coe020_pope.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Welcome back, everyone, to the Cultures of Energy podcast we are here in the Digital Media Commons at Rice University. Thanks to the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences, Sense Cultures of Energy Dawg are sponsor, are our community and we have a really cool show for you today, which involves another member of that community. Simone.

Speaker2: [00:00:46] Yes, this involves a member of our Rice University Community Committee. You think he is? I think he is a committee member, too, and a couple of couple different ways anyway. We're going to be speaking with Albert Pope, who is a professor of architecture in the School of Architecture. In fact, he has a named professorship, the Gus Wortham Professorship and in architecture, super smart, very, very interesting guy who has been looking at sustainable cities all over the world and finding these different models and then looking at those in the context of Houston and its futures and how we might reimagine sections of Houston and in fact, the entire urban metropolitan area of this city and how how we can picture a better, climatological future based on how we undertake growth and development and rebuilding. And one of the interesting things that that he mentioned in a in a talk and maybe mentions this in the podcast as well is that Houston is actually turning over its building stock much more rapidly than your average city. So I think something that average cities like every 60 years or so and Houston's more like 30 or 40. Don't quote me on those numbers, but anyway, it's significantly faster that we're tearing shit down and putting more shit up. And if you drive around Houston and walk around Houston, you see that, you know, there's not a lot of old stuff here unless it's been preserved. And even theres not there's not a lot.

Speaker1: [00:02:26] That's right. And Houston is obviously for those of you who don't know, maybe not. So obviously a deeply unsustainable city. It's a city that is built upon, you know, automobile city and and and the kind of cul de sac form which became very popular in the second half of the 20th century. But Albert has got a grant to do this really interesting project to reimagine one of the most abandoned and desolated parts of the city, the Fifth Ward, a place that desperately needs its infrastructure to be rebuilt. And the idea is, well, if it needs to be done now, it should be done in a way that makes sense for the next century or however long. And so it's a really remarkably interesting way of thinking what cities might look about and look like in the future, what building materials we might use, how our cities would be designed, how we would coexist, human spaces and green spaces. It's a really fascinating and quite in some ways inspiring model for what the future of the city looks like. And his view is that because so much of our carbon emissions are concentrated in cities anyway, cities ought to be the front lines of of climate change, intervention and remediation.

Speaker2: [00:03:47] Right. So some of what he's been researching and proposing and working with students and other colleagues to design and to shape are these different forms of of habitation, all spaces. So taking the taking the cul de sac model, which of course, is sort of like a catfish spine, it's got a, you know, a rectilinear line down the middle and then it has these little, you know, sort of spines coming off so everyone has their own private driveway, et cetera. I mean, we've all seen this in the suburbs. This is like the epitome of sprawl. So one of the designs of buildings that he's been looking at in Hong Kong is that you just take that catfish spine and make it vertical so that you have you have these, you know, hallways that sort of jut out from a middle core so that people have privacy so that people, everyone has a window, people can sort of look out, but it creates this kind of skyscraper form that's different. But that is actually, you know, aesthetically pleasing and comfortable to live in for human beings. And that this is a very it can be a very, very dense form of living.

Speaker1: [00:04:55] Yeah. And Hong Kong, which we talk about in more length in the interview, is the only large sustainable city in the world right now in terms of the emissions being low enough to keep us under whatever a 1.5 degrees centigrade warming right, which is really freaky. And you know, Houston is who knows what Houston. It's I'm sure it's way, way off the charts in terms of emissions per capita.

Speaker2: [00:05:19] Right, right. Especially, yeah. I mean, with all of the construction, which is really energy intensive, and then also, of course, the driving, which is a really clear source of CO2 emissions. So one of the propositions that Albert and others have is that basically we need to live in carbon capture units, right? And what that means is living in wood, living in wood. And so there's a form, a kind of, you know, technologically mediated form of wood that's laminated cross laminated wood, which can actually build up to 40 storeys high. That's right. Skyscrapers 40 storeys high. And yet it's a carbon sink. It's a carbon sink that's constructed into a nice apartment housing for people to live in. But I think this idea of living in carbon capture units is just brilliant. And and one of the other things that he brings up is that, you know, everyone loves wood. Yeah, you know who can who can argue against wood. It's beautiful, it's natural. It smells good. And and if you're growing, you know, large tracts of of not forest, but managed stands of of trees, right? And he's very precise about this being a managed space. It's not precisely a park,

Speaker1: [00:06:35] It's a plantation, he

Speaker2: [00:06:36] Says. Plantation, yeah, but there was some pushback against that word, especially here in the South, right? So I mean, yeah, but it's it's it's it's managed stands of of of woods, and it's not natural for us by any count. It's it's all, you know, sort of carefully arranged, but it becomes a carbon capture unit and then it can also be chopped down and made into into materials instead of using really intensive, really energy intensive concrete, which is one of the most energy intensive materials out there. And right now, it's really, really cheap because we're not counting the amount of carbon that it takes to use it and to to process it.

Speaker1: [00:07:14] But the logic is if and when carbon markets come that it's going to become, you know, proportionally more expensive to use, concrete and less expensive to use wood because there should be incentives for people to do wood construction. And just this idea of of living in 44.0 story, high wood buildings is incredible. I mean, I love it, and it's it's real. It can be done. It's not a sci fi thing. It's not a technology to wait for. You could do it right now.

Speaker2: [00:07:40] Yeah. And I remember telling him, you know, he's like, Oh, I don't know, you know, they'll never go for it, they'll never go for it. And I was like, Come on, Albert, if anyone can convince anyone to, you know, to take this on and to to fund this thing, get Google on board to, you know, do an experimental habitation or space somewhere in the Fifth Ward in Houston, like he would be the one to sound.

Speaker1: [00:08:01] And and it can go. It can go farther. I mean, he's he got into the Venice Biennale this year with this project, and we're going to put a link to that up on the podcast because I think that it's going to be pretty much this whole. This episode is going to come out about the same time that that that's happening. But anyway, really inspiring. And it's great to work with somebody as brilliant and talented as Albert. He's been a wonderful contributor to since. He's been a wonderful contributor to our Environmental Studies minor program here at Rice and is just wonderful to see the insights of architecture coming into the conversation right

Speaker2: [00:08:39] In innovative ways, really, especially in the context of all of the strange forms of building and rebuilding that we're seeing around climate change. You know, like Staten Island, Hurricane Sandy, rebuilding now they're sort of tearing down these houses that are worth about 80 or $90000 and then reinvesting upwards of five $600000 in order to make them storm proof to raise them up onto stilts that are 12 to 15 feet high in order to be able to withstand the next storm surge. Or if you look at some of what we've been seeing around Houston with all of the flooding we've had and we have had torrential rains and that's a key part of it, but also around Houston. A new report came out from a geologist who is a professor at University of Houston, who looks at this phenomenon, called subsidence and subsidence is basically kind of uneven sinking of land masses. So that and they find that places of high subsidence that is places that are kind of sinking and wilting down at a at a greater rate are those places that have had groundwater removed or have had oil and mineral extraction, right? So they can actually sort of trace and map all of these, these different spaces that are now sinking because there's less mass underneath them. That makes sense. It makes a lot of sense. And it's it's getting larger and larger in the in the suburbs of Houston. So there are lots of ways to absolutely.

Speaker1: [00:10:13] And let us just say it was yet another round of heavy rains that prevented you from being in on the taping of this interview. You were trying it

Speaker2: [00:10:20] Out there and. I think I was even out there and the subside, the subsided adventure,

Speaker1: [00:10:25] The subside, an adventure.

Speaker2: [00:10:26] It's kind of out of that way. Ok, so lots of ways of building and some better than others

Speaker1: [00:10:30] And who better to tell us about the better ways than Albert Pope, to whom we shall now turn? All right, Albert Pope, welcome to the Cultures of Energy podcast, and I want to say, first of all, that we're so happy to have you here as a stalwart supporter of the whole sense project over the past few years, but also as somebody who just gave a dynamite closing keynote talk at our Spring Symposium that I think really left a lot of people rather breathtaking about this project that you've been working on. I know that's a lot of set up. I'm not trying to put you on the spot or anything, but we'd love to hear a little bit more about maybe the origins of this research project you've been working on in Houston's Fifth Ward. Take us as far back as you wanted to tell the story.

Speaker3: [00:11:33] Sure. I've been working on the Fifth Ward for a while. I started there because because redevelopment is something that you can get funded, get research funding for. Ok. As opposed to just working on parts of the city that don't necessarily need a lot of help, but more or less take care of themselves. And I did a couple of projects. One was funded by the Kinder Institute. I've done some studios in the Fifth Ward. It's a an interesting part of Houston.

Speaker1: [00:12:09] Yeah. Maybe you can tell us a bit about that for people who who outside, I

Speaker3: [00:12:12] Don't really know what it's all about. I know Third World is not really a correct term, but the it's it's is about a shocking a slum, as you can find in an American city. It's it's the lowest income population in the city. It's a a friedmans town, which means it was settled after the Civil War by freed slaves, right? And has a pretty strong legacy. Continuing up to today, it's got over 100 small churches in it. It's about seven square miles and 100 small churches, which tells you a lot about it. It's evolved over the years. It has been the center of the African-American population in Houston up until the 70s and 80s, where a lot of the of of the original owners and renters sold. It's now, I think, majority Hispanic, majority renters, but still, even if if it's not occupied. Even if the majority isn't African-American, it's it's still psychologically the center because of its history. George Foreman grew up there. A number of of well-known African-Americans grew up in the Fifth Ward. It was on the bayou, which is a river right right across from downtown, which makes its dilapidated state even more of a scandal. And it's about, I would say, I don't remember the exact number, but about 70 percent of the housing stock is basically gone, right? 30 percent that remains is, I guess, 10 percent of that would be substandard.

Speaker3: [00:14:35] At least 10 percent of that, and the rest is is not so great. So it's an area that needs redevelopment more than any other in Houston. And we've taken it on in design studios where I teach in the school of architecture. And then I got funded first by the Kinder to do a redevelopment project and then by the Shell Center, both here on campus, right to do a redevelopment project that was also combined with carbon carbon neutral. So the the project was, I mean, it took on too much. Redevelopment is hard, right? Carbon is hard. Yeah. And doing it both together is a little bit crazy. But what holds it together is the fact that you really want. You don't want to build anything today that's not going to be not going to make sense and 10 years, 20 years, 50 years. And that really is the the the inroad to thinking through how how carbon might play a role in redevelopment.

Speaker1: [00:15:47] Because I mean, you were saying and this is something you were talking about a bit in in in the lecture, that cities in a way they have a kind of metabolism that maybe we don't always think so much about. I mean, you know, you build every 50 years, maybe the entire housing stock of a city will turn over. That's right. So you're thinking, you know, where, you know, in 2050 or whatever, 50 years from now, 20. Sixty five, what should the Fifth Ward look like?

Speaker3: [00:16:11] Yes. One of we we tend to think of cities as static, as concrete, as cast in stone. But in Houston, the average life of building is about 50 years. If that a lot of it's less. And the way I describe it is if you could, if you can do a. A thought experiment and imagine yourself standing in the fifth Fifth Ward, 50 years from now looking around, you could ask yourself the question How do we do? We just rebuilt the whole city. How do we do? So there are some things that that we know we need to do in the next 50 years. One of them, I think, is what drove the project is what we really need to do is is get our per capita energy consumption down on the order of 70 80 percent.

Speaker1: [00:17:06] Right now, this is where I this is where you took us to Asia and specifically to Hong Kong, right to tell us about us. Maybe if I if I'm remembering you correctly, the only city on the planet, that's actually at this moment, we're where the entire planet would have to be to stay within the 1.5 °C.

Speaker3: [00:17:25] It's the only only planet. It's the only city that is a modern city, right? And a large city, which is how we're living now. And we'll we'll be living at least through this century. That gets us close to that number. It's pretty close to the world average, which is shocking. It has one eighth. The per capita energy consumption of Houston has one quarter the per capita energy consumption of a typical European city. Ok, so it's it's basically a a a matter of density, meaning that there is no private fleet of automobiles. It's all a very sophisticated mass transit building system. And the buildings there are instead of as we do here, build millions of small single-family houses are rather large buildings that are obviously a lot more energy efficient. It's a model of density that was important to us to thinking through the project, as was, say, Manhattan. Manhattan is the the greenest environment in the country because of its density, the low footprint, the fact that you have small, small apartments. No one needs car and most people don't have a car. So even though it seems or feels like the antithesis of a green city, it actually is is in terms of its energy consumption and its carbon emission is is something to be envied.

Speaker3: [00:19:13] We still need to do a little bit better than Manhattan. The problem with Manhattan, of course, is that it was all built in the primarily in the 19th century in the beginning of the 20th century, and how we build today is quite different than how we built even 50 years ago. Right? Which I mentioned in the lecture that we need to think of. We need to update our model of urban density, and Hong Kong is actually the way we do it. In a nutshell, in Manhattan, it happened you. They laid out a grid, very nice grid and just piled buildings on top of it. It's fortunate they had rivers on either side of the island because there's no real provision for open space. What we wanted to do is not just pile buildings up in a dense organization, but to come up with a fairly simple model that had equal amounts of open space to density. So any time you, you build density, you also build in openness, right? Which is a very different model than than Manhattan.

Speaker1: [00:20:26] Can I just ask you one from before we leave Hong Kong? You know, it was striking to me. One of the things you mentioned was that, you know, there's maybe a certain discourse because you're an architect or designer as well as as a professor, obviously. And I guess there's a little it sounds like there's a little bit of a, you know, if not criticism. You know, people feel that the Hong Kong model is somehow inhumane. This design of these massive towers, that it looks like a kind of modernism that we left behind and justly so in the 1960s. And then like, it kind of evokes these like public high rise public housing that's failed and things like that. But you had a really interesting take on that where you said actually in the design of some of these mega towers is actually quite humane. And you spoke specifically to the fact that they actually have windows in bathrooms, in bathrooms,

Speaker3: [00:21:14] Bathrooms and kitchens.

Speaker1: [00:21:16] So not something we think about a lot. But but yeah, it's

Speaker3: [00:21:19] A it's a code requirement even for the public housing, which is 50 percent in the housing. There's a code requirement that every room, bathroom and kitchen have a window in it. It makes the. Hong Kong high rise, unique. But you just compare it to multifamily housing in the United States, where we haven't put a kitchen, a window and a kitchen in 50 years. And bathrooms, forget it, right?

Speaker1: [00:21:50] So you describe them as closet as these like closets that

Speaker3: [00:21:54] Closets with appliances,

Speaker1: [00:21:55] Closets, closets with sinks and things. Yeah, it's

Speaker3: [00:21:57] Kind of weird. We're sitting in a room with no windows in it right now. Right, exactly. But there's there is it's an affront to who we are and what we need as human beings to actually live in rooms that don't have natural light in there.

Speaker1: [00:22:13] Yeah. But anyway, so it seemed to me like this is one of the design things you were up against. You and the team were up against was thinking about How do you? I mean, is it fair to say, humanize that model or rescale it in such a way that that it does, you know, feel like to a average American urban citizen that this is someplace you'd like to live? It would be pleasant to live.

Speaker3: [00:22:34] Yeah, well, it's a going. What we need to hit to get a sophisticated mass transit system is about 65 units per acre, and Houston's maybe about five. So no matter what you do, it's going to be a shock. Yeah. But there are a number of of things that we've done and thought through that would would make dense living and this different kind of urban density that combines open space with dense building into something that's more palatable, palatable say than a housing project. I should say everyone when you think urban, everyone wants Brooklyn, right? Everyone wants the walkable three storey urban city that Brooklyn is, and it's a good reason. I mean, there's a good reason for that because it makes a very nice urban environment. We Brooklyn was laid out and largely constructed 100 years ago. We can't given the the economies with which we build today, given the scale of our cities. We can't go back to that model. There are things that we can learn from it having to do, certainly with street life and mixed uses that can be translated and actually improved on in the way we build cities over the next 50 years. So what we essentially have done is latched on to wood construction. Mm hmm. And for the dense part of the model and then for the open space, we've latched on to carbon plantations in the form of multiple species of trees that are are planted in sequence and are essentially produce a rotating landscape that is optimized for sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. That's what trees do, right? It leaves pulling carbon. Wood stores it as long as the carbon isn't burnt, the tree or the wood isn't burnt or it doesn't rot. You can look at a piece of wood as a block of carbon storage.

Speaker1: [00:25:01] Yes. So let me underscore that because I think this is this is a great just in terms of the imagination or thinking about the future of cities. So one of the things you're advocating here is a return to, you know, wood build wood is a primary building material for cities going forward.

Speaker3: [00:25:16] Right? It's a it's a game changer. The concrete is one of the dirtiest from a perspective of carbon is one of the dirtiest industries that exist when carbon pricing goes into effect. Not if, but when, right? Wood is going to come down in price and concrete is going to go through the roof. And to take advantage of that, I think, is I mean, it's almost a Win-Win situation where you have a building material that has the qualities of wood that actually starts to answer some of the problems of traditional dense building. It's abstract, it's cold. It's concrete, it's brutal. Wood is none of those things. And you can imagine any of the urban environments that you've thought of of or that might come to mind how they would be transformed if they were made out of wood. It just so happens that there's been a good amount of research done on what's called cross laminated timber construction, and it's possible to build tall and dense out of wood. I projects up to 15 storeys have been built

Speaker1: [00:26:39] 15 storeys, OK, so again, I'm sorry. I'll just take a moment to for the wow factor here. So normally you would think the incumbents or ability between would and like the Hong Kong scenario is that you can't build massive towers or what. But now actually you can. So you can go up to 40 to 40 stories in theory. They haven't built them, but

Speaker3: [00:26:57] No, but they've been engineered, exhaustively engineered up to 40 storeys. And there's no question that that could be done and that could be done efficiently.

Speaker1: [00:27:05] And this is called cross laminated timber.

Speaker3: [00:27:08] It's like a plywood on steroids. Instead of doing it with sheets of veneer, it's done with one buys that are laminated up into big panels. Wow. There's a lot of Infratel you got to do is is Google that phrase and you'll get an eyeful of of its potential? And what we did is combine that with with the wood. Sorry, the plantations and the wood plantations are are another obviously another manifestation of wood living and take also do a lot to help the the abstraction, the large scale, the difficulties of dense urban environments. When you have a lot of open space, right, that it tends to be if you have a lot of open space that's not organized or is more or less just wide open, it tends to to magnify the scale. It tends to create a problem environmentally, which if you think of of what we're proposing here is a kind of combination between plantation, tree plantation and urban forestry. Mm-hmm. Part of the Win-Win is that that tree plantations are actually incredibly beautiful environments. Yeah, they're they're different from forests, but nevertheless incredibly beautiful, beautiful environments that we hope would be, we know would be easy to integrate. They would obviously produce a carbon credit. It's not a situation where you cut down a tree and then you make a building that can operate on different, given their different economies. The point was to bring the wood construction together with the wood plantation in a way that you'd get a larger picture, a larger understanding of the cycle. The idea of the project is really to try to put the city into the carbon cycle. When you got trees sequestering, storing in the trunks in the wood, the wood then gets made into building material, gets built and per protected and preserved because it is configured into a building. What we kind of thought of this as is carbon sequestration and storage facility that you could live in. Right, right.

Speaker1: [00:29:55] Becomes the city. It's fascinating. I mean, it's fascinating to me. And I wonder, you know, just thinking about this in terms of the history of cities, you know, there is the the kind of manicured gardens and carefully controlled natural spaces of the modernist city like Central Park in New York or Jackson Park, where I grew up. And it's fascinating to think about the plantation as maybe being the equivalent for the Anthropocene city, right, that cities will have to learn to and also come to enjoy aesthetically and environmentally urban forests. Yes, it's funny because you hear a lot about urban farming. I haven't heard much about urban forest, but maybe this is something there is a literature about. Are people getting turned on to this already

Speaker3: [00:30:34] Or, well, urban forests have been around for a long time. Urban forestry has been around for a long time. It's never we. We haven't really. It hasn't been combined with carbon plantations because the the issue hasn't been there for long, and it's not the kind of really refined, highly cultivated landscape that you would expect from a city park. One of the things we wanted to do when we integrated wood into the building cycle would in the foreign plantations and in construction material is to think of it as as not another manmade element, but that it retains its natural character processes. It's almost, I guess, the the simplest way to say it is. It's trying to put something non-human, something almost feral into the building cycle. Yeah. And that it. Retains its properties, so it's not manicured within an inch of its life, right, where you cut bush to in the shape of box that it has a wild component to it, which carries through is pretty important to how how we think of the project and I think how we think of natural landscapes going forward, which is not as these highly highly manipulated, highly stylized, highly humanized environments, but that retain in some some measure their their own characteristics.

Speaker3: [00:32:12] Yeah. This project is tied tied to the bayous, and bayous are amazing for the for you know what bayous? Our bayous are kind of muddy rivers, right? Right. That is spread horizontally. They're really primitive landscapes. I don't know if you've seen, like gone through Memorial Park and seen an actual untouched bayou. They're stunning, stunningly beautiful landscapes, but pretty primitive. It's not the kind of place where you go and throw out a blanket and have a picnic, right? Right. Part of this was this thinking in terms of how it expands to the rest of the city is to really think through over the next 50 years a rewilding of the bayous that then in the way that we're thinking of the project, you go through grades of cultivation. So the the the bayou is is is left in is much of a natural state, as can be, the plantation is a second degree of cultivation. The wood construction is a third degree of control and managing the the wood. But it's all thought of as a single material culture, right, that carries through the entire project.

Speaker1: [00:33:33] Yeah, it's amazing. And I guess, you know, I wanted to ask a little bit more about the building designs that you came up with. Are they I mean, how how to make to make Houston a sustainable city of the future? Or, if, you know, close. I don't know if we're talking zero emissions or or moderate emissions, but but I mean, how tall and how dense do we need with these new materials with the carbon sinks in terms of? Because I know you put together, obviously, this is a very complicated model with a lot of different moving pieces in it. But when you finally brought it together, what would the Fifth Ward look like? And I know we can't. We can't, we don't run a podcast, so you have to talk us through this a little bit. It's going to look like what would a block of Houston in the Fifth Ward look like? It would be the wrong unit. I mean, it might have bigger than a block.

Speaker3: [00:34:23] Yeah, it's there. We haven't. We've grown out of the size of the block for the last 50 years and and how Houston is really built today is by subdivision spines that we call cul de sacs in the context of the project. What we have is high density spines developed along a central axis with wood or wood, buildings with construction, high rise wood construction and then adjacent immediately adjacent to that. The plantations no, no building at all add out to a certain area before you pick up another cluster and another cluster and another cluster. So we've divided subdivided the Fifth Ward, and this is a plan that plays out over 50 years time. Mm hmm. So that buy in over the next 50 years, we're going to we would be rebuilding the Fifth Ward such that at the end of that, that cycle, what you would have is we broke the fifth. We're down to five major clusters that center around a piece of the Fifth Ward, which was preserved and then around that piece, therefore sub clusters. So it breaks it in scale down and gets you enough density within a pocket, enough people to support mass transit, to support commercial, to support, you know, grocery stores. The problem of of food deserts is is really a problem of density. One of the a lot of people don't like density. They don't like the fact that people live close to each other, probably because they haven't seen good examples of it.

Speaker1: [00:36:12] Oh yeah, yeah, we got a phone in here. We're just going to let that one roll over. Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:36:17] But what density people, right, bring you all kinds of amenities that you would otherwise never be able to have. It's one of the reasons that the Fifth Ward right now is a food desert. Not because there's some conspiracy against the people in the Fifth Ward, it's because they're not enough people to support it. And I'm sorry. And the amenities that you get go way beyond just the basics of food. When you start putting people together, the the mass transit system in Hong Kong is unbelievably sophisticated, handles a number of people and you can move across the city in no time at all. So the the I think the arguments, they're not it's it's a it's a steep climb to think think about how in 50 years, over 10 years segments we could get to this kind of density, this completely other type of city. Essentially, what the project is doing, we we have tree plantations in Houston. Reliant Energy is already buying up a lot of plantations because they know they're going to have to offset their carbon footprint very soon. We already have high rise construction, right? We all of the pieces that that are in the project exist. We're putting them together in a different way, in a way that that even if it won't, it can't be achieved that fast. Shows you where we need to go. Right. Right.

Speaker1: [00:38:01] So, you know, I'm curious because there were a lot of folks who were invested in your project and who I think keeping an eye on your project. Have you had a chance to give presentations to the city of Houston or to planners here? I'd be very interested to hear about the feedback you got from them. Are they ready to imagine this or is this still too sci fi for them?

Speaker3: [00:38:24] I think a lot of one of the problems with planning and politics policy the real estate market is that it thinks in incredibly short periods of time. You know, a politician sees one election cycle. Real estate industry sees, you know, two years, four years into the into the future. No more. It's pretty. It's it's clear that unless we start thinking and larger, longer time frames, we're going to we're going to we're screwed. So I think just that's one of the reasons we broke it down into 10 year segments is it becomes more palatable if you can say, OK, there's where we're going. But look, this is a this is something we could do today and tomorrow that would lead to that and which is what people really want to know, even if they are only thinking in short term cycles. Nobody wants to build something today that's not going to make sense in five years, right? So we picked a part of the of the project that we did one one of the clusters that I mentioned, which was by the bayou and have some really simple. I mean, it starts with a lot of of demolition of substandard housing, planting of trees, rehousing people in some of the first wood construction that we would propose. Connecting up a public space to the bayou network, which is in Houston. Extensive, it's 150 miles of linear park that's in the public domain. No other city in the world has this wow, which are easy to easier to understand than than, say, we have to go out and build these wood high rises, which everyone would just walk away with with no interest.

Speaker3: [00:40:19] So we've had I've done a couple of public events. Rice Design Alliance has a public forum. I presented it there. I presented. We had a symposium around the project on the campus last fall. I did a ciencia and I've published the the project. We're just getting out to the point where we're we're finishing it and getting it into a stage that is communicable. But if you get. If you find an audience who is willing to at least entertain the idea that we have to start thinking farther out and we have to pay attention to carbon, right then you've got a pretty, pretty receptive audience in the way we've said. I mean, our argument really is that there are lots of white papers and there are lots of newspaper articles, and there have been a lot of speeches about carbon, all very important, you know, courses in universities like the one we teach. Right? One of the things that architecture can do is show you, everyone knows, can relate to an environment. So the point of the project would be just to simply answer what would a city that would achieve a 75 percent per capita cut in energy consumption look like right? Right. And just to show that image is a completely different way to show not only the carbon problem, but the carbon a potential solution? Yeah, I think part of the problem of not not of understanding and engaging the climate crisis is that there's if you can't see a way forward, you're just not going to go there at all. Right? You're not even going to get started.

Speaker1: [00:42:12] Yeah, no. That's what makes it so exciting is even if this is just a prototype and not like a finished design, even if it's just an idea on paper, it's still a visualization and a concatenation of this problem. And it is a solution. It's a potential solution. You can begin to talk with people. Well, you know, how much money would it take to do this? And what's also that kind of two birds with one stone aspect of this is you're talking about doing this in an area that desperately needs to be redeveloped anyway? Right? It's not. It's it's a place that's had a very hard history and a lot of communities are underserved in that area, which I guess also brings me to maybe a slight follow up question whether you've talked to folks who lived in the Fifth Ward and are they excited about this, potentially to

Speaker3: [00:42:57] The Fifth Ward. Crc is a great institution they've been building. They said Community Redesign Corporation, Community Design Corporation. They mostly work with Habitat for Humanity model, where they build one house at a time, and that's a great way to build. But it's the most expensive kind of construction you can can do because it's just a custom house, right? Even if it's a modest house, it's a custom house. You have to build and scale to really make a dent in the problem, and they've been very receptive to that argument that that we need to look at larger scale projects. The more units you build, the cheaper each unit will be, the less expensive. Another way to say that is the more units that you build, the higher quality the building. The units will be right. Simple economies of scale. And so I presented it in the first first phase of the program to the to the work that we did on the Fifth Ward, to the CRC. They're open to it. Of course, they've got huge, huge problems there. We're trying to find enough where we're trying to to get some momentum by talking to people who are involved in the bayou. Since it's adjacent to the bayou environmentalist community planners, there are enough vested interests. Once you combine the the those who are committed to social, the social welfare and those who are committed to environmental welfare, it's one of the reasons we put them both together is that you could build a kind of critical mass of of interest and get some things moving right.

Speaker1: [00:44:55] And it seems like there already is a major plan afoot to green the bayou space to make them more accessible to put, you know, bike paths and pedestrian roadways along there.

Speaker3: [00:45:07] What we want to do is to make sure that that attempt to make a bayou isn't just a beauty strip, but that in fact, the redevelopment of the bayou is a first stage and moving out and redeveloping the city, which is why we focused on the the part of the project that was right next to the bayou so that you could both get that amenity within the Fifth Ward, which it would need. Plus, you could see it as a model for anywhere in Houston that has an adjacent sea to the bayou. The beautiful thing about Houston is this this bayou greenways network, which I was just talking about, puts 65 percent of the population within a mile or a mile. One and a half from a bayou. Right? Which is remarkable, that kind of fine grained network, green network. The argument I make I've tried to make is that what what the freeways were to Houston, the construction of Houston, the 20th century the bayou network is going to be in the 21st. It has. It's a an incredible resource, not only for recreation, but for transportation, for openness. You know, the open space that I was talking about being necessary for dense development is given in the bayou. So if you imagine Houston being built as dense areas, dense neighborhoods around those bayous, you've got a model of a city, which I think is is particularly attractive, totally relevant and totally doable.

Speaker1: [00:46:59] I'm wondering if it actually, you know, I heard our former mayor, Annise Parker, give a talk last year less about this time last year where she basically, I think she's been or was generally an advocate of environmental and social progress in the city and did a lot to help accelerate this bayou renovation we were talking about. But she said, you know, given Houston's scale and you probably have the figures at your fingertips on this, you know how many square miles it is as and how how little density there as as compared with like the average American city, despite being the fourth largest city population wise, that, you know, in that environment, she said. You know, we're never going to be able to cover everything by public transportation, like there's no way we'll be able to develop a network that will that will be effective, that'll cover all of Houston, which is sort of sad. But what I was leading to it, this was what you're saying. In a way, Houston's lack of density, if I'm understanding you right, could possibly be an advantage in being able to integrate, you know, for a speck into the city more quickly.

Speaker3: [00:48:02] I think the there are a couple of things to that. One is that the the reason that Houston has 150 miles of continuous public domain linear park space is because it is not dense. The reason other cities haven't been able to put together a system like that is it's just too expensive, right? And that, I think is has been a traditional it has been an advantage to us. The next phase of development can't be that done in the same way the first phase of development was. It has to get dense and to say that Houston never will get that dense is. Uh, incorrect. It's in some ways it's it's not looking broadly enough, not only at what the potential is, but what the needs are over the next 50 years in terms of of our environmental problems. There's the project is really based on a carbon, a working carbon market where you would have those those incentives that were built into wood construction and disincentives that were built into single family houses and private automobiles. I think everyone kind of freaks out when you say it in that particular way, but I think it is all a part of our future. And the the point is to imagine, not imagine that prospect, not as a decline or compromise, but is actually producing a superior environment to what we have now. I think we've had enough of dissipation. The alienation of the suburbs is a kind of, you know, it's accepted. It's a given people want to move back into the cities, they want density, they want to see other people on the street. That's why everyone wants to live in Brooklyn, right? Yeah, exactly. And so there's it's not hard to to think through the carbon issue in terms of things that are demonstrably desirable, right, that everyone otherwise wants. Even if, if not in the exact configuration which they're thinking about, but the kinds of urban qualities I think can provide an environment that is far superior to the environments that we have today. And on top of that, at least make a take a shot at responding to the environmental problems, right?

Speaker1: [00:50:51] And another good thing is we're not waiting on some magical technology

Speaker3: [00:50:55] To make this possible. Well, there's not going to be one, right? There's not there's no technical fix for climate change. We've we've you know, how many whack ideas do you have of planting out the Sahara desert or seeding the clouds with sodium nitrite before you know that there's not? There's not going to be a silver. There's no silver bullet for this problem. One of the things that makes the the the thinking it through in the context of the city is that it. The frontier of climate change is is in the is is in altering our own habits, right? Right. We can scream at the fossil fuel industry forever. We can, you know, we can try to divest the universities and cities from fossil fuel if we put coal in a tailspin. But we're the clients of that system and until until we recognize that it's us, we're not really going to solve the problem. So when you recognize to in order to make that recognition you, you understand that that our way of life will need to change in our environments will need to change. We will need to change in order to to answer this.

Speaker3: [00:52:23] And it's just not going to work by, you know, an electric car. We don't need electric cards. We need no cars. Right, right. Changing a light bulb is is great. I mean, it's fantastic to use to make these energy savings. But the magnitude of the problem is not addressed by these savings. And so this is is to say that the front the front line of of tackling the climate problem is the city. Seventy percent of energy consumption is within the city industries, houses, transportation. Yeah. And to and to think through knowing that we that you have an urban dynamic that you can engage and change things to think through how how we're our patterns of habitation. And how to make them bring them into line with the limitations that we're facing today, I think is something that is inevitable. We can do it, we can do it the hard way or we can do it the easy way. We can turn it into advantage. Or it could be, you know, a mess. I think the way to avoid it being a mess is to take it on now.

Speaker1: [00:53:46] So how I mean, you talked, I think in answer to one of the questions at the symposium, you mentioned that you were also going to do a presentation in Detroit. You know this, this model is not one that's just limited to Houston. Let's be very clear, it's something you think you can take to other cities. Do you think there are a lot of cities in the U.S. that could benefit from this approach? All of them may be, or I think it's somehow related to geography in ways that that they were.

Speaker3: [00:54:12] You'd obviously have to make adjustments to a system that ties in to an urban system that ties so closely into a natural system as the one that we're proposing would have to adapt to that natural system where relative to where it is. But I in some ways we know we're going to we're going to make these energy cuts one way or another. Right, right. We know that the that the five unit per acre single family housing tract is is over. That's not a city that's going to take us into the future. And there they're obviously different ways, different kinds of cities that one can imagine that would would come up with the same result that we are we we have other other. They're a good, good many variables you could address. The point is that we we have to change our model of habitation. And you know, this, I think, is an attempt to to make that statement clear by showing you how we could do that. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:55:28] Absolutely. It's very exciting and it's great to see it happening here in Houston because as we've talked at great length about, Houston is not always the place you think about as being the epicenter of of environmental progress.

Speaker3: [00:55:43] Well, we there's all kinds of reasons,

Speaker1: [00:55:47] But few of us are trying.

Speaker3: [00:55:49] Yeah, the epicenter of the carbon economy is maybe not the best place to try out new models of of low energy dwelling, but maybe it is the best place to try.

Speaker1: [00:56:03] Right? Well, I mean, like you said, there's there are some unique things about Houston's ecology. Yeah, I'm speaking broadly that might actually be advantageous in this case and give us a flash forward. I mean, if this if if Houston, let's say the city government were to to sign on to this, would this be principally a public project? Would it be a public, private, mixed project private? I mean, how would how would this be best developed and as a as a kind of Five-Year Plan for Houston's?

Speaker3: [00:56:34] Well, I think it's it's it's because we we don't really have time to invent a new economic system. Yeah, which some people think we do. We've we've imagined this occurring through the carbon market through a rigorous carbon market. And to the extent that that market is controlled and guided by by government agencies is is probably, you know, depends wildly on what the circumstances are, where one is now. Houston we have very little interference with the building industry. Almost none that would will probably have to change. But the the. The incentive to change, I think, is imminent right there. The incentive is there, and there's no reason that a capitalist economy. I mean, Hong Kong is the most, you know, probably the capitalist city par excellence, right? It's it's capitalist as you could get managed to create these incredibly energy and efficient environment. The only conclusion you can make from that is that it makes good business sense or else they wouldn't have done it right. That's how Hong Kong works. So it may not exactly fit the profile of public private interactions that have built this city in the last 50 years. They may be shifts and adjustments that are necessary, but I think it's our best shot is that interaction that interconnection between public and private that would make sure that these and the incentives that will exist to cut our energy consumption are guided towards the best end. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:58:36] So we're going to put your project website up, which I understand is still in development. But I think it's good for people who may be in other cities who think this is a great idea. It might want to reach out so they can find a way to contact you. Are you open to new international partners, new places to go and pitch this?

Speaker3: [00:58:52] We've done a second. As you mentioned, we did a took the the ideas that we developed in the Fifth Ward and did a project for the Detroit area called Corktown, just to the west of the Central Business District for the Venice Biennale, which is on will be on display this summer from May 29th through September, I believe. Congratulations. So you can see another version of it and that has a web presence as well. That particular exhibition has a has a pretty good as as well distributed. We're then going to take that those projects that we did showed in Venice and move them to Detroit in the beginning of next year to put it in the place where it's directly addressing,

Speaker1: [00:59:51] Yeah, well, I am for one, and I think I speak for Simone too, who couldn't make it today because of yet more inundation. You're talking about living close to bayous. Here's the other side of it. But yeah, it's great to think of Houston having a different kind of urban future. It's a weird city. I don't know if it's here because I grew up in Chicago, which is a classic grid city spent most of my life in other gridded environments and then came here and was, you know, it's vast and so vast that I feel like I know maybe, you know, 10 percent of Houston. Well, yeah. And then the other side of it, though, is that even where it should be densest, like downtown, they're just huge vacant lots. You know, it's a different way.

Speaker3: [01:00:32] It's we change the way we make cities around the middle of the last century and Houston is is for I mean, it was very small in 1945, not not much of a population, which is when we really stopped building regular city blocks and we started building subdivisions and cul de sac called us and started cul de sac instead of building continuous grids, which is a problem I've been been working on mostly my whole career, thinking through the differences and the benefits and the positive and negative aspects of that change. But it makes Houston incredibly different from Chicago, which was by the 1950s when they switched as well, right? Much more built out. Everything within the city limits of Chicago is actually a grid. It's great about and the suburbs start outside the city limit. It's the same in in Detroit, so you have much more conventional urban situations there than than you would in Houston, which is mostly been built in the last 50 or 60 years.

Speaker1: [01:01:39] So if I if I remember correctly so we've got the evolutionary path here is is from grid to cul de sac. And then you're saying, turn it vertical, turn the spines vertical.

Speaker3: [01:01:50] Yeah, yeah. The the the cul de sac city, which is based on the spine morphology as opposed to a grid morphology, can be I mean, there are good spines and their bad spines, just like their good grids and their bad grids. And I, a lot of people write the suburbs off, and by now we can't. We built too much of urban substance based on suburbs, but they are. It's actually the spine based development is more flexible than grid grid based development, and this sort of rotation from the horizontal to the vertical is an example of that. Mm hmm. Right. Yeah. You could put all of the woodlands and. You know, I don't know if you know, the Woodlands, it's a little new town north of north of the city, you could put it in in 10 high rises. Yeah, right. So huge, huge spread out area and you could make given given the resources have gone into the that area. It's a beautiful environment. 100000 people live out there, 120 now. You could make an incredible environment. Yeah.

Speaker1: [01:02:55] All right, Albert, thanks so much for coming in. Thanks so much for everything. I hope to have you back again to talk about further projects, you know, whatever is coming next on your pipeline. But this is amazing. And congratulations on not only obviously getting the grant and doing the work, but just coming up with this really compelling vision of of Houston's future. Maybe a lot of City's future.

Speaker3: [01:03:15] It's it's nice to nice to hear the feedback. I mean, we just like you guys, we we tend to be locked in our discipline. Yep, and hall one of the efforts, the big efforts here is to break that boundary. So it's appreciated.

Speaker1: [01:03:31] I'm going to go out right now and imagine what Houston's going to look like with a lot of plantations and great cheers.

Speaker3: [01:03:37] All right.