Planning Livable Downtowns with Brent Toderian
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Term
regulation
Regulation means rules made by the government to keep things safe and organized, like traffic laws or car safety standards.
Concept
War on Cars
The 'War on Cars' means when people make rules or changes that make it harder to drive cars, usually to help other ways of getting around like bikes or buses.
Concept
automated driverless light rail system
This is a train system in a city that drives itself without a person controlling it. It helps people get around quickly and safely.
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The problem with American conversations about this is that brings up the R-word, regulation,
you know, which is like this evil word in the United States, which is just ideology.
I always say it's your ideology that's keeping you from succeeding.
When I work with my American cities, you tell me what you want, I'll tell you how to get
it.
But if you say, oh, I can't do that because it's against my ideology of zero regulation
or a regulation being bad, well, then you're not going to succeed.
That's the truth of it.
This is the War on Cars.
I'm Sarah Goodyear, and Doug is away this week.
We have got a terrific guest with us today who has a lot to say about building better
cities and who speaks with a special kind of authority because he has actually done
the work to make that change in cities around the globe.
We'll get to that conversation in a moment, but first we have some quick business to take
care of.
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slash the War on Cars pod.
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the automobile, wherever books are sold.
Find out more and learn all about our book tour at lifeaftercars.com.
Okay, let's get to our guest.
Brent Totterin has decades of experience in city planning, urban design, and transportation.
He was chief planner for the city of Vancouver from 2006 to 2012, a time when the city hosted
and was transformed by the Winter Olympics.
As a consultant, Brent has advised and collaborated with folks in Auckland, Brisbane, Buenos Aires,
Copenhagen, Götterberg, Groningen, Helsinki, Limerick, Medellin, New York, Oslo, Paris,
Perth, Reykjavik, Rotterdam, and Sydney, just to name a few.
He often sparks conversation on social media, where he is one of the most prominent voices
advocating for more human and humane urban design.
Brent Totterin, welcome to the War on Cars.
Hi, Sarah, glad to be here.
Yeah, great to see you virtually.
We just saw you not that long ago in Vancouver, where you live.
And you showed us around some of the great stuff that you have there in Vancouver,
including the famous Costco in an actual urban centre, which is such a delight to see.
So maybe we could talk a little bit about what you showed us there and some of the high points
that you especially like to point out to visitors when you're showing them around Vancouver.
Well, boy, everybody wants to see that Costco lately, especially since I started posting it
on social media. So we met downtown. I live downtown Vancouver. So for those who know
the rest of the city and the rest of the region, who will say to you, you should have got out of
the downtown. You shouldn't have stayed there. But we had the time we had and we were on foot.
And we covered a lot of ground. The Yale Town neighbourhood, which is the sort of original
warehouse district that had sprouted towers, but in a way that sort of matched and was
designed sensitive to the warehouse kind of character of the neighbourhood.
We walked down to the waterfront. You saw some of the best parts of the original
waterfront transformation after Expo 86 in Vancouver. It really is a lot of that initial
development along our waterfront that sort of put Vancouver and Vancouverism and the so-called
Vancouver model on the map globally. Whereas as a relatively smaller mid-sized city on a global
scale, we certainly started punching above our weight in the urban conversation about better
city making. And certainly here in North America, probably being the leader in that conversation
in many ways. And then we stayed on the water. We came to my neighbourhood. You saw the four-story
elementary school across the street from my building where my kids go to school. And I tell
you, that's one of the things that breaks a lot of Americans' brains. It didn't break your brain
because you're from New York City. But the idea of a vertical school is somewhat revolutionary
and a downtown school. And when I explained that it was the second we since opened the third,
we're about to open a fourth just around the corner from the downtown to accommodate the
almost 10,000 kids and teenagers that are in our downtown peninsula living right downtown.
In North America, where the common language or line is, don't bother trying to plan for
families downtown because families don't want to be downtown. And I always say Vancouver
is the proof that that's wrong, although most downtowns have been designed to virtually repel
families. So not only do we have that many schools and the daycare right beside, by the way, you
can't swing a stick without hitting a daycare in our city centre. And then right around the corner
is the SkyTrain station, which is one of the many stations in the longest automated driverless
light rail system in the world. And right beside the SkyTrain station is our urban Costco, our
downtown Costco. It's the same size as the suburban ones. It sells pretty much the same stuff, although
you can tell that it caters to an audience that's walking there and taking public transit with
some of the things that they sell. And it's got towers above it. It's not just a bit of tower,
a lot of tower above it. There's four residential towers above it, working with the slope of works
quite well. So you can go in the Costco underneath and you almost have a hard time realizing that
there's a residential community above you, a very high density, tall residential community above
you. And of course, we're starting to see, oh, by the way, if you just, if I had taken you over
the bridge, we didn't quite have enough time, you could have seen our urban Home Depot, where you've
got a Home Depot, three midbox category killers, a grocery store, and rental housing above, which
is part of what I call the largest urban power centre, vertical power centre in North America,
maybe the only vertical power centre in North America, but certainly the most distinctive one.
So it shows that you can do these kind of big box and midbox retailers in urban settings if you
do it in an urban way. You know, by the way, the Home Depot only has a little bit of frontage on
the corner with liner shops and a great walkable street. So Home Depot and Costco haven't ruined
the streetscape like they do in normal context. So I showed you that. And that's the other thing
that of course breaks people's brain. And they say, I often get asked, why can you get Costco here?
And, you know, I'm going to use this to force Costco to come to my downtown in my city.
And I said, well, you have to understand how we got it, because we have 100, probably 125,
130,000 people living in the downtown peninsula, we're the only city, major city in North America
that said no to freeways. So it's not easy to drive to the suburbs when you live downtown.
So they had this big captive population, this trade area that they wanted to get access to,
that were not shopping in their suburban Costco's. So when they came, they said we want to be
downtown, of course, like all these Walmart, Home Depot, everyone, they want to start,
they want to do their suburban style, sea of parking, big box retailer downtown. And my
predecessors, this happened before I was chief planner of Vancouver, had the intelligence and
guts to say, nope, you want to come to an urban setting, you have to do it in an urban way. We're
not banning Walmart, we're not banning Home Depot or Costco, but we're banning suburban versions of
those or suburban versions of anything. If you come downtown, downtown Vancouver, you have to do it
in a highly urban, highly pedestrian friendly, highly transit supported way. And if not, you know,
don't let the door hit you on the way out of downtown kind of thing. So, and that's why it
happened. One, they wanted the market they weren't getting and a lot of cities don't have that market
in their downtown, North American cities, let's be honest about that. And two, they were forced to
do it well. And Vancouver has a culture of being willing to force developers to not do things in
a crappy way. Well, I mean, all of that really goes to one of the things that struck me so much
about Vancouver is that it is an outlier in North American cities, not just for its urban form and
its, you know, highly populated residential downtown, but especially because it is on the west
coast, it's west of the Mississippi, as we would say here in the United States. And I think I often
hear from people who say, well, you know, all of these cities are new. These were built after the
invention of the automobile for, in large part, Western American cities. And you can't expect
them to have the form that makes for a nice dense urban lifestyle, that they were built for the car.
And that's the end of the story. You hear this over and over again in the United States that,
you know, just and so. And sometimes in Canada too, I'll tell you. Yeah, I'm not surprised
because Canada has plenty of car brain culture as well. So I guess my question is, what historically
and even now, what are the forces that have made Vancouver an outlier in this way? And what can
other cities that were quote unquote built for the automobile learn from Vancouver?
Well, you know, I buy that excuse, not because it's true, but because I at least understand the
logic underneath it. I buy that excuse halfway, because yes, they were built later and thus had
probably more of their growth since the 60s. So yes, there's some truth to that. But look at the
progressive cities on both of our countries west coast. You know, you have the portlands and the
Seattle's, and you have Vancouver and Victoria as a smaller city here in British Columbia. So you
have progressive cities on the west side, not just politically progressive, but city building
progressive, which I say is not political. It's not right or left. It's just smart or dumb. It's
just successful or unsuccessful, frankly. And we've got all the receipts to prove that our
cities work far better and are far more successful, including economically more successful than the
other cities that do it the bad way. So, you know, on the one hand, sure, you had more of your growth
post car, but there's also a sensibility perhaps on the west side, on the west side of both countries
that says we don't have to be stupid about these things. I also tend to think there's a temporal
element. Like we said that we often say that in Vancouver, we got to see the failures of the
ironically, because she had moved from New York to Toronto, Jane Jacobs. And so by the time the idea
had crossed the country, we had a better sense how stupid it was. And so, but you know, I gotta
say, it wasn't the professionals or at least most of the professionals that knew it was stupid
building around freeways. You know, the freeways, we had a freeway plan in Vancouver, it would have
lobotomized our waterfront, it would have decimated low income, but vibrant mixed communities.
It would have done all the damage, maybe even more damage than than some other most other North
American cities saw. But it was the moms and the grandmothers who started with some progressive
politicians who started the great freeway revolts. And it was a professional city planner who I
was point out was not a city planner. He was an English engineer because there was no such thing
as a city planning profession back then. It was all engineers and who was very pro the freeways.
And ultimately, it got killed by the moms and the grandmoms, not because they understood a better
way of mobility and mode shift and such, but because it would have decimated low income
communities like Chinatown and Strathcone, et cetera. So they were fighting to protect
diverse communities. But thank God they did for that reason, because they're for all sorts of
reasons. I call it the most important moment in Vancouver history, because it set us on a path
of saying, okay, if we're not going to have freeways, violently penetrating the inner city
in the downtown and the waterfront, how are we going to grow our downtown? Because our downtown,
the famous skyline that we have now didn't exist then. And the answer was SkyTrain. The answer
was SkyTrain. From a how do you go far perspective? And then from a how do you go near perspective,
the answer was housing downtown, obviously. And it's so obvious it makes my brain hurt.
And then we all know that probably the most important thing, the most common answer I give
about how to strengthen downtowns is I always say there's no such thing as a silver bullet,
but the closest thing to a silver bullet is more housing, because duh. But you've got to remember
when Vancouver was doing this, everyone thought they were crazy in North America. Nobody wants
to live downtown and certainly no families want to live downtown. So I give credit for the vision,
which is defined as being able to see something that isn't there when everybody tells you you're
crazy. Yeah. And I will say that it was just incredibly visible to us when we were visiting
and staying downtown that we had just come from Seattle and we'd been in San Francisco.
And we had seen even in those cities where the downtowns do have a lot of activity compared to
some American cities. At night, they just emptied out. And there was nothing there. Nobody there
didn't feel necessarily safe on the street. And the contrast when we got to Vancouver was really
dramatic because we saw people on the street, it felt safe, it felt inviting. There was a lot of
activity, a lot of vibrancy. And that is just something that is so rare in so many of our
North American cities. And by the way, Vancouverites listening to you right now, I guarantee you
they're saying, oh, Brent didn't take them to the downtown East side. Your talk was in the
downtown East side. Your talk was at the Woodward's building, which was ground zero of the tensions
of gentrification in the downtown East side. And we walked with your suitcases from Woodward's
up to Steamworks on the waterfront along Water Street in Gastown. So you were there.
And nobody can say you avoided the places that would have made you feel unsafe. Now, admittedly,
if you got a few blocks the other way, you would have seen some different scenarios
that step up. But you were not in the pristine parts of the downtown, so to speak.
Yeah. And even some of the pristine parts, I would have been worried that there wasn't
anybody on the street because sometimes in a nice downtown like Seattle has some beautiful
downtown stuff that, you know, it's very pretty and it's clean and it's not scary at all. It's
just empty at night. Like, you know, there's just nobody there because there's nothing to do and
nobody lives there. We're very big on body heat. We tend to talk a lot about the sky train being
the alternative to the car. And it is at the regional scale, but walking was the primary
alternative to the car. But to get walking, you needed the body heat. You needed the population.
That took a long time. And it was based on my predecessor's strategy of the Living First
Strategy. It was leaning in on housing, but not just housing. This is the mistake that so many
North American and I got to say particularly American cities make. They want housing. They
want to convert some of those downtown parking lots. God help you. You got far too many of them
into housing, but you're not putting in the things that make the housing liveable.
So you're getting units and you're checking boxes and you've got a nice unit count. But are people
driving out of the downtown to go to get their groceries, take their kids to school, etc. If
you don't have the amenities, if you don't have the walkable street design, if people are still
trying to walk around on a tight sidewalk on fast moving one-way pair streets, that's still all
designed for the car, then sure you're getting the housing, but you're breaking what I call the
urban contract. The urban contract is if you want people to live downtown instead of somewhere else,
you've got to provide the good stuff. You've got to provide the amenities. You've got to provide the
livable, multimodal design that makes car-free living not just possible but enjoyable. And if
you drop the ball on those elements, you've broken the contract. And why would they live
downtown in an apartment where they still need a car, they don't get all the stuff that a real
urban place provides, and they might even be paying more for that apartment than they would
if they were renting that apartment out in the suburbs. So the urban contract is very important.
The work I did recently in Sacramento about how to get more housing built in Sacramento,
we did a strategy with the Downtown Sacramento Partnership, I partnered with them.
It was very big on the urban contract and the idea of it's not just the housing you need,
you need all the things that support the housing and a lot of American cities and many Canadian
cities are bad at that. Yeah, we have seen that. We've now gone to 18 different cities on our book
tour and we have definitely seen downtowns that are trying with housing but failing exactly on
what you're talking about. The amenities that make it possible to live in a downtown and not
have to use your car for groceries and the pharmacy and all of those good things that we need.
And I think that there's been a lot of attention on parking minimums getting rolled back or
eliminated in many North American cities and that's great. But I talked to a developer in Houston
who said parking minimum, shwerking minimum, because I got to put parking in because nobody
will live in these places if there's no parking. They were probably building more parking than
the parking minimum required anyway. Yeah, because nobody will live there otherwise because,
guess what, they can't. And if you don't create a new reality for folks, a reality like you're
talking about that's based on an urban contract, then you can't expect them to, what are they going
to suffer and go without just on the principle of living in a downtown? That's not how it works.
You need to have a lot of things to walk to and it's not just the, it can't be the t-shirt,
the special t-shirt economy or the ice cream economy, it's got to be the basics. The grocery
store and the one that often gets forgotten is the hardware store, those kinds of things.
You need to be able to walk to those. You need to be able to take public transit to the things
that are further away. You need to be able to get your kids to school and daycare in a convenient
way. You need all that, but then you also need all the experiences and such and some downtowns
are better at that than providing the basics. But you need to particularly design for families,
if that's what you want. And this is one of the big questions that there's such a striking distance,
a difference between Canada and the United States. Let's use Seattle and Vancouver as
examples. They often get compared, we're sort of peer cities, we're friends on the West Coast,
but you can tell which one of those cities is American and you can tell which one of those
cities is Canadian. And one of the big things is, I've been asked, well, how did Vancouver get all
the families and the kids in Seattle different? Didn't. And I said, well, both cities started
off saying they wanted kids, but only one city mandated the things that would attract the kids.
Guess which city it was? And it starts with, one, you need to mandate two and three bedroom
apartments or else you literally can't fit families. If all you have is studios and one
bedrooms, which is what got built in Seattle, then it's game over. It's game over. You don't get the
families. And in Vancouver, for example, we've been mandating percentage of buildings to be two
and three bedroom, well, certainly two bedroom for many years and then added three bedrooms.
And that's been critical because, you know, we've got families with three to five kids in apartments
that are tight, but doable. It's tight, but doable. And they're trading space for the amenity that
they can walk to, right? Two, you need to have all the things like daycare and schools and such
that support living downtown. And three, you need to design your public realm for kids because
that works for everyone. Playgrounds and even the streets. And what I find with American cities is
they go right to number three. There, you know, some big consulting firm will put out a study
saying, here's how you design the public realm for families. Well, sorry, you already lost
because you don't have the homes that fit families and you don't have the amenities that
support everyday family living. So it doesn't matter if you have a playground. You know,
so you got to do those all three in that order is what I advise cities. And the problem with
American conversations about this is that brings up the R word regulation, you know,
which is like this evil word in the United States, which is just ideology. I always say
it's your ideology that's keeping you from succeeding. You tell me what you want when I work
with my American cities, you tell me what you want, I'll tell you how to get it. But if you say,
oh, I can't do that because it's against my ideology of zero regulation or a regulation
being bad, well, then you're not going to succeed. You know, that's that's the truth of it. 100%.
And by the way, all the regulation we do results in more financially successful housing,
more financially successful neighborhoods, our developers in Vancouver make far more money
than any real estate on the West side or or probably anything, it's comparable to New York,
probably only New York is making sort of similar money, which is probably a big part of the problem,
of course, don't get me started on affordability, although we could certainly talk about that.
But nobody could say that ideology is anti commerce, it's anti capitalism, you know,
our Canadian developers literally have more certainty, more predictability and more profit,
which are all the things that developers say they want. Right. So regulation provides those things
and certainty and consistency, which is all things that the market wants. But it's your ideology
about the R word that's keeping you from succeeding in some cases. Some cities are getting passed that
don't get me wrong. But it's always a bit of a fight I have to have as soon as we have the
conversation about how you do it. I get the inevitable, oh, we don't do that, we can't do that.
But you know, you can if you want to. Let's pivot a little bit and talk about another really
important part of what you do, which is, I think that you're great at talking about communication
and how advocates can communicate with practitioners and how they can also sometimes
have some negative outcomes from some of the kinds of communications that they have. So,
you know, a lot of the people who listen to this podcast are advocates, activists, I know you make
a lot of researchers who come on academics, people from the academic world, we don't have as
many practitioners. So I would love to hear from the practitioner standpoint, what you see as the
most effective, the least effective and sometimes counterproductive things that advocates and activists
can do to, you know, push their cities out of these ideological boxes that they're in sometimes,
or these boxes where they're saying, well, this is just not something that can be done
in our country, in our region, in our city, and help them to not only see the possibilities,
but to build the political capital that they need to make some of these more healthy decisions. I
mean, I think of it almost as like when you're trying to make your body healthier, you know,
you make, you try to make every choice the healthier choice rather than, you know, eat the
salad rather than the pizza or whatever. I feel like in our cities, we have those choices that
come too, that you can make a healthier choice, you can, or you can make the less healthy choice.
So how do you see the role of advocates and activists in communicating with elected officials
and planners and also with, you know, how those groups can help each other move toward healthier
cities? Okay, before I jump into that, I want to address your metaphor, because I'm big on the
power metaphor. Imagine the healthier choice that you're talking about, but it made you happier
than the unhealthy choice. Imagine the healthy choice making you as happy as pizza, not as happy
as Brussels sprouts. And that's what the data and the facts and the evidence shows. When we walk
and we bike more, we know that makes us happier, right? The evidence actually shows that. But then
we treat it like we're eating Brussels sprouts. No, hold on. Walking is pizza. Cars are Brussels
sprout, right? That's what the facts actually show. That's what the evidence and the data show.
And I'm big on evidence and I'm big on metaphor. And we've got to change some of these narratives,
right? We're not doing these things because they're good for us. Bicycling is obviously ice cream
in this equation. It makes us happier than the alternatives. And it works better. And it provides
more freedom, that word that you folks love in your country, or at least did until recently, I
suppose. But, you know, if you want freedom, you want choice, you want ice cream and mixed in.
Anyway, I'm not I'm now obliterating the metaphor. Here's the point. Yes, I'm a well aware that I
might be the only practitioner, at least certain, or certainly part of a small group of practitioners
that get mixed in with book writers and media folks and podcasters and such. And there's a very
simple reason for that. My professions are mind numbingly boring. And most of the people who are
in it managed to take something that is inherently sexy and interesting and cool, like cities,
like who doesn't think cities aren't, you know, not only the that we've called it the most
significant or intelligent collective thing humanity's ever created. They're cool, they're
sexy. And yet my profession somehow manages to make them mind numbingly boring. I try to read a
planning report if you want to get some sleep. So yeah, so and I when I was young in my career,
I've been a city planner for 33 years. And I by the way, I considered stop being using that word
city planner because I was so frustrated with my own profession. And it wasn't a good brand.
But then I said, no, hell no, I'm gonna I am a city planner. I'm an urban designer. I'm a
I'm a change agent. I'm all these things. I'm an urbanist. But I'm not giving up on city planning.
I'm going to change it from within. Because city planners too often roll their eyes at the
external critic who says, you know, city planning needs to change. So I'm I'm I am a city planner
and city planning needs to change. It needs to change not only in its content and what it
considers right and wrong, but it sure as hell needs to change in terms of its communication,
its lack of persuasiveness. Because, you know, my profession has for far too long shrugged its
shoulders and said, Well, the decision makers didn't listen to us. Oh, well, on to the next thing.
Well, no, why weren't you more persuasive? Why couldn't you find a way to get the point across,
to make the dumb things harder and the and the and the smart things easier?
Because we are advocates. And this is to your first word. I actually had some bosses when I was
young say to me, you can't be an advocate, you have to be neutral. And that is so fundamentally
and profoundly wrong. We are advocates for better city building, we're advocates for better outcomes,
we're open minded, constantly open minded. I change my mind daily on things with new information.
But we are always advocating for the better outcome. And I think passionately and persuasively
should be advocating. But, you know, somewhere along the lines, the technocratic definition of
our profession decided that we were going to be boring, we were going to be safe, we're not going
to challenge politicians and make it hard for them to make the wrong decisions, because then they
might be mad at us because we made them look bad or something. All of these narratives that I've
gotten my entire career that and by the way, I was told, you know, you'll never get anywhere in
city planning if you if you try to do that. And I've managed to prove that profoundly wrong.
So, you know, when I became chief planner of Vancouver at 36 years old, the youngest chief
planner in the city's history and in a city where the chief planner has the most power of any city
in North America, I say that not to brag. I say that because I achieved that doing all the things
that people told me I can't do. And it's important. And when I when I took that position, I publicly
was talking about all the things I was told I couldn't do in this role. And I'm going to do
them because now I'm a leader in the profession. And it's the leaders of the profession that get
to decide or message what's appropriate and not appropriate in the profession. And so,
you know, all the people who told me I couldn't use the word beauty in a conversation, all the
people that told me I couldn't, you know, say this or that, I say all of them, I said all of them,
and I advanced quicker than any of those people did. So, and that was that was I'd say that not
to brag, I say that to prove the proof of concept. It's proof of concept that you can do it a
different way. Now, I've had people say to me, and here's the difference between advocate and
activist. I've had people say to me, well, that's all well and good rent. Maybe that worked for
you. But I actually got asked this in a question in a Q&A session when I was presenting to a
provincial, which is the equivalent to states in the United States, a provincial planning
association. I don't know 500 to 1000 people in the audience and someone in the Q&A afterwards said
that's all well and good rent. I was giving this talk while she planner telling planners
that they can do this. And the person said, that's all well and good. But here in this city, and I
won't tell you which city it was in, someone got fired for doing that. And I said, well, hold on,
tell me what they did. And what they did was they basically publicly went against the recommendation
of their own department because they disagreed with it, wrote an op-ed piece in the paper,
disagreeing with it, showed up with a placard and a button with the line through it, and basically
said, my colleagues are all wrong or even maybe suspect, suspect, right? And I said, well, hey,
no wonder they got fired because you can be an advocate, but you cannot be an activist. And you
cannot do what the worst kinds of activists do, which frankly is, you know, sometimes tell lies
in order to try to win. And I've seen activists do that. I've seen some professionals do that,
but it's common technique in activist circles. And you can't, if you're a professional city planner,
you can't cross that line and become an activist. But should you be an advocate? And I do make that
distinction. Should you be a champion for better ideas and better outcomes and actually seeing
them realized? Absolutely. Or else, what good are you, honestly? Yeah. But from the perspective
of people who are on the outside of the halls of power, what are some of the communications
techniques that do work to get through to people who do have power?
So first of all, it helps that, you know, I'm not really wired to be blunt.
And I'm very comfortable on stage, these kinds of things. So my communication style helps,
but I've leaned into my communication style more and more every year by talking just more
and more normal, more and more human. So goal number one is talk and write as a professional,
like you talk and write as a human, usually. Because we somehow, I don't know why we decided
we can't talk like normal human beings or write like normal human beings when we write reports.
God, they're so unreadable. What I did was I became obsessed with a better approach to
communication in my 20s and 30s. And I practiced, I started writing articles for professional
magazines, then I started writing articles for not professional magazines. And I did a, for
three or four years, I did a radio show on CBC Radio here in Canada with a regular segment on
city making where I would talk about timely issues. And I'd do it in the radio because
it would force you to learn how to not be boring and talk in a way that normal people are interested
in hearing while they're driving, mostly driving to work because that's people aren't listening
to the radio as often, at least on other modes. So, you know, and social media. Social media,
I got big into because it was a way of testing my message. It was persuasive. A lot of my slides,
a lot of my messages started off as tweets back when Twitter was saying, you know, I have slides
that have a phrase like that are exactly 140 characters long because they started as a tweet.
And I would see how many we posted, we tweeted, and I said, oh, that's resonating. So I'm adjusting
it. I tried again a few months later. That's the data side. That's the data side of you.
You're testing, you're experimenting. And what works is what matters. Every once in a while,
I will do a post and it will not get reposts. And I'm like, ah, it was so good. I was convinced it
was good, but it didn't. And I tried, I might try it again. And it still didn't. And I said, well,
I have to accept it. It's not as good as I think it was. It's not working. So I dump it. Yeah.
And I looked and, you know, we talk about in planning professions, the way they say that
they were going to clean up the communication is to get rid of jargon. And it's three letter
acronyms, which are just the worst. And every planner in every city has different three letter
acronyms, which drive me bad. And absolutely, you should get rid of that. But you don't get
rid of brands. You create brands. I brand every idea I can think of. I take other people's brands
if they're good. I've been credited for certain brands that have been around for a long time.
And I said, I didn't invent it. I just liked it. And I saw that it worked. And so now it's associated
with me because it gets big retweets or big posts. But it's just, it worked. It worked. It
resonates. It sticks in people's brains. It makes them think differently. And people would say to
me, oh, that's jargon. No, it's not. It's branding your ideas. And I'm somewhat obsessed with how
marketing and, you know, the forces of evil can use marketing to do great damage in our profession,
certainly around car dependency and dominance, car brain, because they understand how marketing works.
So that seems like a good way to move to an exciting announcement that you have about
communications and communications strategies. So you told me you have a new project coming up.
Could you explain that? Well, I told you that you were getting the scoop because you happened to
ask me to come on your show right now. And we're just putting the finishing touches
on the soft launch of something that's going to come out by the time this podcast goes live.
You know, I've joked that I've almost stopped thinking about how to be a better city planner
decades ago. I'm 34 years into my career. It's not true. It's a nice joke, but it's not true.
I'm constantly obsessed with getting to be a better city planner. But what I'm really focusing
on is to be a more effective city planner, more persuasive. And that's about communication,
marketing, branding, etc. And how to position your work for success rather than failure,
because my plans succeed, they don't fail. And I don't, if they fail, I blame myself for not
being more successful in how to position them for success. So that's been at least the last 10
years of my career. And I come at communications and marketing from the perspective of the practice
because I'm a practitioner. I'm not a journalist. I'm not a writer, etc. But I greatly admire the
people out there who've come to the practice from the communication side. You and Doug are in that
category. You are from the more of the communication side and you've come to the content of better
city making, less car dependency, etc. And so you generally come to the content with better
communication, more effective communication. And I've learned a lot from the advocates who are
not practitioners like me. I want to be at least as persuasive as the non practitioners
while knowing what a practitioner knows, and particularly a practitioner with my rather
unusual experience, because not all city planners know what they're talking about, to be honest.
So I've always kept track of the people like yourselves who were doing a good job with the
communication and breaking through and resonating. Tom Flood is someone your listeners probably know
a Canadian former marketing guy, ad guy who used to work for car companies. And now he
applies, he uses his powers for good and applies his creativity to particularly street violence
and safety of streets issues and such. And he's very good at bringing things down to the human
level, how people think about their day and their lives and their family, etc.
Yeah, yeah, Tom's great. And he talks about disrupting. He also talks about the ability
that these things that he does have to disrupt the patterns of people's thinking. And yeah,
and we'll link to some of Tom's work as well in the notes for this. But go ahead.
And Grant Innis is a fellow, he's American who now lives in Paris. And he's done a lot of interesting
work. But his particular impact is his book Dark PR. And I think you've had him on your show too.
We did indeed. We did indeed. And that book is a fantastic book because it reveals all the ways
we're being manipulated by marketing campaigns, framing of issues, political, commercial,
ideological, etc. And so I struck up these friendships with Tom and Grant and others.
And just to make my work better and more effective. And eventually I had this thought
that we should collaborate on something. So I pitched to them the idea of creating some sort
of a thing, an organization, a movement, something. And it's ironic, I was talking about this before
things got particularly bad, another level up on the disinformation side of things.
But after the tinfoil hat folks had started going after 15 minute cities and other issues like that
and low traffic neighborhoods, after that and said we should do something to go right at the
disinformation. It's a communication movement, but it's focused on cities. And so I pitched that
to Grant and Tom and they liked it. So the three of us are about to launch what we call the Urban
Truth Collective. And it starts with the three of us, but we wanted to expand beyond that.
Basically our website, our social media accounts will hopefully have gone live by the time this
podcast lands. Please look for them, either look for Urban Truth or Urban Truth Collective on the
various platforms. Certainly Blue Sky, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. So the intention is that we're
not just a clarity group where we're going to fact check. We are probably going to do that,
but we're going straight at the liars and straight at the lying campaigns. And it's
whole purpose and what makes it different from other professional associations that might put
out a frequently asked questions list or a fact check and nobody pays attention to it frankly.
So the lies are incredibly successful and the clarifications are almost non-existent. We want
to make a significant impact in the sphere of cities and the sphere of city making. We're not
going to apply our truth telling and calling out the lies on everything. That would be exhausting.
I don't know that anybody has the capacity for that. But specifically on the cities and we're
going to be doing actual campaigns. The point of being able to team up with people like Tom
is we can actually put out campaigns to deliberately call bullshit to use a technical
term on these not just wrong things but deliberate lies. And so we're very excited about it. All
three of us are doing it off the side of our desks. So we're going to see and they're all
busy desks. So we're going to see how it goes. But we'd like, this is a soft, soft launch on
your podcast. So we hope folks who listen to it will go looking for those social media accounts
first. Follow us. We want to start building up an audience. We're going to be talking to other
podcasters, putting out op-eds, doing interviews with various publications to just get the word
out about what we're doing. And we'll be positioning ourselves for making a lot of collaborations
with different folks like yourself. And then we'll be putting out campaigns. It's going to be a
constant communication effort through our social media platforms. But we're also going to be
dropping bombs. And the bombs are going to be these campaigns that we start to put out
that just call out some of the lies. It's about telling the truth in a more persuasive way.
But it's also specifically about calling out the lies. I love it. It's something that is so needed
in this realm. And maybe it can provide a model for people in other realms as well,
because you're right. You can't take on all the lies. It's quite overwhelming. But I'm really
excited to see what the three of you get up to, because you each bring something really special
to the effort. So I think that's a, you have something else to say?
No, just it's been so long since I said the name. So I'll say it again, Urban Truth Collective.
And I think on various platforms, we've either taken Urban Truth or Urban Truth Collective. So
look for both. Okay, well, we will put links to all of that in the show notes as we are able,
as things launch. And Brent Totterin, thank you so much for being here at The War on Cars and
for everything that you've shown us about the beautiful city of Vancouver.
My pleasure. Glad to be here.
That's it for this episode of The War on Cars. Thanks again to Brent Totterin. We'll put links
to all of his work and his new enterprise, the Urban Truth Collective in the show notes.
Remember, you can support us and get exclusive bonus content, pre-sale access to live show tickets,
free stickers, and more by signing up on Patreon at patreon.com slash The War on Cars pod. A big
thanks to everyone who supports The War on Cars, including our top contributors, Charlie G of Human
Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, Mark Headland, Virginia Baker, and Brandon DeCoster. And please,
pick up a copy of our new book, Life After Cars Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile,
wherever you get your books. You can also find us on tour. Learn more at lifeaftercars.com.
Thanks also to our friends at Cleverhood. Listeners of The War on Cars can save 15% on the best
gear for cycling and walking. Now through the end of February with code Kiss Me You Fool,
just go to cleverhood.com slash War on Cars. The War on Cars is produced with support from
the Helen and William Mazur Foundation. This episode was edited by Samantha Gatzek.
Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Transcripts are by Russell Gragg. Our logo is by Danny
Finkel. I'm Sarah Goodyear, and on behalf of my co-host Doug Gordon, this is The War on Cars.
About this episode
Brent Toderian shares insights from his extensive experience in urban planning, highlighting Vancouver's unique approach to creating livable, dense downtowns that accommodate families, transit, and even big-box retailers like Costco in an urban format. He discusses Vancouver's rejection of freeways, the importance of regulation in shaping cities, and how other North American cities can learn from Vancouver's success in balancing growth with human-centered design. The conversation also touches on the cultural and historical factors that make Vancouver an outlier in North America’s car-centric urban landscape.
Original notes
Brent Toderian has decades of experience in city planning, urban design, and transportation. He was chief planner for the city of Vancouver from 2006 to 2012, a time when the city hosted and was transformed by the Winter Olympics. As a consultant, Brent has advised and collaborated with folks from Auckland to Buenos Aires to Copenhagen to Reykjavik, and he often sparks conversation on social media, where he is one of the most prominent voices advocating for more human and humane urban design. We talked with him about how to make downtowns attractive and livable for families, why developers should value regulation, and that legendary urban Costco in Vancouver. Plus, Brent gives us the scoop on the new Urban Truth Collective and its mission to beat back the lies people tell about cities.
Join The War on Cars on Patreon and listen to exclusive ad-free versions of regular episodes, Patreon-only bonus content, Discord access, invitations to live events, merch discounts and free stickers!
Find out more about Brent Toderian and all his projects at his website, and follow him on Bluesky.
And check out the brand-new Urban Truth Collective, Brent's collaboration with Tom Flood and Grant Ennis.
Order our new book, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, out now from Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Find us on tour and get tickets at lifeaftercars.com.
Thanks to Cleverhood for sponsoring this episode. Listen to this episode for the latest discount code and get the best rain gear for walking and cycling.
The War on Cars is produced with support from the Helen and William Mazer Foundation.
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