Future Forward

Seyi (00:01)
Hello, hello, hello Reza, how are you today?

Reza (00:03)
I'm good Seyi how are you doing?

Seyi (00:05)
I am doing well, I am doing well. It's another day, another episode of Future Forward.

Reza (00:12)
Yeah, this one's gonna be really interesting Seyi. We're gonna talk about the five events that reshaped cities and I'll let you introduce that but before we do, I will just tell our listeners what Future Forward is and welcome them. So welcome everyone to Future Forward. This is a, not just for our regular listeners but our new listeners too. This is a conversation that Seyi and I have been having.

for many years now and we're bringing you into the conversation. We've been talking about cities and systems and how to make them more sustainable, how to make communities within cities thrive. with Future Forward, we approach this from a place of curiosity. We're not experts. We've had experts on this show. We're learning a lot as we're doing this and we hope that you are too. And we usually take the approach of trying to bring some historical context to the discussion, talk about what's happening in the present and then

project forward some strategic foresight about where things are going and All of this we hope will get you to think about You know our cities and and also hope to get your input and feedback We always have a sort of a mailbag segment where we ask for you to share your thoughts with us But with that Che, let's dive in. This is a very interesting episode. I really love how you have you know sort of

You always come up with these great ideas for episodes. They're so different every time. And so I can't wait to talk about this one.

Seyi (01:37)
You

Yeah, no, I'm glad you're excited about it, because I am. And it came, it was inspired by a conversation with a native austenite who's a policy expert that maybe we should bring on actually now that I think about it. But I was inspired by a conversation with him. He's lived across the world on four different continents, spent, I think he lived in.

in France for about five years, lived in Japan for a few years as well. And one of the things, and he lives, obviously grew up in Austin. And one of the things he mentioned when we were grabbing hot chocolate or tea or coffee, I can't remember now. I think he had a coffee. I don't drink coffee, but he said something that really

He goes that in his experience living in different parts of the world, that cities change the same way. And that we are really moving towards a point where the homogeneity, which we've talked about on this show, is showing up across most cities as they become very alike. And so we thought, you know what?

Let us explore if this is true, but more importantly, identify the things that have reshaped our cities over the few decades or so that are relevant to where the cities are today. So I'll dive in with the first one, which I'm pretty certain will not surprise anyone.

and it's Cars, automobile, specifically the mass production of automobiles, which began with Ford's Model T in 1908, revolutionized urban planning because prior to cars, we didn't need roads to be this wide, as wide as they are currently. We didn't need highway systems.

We didn't need parking infrastructure, which has taken over a lot of our cities now. But when the Model T came in, city planners, and it took off in terms of adoption of the vehicle and other vehicle types that came along with it shortly thereafter. By 1950, the city of LA, which some suggest is one of the most

car-centric cities in the US. By 1950, urban planners in LA had completely redesigned LA around car travel. And LA is not unique in that, but LA seems to be the biggest representation of what eventually happened with urban planners having to cater to cars. It became a more car-centric.

Reza (04:39)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Seyi (05:06)
city than a people-centric city with 60 % of downtown dedicated to roads and parking in LA. 60 % dedicated to roads and parking, exactly. And this reshaping of our cities to enable cars to become the main thing we focus on in cities, which...

Reza (05:09)
Mm.

Wow that's crazy!

Seyi (05:34)
Even saying it out loud, it's just wild that we let ourselves get to this point. And studies have shown that car-centric design led to urban sprawl. And we'll talk about that shortly. But US metropolitan areas expanded at approximately twice the rate of population growth between 1950 to 2000.

One of the things that I want to bring up here is we've talked about the book, Scale by Jeffrey West. And in Scale, he talks about the relativity of the growth to the population, but cars sort of broke that for, and that's some of what the research showed because we needed a lot more space than people need.

Reza (06:13)
Mm-hmm.

Mmm.

Seyi (06:33)
obviously, but we are now catering to and to bring it to today. We're now catering more to cars and to people in the planning of our cities. I already mentioned LA, but there's a specific neighborhood in LA that brings this to life. And it's a neighborhood of Boyle Heights and

Reza (06:33)
Yeah.

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Seyi (07:02)
It was once a thriving walkable city. had street cars, which we've also mentioned on this show before. Once cars became the thing, Boyle Heights was literally split into two because of highways between 1940 and 1960. Families were displaced, local businesses collapsed because they had to be relocated.

Reza (07:20)
Mmm.

Seyi (07:32)
as a result of the highways that were being built and pollution levels soared. The neighbourly fabric, the community that had defined ball heights for generations was decimated and subordinated to the needs of automobile traffic with physical barriers being built to separate the parts of the city. And you see this interestingly

in most American cities in Dallas, in Austin. 35 is what represents that divide in I-35, the highway here in Austin. Similar one, Boyle Heights is sort of the first example of where this divide really became stark. And you have this East versus West of downtown divided by highways, which is quite a shocking thing.

Reza (08:26)
Yeah.

Seyi (08:31)
if you did not grow up in the US and you move here. I still talk about this phenomenon with my wife whenever we drive through a city like Dallas sometime, I go, how did we think it was okay to put a highway through and build walls to make sure either side of the highway, one side most of the time tends to be the wealthy side, the other side tends to be the poor side.

Reza (08:47)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Seyi (09:00)
Cars absolutely reshaped cities, de-emphasized the walking and street cars, which was a form of public transport through most major cities in the US. So I'd like to get your thoughts, because we do have a law that talks about this and your thoughts on this phenomenon.

Reza (09:20)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's a really good overview, Seyi. And the law that this addresses, have law number 10, which is sustainable transportation improves livability. And the rise of cars really challenged this principle because we did this car centric planning. It led to increased pollution, traffic congestion, and the reduced accessibility for non-drivers. So nothing about that is sustainable. And you you have examples like the city of Amsterdam.

that have an alternative approach where 32 % of trips that are made are made by bicycles. And you can see over there, they actually prioritize bicycle infrastructure. You see bicycle parking lots. And what they've learned in what I've read about is the more they invest in bicycle infrastructure, the more demand they bring for people to use that infrastructure to where they're just trying to keep up. Every time they add more...

bicycle lanes every time they add more parking lots, people are like, okay, well, I can now use a bicycle and be part of this new way of transportation. So that's a really good alternative approach. I do think there's one other thought that comes to my mind, is, have, there's also some fundamental reason why humans want to,

Seyi (10:33)
Yeah.

Reza (10:51)
have convenient transportation. They want to get to places quickly, conveniently, because we're social, we do things, we want to connect with others. A transportation system has to think about that at its core. Cars are a very convenient, good solution, but has a bunch of trade-offs that makes it not the best solution.

Seyi (11:00)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Reza (11:20)
So

I'm very curious, like we've had discussions about like what the future of transportation is. And so I'm very curious about how this plays out that actually is better for a city. Because as mega cities grow is is a car centric city the best solution?

Seyi (11:38)
Yeah, no, it's such a thanks for bringing in that human centric perspective that you always bring to these topics because we'll talk about mega cities shortly, but the bigger the cities get, the more disconnected it feels like the people in the city are from each other. And consequently, what

Reza (11:57)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (12:07)
the problem we're trying to solve with cars, which is to get from A to B, maybe we could solve by just making smaller communities within cities such that you don't, you have within a certain radius, and we'll touch on this a little bit too, in little bit too, is you have within a certain radius the things that make living in the city worthwhile and fulfilling for the residents of the city.

Reza (12:19)
Thank you.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Seyi (12:36)
in these small clusters within the city so that you're not having to all the time move from an hour away to go experience something in the north part of the city if you're coming from the south for example and then we connect those small clusters through some of these multimodal transportation systems that we always talk about so that even if you have to move from one end of the city to another leave your cluster

Reza (12:39)
Yeah.

Seyi (13:06)
to go experience the joy of the city somewhere else, you take a sustainable form of transportation that is still communal because you will be on the train with a bunch of other people and you experience the sense of belonging that we all yearn for in the cities we're in. So just some idea there about an approach that takes us back to the things we really care about in the cities we live in.

Reza (13:35)
Yeah, I like that.

Seyi (13:38)
Fantastic. The second.

thing that has reshaped cities, interestingly, I think was enhanced by the presence of cars. We talked about urban sprawl and suburbia has really changed cities. What we find is that in the 1950s, 1970s,

Reza (13:53)
Yes.

Seyi (14:10)
After the Federal Housing Administration put out the GI Bill, especially after the war, subsidizing homeownership.

there was a tendency to build out and home ownership, which unfortunately excluded inner city neighborhoods, even as the GI Bill came to be and more people were looking for homes and the city, the inner cities could not house all the, there were not enough homes in the inner cities and the neighborhoods there to house.

the veterans who were trying to build their families and live their lives, get jobs and live their lives, the inner cities were not considered where this growth should take place. And so between 1950 and 1970, the US suburban population grew from, more than doubled, grew from 35 million to 75 million.

even as urban populations decline, the inner cities, the population of inner cities decline. And there a lot of reasons for this. There was a bunch of certain races moving out of the inner city because they didn't want to live with other people. It was the height of discrimination across the board. Redlining was happening around that time that made certain parts of the inner city.

undesirable and consequently the homes in or building a home in these redlined areas was not considered a wise move because the value of your home would be diminished by some racist decisions that were made. So.

the suburban landscape of America changed with the increasing population, even as the inner cities shrunk. What this caused, and I had to touch on this because suburbia was blamed for the lack, the increasing loneliness that we're now seeing a lot more of today, but even in the

Reza (16:34)
Yeah.

Seyi (16:41)
early 80s, after the boom of suburbia between 1950 and 1970, Robert Putnam wrote a book called Bowling Alone, which talks about suburbia and loneliness at a depth that we can't really touch on on this. And more recently, Putnam has a documentary called Join or Die, which he still talks about in which he still talks about this.

Reza (16:52)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (17:10)
idea of loneliness as a result of no longer being in community and in small groups where we think we belong because suburbia is very...

just it's difficult to build community in suburbia because you have your two car garage home there's a there's some gap between you and your neighbor and a perfect example of this is levy town in new york which was completed in 1951 it it is the template for mass-produced suburbia i get this reza 17 000 identical homes

were built in Levy town at an astonishing rate of 30 homes per day, creating a totally new landscape, which we now know as suburbia, obviously. So people who moved from cramped city apartments found themselves with yards, modern appliances, and achieving the American dream. But it was exclusionary, not just to

Reza (18:02)
That's crazy.

Seyi (18:25)
racial other racial groups that were not given the opportunity to own this American dream. But it also came with a lot of driving in your car. The car comes back again, maybe with your family or with your few friends from your home to a place to go experience something that was now no longer

as easily accessible when these individuals and their families lived in the inner city. You could walk to a place, you could walk to go watch a movie. Now you have to drive to go watch a movie. And as we just shared, that did not lead to increased belonging. In fact, it led to isolation. It reduced the community interactions and the...

Community built through proximity now required way more effort for people and consequently we find ourselves today with huge homes in suburbia but not as much community in the suburbs where these homes have been built.

Reza (19:48)
Yeah. That's a really good overview of the suburbs. it really, the law that we have that addresses this is our law number two, which is urban density drives efficiency. And suburbia is really the opposite of it, right? It directly contradicts this principle. It creates this low density urban sprawl. It results in increased infrastructure costs, high energy consumption.

Seyi (20:08)
Exactly.

Reza (20:16)
and a lot of more environmental impact. And so you can see this contrast between a city like Atlanta with huge amount of sprawl and a city like Barcelona, which they have found a way to maintain urban density. And so it exemplifies like this difference. But I would also say, Shai, again, I'm trying to bring this sort of human factor to like, why would suburbia appeal to a person? And I would say that to some people like,

no matter where they are, they want to care for their family and they want a good place to raise their family. And sometimes a suburban environment is very conducive because there's space, it's safe. And so it appeals to some needs that we have, but at the cost of what it does to the urban environment and how connected we feel with other people. So there's this odd trade-off.

Seyi (20:49)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Reza (21:15)
And I would also say that suburbia, like, I mean, we probably should explore in a future episode, it's like, how has suburbia evolved in the US versus other countries? Because suburbia exists in other countries, but in slightly different ways. Like, if I think about the city of Mumbai, the central city is where the wealthy live. And the further out that you are, you if you move into the suburbs, it's, you're less wealthy.

Seyi (21:15)
Yeah.

Hmm. Hmm.

Yes.

Hmm.

Reza (21:43)
But it's also a factor of how the city has been shaped over time. And so, you know, but there is value for them in living in suburbia because they can afford to, and maybe they can get a better place, but at the trade-off of, you know, being away, you know, distant from the city, maybe where they work. So there's all these factors. And I think the US is a unique example of where suburbanization hasn't worked.

Seyi (21:47)
Mm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Reza (22:11)
Well, I'm curious to see how it has played out in other countries, cities in other countries.

Seyi (22:12)
Yeah.

No, that is a really good point. I'll add one quick comment to that about the fact that as the inner cities in many US cities became victims of this move to suburbia, we ended up with commercial

interests in the middle of the city and only in the last couple decades or so have these expensive high-rise condos in the city become a thing again. So we're seeing a little bit of a shift but to your point very few of us can afford the penthouse condo in one of the Austin

Reza (22:49)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Seyi (23:15)
high rises downtown. Very few of us can. So even as suburbia might be losing some people to the city, there's still a wealth gap and it's impossible for the vast majority of us to go back into the city. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. But that I see as part of sort of the future here.

Reza (23:34)
So true. So true.

Seyi (23:43)
If we, well, we've been pushing for return to office and consequently some of the commercial property that was being earmarked to be switched to residential might not, that might not happen anymore. But I think rebalancing the, cause yes, some people will want to live on vast areas of land away from everybody else for whatever reason and consequently.

Suburbia might work for them, so we'll see how it goes. Now I move to the third one, which is the rapid urbanization and megacities. I'll just start with a stat here. The United Nations data shows that urban population, that is city dwelling, surpassed rural population for the first time around 2007.

There were in around 1990, there were 10 mega cities across the world. And mega cities are cities with a population of more than 10 million residents. I grew up in a mega city. It's always been ranked as a mega city, Lagos, Nigeria. And in 1990, there were only 10 of such cities.

Reza (24:59)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (25:09)
Now there are approximately 35 cities worldwide that are considered mega cities. So 35 times 10 million residents minimum, we're talking 350 million people in just 35 cities across the world. It's kind of wild to think about it that way. And the best example of this I'll say is,

Reza (25:20)
Mm.

Seyi (25:37)
maybe best or worst, I'm not even sure how to frame it. But China's urban population, which grew from 26 % in 1990 to over 60 % by 2020. So 60 % of Chinese people now live in urban areas. And that is the largest and fastest urbanization in human history.

A wild example, I've never been, but I know a lot of fellow technologists who've been. A perfect example is Shenzhen, China, which in the 1980s was a fishing village of 30,000 people. And in under four decades, it became a mega city with 17 million people.

Reza (26:29)
Wow.

Seyi (26:31)
Workers were arriving in Shenzhen by thousands daily, massive dormitory complexes were constructed literally overnight to house them. It grew upward and outward at a pace that most urban planners are still astonished by. It's defied the more conventional urban development timelines and

It's created this urban form that is characterized by wild density. We don't have the data, but we'll probably find it and put it in show notes. A lot of technology and perpetual change with residents describing entire neighborhoods showing up within months where there were landmarks and all of a sudden

a bunch of skyscrapers are emerging in their place within a few months. This has created cities where multiple generations of urban development frameworks have existed simultaneously, where if you had modern buildings and in some cases, some of the older structures stay.

And the juxtaposition of modern and old maybe only lasts for about three months or so, but there's that stark contrast between them. And it's challenged a lot of traditional notions of cities in their form and their function.

Reza (28:12)
This one's very interesting. The law that it touches on is our law number 18, which is urban metabolism requires circular thinking. MegaCities really contravene that law because there's so much resource needs, extreme resource flows. It really goes against this idea of metabolism and circular thinking.

Seyi (28:29)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Reza (28:41)
without that thinking about how the economy of these mega cities work, these urban systems, they just face huge depletion and environmental degradation if it isn't addressed. And we've touched on this in prior episodes, like the future of technology, we talked about waste and how...

Seyi (29:02)
Yes.

Reza (29:10)
how waste disposal could be done in a more circular way. To add my separate comment about the human factor, this rise of urbanization is a unique thing in our modern world because people are migrating for better opportunities and cities offer that better opportunity. We've talked about Jeffrey West's

Seyi (29:13)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Reza (29:39)
scale laws about how cities are more innovative because more people bump into one another and serendipity creates innovation, which creates economic growth and then people wanting to come to be part of that economic growth. It keeps seeming to grow to where we have these mega cities. It's fascinating to observe. I remember going to an exhibit

Seyi (29:48)
Yeah.

Reza (30:07)
at the Architecture Center in Chicago and it was an exhibit about megacities and where they could grow, where they will go and what ways to address the challenges that megacities face because how much more can they grow is really the question. mean, can it go to 30 million and 40 million and 50 million? Like, I don't know.

Seyi (30:25)
You

Yeah.

Reza (30:34)
And so some of these laws have to be addressed like about the circular economy and it might be unsustainable for mega cities to continue to grow. At that's my thought. What do you think?

Seyi (30:45)
to grow, yeah. No,

you're so correct. And this one also flouts, as you were talking, it occurred to me that it also flouts our law number two, which you mentioned at the beginning of the show, around urban density driving efficiency. Because at some point, it is impossible to be efficient with that much density. And the worry there is...

Reza (30:58)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yes, yes. Yeah.

Seyi (31:14)
What is the breaking point? As you rightly pointed out, there needs to be a lot more consideration for what the limits to growth as suggested by Donnella Meadows, one of our favorite people on systems thinking. There's a lot of more thinking that should go into how these mega cities

remain sustainable, even if they are barely sustainable now. Now I'll move to the fourth one, which is climate change policies and the resilience movement has been a big reshaper of cities. And the genesis of this resilience movement and deeper awareness of the climate change

effects on our cities and the consequent policy changes that were made in the more forward leaning cities came as a result of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol where off the back of that about 10,000 cities worldwide developed climate action plans and at some point in the 20...

the early 2000s, you had a lot of cities appointing a chief resilience officer. I distinctly remember the point when that became a thing where a lot of cities were appointing a chief resilience officer who would then come up with a resilience plan for the city. And my group was formed the C40 Cities Network where

Over 14,000 climate action plans have been developed since 2011 as a result of the work of the C40 Cities group. this, the back of all these climate action plans and the implementation of these plans, it showed that climate-focused urban design was reducing by 20 to 50%.

the density, transit and increasing the energy efficiency usage in those cities with the best example of this according to our research being Rotterdam in the Netherlands where it's a vulnerable city, water, surrounded by water. And rather than fighting the water,

the city learned to live with it through solutions like water squares that function as playgrounds in dry weather, but become retention basins during heavy rainfall. they are essentially porous points where water sprouts can cool the kids during the hot days. But then as floods come in, they soak.

Reza (34:19)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (34:30)
the water sinks into the basins at those points. And I'll try not to mess up the pronunciation of this word. It's Meislenkering storm surge barrier, which is an automated and massive port that does this flood water retention.

automatically once rainfall exceeds a certain level. And it's a perfect symbol of the city's adaptation to climate off the back of the Kyoto Protocol and their recognition of their vulnerability. And it goes beyond infrastructure. I think you always touch on this, Reza. It was a philosophical shift in

Reza (35:28)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (35:29)
how the cities that adopted and implemented their plans, it was a shift in how they approached and engaged with nature. Instead of trying to dominate it and force nature to do our will, it became more of a, the best word that came to me was more of a dance, a recognition that how nature,

Reza (35:42)
Mm.

Seyi (35:57)
behaves and acts and what nature desires should reflect the actions we take. And we should also, even as we desire some things from nature, be considerate in the actions we take. it's a philosophy that still exists in a bunch of cities across the world. This whole living systems approach and some of the research that

we've seen from this group out of the UK Cities Forum talks a lot about this living system approach to building cities and planning in cities as a result of the recognition of the need for resilience against climate change.

Reza (36:44)
Yeah. You know, this is, I loved your example about Rotterdam because it exemplifies our law number 15, which is climate resilience is an urban imperative. you know, the Kyoto Protocol, you know, Rotterdam really taking that to heart. And as you said, this philosophical mind shift of how they could approach

climate adaptation resilience, just fantastic examples. I love it. And the thing that comes to mind over here, Seyi is that given the climate challenges that we face in the future, cities are so well placed to address them because of the concentration of people, the concentration of resources, the concentration of all the environmental issues that could take place. And so this is...

really a spotlight for cities to try to address climate change and climate resilience. And so I'm excited about what cities do here. And I love how Rotterdam has addressed it and is an example for other cities to take this on. So fantastic. I love this. I love this example. It's inspiring.

Seyi (37:51)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah,

it is. It definitely is. And the next one is as much a philosophical one as it was a physical one. And it's COVID-19 and how it reshaped the urban space. I won't bore anyone with the details of COVID-19. If you're listening to this,

Reza (38:21)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (38:31)
you are probably old enough to have experienced it. But the big part of how we reshaped our cities apart from all the death and destruction it caused was just that downtown activity, which we've mentioned before, in major global cities decreased by 80 to 90%. It was a total shutdown of

what tends to be the economic engine of most cities since we said commercial activity tends to be located downtown now. We saw the adoption of remote work, 6 % before the pandemic to over 30 % in developed economies post pandemic. 200 cities implemented slow streets or increasing the pedestrian.

opportunities on their streets in their cities during COVID. It's when we saw more walkable areas downtown and an extension of restaurants and third spaces to include the outside of those third spaces as well. And Paris, France was a big proponent of the 15 minute city during this period.

It was an idea or a concept that had been gaining momentum before the pandemic, but then got accelerated during the pandemic when we were all confined to our neighborhoods and Paris being this example here. And we rediscovered our local amenities. It's interesting because during the pandemic, I heard a lot about this, the mayor of...

Paris, France, Anne Hidalgo, where she transformed 70 % of on-street parking into bike lanes and pedestrian areas. 70%. And remember the stat we gave about 60 % of some cities being, or some downtowns being catering to parking and cars. She flipped that number.

Reza (40:52)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Seyi (40:56)
and it made for a new urban rhythm in Paris. The popular cafes that we all desire to go to when we visit, they spilled onto the streets, community gardens sprouted in those parking spaces, neighborhoods became more communal with stronger identities within those neighborhoods.

And the pandemic, for all the horrible things it brought, it actually brought us back to the human scale of living in cities. We, my family and I, we would walk twice a day. My older kid learned how to ride his bicycle, his scooter, and skateboard.

Reza (41:49)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (41:54)
during that period because he had so much opportunity to practice. And there were very few cars going anywhere, so he could literally practice on the roads. And this was at a bigger scale in Paris, because it's a dense city in that regard. But people still got to come together at a human scale. So I'll pause here, because there's a law.

Reza (42:05)
Mmm.

Seyi (42:24)
or a couple of lures actually. Yeah.

Reza (42:25)
There are a couple of laws. Yeah, there

are a couple of laws and law 16 says social infrastructure is as crucial as physical infrastructure. And it really, the pandemic was such a profound event, right? And it really highlighted this argument and we've cited Kleinberg's research about this, about the importance of social infrastructure, about the importance of people having this ability to come together. The closing, the...

subsequent reimagining of these community spaces, it demonstrated that essential role that social connection plays in urban resilience. So that's one. And the second one is, you know, law number eight, where public spaces foster social cohesion, similar, which is, know, in COVID-19, you know, it really changed our understanding of public spaces and why they're important. It reinforced the research that we have cited about white.

on the importance for community interaction. It's like a place where you can come, a common space where you can interact with others. And so the pandemic got us to rethink street space, as you mentioned about Paris, creating these new public areas to promote that social cohesion, that social connection, while we were still physically distanced, but it created ways for us to come out. So I love the example that you gave about Paris. And I think it's...

Seyi (43:46)
Mm-hmm.

Reza (43:54)
This is the fifth one that we talked about in such a poignant way to bring this up on the episode because more than any of those other ones that you brought up, every one of us in this world experienced the impact of COVID-19 and every person in the world, obviously every city because we were talking about cities, was profoundly impacted and changed by COVID-19.

Seyi (44:19)
Yep.

Reza (44:23)
and we got to rethink some of the assumptions that we had. And I think it's made cities better for it, like your example of Paris. I there's still some of these remnants of what we did during COVID that exist in our cities for the better.

Seyi (44:39)
Absolutely,

it's and thanks. for pointing that out. And as we summarize here, I will say because of its recency.

Reza (44:53)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (44:56)
It does give me hope that we can, we won't swing totally back to where we were before. We're seeing some swings in that direction, some of the cities, but I think we, beings are not great. We're not great at lying to ourselves. We experienced it. We saw what was possible and we will as best as we can retain some of the good.

Reza (45:18)
Yes.

Yes.

Seyi (45:26)
in

how our cities are formed that we got from that experience. those are the five. It was so much fun researching for this episode and I hope our listeners enjoyed it too.

Reza (45:36)
Yeah.

Yeah, Seyi, that was fantastic. It was such an interesting approach or lens to look at cities through five events that profoundly changed our cities in such an interesting way to then touch on our laws that apply. So I love the episode. Our listeners, I would love input from y'all. We have our mailbag typically at the end of the episode and it's hello at

futureforward.fm, so please share your thoughts, your questions, your expertise. And as we always say at the end of our episodes, share this episode with someone in your circle. Word of mouth is the best way for us to grow, but then also take the time to rate and review us, like and subscribe. We're growing on both our podcasts as well as the YouTube platform.

We would love other folks to experience and become part of our Future Forward community. And yeah, this was a great one, Seyi. I really enjoyed it. I learned so much. I learned so much because we talk about this, but I learned so much as you dove into this research and shared all this for our listeners. So thank you so much for doing it.

Seyi (46:50)
Me too.

Thank you and to our listeners, we appreciate you always showing up and till next time, bye for now.

Reza (47:07)
Bye.