hop is poised to produce its own architecture.
Collaborative Innovation. I know I know I know. You’ve heard it all before. The words are used and abused. Like so many important concepts, they have earned a plot in the graveyard of ubiquity. Eli MacLaren of The Business Innovation Factory is here to resurrect collaboration and innovation and to discuss why they are indispensable and inseparable.
Let’s call this the career episode. Today’s episode is special and different. My intern, Lyric Crocker turns the mic around and interviews me. I give you the inside scoop on my mid-life career transition and my take on the Private Side of Public Work. And, we give you an inside peak into our own conversations about the purpose of the show, the distinction between relying on people and collaborating with them, and the difference between urban planning and gentrification and why that is a real question.
What is the end-goal of all of university research? Academic journal articles are great as a record of scientific achievement, but if those articles are the last stop, what is the point? How can research move from the ivory tower into the real world? As the Director of Business Development in the Office of Industry Engagement and Commercial Venturing at Brown University, Brian Demers works at the sweet spot between scientific invention and commercial viability.
Today’s Private Side Challenge is keeping your wits about you when confronted with a Public Private Partnership deal. Last week we discussed issues that arises with private financing of public infrastructure. One of the things that struck me was that the in the worst of these deals, governments are throwing away their best capabilities – the ability to do strategic and long term planning in favor of a pseudo wall-street hack….
Aaron Renn discusses ways that public commons are constrained through private investment. Private infusions of capital can completely derail innovation within city planning. If this sounds counterintuitive or antithetical to popular rhetoric, it is because Aaron Renn pays attention to the nuance behind these public-private partnerships. Aaron gives incredible advice on what to pay attention to when it comes to financing public infrastructure.
You may be aware of bottlenecks in your work environment, but did you know that even plants have bottlenecks? What if there was a productivity coach for plants? Someone who could give them all of the secrets to being faster, greener and more productive? Someone who could whisper secrets into plant DNA so that they could transform sunlight into a bigger, better plant self…to be eaten by humans of course...
The impact of the big environmental acts passed in the 1970's is enormous…and almost invisible to the average person because we tend to take things like clean air and clean water and forests and beaches for granted. But if it weren’t for those four pieces of legislation passed in the early seventies, we would be living in a very different world. Brian Mooney Rick Engineering provides a fascinating retrospective on environmental planning in California.
What if there was a book that you could hand to a developer that would help them understand how to activate community spaces before dropping millions or billions of dollars into a project? And what if there were a book that you could hand to community leaders that could help them infuse vibrancy into their neighborhoods to attract resources and capital investment? And, what if those two books were one in the same?