The Best of Transportation TED Talks (part 1)
TED Talks is a clearinghouse of informative and inspirational short lectures from the leading thinkers of our age. In case you didn’t know, TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design (its creator was himself an architect and graphic designer).
With more than 1,500 TED Talks available online (not including Mobility Lab’s own mini-TED Talks we hosted recently for Young Professionals in Transportation), and a new one added daily, parsing through those to find great talks about transportation and urban development might seem daunting. Thankfully, we’re rolling out four talks in the transportation arena that you shouldn’t pass up.
There are four TED Talks blog posts planned. Without further ado, we hope you enjoy our first curated video:
How Bad Architecture Wrecked Cities
James Howard Kunstler, one of the most outspoken critics of suburban sprawl in America, claims that the American development pattern built around the automobile has been “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.” He calls America a “national automobile slum … [of] places not worth caring about.” Kunstler’s objective was to convince the audience that, “We must do better.”
Notably, places like Arlington County, Virginia and Portland, Oregon are doing better, focusing on TOD and transportation demand management (TDM) to “move people, not cars.”
Kunstler’s lessons in this insightful, humorous, and acerbic presentation is that we need to live closer to where we work and closer to each other in order to create meaningful places and revivify our town centers. You don’t have to look too far to find cities and counties developing in the way Kunstler suggests, but the majority of the country is still lagging woefully behind.
Also see Part 2 in this series, How Bad Architecture Wrecked Our Cities.
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