Daniel Basubas thought New Zealand would feel very different from the sprawling Southern California communities where he grew up. Instead, he found many of the same development patterns and many of the same arguments over parking, bike lanes, and who streets are for. In Dunedin, he now helps lead the Urbanerds Ōtepoti Dunedin, a Strong Towns Local Conversation that meets at the local pub. The group gives people a low-pressure way to talk through those issues, meet others who care about the city, and get more comfortable participating in local decisions, whether that means commenting on a council plan or speaking at a public meeting.
Hello and welcome to Bottom Up Shorts. I'm Norm with Strong Towns, and I love connecting with Strong Towns members all across the world. That's especially relevant today because Daniel Basubas is a Local Conversation leader and a Strong Towns member in Dunedin, New Zealand. Welcome, Daniel, to Bottom Up Shorts.
Ko Ortegas Timonga Ko Kenilake Tiroto no California. I bet you're wondering what that is, and that's what we call here in New Zealand a mehi mehi, which is a short introductory speech in the Maori language, the Maori being the indigenous people of Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Basically, what that is is me introducing myself. My name is Daniel. My mountains that I associate with are the Ortega Mountains. The body of water that I associate with is Canyon Lake, and I'm originally from Southern California. I'm a Local Conversation leader based in Otipoti, New Zealand.
I love that expression because it captures several important things: the land that we're on and the waters that we need in order to stay alive. I do want to share about some of the efforts that you're making to improve your community and help, especially around safety and transportation, those sorts of things.
Yeah, absolutely. We live in a city, Dunedin, which has about 125,000 people. It's a university town, and about 20% of our city is actually students. We have a bit of a compact city center and the surrounding suburbs.
We have a situation where the city council will want to do something, make some improvements, maybe remove parking or add a bike lane, and there's not a lot of public support for it. You have these families who live out in the suburbs, and they kind of overshadow more people who live in the city center.
Our Local Conversation, what we're focusing on first of all, is trying to elevate the voices of people who think about urbanism in the way that Strong Towns does. We're focused on getting people in the room: academics, students, politicians, and just everyday people. We meet at the pub every other month. We have a guest speaker, and we facilitate conversations around how we can improve our city and what that can look like.
As part of that, we're also trying to move a bit more into the advocacy space. So, getting those people who are in the room and trying to activate them from just being passive recipients of knowledge to actively working to do something. Maybe that's writing feedback on council plans and doing whatever we can to work with the local councils.
Your group is called the, let me make sure that I get the pronunciation hopefully right, the Urban Nerds Otipoti Dunedin. I love the name because right away I feel seen as an urban nerd.
Can you share just a little bit more about how that came about? You mentioned getting people to write to councils, and I'm sure that's breaking the ice for some people who have never tried to do that before or maybe were scared from doing it. Can you share the environment that you've managed to create there?
Yeah, absolutely. Urban Nerds is the name of our Local Conversation. Before I get into that, I need to acknowledge how much work is actually being done in this space before we even enter the scene. There are a lot of local groups doing bike advocacy or trying to connect trails, and they've been doing work for decades.
In the capital city of Wellington, there's been a group that's been going for quite a long time, many years, and they're called the Urban Nerds. I spoke with them, and they were talking about what they do. I was like, actually, we kind of want to do something similar, but with a bit of a Strong Towns lens to it. So we borrowed their name, and they're happy with it.
The idea is that you show up to the pub whenever we meet, and everyone who shows up is an urban nerd. It doesn't matter if you're a student. It doesn't matter if you're the mayor. You show up, you're an urban nerd. Everyone's equal, and we all talk and hang out and bring around those ideas.
Otipoti is the Te Reo Maori name of our city in New Zealand.
Yeah, that's really cool, and I love that sense of inclusion because it creates that sense that we all experience many of these overlapping systemic problems, but we also can have a role in trying to reach them and figure out how we make sure that we are sharing space on our roadways.
We had a Strong Towns member in Littleton, Colorado, who said a lot of our suburban neighborhoods were at first designed in a way that meant that the street was assumed to be shared. Over time, that battle was sort of ceded in terms of people just assuming, no, no, no, these are auto-dominated spaces. Then they became auto-exclusive spaces, and that can have a real knock-on consequence. A bike lane or another form of getting around is seen as an interloper or an intruder rather than a proper reallocation of the space that we need in our places.
Your community certainly has, I would imagine, a sizable population of people who are never driving and are getting around ably, or in other ways needing to be able to get connected to their source of work or source of food or source of connection with other people. Do you want to touch on some of the core small bets that you're trying to make, or the efforts that you're leading in your community?
Yeah, absolutely. There's maybe a misconception around New Zealand that I certainly had when I first moved here. New Zealand has very much followed the North American development pattern of sprawl, where you have big-box stores, that kind of stuff. When I first moved here, I saw single-family homes as far as the eye could see, and I was like, oh, this isn't what I expected. So actually, a lot of the problems that we see in New Zealand are really similar to those in North America.
Some of the issues we have here are that auto-dominated thinking and those voices being really elevated in the conversation. Every time something happens, it's, 'Well, the cyclist shouldn't have been riding on the road,' or, 'Maybe they should have been wearing a helmet.' People often feel that they have the right to drive through the middle of the city as fast as they can, where children are walking and where people are shopping.
The reality that we face is actually in our city in particular, most of the people live in the suburbs just around, and they often do require driving to get around. One thing that we're doing is trying to flip the narrative a little bit and talk about space and streets as opportunities. What are the ways that we can make our streets safer, that we can have more people walking and shopping in the middle of town where people congregate? Those are where I think some of the nicest places of the city are.
Trying to start that conversation and reframe people's minds from, 'I should be able to drive as fast as I can wherever I want,' is actually a bit of a challenge. That's what we're trying to do, just plant the seed. We're not going to change everyone's minds, but if we can get them to think, 'Could this space be different?' I think that is in itself a win.
Imagining it in new and fresh ways. I had someone who said, 'Can you believe that they closed down a street in Mari Village Center for a bunch of picnic benches and things like that?' I said, 'Oh, they opened up the street. That's amazing.' He sort of did a double take, and I was like, 'No, no, open it up for other types of uses. That's a really interesting way.'
It's not that we have a shortage of streets. It caused this person to pause and be like, 'Well, I mean, we have a particular shortage of streets, don't we?' It's like, no, we have a lot of them. In fact, we have so many of them that they're a real challenge to keep up in our maintenance plans and all of these obligations that we're racking up.
Hearing you say that describes that sense of openness or opportunity that definitely lies ahead. From a Strong Towns perspective, when we think about doing the math, it also helps if we're not wearing out our core infrastructure as much. That means we can be a little bit more sustainable or a little less worse off than we might otherwise be.
I'm always curious: was there an initial spark that helped to get the Local Conversation started? Was it a Facebook post? Was it a Reddit thread? In my community, I just took note of people that spoke up in a public hearing and reached out to them afterwards and said, 'I love what you had to say. Let's meet up regularly.' What was it like for you?
We've got a small city, about 100,000 people here who are not students, and trying to get those people activated can be a challenge. People are busy with kids, working, and whatever, and how do we get them to care about things that often feel like someone else should care about that? The local council should be the ones taking care of this. Who am I?
There was a political event called Transport Dreams, and they had some speakers come up. Transport Dreams was about envisioning new ways for our region of how we can move people around and all this stuff. I was surprised at how many people actually turned out to that. It was a rainy night on a Thursday evening or something, and a lot of people turned up. I was thinking, you know what? Maybe there is more of an appetite than I thought for this.
When you think about it, there are a lot of people, maybe retirees who might have some time, or academics who want to be able to elevate their work. There are actually a lot of human assets, a lot of strengths that we can leverage in the community, and I guess it's just finding what that is.
At that event, I was able to speak with some politicians and local people, and I was like, 'This is really the beginning of a Local Conversation.' That's where that started planting the seed.
Yeah, that's the goal, shifting the conversation over time. It's not going to happen overnight. But can you share, as a bit of a character profile, can you introduce us to yourself and some of the core things that have put you on this path that you're currently on today?
Yeah, absolutely. I grew up in Southern California, and if you've been there and are familiar with it, it's very suburban outside of the main cities. I grew up in this small private community called Canyon Lake, which is surrounded by suburbs. You have to have a car to get anywhere to do anything.
As I was growing up, I was thinking, why is it at age 15 that I can't do anything? I have to drive to get anywhere, but I can't drive. I'm too young. I felt constrained. That was something that carried with me as I got older and older. I was like, why is it that we are creating communities where there aren't really any opportunities for young people?
I went on to university, and I did a master's and PhD and was studying various environment- and geography-related things. But it wasn't until I started working in local government where I saw how the sausage is made, how the decisions are made around the way our cities work. I thought, actually, there are a lot of opportunities for change in our communities.
As I started reading more about Strong Towns and the work that the organization does, I was thinking, there's a lot of alignment here. Strong Towns provided a good framework for me to understand: now I see my city through this lens. Now that I think about it, all the places that I've lived are experiencing the same thing.
Living here in New Zealand in a smaller city, there's a lot of opportunity for making that change. There are only 100,000 people, so if a handful of people come up and say something, it actually has an outsized impact. For me personally, and maybe speaking to other people who live in smaller towns, it is a bit inspiring to know that I'm not in a city of 15 million people. I can go out and actually write a paragraph and say I like something or I don't like something, and people listen to it. That gives me a bit of motivation on the day to day in the Strong Towns work that we do.
That really resonates with a lot of what I've heard from other Strong Towns members. It's interesting that we can change the context that we're in, but some of those core needs and core impulses definitely are there, and the fruit that can come from small but significant steps that we take. I'd love to hear: do you have a tip or a suggestion that you'd like to offer others?
Yeah. There's this term that gets captured well in a lot of the Strong Towns content, called radical incrementalism, which is that you can make huge, radical change, but you have to do it incrementally in small bits over time, bit by bit. I think the Strong Towns approach really, that's the core of it.
My advice would be, thinking about that, you have the longer vision, but actually you need to start really small. You need to do really small things, and collectively those will add up over time. Maybe it's you personally writing public feedback on a plan. Maybe it's a parking change or something like that, and then maybe you get three friends to do it. Maybe one of you speaks at the public forum to the council about it.
When you start off starting from nothing, and you can do a bunch of small things, they really add up. That's what I would suggest as one of the first steps. I think that people often feel, and I certainly felt like this, that local government wasn't a space for me. It's like, they use all these acronyms and words, and they talk about things and processes and meeting agendas. I don't know anything about that. How am I going to engage with that?
There are such complex council processes, and how do I engage? How do I even start? It actually is just the smallest step in finding a way to find your way in to be able to make that change. You don't need to be a massive activist dedicating 20 hours a week. It can be an hour a month.
Yeah. Oh, that's powerful, and for me, it connects with some of the things that I just know that I need for tomorrow, and then the next day, and the next day, and that continuation of carrying on in these ways. I always love to ask: what is it that gives you hope in this work that you're doing in your community?
I think the hope is actually coming, unfortunately, from a bad place, which is that in New Zealand we have the North American development pattern. These communities are growing and sprawling, many of them are, but they're actually running out of space.
We have a lot of mountains in this country. The terrain is really, there's a lot of rivers, a lot of hills. We actually can't sprawl. We're starting to realize we can't really sprawl anymore. There is hope in the sense that people are starting to realize that. People are starting to go, wait a minute, where are we going to put that? How are we going to afford to build another box store or build a community that's five, 10 miles away from the city center? Who's going to pay for that?
I know that Chuck has done a lot of this. Chuck's actually visited New Zealand a couple times because of the national infrastructure plan that was just passed. If any of the listeners have a chance to look at it, it's really good. It's the national infrastructure plan from the Infrastructure Commission in New Zealand, and if you took a Strong Towns playbook and overlaid some of it with what we should do with infrastructure at the national level, there would be quite a strong overlap there.
What gives me hope is that the conversations in New Zealand are starting to shift. Maybe not as much politically, but they are starting to shift, and people are starting to ask questions of how are we going to pay for this? How can we expect the future to pay for this? Whether it's highway expansion or more greenfield developments, the hope is that from the top down the conversation is beginning to change, and I'm thinking that from our end, we're trying to change it from the bottom up.
I love it, and I feel like it also creates the conditions where there's a growing national reckoning with these things, and then there are these bright spots in places like Dunedin where it's like, hey, there are already people that are talking in this language. They're fluent or conversant in these things and really wanting to grapple with it. Like you said, building on great work that so many others in your community are doing. Daniel, it's a pleasure to have you on Bottom Up Shorts today. Thank you for joining us today.
Awesome. Thank you so much, Norm. I appreciate it.
For those that want to follow what Daniel and the Urban Nerds are doing in Dunedin, definitely reach out. They are on our Strong Towns map. So if you are planning a move there and you are planning to help contribute to the improvement of the community, definitely make a point of looking up the Local Conversation there.
With that, thanks everyone for listening and participating in this time of grappling with how we begin to do, as Daniel said, radically incremental steps along the way to making and improving our communities. With that, take care and take care of your places.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.