out-of-work tractor mechanics and opened a turbine repair facility and built themselves a wind turbine and created stability for the town. the thing for me is that all of these towns are part of a larger movement, a movement you may have heard of, toward distributive power. i think the thing that all of us have been thinking about is infrastructure being more distributed in the new century. the 20th century move for power to be centralized, vertically integrated, and scaled up were pretty big, huge power plants out in the pucker brush. i've never heard that statement before but i loved it. in the 21st century, it seems to

be largely about reversing that trend. not surprising, it makes them more controversy all and not less. surprisingly, you might see people squawking more about wind turbines because it blocks their view than you would hear about them squawking about a huge coal plant because you don't actually see that because it is out in the pucker brush and you don't actually see the emissions that gives children asthma or the acid rain that goes downwind. so i think if people think about infrastructure and when we can see it and when we don't -- so i think people think about infrastructure and when we can see it and when we don't. and number five was another thing that surprised me, and it became clear to me when writing this piece is that we are going to rebuild our entire electrical grid one wind turbine and solar panel at a time. we are not going back to the 19th century where everyone has their own windmill and every

factory had its own mill dam. the great thing about these communities is that they are developing their own power but it gives them a chance to rethink infrastructure and see how it works because it is aging in two ways, and i think we will probably end up talking more about this, but it is old-fashioned and it has been around for a long time, and electrical infrastructure hasn't changed really very much since thomas edison wired up the jp morgan mansion in new york, but it is also old-school. it is based on an old model of thinking about electricity and how it should work, and that is optimized for those big centralized power plants that are way out in the pucker brush and it is centralized for fossil fuels. so developing our own communities, we are thinking about how a power grid might look like. they are thinking about a grid that includes these small, local, and

powersingly-renewable sources, instead of a system that we had that was for most of its history virtually and literally a monopoly. but that doesn't mean that the utilities will go away. they are going to be more critical than ever. they're going to have to enable green power and they're going to have to get smarter and interface with what is now being called the internet of things, possibly with our electric cars, with their phones, with our appliances. they will have to get more sophisticated about pricing, and consumers will be rewarded more for using less power during off hours. utilities are going to have to become a partner in increasing efficiency in developing green power, which means unfortunately, i inc., that that means we are all going to have

to get involved in thinking about the boring, nitty-gritty rewriting of our energy system. i think, you know, i had a lot of fun thinking about electricity. i am kind of an infrastructure geek. but the piece tied into my central work and generally around "orion" and "orion" "reimagined infrastructure" series, which is that we tend to think about infrastructure as and thate, big thing is simply the way that things are. we tend to think about the status quo and it is this huge giant ship that you cannot turn it around.

at the same time, we are aware that we need to think about critical systems, certainly the power grid that is basically functioning in hand and is tipping the scales toward fossil fuels. we need to tip the scales toward more renewable sources of power. harriet mentioned presentation and infrastructure and i am sure we are all interested in rethinking the infrastructure that has encouraged the sprawl and ported sustainable urban planning. and ben mentioned hoover dam. we might also feel critically at this time and certainly with this audience that it is time to rethink a federal system of water entitlements that is about fostering a water saving systems. the good news that i took away from working on this piece is that it is not impossible. we are always rethinking our infrastructure, as much as it feels like it is the way that things are, we are always changing it. think about how it a mere 50

years, we dismantled an incredibly complicated complicated system of rail and replaced it with automobiles on a very complicated system of highways. that was driven by incentive, that was driven by desire. i think we can do the same things especially with the same level of desire to imagine and new system and how it will work. [applause] ann: thank you, ginger, very much. this event is the commonwealth

club of california, and find us on the internet at commonwealthclub.org. we come to that point in our forum where we have questions from our audience. first of all i want to thank our speakers so far. harriet, who is the assistant secretary of the office of urban planning at hud, and jim and -- chip, who is the design director in san francisco and ginger strand who is a writer and historian. now we turn to our moderator, h. emerson blake, the executive director of the orion society. h. emerson, you have charge now to ask the audience questions and have our panel discuss them. chip: thank you, ann. we have a number of great questions here from the audience. the first question is going to

theriet, and question is, given our obvious use of personal automobile use and other forms of transportation, how can we shift this? obviously, that can be applied to any of our panelists to answer it. harriet: you might make the argument that the federal government is renewing this with the gasoline tax, which basically makes states and localities be more or less on their own with transportation, and in some ways, that really

favors bikeability, walkability, and even transit, over very large and very costly new highway expansions when we cannot pay to maintain the things that we have up. maybe that was a slightly facetious answer, but i think in general, ginger talked about desire. i think what we are seeing in the communities across the country is that they see these transportation choices as being important parts of their economy and their competitive future, and that more and more places are investing in transit, with or without the benefit of a federal partnership or significant federal funding. as many of you know, the federal policies have favored roads over transit, just in terms of the share that the federal government was willing to pay. you know, so the fact that there is less money for all of those things is probably more of a disadvantage for road building it is for transit or for the other modes. i think that in fact because of the strong links between land

use and the value of land around transit, in all candor, i sit on the board of our transit agency in the washington region, just for an example, 86% of all of the office construction that is underway in the entire region is literally a quarter-mile or less from transit, so it is on top of transit. so in that market, as an example, if you are not developing on transit, you are essentially not selling or leasing any office space. so i think that is increasingly what cities are experiencing and i don't think you are getting that kind of payback from new road expansions. chip: thank you, harriet. the next question is, given the

expansion of the bay area in california, how can the walkability and bikeability be increased, especially with the car-centric infrastructure choices made years ago? ben: this is something that spur is working on quite a bit in san jose, and we started working on that very deliberately, partially because it is the largest city in the bay area both by area and population, but also because the problems of san jose, which was largely built in the postwar period around the automobile, is this strange area compared to most places. it turns out to be a very, very difficult problem to achieve what we call the retrofitting of suburbia. if you build a place around a

car, you didn't just build a place around the car, you also built markets around automobility, and if you look into all these factors that shape and build an environment. so if you are going to turn it around, it takes a real and sustained engagement on all of those different fronts. i think one of the sort of weaknesses of traditional planning and urban design is to show a picture of what a good walkable neighborhood looks like and say, well, i showed you what it looks like, why aren't you building it? it turns out to be more of an uphill battle than you first imagined. it is very difficult work and it is work that is starting to yield fruit. there is definitely progress in

san jose but also in other urban areas around the country there are crating a more walkable and accessible areas that are more affordable and more livable and better in terms of the public health benefits and so forth, but it is very, very difficult becausestaking work there are so many facets. >> i might disagree. in some ways, streets with sidewalk cafes or narrower roadways, which is actually the subject of a lot of guerilla activity, urban activity across the country, like organizations like better blocks, this shows people what it is like. but i think the street is a wonderfully adaptive and mutable

thing. no matter how wide or narrow it is has to do with paint and furniture and sometimes will. compared to other elements of the environment, it might make sense compared to a lot of things. i might just say that we have an example in our region of the place that was on the cover of a book representing suburban sprawl, tysons corner, it now has light rail. all of those parking lots are being remade with a gridded network of streets. now they are adding all other kinds of urban amenities and it won't happen overnight, but in 25 years, it will look like a real city, and that is a pretty amazing thing. they dropped the corner from the name, they are just tysons now, and their aspirations are urban.

ginger: that is a really interesting model to look at, because it is a completely different thing in cities in terms of remaking the urban landscape. new york has been very successful in terms of shifting streets out of car usage. this is particularly under our last transportation commissioner who was really dedicated to putting more bike lanes in. they made traffic and put it cafe sidewalksr and tables. so this is really true. but tysons corner, or tysons now is even more interesting to me because that sort of held out as the worst possible example of

sprawl-created community. ben: i agree and i will disagree. and a lot of those examples of these urban things are illegal. they are potentially very influential, especially groups build a better block, and they have sort of poked fun at our assumptions of how we use public space and use it as a public right-of-way and it has been incredibly influential because that touches on a whole large set of themes in infrastructure today, like reduced budget resources and also tremendous regulatory process constraints. a great thing to try things out is to try them on a temporary basis. most people will tolerate things for a short period of time if they know it is going away.

then you can try to operate in a different way of doing things. chip: ben, i wondered if you could keep going in that vein and talk about using film as a way of increasing people's awareness of themselves about being users of infrastructure. talk about the way that the art help people understand how infrastructure their lives. that is so much about what the orion project has been about. not just the storytelling and the project itself, but also examples of how art can be used to help people think differently. ben: sure, well i think the genesis of that question is that i was involved in an organization called city space, and it did interventions in urban spaces and did a film festival as well as other exhibitions and events like that. this was 10 years or so ago and

what we found was that there is just a tremendous hunger for exploring the idea of what a city is and to conduct that exploration in urban space is a very engaging and exciting thing to do. so we would have a festival of short films about cities, for example, we would do it in an md lot, it in a very large and get a very large number of people who were very eager to explore these questions, and that has put us in a much broader conversation across the nation. that is the nature of our democratic society and how we live among one another here in a public space. that is now falling under the these kinds of urban

spaces and it helps us look into how we can achieve economic development, community development, and so forth. i think that is part of our broader urban moment of getting over the latter half of the 20th century and embracing our cities again and part of that is telling our stories to one another. chip: part of what we learned in the orion "reimagining infrastructure" project was getting a sense of just how exactly our broken american infrastructure really is and how much it really needs to be changed and how expensive it is not just to maintain and retrofit but to fundamentally reimagine it, as we have been saying, so that the infrastructure still works. so the next question to the audience is very germane to that, how do we get public and private partnerships? ginger, i'm sure this is something you were writing about when you were writing about burlington.

what can you tell us about how they were they able to afford that and how were partnerships at play there? ginger: i can speak briefly and i think that harriet will have a lot more to say on this topic. certainly with burlington's electrical district, which is part of their utility system, incentive was absolutely central to their shift into green power. they are able to make their utility profitable by generating renewable power, selling credits, selling renewable power credits, they actually generate more renewable energy than they need and they sell these credits to other states, which, you know, when i sat there and talked to them about it, it gave me a headache eventually because it was so complicated. i am not even the giving you a reasonable sense of how complicated the whole structure was. but it made me realize that

there is a fine balance between working with private developers who develop some of the power resources, working with state and federal incentives in order to make the whole thing make financial sense. but i really want to defer to harriet. harriet: what i would say goes back to something that chip mentioned at the beginning, and that our infrastructure prices --infrastructure crisis isn't just a question of aging infrastructure, we need infrastructure that is place making, as ben described, that is resilient to a changing climate, and that is part of the reason that private investments sit on the sidelines and i think that this is a moment when in every major infrastructure transportation, water

and sewer, energy distribution, telecommunications, we are at a major inflection point. that straight line that we used to be able to draw from 40 years in the past to 40 years in the future, we can't do that anymore. technology and climate and changing demand, all of these things are making it impossible and itto forecast it makes it risky for somebody to invest in projects like that. so we need to do more to future-proof our infrastructure and do more community engagement, do more scenario planning, think about the risks and otherweather climate-related impacts, and i think that is part of the reason in the federal government at hud and with the white house and the national economics council and the treasury and half a dozen other federal agencies, we have developed an initiative called

build america which is designed to do exactly that, get more private investment in our public infrastructure, but also deliver better infrastructure for those investments. and that means more free development, more planning, and more infrastructure that performs in a way that i think a lot of the panel has discussed, that is more distributed, that is more adaptable, that produces lots of benefits and solves lots of problems. there is a famous quote attributable to winston churchill at the end of world war ii that he said "gentlemen, we are out of money, now we have to think." [laughter] harriet: that is exactly where we are in this country, we cannot afford more infrastructure, so that will be a good thing to help us think. chip: it is comforting to see that other countries are ahead of us in thinking about sustainability and

infrastructure that is actually encoded into law to make sure and mandates that those changes take place. how do you see resilient infrastructure being adapted in the nation, particularly in cities that will be affected by climate change? ben: i will take a bite of a small piece of that. we have had a fair amount of interaction with the dutch in thinking about coastal management at ocean beach, certainly in the northeast as the dutch, of course, have an 800 years history of managing their coasts. from a certain lens, a certain traditional environmental lens, there is something very

troubling about that sort of high intervention, inventive landscape that is the dutch coast. on the other hand, increasingly, we can no longer pretend that nature is out there as this kind of pristine force and our job is to be just a small as we can be. gone is the idea that our virtue lies in being a small entity and in letting the wilderness happened. increasingly we are in a situation where our footprints are on a global scale, hence our necessity for managing processes and we have to meet that challenge. and so the traditional philosophical boundary between the city and nature is polar opposites and never the twain shall meet and it is breaking down. in that sense, the dutch have conscious andore in turn that means we are becoming increasingly aware of

how we should manage these processes and we should let cities and nature have a certain symbiotic interconnection rather than sort of trying to keep them separate. so that is a bunch of different ideas, but that is one particular set of lessons that i countered in international conferences. harriet: i would just add one thing to that, and i would talk about scale. we have a very fragmented system of government in this country, and a lot of power is given specifically to different units of government and cooperation is unnatural. i think in many other parts of the world, it is a little bit easier, sometimes because there is less democracy. i am not advocating that, but in many cases, the government structures make it much more you easy for things to happen at the level of the state, the level of the region, and the level of the european

union, and at a much larger scale, and that is actually at a scale where large disasters occur. here we talk about a flooding problem in one community and it could actually make it worse for the community downstream. that happens all the time. that is one of the advantages that these other places have that we need to learn from. ann: this is ann clark, our commonwealth club program tonight is "reimagining infrastructure." i want to thank our panel tonight for the wonderful information and suggestions and the conversation that we had. the head of office of planning at hud, ginger is a writer and historian, and benjamin grant who is right here in san francisco is the urban design policy director at spare -- spur and has led many of the processes to develop programs in spur for thecy at city.

i would like to actually ask the person who has been our moderator tonight, h. emerson blake, editor and magazine of the "orion" magazine and the executive director of the orion society, emerson, what stands out for you in terms of reimagining our infrastructure, america's infrastructure? chip: i think a lot of us, certainly a lot of us at orion, like so many people, when we think of infrastructure, we think of bridges and roads and you hit on your way to work in the morning and the words that you said when you hit those potholes. and pretty quickly, you begin to realize that the way that our lives play out, they are so defined by infrastructure. when better infrastructure is available, we use it, and when better infrastructure is not available, we are locked into

it. and "orion" readers, like so many people, are people who are to understand how to live , healthier,ller saner lives. when thinking about infrastructure, that is think it about concrete ways of change to make it easier for us to be able to live the kinds of lives the way that we want to live. that is the message we have learned at orion and that is the message that we want to teach to everybody. ann: thanks to our panel and our moderator, our moderator is h. emerson blake, the executive director of the orion society, theour wonderful panel

, deputy assistant secretary for the office of community planning and development at hud, gingerjr and historian, and our own benjamin grant in san francisco who is at spur. we have come to the and of our program, and i hope you have enjoyed it. we really appreciate you and the audience for coming tonight, and we us be surely -- especially wish you all well. at this point in the program, we are looking at the future for our programs and we hope that in will join us once again the programs that we have coming up. you will find them on our green sheet. from all of us here at the commonwealth club, a big thank you to the moderator and panel, and a big thank you to our audience on the internet, and throughout our radio audiences and through c-span. with