Greetings from What is California? HQ, where this week we geek out on how California designs its cities and suburbs—for better or worse. I won’t lie: It’s often for the worse, whether it’s the accursed high-speed rail project between San Francisco and Los Angeles, Bay Area housing, statewide reservoirs and infrastructure, and the freeways that get us between all of the above.
The good news is we have the brilliant Allison Arieff to help us understand not just what’s broken, but also how to fix it. Allison is the Editorial Director of Print for the MIT Technology Review, as well as a former Opinion columnist for The New York Times and editor-in-chief of the award-winning magazine Dwell.
For all her East Coast media creds, Allison is one of California’s foremost thinkers about urban design and architecture. She’s been a Californian since she was a kid, and today she and her family call the Bay Area home—specifically San Francisco.
I spoke to Allison a few years back in a Q&A for Sactown Magazine, where we talked all about her work as a design critic. At the time she was the editorial director for SPUR—the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association. She was also writing a regular design-oriented column for The New York Times. Allison’s current role with MIT Technology Review has her looking and working beyond urban design, but I wanted to invite her to the podcast to talk about some of the opportunities, challenges, frustrations and favorite things she’s seeing in California’s cities and suburbs.
I really enjoy talking with Allison, and I hope you enjoy hearing from her. Check out the show notes below for links to her articles and other references from this conversation.
Thanks for listening! Keep your eye on the bear! 🐻 ❤️
Episode Notes
Allison Arieff is the editorial director of print for MIT Technology Review.
I feel like all of America looks at infrastructure kind of the way a negligent homeowner looks at their house. “Yeah, the roof’s kinda leaky, but we’ll give it another year.” Invariably what happens is you’ve waited too long, your whole house floods, your insurance premiums go up, and it costs you three times as much to fix your roof—because you waited. Writ large, that, to me, is how we deal with infrastructure. We just wait and wait, people fight over it, it gets more and more expensive, something happens, and then it’s an emergency, and the labor costs are more expensive. And people rush, and they make mistakes. There’s no regard for it. There’s no respect for how important it is.
Notes and references from this episode:
@allisonarieff - Allison Arieff on Twitter
MIT Technology Review - home page
SPUR - home page
“Allison Arieff: Riverfront Q&A” - by Stu VanAirsdale, Sactown Magazine
“Adam Neumann’s latest big idea? To become America’s biggest landlord,” - by Lauren Aratani, The Guardian
“The future of urban housing is energy-efficient refrigerators,” by Patrick Sisson, MIT Technology Review
“Los Angeles Enjoys Its New Bridge a Little Too Much,” by Shawn Hubler and Soumya Karlamangla, NY Times
“What Happened to the Great Urban Design Projects?”, by Allison Arieff, NY Times
This Bridge Will Not be Gray, by Dave Eggers and Tucker Nichols
“The Magic of Empty Streets,” by Allison Arieff, NY Times
“Cars Are Death Machines. Self-Driving Tech Won’t Change That,” by Allison Arieff, NY Times
Joan Brown retrospective - SFMOMA
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Produced, hosted and edited by Stu VanAirsdale
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