Chuck Marohn  0:00

Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. It's Member Week, and I want to do something really special. I have been wanting to have a chat with Andres Duany for a long time. In fact, I've been wanting to have him on the show regularly. This is a person with unbounding ideas and deep intellectual genius, and I'm fortunate enough to know him well enough to give him a call, and I asked if he'd be willing to come on the podcast. He said yes. He's in Paris -- not Paris. He's in France right now. He's outside of Paris. We got on Zoom, and he just started chatting, and as happens with Andres, there really was no beginning, so at some point, I just turned on the recorder. So what you're actually going to hear is not a question-answer, like you might have in a podcast. You're just going to hear a dialog, and it really is a dialog of a genius guy talking about things, and I want to share it with you.

I think we have a ton that we can learn from Andres. I mean, he is the most influential urban planner of the last century for sure and I think a person who has, not only dramatically shaped my thinking and my view, and kind of helped me through figuring out a lot of things. But has had that effect on tens of thousands, maybe more, people. Hundreds of thousands. I mean, he's indirectly influenced, literally, the lives of millions of people. So this is someone of extreme consequence, and I want to have him on to chat, and I hope you enjoy it. I had a ton of fun. As you'll hear at the end, he said he's willing to keep doing this, so we'll probably have him on again. But yeah, enjoy Andres.

Andrés Duany  1:54

That ability to tell the truth is utterly gone. I'll give you an example. The last CNU, there was a bunch of films made -- who was that wonderful fellow who's our great filmmaker? God, I'm so bad with names.

Chuck Marohn  2:12

I'm so bad with names too. I know who you mean, though.

Andrés Duany  2:16

Okay, so he had a special session on a collection of documentaries and propaganda films of the people who created suburbia. How they spoke, what their ideas were, how they sold them, how they looked, how they spoke. So you get these basically white guys with thin ties doing an incredible job explaining clearly what the concept of suburbia was going to be, what the concept of the shopping center was going to be, what the concept of the highway system was going to be, what the concept of the big roads was going to be, what the concept of FHA was going to be, what the concept of Levittown was going to be.

The entire audience was booing. "Oh, boo. What idiots." I was supposed to be there with Laura trying to basically create flame, create sparks. And I said, "Wait, wait. The way you're acting is just too obvious. These are people who changed the world thoroughly. We also want to change the world. We don't like the world they built, but they changed the world and built very thoroughly the system that now we're fighting. Can we learn how they did it? How did they transform the preeminence of the traditional city into suburbia? What were their arguments? What did they look like? What were the models like? Let's learn from them."

I got booed. I fought back. "Why are you defending those guys?" And I said, "Because there's much to learn from their success." I got booed. During the entire CNU, I mean it, half a dozen people, maybe more, came up to me and said, "Why did you cause such trouble? People are really angry at you." And I said, "What the hell are you talking about?" Do you see what I mean? It's a hostile environment to that reality.

Chuck Marohn  4:19

I totally see what you mean. I'm going to say this in response. You taught me to go back to pre-suburbia and measure sidewalk widths and measure lane widths and look at housing setbacks and all these things. I got that from you.

Andrés Duany  4:38

Which gave you the confidence to actually say, "This can be done," right?

Chuck Marohn  4:42

This can be done, right. But when I started doing the Strong Towns project, one of the things that we did early on, and I'll credit Andrew Burleson, who's on my board, we went back to the way they marketed suburbia and said exactly what you're saying right now. How do we learn from this? Because you didn't have to sell it. It sold itself, in a sense. It became a culturally obvious thing to do. To me, the question was, how do we make traditional development the obvious cultural thing to do in 2010, 2012, 2015? How do we do that? So yeah, I think that critique is completely misplaced.

Andrés Duany  5:28

Okay, I want to get back to that. That's a good subject. How did they succeed? I'm speaking about the ethos of criticism, of which originally, now, this is something you may not know because it precedes you, when Celebration was designed, I was on the team, and instead of doing marketing studies, which are essentially a rearview mirror vision, kind of "cover your ass, this is what sells, therefore it will sell more of it," they were so smart. They actually got three sets of futurists to report what the future would be like.

I remember one of them was Stanford Research Institute, SRI. I don't know whether they exist anymore. The other one was Yankelovich, and I don't remember what the third was. What they presented independently -- they each presented independently about an hour -- was the ethos of the generation that was culturally dominant and how they thought. They made a distinction between traditionalists, modernists and neo-traditionalists. They introduced the word neo-traditionalism, and originally we were neo-traditionalists. That was our label, and that was actually sociologically correct.

One of them, I think probably the lady from SRI, showed three slides. One of them was of an old, it looked actually like an English townhouse, an English terrace house. She showed one room, one English room with a fireplace, and she showed the fireplace mantle with all the decoration, and it had one of these clocks that goes tick, tock, tick, tock, with a swinging weight. It has to be wound. She said, "This is the room of a traditionalist. They feel that the clock has to be contemporary with the architecture, even though the clock is extremely expensive, makes noise and has to be wound up. It's the correct thing."

Then she showed the room stripped down of ornament with a small modern German alarm clock. She said, "This is the room of a modernist. They realized that this Braun alarm clock is much better than the old clock, but they also felt they had to strip out the ornament." So both of those are ideological -- ideological modernist, ideological traditionalist.

Then she showed the combination of the fireplace with all the ornament and the smaller German alarm clock. She said, "This is the room of a neo-traditionalist, combining what is best in the long run, regardless of ideology. What's coming up, the generation that's coming up, is a neo-traditionalist generation." As soon as she said that, I realized, yeah. What people do is they live in old houses but have a modern kitchen. They live in old houses but they tear out the claw-footed bathtub and put a really modern bathroom in, but they still keep the ornament and everything else. They don't have to change the windows to sliding glass doors.

Then she said, "This is the ethos. Remember, this was 1990. This is the ethos of the generation that will be culturally dominant until just about 2030."

Now, when the New Urbanism was conceived, it was conceived as neo-traditionalist in the sense of whatever works best in the long run. Whenever we design at DPZ, every one of our designs and products combine. We don't banish, we allocate. There are plenty of things that suburbia does well. What suburbia does well is the management is very superior. The physical design is very inferior. We combine the physical design of the traditional inner city neighborhood, but not with the random stuff that happens in the inner city. With very modern HOA management documents.

We also do the same thing with Main Street. We actually revive the Main Street, but under the management that is normally used for shopping malls. We don't transform it into a shopping mall. We don't bring national tenants in, but we give them the same professional advice that the tenants get in a shopping mall. That's the combination.

If you look at the SmartCode or any code DPZ has ever written, you will notice that at every level, from the region to the city to the neighborhood to the building, there's always an off-ramp. There's a decision tree in which you can get off the New Urbanist mode, the traditional mode, and go suburbia. So what we do is we do a triage. We don't combine both, because it means that nothing is optimized. You get a kind of very weak, not better-looking shopping parking lot. But it's not the absolutely fabulous Main Street and the absolutely well-working suburban mall. One or the other.

What happens when we write our SmartCodes, which are neo-traditionalist in the sense that they have an A and a B grid. Not everything has to be optimally walkable. In fact, if you try to make everything optimally walkable, there are so many frontages that are second-rate and third-rate that are not going to go away. I mean, blank walls exist. Somebody has to service trucks. A dense building has to have a servicing yard, et cetera. What we do is we do a triage. All of our codes and plans are what we call tartan grids. They're A, B, C, A, B, C streets.

We always allow the fact that between 30 and 60% of Americans, when given the choice, actually want suburbia. They want it. So what we do is we don't pollute our New Urbanism by trying to compromise it and make it somehow more suburban. The DPZ communities are really killer good because we don't compromise the A grid. But right here at Kentlands, you'll see absolutely beautiful A grid. Then there's some shops we wanted. We wanted a Whole Foods. We wanted Lowe's hardware store, and they don't fit on the frontage. So we have an A grid and a B grid. It is actually one of these communities that you really don't need a car at all, but that can only be done by triage.

Every single one of my fellows at the CNU, when they actually calibrate a SmartCode or do their own plan, they pretend, or when they write, let's say, a book on traffic engineering, they pretend that suburbia doesn't exist. It's never in the same book that this is the traditional, and you have a decision tree, and this is the, I'm sorry, you're building in a context that has suburbia and will have more suburbia. The engineers shouldn't have to reference both books. They need both books and the correct decision trees in one book, in one manual, not only because suburbia already exists, but actually, when there used to be, when Tony Nelessen used to do in the old CNU, he used to do visual preference studies. You know what they were.

Chuck Marohn  15:06

Yeah, I've seen those photographs.

Andrés Duany  15:06

They were traditional this and suburban that. Now, even with the photographs being manipulated, which they were, for example, the traditional neighborhood always had a blue sky, and the suburbia always had a gray sky, and the suburbia always had a lot of asphalt in the foreground, and the New Urbanism always had a lot of green in the foreground. The photos were manipulated.

He would say, "Can you believe that 60% of the people wanted traditional neighborhoods, and they're not getting them? Can you believe it?" Now, that was his proposal. 60% want the good slide. I was thinking, who the hell are the 40% with everything manipulated against them? They actually chose the three-car garage with the driveway in front. I've never forgotten that. We cannot do what we do and pretend the other part doesn't exist. We can't just banish it. Because, well, "the New Urbanists don't deal with that, therefore it goes away from the world." It doesn't. What it does, it comes in and bites you in the ass. That is why so many New Urbanist communities are actually, I must say, quite mediocre.

Because the attempt to get the parking kind of like a shopping center, getting the streets kind of like the fire marshal, it's just, and they don't get it. What I find is that our movement, and yours for all I know, has actually given birth to a whole bunch of -- I'm sorry to be politically incorrect, but I don't give a damn -- a bunch of Ayatollahs, absolutists, that are so absolute. That is why so many of the attempts to institute the SmartCode or to do a regional plan blow up. The New Urbanists get good fees. They have the trust of the people. They have two, three years. It goes in for public, and it blows up. Has anybody analyzed why they blow up?

Chuck Marohn  16:05

I see exactly what you're saying.

Andrés Duany  16:08

It's because when there's opposition, "but I like my three-car garage," "but I really love driving my children to school. I love driving my children to school. I don't want to unstrap my baby to get out. I want to drive through," you're able to say, "Yes, yes." Or "we need a McDonald's. It creates 27 jobs." I say absolutely, you can welcome them in. You just allocate them. You don't banish them. I think there are too many people that are, I'm using this word, too many things are being hated on

Chuck Marohn  16:45

Let me start with, I mean, we've been trying to get people to not be in a war on NIMBYs. I heard you years ago argue that NIMBYs are rational people. This is one of the problems. You use the "we're all Ayatollahs."

Andrés Duany  17:02

No, no, some people aren't, but the majority are too pure for our activity, because society is not utopian.

Chuck Marohn  17:12

Yes. I've often felt like I'm trapped between the two, as you call them, influential generations, the Boomers and the Millennials. There's a strain there that is not very practical and is very ultimatum-ish. It's got to be this way or we'll fight it to the death. I feel like the NIMBY thing is one of those where I just watch real people in the world turn their brains off when we start talking like this.

Andrés Duany  17:45

The NIMBYs actually hate further growth. I remember when there were no NIMBYs. I remember when nobody knew what that name meant. I remember when developers were always welcome. When I first practiced, developers were heroes.

What happened was the promise of suburbia, of free-moving traffic, plenty of parking and beautiful green areas was betrayed. Suburbia has never delivered any of that. It delivers traffic congestion and hideous parking lots and really hideous big boxes and so forth. It destroys nature, partially because the engineering is also rather absolutist. You can't save the tree. The engineers are absolutist as well, but so is everybody else, every specialty.

What happens is that the NIMBYs who don't want any more growth are your allies. They actually don't want any more growth. What we've always done is say, "We totally agree with you. Totally. I understand you hate this stuff, and let me explain why you hate it." Then I demolish suburbia and its stupidity, and I say, "That's why you hate it. But there's an alternative, which is this." This is part of the solution rather than part of the problem. So basically, I always begin by agreeing with them.

I want to make a parenthesis now, because this is something, since you're such a prolific writer, there's a book written by Stewart Brand, the guy who did How Buildings Learn, the Whole Earth Catalog. He also did, I think it's called Thinking Seriously About the Environment, but I don't know what the title is. It's not his most recent book. It's the next to last. He actually says that, if you really believe in the environmental problem, climate change, there are really four solutions, all of which are against the theology of environmentalism.

He begins each one, and one of them is nuclear plants. You know how everybody hates nuclear plants, even though nuclear plants are actually the one chance we have. France, by the way, has 75% or 80% of its electricity from nukes. It's the greenest advanced country on Earth because of that. Have we had any explosions of the French ones? We're here. I'm here, by the way. I'm 45 minutes from three nuclear plants right here.

Chuck Marohn  19:16

I didn't know.

Andrés Duany  19:16

Yeah. So what happens is he begins in every one of the four chapters by making the argument against nuclear plants thoroughly. Then he makes the argument for them. If you begin with the positive, nobody's listening to you because the person who's reading says, "Well, this guy doesn't understand that there's all the pollution that lasts for 10,000 years. Where's that going to go? There was Chernobyl," and blah.

So he begins each chapter by making the counter-argument to his argument. It's so brilliant, because once you say, "This guy understands what I have against nukes," and then he takes it on and demolishes the counter-argument, it's so brilliant. That's what I used to do. I would always say, "Let me explain suburbia to you. Let me explain why you have so much traffic in your town. Let's look at the aerial photographs. I completely understand what your life is like. I completely understand what it's like to be a soccer mom." And they were just going, "Yes, yes. This guy really gets our problem."

Then once I was on their side, I said, "But I'm here to help you out of this quandary." That is what we've lost. We lost any understanding of where the NIMBYs are coming from.

Chuck Marohn  21:53

I've called it an empathy bridge. That was a term I got from, where did I get it? It was a book. Can't remember the book, but they talk about an empathy bridge. A lot of people when I've said that, "we need to have an empathy bridge to drivers," they think I mean we need to say that drivers who kill people are okay. And no, no. We need to understand why people speed, why people drive fast, why they look at their cell phone when they're driving. We should understand that.

Andrés Duany  22:24

And the sheer pleasure that the cars have become. Even the least expensive car is incredibly comfortable. Those guys aren't sitting around not dealing with their problems. They're dealing, they're trying to, what they've done. I know in Miami, when I get into a modern car, I say, "Well, this really mitigates that terrible experience of commuting." You're sitting on a beautiful couch with beautiful music, communicating with the world. Oh my God. I know it takes an hour, but it ain't what it used to be, just pure hell.

Sometimes we need an overarching theory to justify an organization. If everybody knows, if you think that the New Urbanists have kind of nailed it, and you're kind of nailing it with the younger people, because I understand our discourse may be intrinsically too advanced. It's like throwing people into third-year university. Nevertheless, you could also make them more effective by having that empathy. I think it's a wonderful term, the empathy bridge, and also granting that some things suburbia does better. Sell them the physical. Sell them the physical. But very often the software is what I call the hardware and software problem.

We are ever more expert in the hardware, and we're terrible at the software. The HOAs, we create these communities that are just beautiful, wonderful replicants of traditional urbanism. Everybody walks, but fundamentally, the governance is so desiccated that eventually the people are not happy. We just throw in the old HOA lawyers, and they're like insects in plexiglass, struggling to evolve with the society, and they can't.

Chuck Marohn  24:30

You asked me about the Strong Towns/CNU difference. I do feel like CNU, one of the positives of it for a long time has been that it attracts people who are zealous. I really, I'm really into this. When I was in the early days, it was a lot of "I want to figure this out. I want to learn." I remember being in a room with you where we were doing a review of different New Urbanist developments, and Victor Dover stood up and he presented his and everybody asked polite questions. You got up and got mad at everybody, and you said, "If we ask polite questions, we're not learning, we're not getting better, we're not improving, and we're going to lose unless we improve."

I kind of feel like that was the vibe. I'm a zealot, I'm here, but I want to get better. I wonder if part of the struggle is that the zealot mindset works really well when it's focused on improvement, and it works less well when it's focused, in a sense, defensively.

Andrés Duany  25:38

Okay, I know exactly what you're trying to say. Yes, I know exactly. I actually have a pretty good response to that. I believe you were probably in a kind of closed meeting of advanced people, maybe it was a council in which we were the people that were experienced, and we knew how tough. It's like battlefield reports. You've got to be accurate. That didn't work, that didn't work, that didn't work, and we had to understand what's in the head of the fire marshals.

We have great aha moments, like they just have a liability problem, and if you put the exception into the code, they no longer have liability. Whatever you put into their code basically relieves their liability. That was gold. That kind of thing, instead of just hating on them. That's the word I was looking for, hating on. You're hating on the fire marshals. That's it. That's a key word.

So what was happening then? I want to give the example of Leon Krier. Leon Krier, in public, in his presentations and in his polemic, was absolutely rigorous and formidably inflexible. It has to be this way. Personally, he loved modernism. He loved Le Corbusier. I spent so much time with him. He was the opposite of a hard-ass. He was the sweetest guy. His library, which was in his room, had 9,400 books. Do you know how many of them overlapped with Notre Dame when he gave the library to Notre Dame, being a huge library of traditional architecture and urbanism? The overlap was 20%. 80% didn't overlap because Notre Dame is like this, absolutely certain, as certain as Leon's polemic. But he was continually enjoying everything that was good. He was enjoying life. He loved cars, for example, but he could never say that. He loved, we visited modernist buildings everywhere.

Do you know what books he kept when he left? He kept his entire Le Corbusier library. That's what he took with him.

Chuck Marohn  28:18

Really?

Andrés Duany  28:18

Yeah. We should talk a lot more about Leon, because the real Leon, now that we can talk about him, is a much better model than we think, actually, because he had that range. But to get back to your point, when you're polemical, you have to be crystal clear and repeat it and repeat it and simplify it and say, "This is the way it must be." I totally get it. It's the doctrine.

You know what I mean by doctrine?

Chuck Marohn  28:48

Yep, I do.

Andrés Duany  28:48

The church, the Catholic Church, has an organization called the Office for the Doctrine of the Faith. But those guys in Rome are so sophisticated. When they talk to each other, they know all about everything. That's how you get to be a cardinal. Super-sophisticated people. Did you see, what was it called, The New Pope or whatever, that film?

Chuck Marohn  29:19

Oh, Conclave. Yes.

Andrés Duany  29:23

Yes. Do you remember how sophisticated the cardinals were?

Chuck Marohn  29:27

Incredibly. In the book it's even more in-depth. They're just genius people. How many languages did Pope John Paul speak? Nine languages fluently.

Andrés Duany  29:37

Yeah, but when they put out the doctrine, there's a doctrine. I adore the Anglican, Episcopalian attitude. Everything about them is just the way I think. But they don't have, they're too loosey-goosey, and they do nothing but lose. They lose population, they lose and they lose and they lose because they haven't got that hard doctrine.

By the way, I have clients that are Mormons and Orthodox Jews. Oh my God, I understand perfectly why they're the fastest-growing religions, because they have a doctrine. I understand the doctrine, but inside our conclaves, which are the councils, is probably what you were witnessing. What I didn't like is that we were acting as if we were in front of the world, and we get along, and all this, and it was a waste of time.

Chuck Marohn  30:39

It was a waste of time. Yeah. When that zealot mindset outside of that conclave becomes the dominant force, then you get, let me put it this way, you get mindless doctrine without the mental awareness or flexibility to actually administer it.

Andrés Duany  31:01

Oh, isn't that the key? How do we have them really look at the Krier diagrams so they really know them? Those incredible diagrams. Do you have a book called Houses, Buildings, Palaces, 1984?

Chuck Marohn  31:16

No.

Andrés Duany  31:16

Okay. Houses, Buildings, Palaces, 1984, editor Porphyrios. You know Porphyrios?

Chuck Marohn  31:23

Okay.

Andrés Duany  31:23

Editor Porphyrios. It was an AD publication. Get that. That is the publication, 1984, where the doctrine appears intact in full sophistication. Everything else later, before that, he's working it out. There are about three books before that, and there are about three or four after that where he becomes kind of baroque and sophisticated. It's not the first book.

Everything in that book, I'm looking at it now because I have to write an obituary. Everything in that book is exactly the, what's it called? That drug that lets you in the gate. It's the gateway. It's the gateway to urbanism in that book. Just get it. It's not going to be very expensive, but even if it's 100 bucks, get it.

We knew, and I knew, and everybody knew every line and every design in that book. After you're through with that, yes, you get more, better arguments and so forth. But that's the key book. I'm beginning to see, I think we need to have a kind of younger, earlier presentation to people that really need to get the doctrine before we actually then loosen it later, which replicates exactly what we did. If you say, "Well, how did you get to be the way you are?" Because I did Leon first, and then I was loosened up by the Celebration experience. Then on and on and on, you gradually let new stuff in.

I'm going to tell you, you asked me first, what is new? Let me explain a couple of things regarding traffic engineering. The first thing that happens, and I'm going to tell you anecdotally, you can edit this out, but this is how I find that people remember things. There's a big city next to where I am. It's the big city, and it's called Nîmes. Every time I drive there, I find that it is the most incompetent traffic engineering I have ever seen. I said, "I could fix this in two days. These French, nothing works, nothing connects. They're so illogical."

Then after I did it several times and I stopped, what you do is you park and you start walking. Then I began. I had this little insight in Paris, probably four years ago, in which I arrived in Paris on a Thursday, and the old avenues that I knew very well from the old days, totally crowded, were empty. I mean really empty. Traffic was flowing, lots of space. So I took a taxi, and I said, "What's going on here?" And the guy told me, "Well, they've really screwed up the traffic by putting bollards in that deflect the direct communication and force you out." I'm simplifying, but it forces you out to the next ring. You know Paris has rings.

Chuck Marohn  33:28

Sure, yep.

Andrés Duany  33:28

So they deflect you out to the next ring. So you can still get there driving, but it's inconvenient. The bollards were put in without any fanfare. They just appeared. They just drilled a hole, then appeared. Next to it were an infinite number of electric bikes. Just, boom, no consultation, which, of course, would have prevented it. The taxi lobby would have done it.

I said, "What's that system called?" He said, "It's called the daisy system, in which you have to go out and come back in from every boulevard." You see how that works?

Chuck Marohn  34:06

Totally. You could even do that in a straight grid.

Andrés Duany  34:06

Then I began to realize one of the stupid things we've done. This is pretty subtle. This is advanced stuff. When you look at all the DPZ plans, you will see, and most plans, you will see that they tend to have a diagonal towards the center where the retail is. You get the picture?

Chuck Marohn  34:24

Yes.

Andrés Duany  34:24

Their roads go to the center. Well, if the roads go to the center, there's a tendency to encourage getting in the car and going because not only is it short, but it's psychologically very available. What happens is, when people start driving what would be a five or ten minute distance, because you made it so easy, they tend to take the car, and then you have to surround your town center with a great asteroid belt of parking lots. Although they're hidden from the town center, the town center is all masked from the town center, you always have to have these sleeves, very carefully designed sleeves coming to the center, which things up because it lowers the density immediately.

So I realized that that was crazy, and that came from the reading of the conventional suburbia that says, "Well, if you're going to have a grocery store of this size, you need 1,700 trips per day driving in front. Then if you're going to have a bank, you need this much. Then if you have a grocery store," they give you the number of cars going by the frontage. That was a toxic pollution of conventional suburbia. It came from the expertise of people like Bob Gibbs. They were not wrong.

Now all our new plans, you cannot get to the town center except by going out to the infamous ring road. Except the ring road is not next to the town center. The ring road is at the edge of the entire town. Sure you can get there, but go have a look at the edge of town and then come back in. At the same time, we do have direct paths for electric vehicles, which are looking really good, by the way.

Parenthetically, you can buy a Fiat Topolino, wonderful, sexy little car, electric, for 9,000 euros delivered to your house. Look it up, a Fiat Topolino. You put it in your credit card. They deliver it in six weeks to your house. They have no dealers. That's crazy. It's an appliance. It should be in the mortgage. Washer, dryer, and a Topolino on your mortgage, because what the hell, it's what goes with the place. Thirty dollars a month.

The Topolinos can go through the small, two-passenger, dignified cars, not the golf carts. In fact, you can get a date if you have a Topolino. You're not, you can get a date under 60 if you have a Topolino. If you're over 60 with a golf cart, it ain't going to work with anybody else. Then the electric bikes and the walking are ever more direct. So the grid that we're designing now is completely different. It's got a hierarchy of four. Do you understand what I'm saying?

Chuck Marohn  36:52

Whoa.

Andrés Duany  36:52

How did we ever design such towns in which the cars go to the center? What are you thinking? So that's one big change. Let me talk about another one.

The garage. One of the things that I discovered with COVID is that the people who had the best home offices used their garages and they didn't screw up their living room, et cetera. I mean, I could see it in Coral Gables. If you had a better garage, wider and it had a higher ceiling, you had a really great home office. If you had a really good garage door, not for being good-looking, but for having glass, and some garage doors can look really good with glass.

So I started saying, "Wow, isn't that the most amazing thing that the garage is the desired work-at-home space," and we're paying for it anyway, instead of adding something else to the house. Where the New Urbanists are wrong, I mean, the innocent ones, is they think we'll just eliminate the garage. Well, you know what happens when you eliminate the garage? The appraisers need to find a comparable, or they can't give you the appraisal. They're locked. They're handcuffed to finding comparables. Can you find a house worth anything in Florida that doesn't have a parking space?

Chuck Marohn  38:11

No.

Andrés Duany  38:11

Not even the worst slum, rural slum, doesn't have parking or a garage. So basically, when you don't have a garage, your comparable just completely deflates. So you need it. So why not build it? Show it as the fact that it actually holds a car, which, by the way, you can also use it for a car if you want, and then get your appraiser up, because the appraisal is very important. It allows you to sell the house for more.

Now, one more thing happens. So I started thinking, how much does a two-car garage cost to build? There's a number. They're not nothing. So if the house costs, let's say, 280 a square foot to build, the garage costs only 240. The only thing you're saving is insulation. That's all. If you don't want it, the garage. So then I did it. I have a normative 480-unit quadrant. That, 480, which is seven units to the gross acre, it's normative. That's something else we can talk about. If you have two-car garages, the builder is spending $21 million building those garages. Get it?

Chuck Marohn  39:17

Yeah.

Andrés Duany  39:17

It's an incredible load. It isn't just the buyer that doesn't have to have the car. The builder's burden, $21 million. So we said, what good is a self-driving car? It actually feels awful to have a dream. There's some interesting stuff about transit, which Calthorp talks about. But what would happen if you have within each quadrant in an undesirable place, a parking lot, so that your car can very, very quickly, within a minute and a half, go to a very tight and efficient parking space, and your residence doesn't have to be burdened with the maneuvering of a car, of two cars. Do you know how much that parking lot costs for that number of cars? 1.7 million.

Chuck Marohn  42:27

So a fraction.

Andrés Duany  42:30

Yeah, a tiny fraction. You know what else about that parking? This isn't going outside. You know how the cars can come to you? The cars can come to you. It's a misery. So use your car, the backup space. You cannot imagine how big a 40 by 100-foot lot is if you don't have to have a car maneuver. So you get the car out of there. You still build the garage as the live-work unit, but you build it nicer. You give it 10-foot ceilings, beautiful garage door. You can really sell it. "This is your dream house. Have your yoga studio, have your pottery studio, whatever you want."

Incredibly strong. The car is a minute away. Just before you leave, you click it. It comes back on an internal road that is impossible for it to have an accident, because the accidents all happen on roads that are not designed. The problem with the self-driving cars is that the system of thoroughfares does not meet them. It doesn't meet it halfway. If you actually design internally to our community, a place that actually takes into consideration a zero-accident environment for a self-driving car, and you send them off, first of all, you save $20 million, you turn an asset into a very big asset.

Here's another thing. Do you know where the solar panels go? On top of that car park.

Chuck Marohn  43:43

Yes.

Andrés Duany  43:43

Because they're hell to install on a house, and it distorts your roof and it distorts your look, but the cars are out there in the parking lot. They love the shade. It is as symbiotic as anything suburbia has ever done. Suburbia tends to be symbiotic, everything poisons everything else. So this is the kind of idea we're having. The CNU doesn't know about this, zero. Do you know why?

Chuck Marohn  44:10

No.

Andrés Duany  44:10

Because it's upsetting to the doctrine. You're just Andres, you're just trying to be interesting. You now want garage doors in front. You're just trying to be interesting. What happened to you? That kind of attitude. I cannot operate within an environment that actually takes a new idea and thinks it's heretical, especially from a person that isn't some crazy guy, but an insider that has time and time again come up with ideas like the form-based code, like the charrette, like the transect. You would think that they would trust me.

Chuck Marohn  45:08

Yeah.

Andrés Duany  45:11

It's just upsetting the kids.

Chuck Marohn  45:13

How do we deal with that?

Andrés Duany  45:14

By the way, I have all this drawn and to the last detail, presented to clients, to real clients and real projects.

Chuck Marohn  45:22

How do we deal with that? I feel like...

Andrés Duany  45:25

She says that I should actually have an advanced course one day before everybody else arrives. She, by the way, she totally gets it. Don't get Mallory wrong. She is on it. But yeah, she also has this larger responsibility to keeping everything together so it doesn't fall apart. So she has said, "You come in a couple of days early and have..." And I said, "Yeah, but I've got to choose the audience. I can't have kids asking kindergarten questions."

Chuck Marohn  45:57

But this goes back to the very first thing that you asked me. I do feel like, when I say Green Berets and you say Marines, to me, there is, you go and sequester and figure stuff out. I'm not going to pretend that I had this vision from the earliest days. But I remember when we were together in New Orleans, and we had a next-gen thing at your house. I slept on the floor in your kitchen, your hardwood floor, one weekend when we had a whole bunch of next-gen people down there. I remember, I've got photographs. It was fun. I mean, I got a lot out of it. Mike Lydon left that and said, "I'm going to do tactical urbanism." I left that and I said, "I need to build a broader cultural movement to support these ideas." In other words, I need to be able to communicate broadly to people so that the wind is at the back of the CNU-type people who are out doing this stuff.

Because I watched you, you said this before, and I took a lot of thought from it. You said, "I have to show up to every one of these things and re-educate people from the start. I have to start from ground zero and teach them everything. So 80% of my planning is just teaching people basic stuff before we can actually do real work." My thought was, how do I get that teaching, in a sense, pre-done, so that you show up and people are halfway there, or three-fourths of the way there?

Andrés Duany  47:33

Well, aren't you developing a curriculum like that?

Chuck Marohn  47:38

Well, we, I mean, that's kind of what we do. We do media work. So articles, podcasts...

Andrés Duany  47:45

Yeah, it's amazing, actually.

Chuck Marohn  47:50

2 million people read articles this year from the site. We'll have 12 million people watch our videos. That's changing the way people think. So you get them ready. This is where, years ago, I used to have this, every year I would do an interview with Lynn Richards at CNU, and I asked her the same question every year. I said, "What does CNU want to be?" and I would say, "Do you want to be the Marines of urbanism? Or do you want to be a broad popular movement?" And she said, "Yes, we want to be both." My argument was, I don't think you can be both. I think you have to be one or the other. I don't know.

Andrés Duany  48:34

Oh my God. I'm almost exhausted, not only thinking about it in a circular way, but actually speaking to Mallory, I'm exhausted having everybody agree with me and then saying, "But." Do you know what I mean? So I think one of the things that I have to make a decision is how much energy do I want to put out. I certainly feel that I have it, but it might be better allocated to... The problem with causing waves is that waves take energy. Like yes, of course I could do it again. Of course I could.

By the way, here's a story you don't know. In the original, very old CNU, the ULI took it on. They actually said, "We're going to teach New Urbanism." Did you know about this? At their conferences. I attended one, and I realized that they didn't know very much about the New Urbanism, but most of their presentation was actually how it didn't work. They were actually presenting it in a negative light. Unbelievably.

Chuck Marohn  49:38

That is unbelievable.

Andrés Duany  49:38

I said, "Oh my God, it's exactly the opposite." These developers were paying $1,000 to go to these two, three-day things. So what I did, I got Bob Chapman to, whenever there was a ULI conference, rent the room next door, and I would put together a counter. People would wander in and out. Well, our stuff was fabulous in those days. They would just begin and stay. That only had to happen once, and then the ULI accepted the New Urbanism to the point that I would say that 10 years ago, I said, only half jokingly, "We don't need a New Urbanist magazine. Urban Land is a New Urbanist magazine. We don't need one." It's moved on to landscape urbanism, which, by the way, is another very interesting phenomenon, but it actually moved on.

But about 10 years ago, I'll tell you, we had won. We had won. People maybe have been against us or for us, or whatever. But the subject of discussion was always New Urbanism. "We're not New Urbanists," "We are New Urbanists," "We're New Urbanists, but without Duany, who's very hard to deal with." It was always within New Urbanism. We said we'd won, but we did not occupy the territory. You know that military concept?

Chuck Marohn  50:44

Yep.

Andrés Duany  50:44

You can capture territory, but you have to occupy it. You have to hold it. You pull back to your old comfortable fortress, which feels really good with your friends. You've got to hold the territory. We never held the territory. That was an interesting analogy, actually. So landscape urbanism as a coherent movement, it's the first movement, as opposed to individuals that had positions. Architecture and planning has a small number of individuals that take positions that are personal. But there has never been a movement that we've been able to say, "We can chew on it. We can chew them up."

Landscape urbanism did that, and they did it by attacking the New Urbanism. I welcomed it. I was the guy that brought them to the New Urbanism. Then we had a debate, and I defended them, because finally, we had an opponent that had something. Because the answer at Harvard used to be, "Oh yes, the New Urbanism is great. It's one, it's sure it's one of the eight urbanisms we teach." You see how slippery that is?

Chuck Marohn  51:40

Yeah.

Andrés Duany  51:40

"We're not against it. It's one of the eight. It's just that there are seven others." But landscape urbanism came in and said, "We have a position, and it's the best and only position." But we never took them on. That CNU was very impressive. You should have seen Waldheim surrounded by 10 of our beautiful, smart women at one table. Do you remember seeing that? They were just eating him up, circular table, over dinner. I said, "This is so great."

Chuck Marohn  52:18

Yeah.

Andrés Duany  52:18

So great.

Chuck Marohn  53:15

I remember that. It was a lot of fun to be in the room. There was a lot of excitement. I mean, that's the thing. I love the ideas, and I feel like there's power in ideas and creating a place where the ideas can surface, percolate, get thrown around, get ripped up, get tossed back out.

Andrés Duany  53:38

As long as they're not ignored. The problem is that the new ideas are being ignored. You don't even have to kill an idea. Just meet it with silence and it dies.

Chuck Marohn  53:52

Right. Or inundated with conditions. "I can consider this idea, but you must also do this and this and this and this." I've got to run. Can we do this again?

Andrés Duany  54:06

Anytime.