#274      36 min 06 sec

Just cities: Planning for fairness in the modern metropolis

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VOICEOVER
Welcome to Up Close, the research talk show from the University of Melbourne, Australia.  

PETER MARES
I'm Peter Mares. Thanks for joining us. More than half the people on the planet now live in cities, and the process of urbanisation shows no sign of slowing. By 2050 it's projected that two-thirds of the world's population, more than 6 billion people, will be city dwellers. So how we plan, build and manage cities is a vital question of the future with enormous implications for our wellbeing. On this program, we look at the city through the lens of justice. In diverse societies, how do we create cities that are reasonably equal, that are environmentally sustainable, and that are democratic, giving residents a say in shaping their communities? Is that even possible or do these ideals conflict with one another? Does the idea of a just city contradict other aims, like increasing productivity and economic output? I'll discuss these issues with one of the world's leading thinkers on urban planning. Dr Susan S. Fainstein is a Senior Research Fellow in the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she was Professor of Urban Planning prior to her retirement from teaching in 2012. Susan Fainstein is the author is numerous books and more than 100 articles on urban planning and theory, urban redevelopment, and comparative urban policy, drawing evidence from her study of cities in the United States, in Europe and in East Asia. The Association of American Schools of Planning has honoured Susan Fainstein's lifetime achievements with its Distinguished Educator Award and with its Davidoff Book Award. That was for her book The Just City, published in 2010 by Cornell University Press. Susan Fainstein, thanks for joining me on Up Close.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
It's a pleasure to be here, Peter. Thanks for inviting me.

PETER MARES
What is a just city?

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Well I looked at a number of political philosophers in order to develop a theory of justice that would be applicable to urban planning. I distilled from a number of these very well-known thinkers, I'm not certainly a professional philosopher, but I argued that the values, the principles of diversity, democracy and equity were the three principles that constitute justice as we developed cities. I did not aim at developing a theory of the good city, which I think would be much more difficult and there would be many more differences among people in terms of that, but I would say that these three principles of justice would probably be agreed with by many different people with different political outlooks.

PETER MARES
Is there an example of a just city in the world today?

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
There's no place that we would call a just city, but what one could say is that there are more just cities and less just or more injust cities. So what I really tried to do in my book was compare three cities, New York, London and Amsterdam, in terms of the levels of justice that they provided. Of the three, Amsterdam came out looking best, so I would say it's not a model of the just city but it's a model of a more just city.

PETER MARES
What about unjust cities, if you like? What about the opposite end of the scale if you think Amsterdam's sort of towards the top end of the scale?

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Well of the three I said that New York was the least just, at least as measured by the principle of equity to which I give priority. But New York scores very well in terms of diversity and it's certainly democratic. There is a great deal of pluralism and participation. On the other hand it's less democratic in that there are certain groups which have too much power or inordinate power in terms of urban development, by whom I mean real estate developers.

PETER MARES
We'll come back to the question of power and who gets to make decisions in cities later in our conversation. But is justice in your view the most important feature of the city? Is that why you looked at the city through that lens?

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Well it's my feeling that after a period following World War II when we saw greater equity coming about in many places, we saw decolonisation, we saw the achievement of democracy in places that had been run by dictators. We saw in the wealthier countries much greater power for labour unions, higher wages for workers. But starting about the middle 70s we saw a decline. I could see this very clearly in the United States, a move away from the New Deal, lack of sensitivity to issues of urban poverty. When I first started teaching, which was in 1970, urban poverty was considered the major problem of cities. But around the middle 70s it switched to the major problem was economic development. So the focus that had existed on the poor ceased. What we see now is across the world an ideology that's come to be known as neo-liberalism - and I'll get to what I mean by that in a minute - sweeping every planning establishment, every political body in cities that neo-liberalism says that we need to deregulate, that we need to let the market rather than political decision-makers determine prices, that it isn't right to supply low income people with housing because that distorts housing markets. This general view that government should stay away from attempting to create more equal cities has led to what's a very visible increase in inequality everywhere.I started then looking at other cities outside of the United States to say, well, these are all capitalist cities but some of them seem to have more equity than others. Some seem to be more just.

PETER MARES
So there are different ways of doing ways. It's not a given that a capitalist city has to be this way rather than that way.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Within constraints, but yes, that if you're concerned with the quality of life for everybody in your city, I think that you have to have a different set of aims than if you're saying well, our city, viewed as a single collective, has to beat out other cities. What you hear so much of now is we have to have a competitive city. Our city has to be competitive with Shanghai or Singapore or London or Paris or whatever, but what does it mean if your city is more competitive, that you have more investment, if the people in your city don't benefit from that investment?

PETER MARES
But this is exactly the argument, isn't it, that counter to your position, the neo-liberal argument if you like would be well, if your city's not economically competitive it won't attract investment. It won't attract capital. It won't attract industry. The city itself won't prosper. So that whereas you've put the lens on justice as being a priority, other writers would say no, the productivity is the key thing. You've got to make your city as productive and therefore as competitive as possible, and that will then lead to benefits for its citizens because without economic activity people will be poor.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Right. But there are different ways of encouraging economic growth. I'm not sure that giving huge subsidies to real estate developers, which is the principal method by which cities encourage economic growth, is the way to go. Or the thing that I find the most irritating I guess is huge amounts of public money going into the building of sports venues. Now you would have to show me a very good argument that says that the mass of people benefit. New York spent something like half a billion dollars so that the New York Yankees, the richest team in baseball, where players will be making 10, 12 million dollars a year, where the team itself gets huge revenues from broadcast rights - why we, the public, need to use our tax money to subsidise this team and how this brings somehow economic benefit to people who are low income.

PETER MARES
If we think about equity in the city it can have two dimensions. I mean you can have different levels of income and wealth, but that can also be expressed spatially. So you could have poor people and rich people living in the same suburbs next to one another, rubbing up against one another, or you could have them segregated into different parts of the city: very poor suburbs, very well-to-do suburbs. Does it make a difference?

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Well there are those who argue very strongly, and this has been very much part of American public policy, that we have to disperse the poor because by living in areas of concentrated poverty there's a perpetuation of poverty.

PETER MARES
What are called area effects or neighbourhood effects, those sorts of things.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Right.

PETER MARES
People that see their parents never work so they never have an aspiration to work, that sort of argument.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Right, and the people who in their neighbourhood seem to have money are the drug dealers, so they're bad role models. But that is in fact blaming the poor for their poverty. It's saying well, if these people would only get up and go, if they'd only strove to get better education, if they didn't follow these bad role models, if they didn't see bad examples, that they would somehow be able to move out of their position. But what you have to realise is that as capitalism has developed in the 21st century, there are simply going to be huge numbers of low income people and they're going to live somewhere. So if you disperse them, they're not necessarily going to be any less poor than if they're together.

PETER MARES
You don't think dispersing them makes any difference to outcomes?

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Well the research on the people who've been dispersed finds that they do feel more secure. They're less likely to be the object of a criminal.

PETER MARES
Because their life cycle had been sort of trapped in a crime-ridden neighbourhood as such.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
That's right. But aside from that it seems not to have made any significant difference in their levels of education, in their levels of income, in their employment, any of those things. And although they may rub up against, as you put it, wealthier people, what seems to happen is that they all ignore each other.

PETER MARES
So it doesn't work the other way round, for example, that wealthier people if they are living amongst poorer people, share more compassion or are more generous...

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
No, in fact the opposite. What they try then to do is send their children to private schools so they don't have to go to school with the poor people. They certainly don't socialise with them. At best they might say good morning as they pass them on the street. There's this sort of mythology about if you live near people who have higher status, they're going to help you out, help you get a job. But in fact when this theory was first being brooded about, which is quite a long time ago, I remember being in a conference in Detroit - one of our poorest cities and one that just declared bankruptcy - next to a guy who was on the faculty who himself was African American. He said people get jobs because their uncle gets them a job, not because somebody down the street gets them a job. 

PETER MARES
I'm Peter Mares and you're listening to Up Close. In this episode I'm discussing the future of cities with Dr Susan Fainstein, Senior Research Fellow in the Harvard Graduate School of Design. We're talking about what a just city is. Susan Fainstein, what's the evidence base you'd use for determining what makes a city just? What would you measure?

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Well I think I would measure the quality of life that it affords to those people who are lowest income. I don't think it's within the power of city government to do massive amounts of redistribution. Only the national government can do that. The city, of the ones I studied, that I'd pick out as being the most just is Amsterdam. Amsterdam is able to do the many things it does for people because the Dutch National Government is a high-tax, high-redistribution state, and it funnels resources through the city government. But what Amsterdam's government itself chose to do was to build a great deal of public housing. There was a period of a couple of decades where 90 per cent of the new housing units built were public housing, which meant that there was an adequate supply of housing for poor people. So even though their income wasn't high, their level of expenditure that they had to spend on shelter was also not high, so they had more money left over.Another thing that city governments can do is expand public space and recreation centres so that you don't have to belong to a private gym or go to a spa in order to have access to recreational facilities. 

PETER MARES
How important is it to get the bones of a city right? I'm thinking here of things like housing, transport, infrastructure and, as you mentioned, public space or shared space.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
It's crucially important and it contributes to both growth and greater equity. The example I use a lot is Singapore. Now you can easily say that Singapore's authoritarian, and the greatest weakness I think of Singapore is it has a large number of contract workers who have no rights in the city. 

PETER MARES
Migrant workers from Indonesia and Malaysia and other countries?

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Yeah. Primarily Thailand, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh – of men who work in construction and then Filipino women who are maids and live in very poor conditions. But for the Singaporean core population as they call it, they have built fantastic public housing. Eighty-five per cent of Singaporean citizens live in public housing, in affordable public housing, which means that even though their income might be low, they're decently housed. Singapore, it builds as they would call them new towns and we would call them neighbourhoods, really, because the whole island isn't very big, they aren't very far out. They don't build the housing until they put in the infrastructure. So they have a fantastic public transit system and no matter where you are, wherever you're living, you can get to where you want to go quite rapidly. It's very well planned and it's constantly reinvested in and expanded.Also the housing is constantly reinvested in. So public housing in the United States has a huge backlog of repairs needed. Much of it is crumbling. It was built primarily in the 1950s and 60s, so it's old now. It was built cheaply to begin with. Well, there's no money there to do anything about it. In Singapore they either - and this is true in the Netherlands also. They either put money into renovation like additional elevators, fixing the facades, putting in better bathrooms, or in Singapore they move people, as they put it, en bloc to a new building all at once from the old building, then tear down the old building.

PETER MARES
So they keep the same neighbours and that's helpful.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
That's right.

PETER MARES
Because often that sort of redevelopment of public housing, it's the dislocation that is most distressing.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Right, and that's what I should have mentioned also when you were asking me about dispersal of the poor, is that the greatest loss they feel is for their social network. Many, after moving to a nicer area that seems desirable in many ways, then move back to another low-income area because their friends and relatives are there.

PETER MARES
The examples you give of Amsterdam, Singapore and New York, they all raise questions really of who makes the decisions, where the power lies. Now we can think of state planning or state control often being a very dead hand, if you like. We think of the old East Germany and the sorts of housing that was built in a Communist country like that. But you seem to be suggesting that there is a role for the state, and a big role for the state, if the state gets it right at least.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Yes. That's why Singapore is so interesting, because the state does get it right. It's very meritocratic. The people who run things are very competent. They know how to do good planning. One of the reasons is that in fact it's very competitive to get a state job and it's very well paid once you get it, and it's honoured. In the [United] States, increasingly being in government employment is dishonoured. It's considered one of the least desirable kinds of jobs, so the kinds of people who go into them are not necessarily the crème de la crème. But I have planning students who actually are really smart and very dedicated to the public wheel, but they become frustrated in their jobs because the political power is so much, when it comes to planning issues, resting with property developers. 

PETER MARES
So in the case of a city like New York, the power lies with the money. Is that what you're saying?

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
That's what I'm saying. And they are very big contributors to political campaigns. So politicians really don't dare to defy them. Democracy is one of my values, but one of the problems with the mechanism of democracy is in order to run for office you need money. So the politicians spend probably at least half their time, maybe more, not on issues of policy but simply on the phone trying to get donations to their campaigns. Well, people aren't giving to this politician just because they think he's a nice fellow or woman, but rather because they're hoping to get something out of it, and he'd better deliver or he's not going to get another contribution.

PETER MARE
Susan Fainstein, if we turn back to the question of justice, we have to ask justice for whom, because you have the existing residents of the city, but as I said in my introduction cities are constantly growing. The process of urbanisation is continuing around the world. So there are future or prospective residents of cities, and what they want from a city may be very different from what the current residents want. In fact the current residents may want them not to come.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
May not want them, exactly. To me right now this is maybe the greatest political issue of democratic governance, is that commonly everywhere in the world we see that people who are insiders don't want the "other" to intrude on whatever they have, so that if you have a great deal of citizen participation, often what those citizens are devoted to is exclusion. If they're home owners, they don't want renters in their neighbourhood. If they have low-rise housing, they don't want high-rise housing. We see in the United States there are an estimated 11 million, and it's probably more than that, undocumented immigrants. So they have no political rights. They are essentially invisible except that they take all the jobs nobody else is willing to take. You go to the United Arab Emirates, we're talking 90 per cent of people with no citizenship rights. In Singapore the greatest flaw is the million and a half people who are there as contract labourers. We have this wonderful planning apparatus that plans beautifully for the core Singapore population but doesn't even dare say where the migrant workers should be put. Well the million and a half, maybe a million are low-wage migrants and a half million are expats and people who are highly skilled. But of the million who are much darker-skinned, who speak whatever language they speak, nobody wants them around although they do want their labour. So these are contradictions that are very hard to overcome and which produce enormous injustice.

PETER MARES
This is what's known as the NIMBY syndrome, the Not In My Backyard syndrome, so that democracy, if it's based on the people who already live in the city or the ones who have citizenship rights versus the ones who don't, can be in fact a very unjust or result in very...

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Exactly.

PETER MARES
...unjust outcomes. How do you deal with that?

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Well one of the arguments I make in my book is these three principles of equity, diversity and democracy are often at odds with each other, often are contradictory, that democracy often produces injustice that we've seen now in all the European countries, and I see it in Australia too because I've seen posters to this effect, that there are right-wing parties that make their program of excluding others. They portray the biggest danger as being outsiders coming in so that democracy and equity pull against each other. You might think that diversity contributes to both equity and democracy, but the issue of diversity is if you very much emphasise diversity and that everybody should be so proud of whatever their ethnic origins are, that you divide community to such an extent that you lose any sense of common purpose. One of the ways in which, since capitalism began, that owners have divided workers and protected themselves from what might be more kinds of class warfare, is by encouraging workers to think of themselves as Poles or Irish or blacks or whatever, so that it ends up with people instead of feeling antagonism towards those who might be exploiting them, they simply feel antagonism to those who are some other colour or some other race or some other...

PETER MARES
Who they perceive may be taking their job or threatening their job or whatever it may be.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Exactly. So you get competitiveness among people who are more or less in the same class position so that emphasising difference constantly doesn't necessarily produce greater equity.
PETER MARES
But at the same time, people's expression of their identity is often a core part of who they are and needs to be acknowledged.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
It does, and this is where Marx, I think, went on the wrong track because Marx thought that class consciousness would overcome all feelings of national difference and ethnic difference. But what you see is that emotionally people are much more charged up about their identity than they are about their class position.

PETER MARES
Cities around the world are diverse and the cities you've looked at, you've mentioned, are diverse cities. Singapore, London, New York, Amsterdam, they're all very diverse cities. In some cases diversity is a strength of a city. We might say that about New York. We might say that about Melbourne, for example, in Australia. But in some cases diversity becomes a problem for cities. It's actually simmering tension that bursts out into conflict. We can think of the riots in Paris for example. What makes the difference as to whether diversity is a strength or an Achilles Heel?

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Well certainly a lot of it has to do with how politicians deal with the issue. I am struck in Australia that before every lecture there's a statement about we all realise that this land belonged to the Aborigines, that saying things that say we recognise the rights of others as opposed to saying we're endangered by them makes a big difference. Demagoguery is often built on seeing difference and making too much of it. There has to be a balance. It's all well and good to like your native food. In the United States in cities that have a lot of Italians, Columbus Day is very heavily celebrated. There are big parades and people fly the Italian flag. That's all fine. That's nice. And Italian restaurants are great and everybody eats in them. It's when you get beyond these more or less superficial symbols to saying my daughter can't go out with somebody from a different ethnic group, that these people shouldn't live in our neighbourhood, that you begin to get a lot of antagonism. I think one of the ways in which places like Australia and Canada and the United States do better than China or Europe, most European countries, is that these are settler societies. Everybody realises that - except for the Native Americans or the Aborigines - that their ancestors, maybe even just their parents or grandparents, came here from somewhere else. That tends to lead to a greater willingness to accept difference than in places like France where you feel you have this age-old tradition and if anybody's going to come to your country they ought to act just like you and look just like you.

PETER MARES
This is Up Close. I'm Peter Mares and I'm speaking with a world leader in thinking on urban policy and planning, Dr Susan Fainstein, Senior Research Fellow in the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Susan Fainstein, urban planning has been through many different phases, but it seems that solving one problem can often create another. So if we think of the garden city ideal which is the idea of houses set in green, park-like locations with backyards and that sort of thing, we can see that link to the contemporary problem of urban sprawl. Or if you think of the modernist approach to cities, very functional approach building lots of housing in high-rise apartments influenced by Le Corbusier, then you often end up with projects, housing apartments that are isolated, that are kind of surrounded by empty space that don't work very well. If we think about planning for traffic and building freeways, that then has led us to problems of ongoing congestion as more and more people drive cars. How do you deal with this problem that planning seems to be sometimes its own worst enemy?

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Yeah. Well there's kind of a dialectic. I have taught for a long time, it's over 40 years, and I have seen generations of ideas come and go. Each one tends to in many ways be a reaction to the preceding one. I think one has to learn from experience. Urban renewal was based on an idea, urban renewal of the 50s and 60s, which clearly discredited planning in many places, an idea that slums cause bad behaviour so what we need to do is get rid of slums. So the idea was called slum clearance. Now it really shouldn't have taken great brain power to figure out that if you took a neighbourhood of poor people, bulldozed all their homes and left them with nowhere to go, that that was not really going to solve the problem of poverty because they were all going to go somewhere else and create a new slum. So that idea of large-scale demolition and new construction turned out to be a terrible failure. So then we moved to a new phase very much inspired by Jane Jacobs' book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which basically said look at cities and see what's good about them and preserve it. The best thing about cities was high density and a lot of street life. So, in terms of physical planning, things have moved very much in that direction. We have what's called the new urbanism, which was the idea that you built houses close together, but there are several things in the broader context that have changed, most important of which is air conditioning. So people don't in fact, in climates that are hot, hang out on the street anyhow. They used to hang out on the street when it was hot because being inside was worse. Now being inside is better.

PETER MARES
Because they have air conditioning.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Because they have air conditioning, right. So in the Southern United States all these new communities have been built with front porches because the idea was you sat on your front porch and the neighbours dropped by, but nobody sits on the front porch. 

PETER MARES
Another factor there is traffic of course, because you used to sit on the front porch and kids played in the street. No one does that anymore because the streets are full of cars and it's not a pleasant place to be.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Well there are all these suburban areas where - in fact my son lives in one of them, which are all cul de sacs. And the streets aren't filled with cars but it's kind of boring out there because people aren't walking by.

PETER MARES
There's no shops, there's nothing to do. 

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Right, and...

PETER MARES
It's all housing.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
...for him, he has to drive 20 minutes to buy a quart of milk. So one of the big mistakes of suburban planning was to say we'll have exclusively residential and we'll put all the shopping somewhere where you have to drive in your car to get it. It's one of the great joys of city life is actually being able to walk out your door and walk to the shop.

PETER MARES
So how do you get the right balance then between this kind of dense, urban environment with lots of diversity and people on the street, and the suburban type backyard and all those sorts of things? How do you find the balance?

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Well actually I'm going to go back to the Singapore model because they have done what you might call a mash-up between Le Corbusier's towers in the park and Ebenezer Howard's garden cities, so that it's all high-rise but they're arranged according to the design standards of Howard. So that in each neighbourhood there's a core that has schools, recreation, movie theatres, shopping mall, hawkers' market for prepared hot foods that are quite affordable, a wet market where you can buy if you're going to cook. I don't think anyone in Singapore actually does cook...

PETER MARES
The food on the street's so good, why would you bother?

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Right. So these are all in this core that each neighbourhood has, and each neighbourhood is also connected by the metro to the rest of the city, both peripheral lines and lines that go into the centre. And then there's a huge emphasis on greenery and horticulture so that people who live in the public housing lead very satisfactory lives in which they have easy access, there is open space, the open space is used, there are parks everywhere. They're trying now to have a way of connecting all the parks so you can ride your bike around the whole island. It is really good land use planning. But it also did rely on tearing down extensively what was there before, so there isn't much history left to see. But I think it's a model that works. 

PETER MARES
The other question there though is a big one, and that is whether the means matters, because as you pointed out, Singapore is an autocratic state. It's been dominated by one party for a long time. The citizens don't get a lot of say. And this raises a bigger question. If we think that six billion people are going to be living in cities in an increasingly crowded planet and increasingly hot planet because of the impact of climate change, resources are scarce and so on, can we balance those things with democracy, or do we in fact need to follow a Singaporean-type model of a more autocratic state that says this is what's good for you, we'll set it up, you don't really get a say.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Yeah. Well, you raise what is an incredibly difficult problem. Singapore have the advantage of not having a rural hinterland, so that you didn't get the kind of political conflicts that you get in most countries as between the rural and the urban.

PETER MARES
The city couldn't just go on spreading either.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Right. That too. They had to densify, no question. They also invested a lot in their economy of public money, and they had really forced savings. So it's a peculiar example and I'm only going to use it as an example to say they provide good housing and they provide a model of good land use planning. I don't go in the direction that a lot of planning theorists went that said all we need to do is broaden participation, because often the effort to get consensus means the sort of lowest common denominator and that what you get is not just NIMBY-ism but you get always a reversion to the status quo. People are not very adventurous when they participate. They don't want something new and different. They want...

PETER MARES
People are scared of change.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Exactly. So I think that you need actually more top-downism, but that only works if the people at the top have the right ideas. And the reason that you want more democracy is to prevent the people at the top who have the wrong ideas, who in many places are just plain corrupt, but who also tend to have just some view that they want to impose, that you want democracy to stop these kinds of impositions. 

PETER MARES
So you want democracy as a check to power and as a form of accountability, but you want expert planning.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Yes. You want expert planning and what you have to do as a planner is learn from the experience of others. There's too much of an emphasis these days on modelling and what's called big data. The idea is somehow if you have enough technical expertise and put in all this data, it will tell you the solution. But it doesn't tell you the solution, all it does is tell you a bunch of numbers, and what your assumptions are very much affects what the numbers are going to come out as. So instead we look at other places and certain things seem to have worked pretty well. And we can try that here. One of the ideas that travelled around the world which actually seems to have worked in a lot of places is bus rapid transit, that it's much cheaper to build bus rapid transit than to build heavy rail. But that means building right of ways for buses. In Melbourne you have a trolley system. Trolleys are fine if they didn't have to stop at every traffic light, but they don't have their own right of way and they stop at all these traffic lights, the result of which is it takes you forever to get anywhere on the trolley system. But if you built their own right-of-ways for the trolleys, you wouldn't have to go underground necessarily but you could move people a lot faster.I grew up actually in a planned community but interestingly it was privately planned. It was a private planned community which went bankrupt in the Great Depression. But because it was so well planned it. Actually after World War II became very much a desirable place to live. So when they built it, they built in two light rail lines that have their own right of ways. Even when I was a child, even when I was 11 or 12, it was outside of Cleveland, Ohio, I could with my dime get on this and go downtown by myself. So that was good planning. And it was a suburb and it had suburban densities but it was a mix of densities, so it did have apartment buildings along the transit corridors. One of the things we've certainly learned if you have good top-down planning is that where you have transit nodes is where you put the highest densities.

PETER MARES
So what your conclusion would be is that we can learn from the best examples around the world and the best examples of history, and we can find ways to make our cities more just.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
Yes, I think that's a fair summary.

PETER MARES
Susan Fainstein, thank you very much for joining me on Up Close.

SUSAN FAINSTEIN
You're very welcome. It has been fun to be here.

PETER MARES
Susan Fainstein is Senior Research Fellow in the Harvard Graduate School of Design where she was Professor of Urban Planning prior to her retirement from teaching in 2012. She's the author of many books and articles in urban policy and planning, including the award-winning book The Just City, published in 2010 by Cornell University Press. You'll find more details on the Up Close website, along with a full transcript of this program and of all our other podcasts. Up Close is a production of the University of Melbourne, Australia, created by Kelvin Param and Eric van Bemmel. This episode was recorded on 24 October 2013, produced by Eric van Bemmel with Audio Engineer Gavin Nebauer. I'm Peter Mares, thanks for listening. I hope you can join us again soon.

VOICEOVER
You've been listening to Up Close. We're also on Twitter and Facebook. For more info, visit upclose.unimelb.edu.au. Copyright 2013, The University of Melbourne.