This talk addresses the pressing issues of housing affordability, traffic congestion, and extreme weather in Florida and the U.S. Let’s put in action a transformative approach, inspired by European successes, focusing urban density, sustainable transportation, and climate-resilient neighborhoods. Dr. John L. Renne, AICP is the Director of the Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions (CUES) and an Associate Professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida Atlantic University. He is also an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on creating sustainable, resilient & livable cities, with a focus on land development transportation infrastructure. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
Thank you uh before I start I I’m the kind of the last full speaker I just want to thank all the volunteers and everybody that put this together let’s give him a big round of [Applause] applause with a show of hands how many of you spend about two hours a week
Sitting in bumper to- bumper traffic wow that’s pretty good that’s the amount of time the average Floridian now spends in traffic here in South Florida it’s increased by 30% % since Co we’re now ahead of Los Angeles and there’s only seven other regions in the world that have worse traffic than South
Florida okay another show of hands how many of you think that housing prices here are just outrageously expensive okay that’s a little better I guess and my for my final question how many of you think that I could get elected mayor of any Community here in South Florida if my platform were to
Increase housing density by 500% in order to solve our housing and transportation problems I didn’t think so it’s counterintuitive but increasing housing density and creating walkable sustainable communities is an important part of the solution to solve our housing and our transportation problems urbanist and best-selling author Richard Florida wrote that low
Density suburban sprawl was the cause of the Great Recession he noted that after the Great Recession the places that would be thriving and in high demand by the market would be denser walk able communities that are creative artistic places we see that here in downtown delr we have used
90% of the budget that was set forth in the Paris climate agreement for carbon emissions if we want to keep within a 1.5 degree Global temperature rise it’s not looking like likely that that’s going to happen most scientists now think that we’re probably going to see
Two to maybe as much as 3° within our lifetimes so we need to create climate resilient neighborhoods that can withstand extreme weather and living here in South Florida we all know what that’s like I recently visited the neighborhood in groby France it’s a wonderful place one that I would want to
Live it’s uh people walk bike they use Transit they drive electric vehicles the buildings are solar powerered and they subtract uh they they subtract carbon emissions from the atmosphere because they generate more power than the building consumes so it feeds the grid between the buildings is green spaces
And playgrounds is a photo of my son on the ropes course there’s cafes and they have a species that is almost extinct in the United States the bookstore do you guys all work for Amazon 23 years ago I went to Paris and visited a friend we borrowed bikes and rode around
For 3 days it was a memorable experience but at the time Paris was not a safe place to bike the roads were dangerous and you felt like you were taking your life into your hands this past summer I went back to Paris and also visited groby and
Barcelona and went to the United king Kingdom I was studying the urban Fabric and transportation systems in these cities I’m a professor at Flor atlanic University in urban planning and I have been on sabatical and I’m a v visiting scholar at the transport studies unit in the school of geography and the
Environment at the University of Oxford Paris is a radically different city the people are friendly now maybe a lot of friend people in this audience too but French have a good sense of humor so um it is very bicycle friendly as well this is a photo of my son biking in
A tunnel that used to be for cars and trucks but it has been converted for people who want to run and bike and ride on roller blades and skateboards this is not an isolated EX example this is all over Paris Amsterdam and Copenhagen are places that people know for being you
Know bicycle meccas but Paris is remarkable because it Rivals those cities and it’s a much larger City population wise this got me thinking you know why can’t we do this here in South Florida and across the United States I mean could you imagine if the mayor of
Miami announced that we’re going to take the streetcape away from lots of car lanes and devote it for bicycling and Light Rail people would go up in arms they would say we have too much traffic we’re too crowded we can’t do that well in fact this actually happened all that
Long ago in West Palm Beach where I live was very controversial but in my research I found that cities in France and Europe are five times more dense than American cities and cities in the UK are two to three times denser so imagine Paris with all of the nasty traffic that they had
That I experienced 20 years ago with five times the population density and they still took away that space from vehicles and devoted it over to sustainable modes this is because they’re trying to achieve their climate goals of carbon reduction we need to build more Light Rail and more
Housing we need to convert our streets this is an image from Barcelona this also used to be a wide Street for vehicles and it’s now being converted into a complete Street where more of the spaces alloc ated for Light Rail and bicyclists this is an image of incorporating nature-based Solutions
Into our street Scapes a bio Swale goes along a new bike lane and what that allows for is a green sponge to soak up the heavy rains that are now becoming more prevalent because of our changing weather patterns some say that AI could be a solution
To these problems and I have a lot of Hope for AI I mean AI can make our cities more efficient uh utilize our resources more efficiently and effectively for example we could potentially grow more Landscaping with less water utilize energy from renewable resources with uh with with better
Efficiencies my colleague colag and I recently got a grant at Florida Atlantic University from the National Science Foundation to establish the center for smart streetscapes this is creating a test bed in West Palm Beach and other cities around the country to look at how we can use Innovative AI Technologies to make
Our streets and our cities more responsive and resilient and intelligent uh but a AI is not the Magic Bullet solution to our problems the solution is politically unpopular and it’s counterintuitive for most people we need to build more Light Rail and we need to take allow for developments of Housing
And jobs around those stations we need to convert our streets to allow for more sustainable modes like cycling and and like Light Rail and other modes we see that Richard Florida was correct downtown delr we have seen luxury developments that have been popping up but these are very expensive
And not very attainable for most workingclass people there are two hurdles that we need to overcome one is nimbyism there’s a lot of great projects that are proposed that get shot down by nimes but recently the State of Florida legislature unanimously passed the live local act which attempts to create more affordable
Housing I don’t know if you guys heard what I just said but I said the legislature unanimously pass something you know housing is a major crisis if in any States Florida the two political parties can agree on something on anything the Liv local act mandates that multif family projects must be approved
If they contain 40% affordable housing in commercial areas they could be as tall as the tallest building within a on M radius the other problem the other hurdle that we need to overcome is our transportation system it is overly autod dependent it generates way too much carbon emissions so we need
To build upon the solid bones that we have with the bright line and the TR Rail and we need to be able to connect not just the downtown along the coast but we need to go Inland towards the Suburban areas to the west of our communities after World War II we started building
Highways that created a ripple of suburbs that led to a tsunami of carbon emissions and climate change a new idea was born in the 1800s in England called The Garden cities movement that spread to Europe and Japan during the 20th century to create these more sustainable walkable communities that wave is now spreading
Here to the United States but if we’re going to do something about global warming we need to move quickly we need to build housing we need to rethink our transportation system and to address the extreme weather we need to build resilience into our our our neighborhoods and our housing
If we do these things then just maybe we might prevent the bookstore from becoming extinct thank you