103. Streets are for People, Not Cars? Bringing Joy & Humanity to Your Neighborhood with Blaine Merker

If you wish your neighborhood brought more opportunities for delight and connection close to home, you will love our conversation with guest, Blaine Merker. His work with one of the most important Urban Design companies in the world is aiming at unique, inspiring “street cultures” in the future for us all. Blaine has some amazing stories of how our streets are being transformed from places for our cars, to places for people! If ever the future felt bright, this episode will fill you with a sense of possibility.  Turns out, through most of the last century, cities have been designed, not for people, but for cars! Sounds depressingly obvious and also like awakening to a better way. And it is! I suspect most of us have never considered how much wasted space we have created in our world when it comes to 10 lanes of traffic, parking lots that go on for endless acres, and neighborhood streets choked cars? Think about cities like Chicago, where nothing but a sliver of the Lake Michigan shore is accessible to people because Lake Shore Drive, and its 10 lanes of traffic stand between the city and the water. Think about the big dig.. .and planners realizing that it wasn't a great idea to have a huge roadway cutting through the heart of Boston. In the United states, alone, we have more area paved for parking in this country than the entire state of Georgia. [00:00- 02:18] Opening [02:18- 08:08] Blaine’s Bio Jan Gehl Making cities for people Flip cities back to human focus rather that machine focus Historically, streets functioned as a place… The primary public space of a city [08:09 - 12:45] People’s attitude towards strangers Jane Jacobs Robert Moses City- biggest object designed that we have Dawn of modern age Single family zoning [12:46- 17:07] White flight Zoning and transportation design Cars become the primary or default system of transportation Open road Research in Scandinivia Moments of frustration and boredom for most of us is