Vaissnavi Shukl
Our guest today is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. She is an author, she is also an advocate for better preservation policies, bike lanes and sustainable urban development at the crux of everything, she is a writer and uses the power of the written word to raise awareness, drive change and create accountability. Inga Saffron has witnessed the changing landscape of Philadelphia for three decades now as a reporter, foreign correspondent and architecture critic at the Philadelphia Enquirer. She often writes about preservation, most notably focusing on the African American history in Philadelphia, and how cultural and historic preservation lock horns with urban planning. Today, we’re doing a bit of role reversal, and I get to ask the questions.

My name is Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off- Centre, a podcast where we highlight unconventional design practices and research projects that reflect the emerging discourses within the design discipline and beyond. Architecture of Center features conversations with exceptionally creative individuals who have extrapolated the traditional fields of Art, Architecture, Planning, landscape, and urban design.

You have witnessed the changing landscape of Philadelphia as a writer for over two decades and you’re often focused on the topic of preservation. So I’m going to jump into it directly and talk about your series of writings which I came across. These focus on the African American history in Philadelphia. There are two particular instances which come to mind first is the Christian street, or what to call the Black Main Street and second is your town which was supposed to be viewed as this black suburb. You’ve talked about both these cases through the lens of preservation. Can we focus on these two examples and talk about the Big History question? What is it that we’re preserving? And more importantly, how do we deal with multiplicity of histories, architecturally and otherwise? How do we know what is worthy of being preserved in Philadelphia?

Inga Saffron
Oh, okay. So that’s a very big question. First of all, thank you for having me on the show. I’m really pleased to be here… be part of this. So I guess I have to… have to talk a little bit about Philadelphia and about American history and I’m sure many of your listeners know that. America has a long history, a long unfortunate history of segregation, ahen people of colour, particularly African Americans, live in circumscribed neighbourhoods, they couldn’t rent or buy the homes in just any place, they were limited to where they could live. And often these were neighbourhoods that were getting, you know, getting older, and were being abandoned by white people. That’s the unfortunate part of the history. But Philadelphia has a long, long history of African Americans going back to colonial times. And then, during what we call the Great Migration, when a lot of black people moved from the South to the Industrialised North, they began settling in large numbers in Philadelphia in these limited areas where they were allowed to live. One of the things that happened as often does is, you know, people develop their own very rich culture. And so this… this neighbourhood, this was known as the Black Main Street and Black Doctors Row was an incredibly vibrant black neighbourhood in the early 20th century. And it was quite beautiful, actually, Philadelphia is a Brick City red brick, and with townhouses, a bit like, you know, parts of London, and a lot of these houses were built in the Victorian period in the late 19th century, and so this area, just outside the centre became a black neighbourhood. And there was everything you could want there, you know, every profession, there were many, many churches, and there was a YMCA with a swimming pool, after school activities and grocery stores and butchers and, you know, just every single thing a community could need. And that community actually did quite well, relatively speaking. And it also nurtured quite a few black architects and engineers, and one of the… the most important early 20th century black architect, a man named Julian Abel, lived in that neighbourhood he lived on the street is called Christian Street. Not because it was Christian, but it’s named after someone’s last name, but anyway, Julian Edelman down the street. And he…he… he was an incredibly successful architect. He actually worked for a white owned firm, and they designed the… the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They designed Philadelphia’s library. He travelled extensively in Europe and he made the grand tour and knew a lot about French architecture. He worked on Duke University and lots of houses for wealthy people. So he was very successful. Just a few doors down, lived an engineer named Frederick Messiah, who emigrated from Jamaica. And he developed a construction method using reinforced concrete that was very novel at the time.
There was another architect, a black architect who was married to a very famous singer, Marian Anderson, you know, all sorts of interesting people. I mean, and… and it was at the time when, you know, institutions were opening up to people of colour. Julian Abel went to the University of Pennsylvania to study architecture. I mean, it wasn’t totally, totally segregated. But, but anyway, because it was segregated, it really developed this very rich culture. And then, by the middle of the 20th century, other places began opening up to black people, and they began moving to other better off newer neighbourhoods, you could say, and the neighbourhood went into a very bad decline after World War Two, because blacks are going to better neighbourhoods moving to the suburbs. And that neighbourhood was in really, really bad shape for a long time. And it’s just recently, I guess, being gentrified. I mean, there still is a sizable black population there. Because there is so much new construction in Philadelphia right now and so much gentrification, that a lot of developers and housing developers are coming in and tearing down the old houses and building new ones, and they really just wanted destruction and I can’t say that the new… new houses are, you know, they last 30 years, we’ll be lucky. I mean, they’re replacing these really handsome Victorian brick and stone houses with these metal clad, you know, boxes, it’s… it’s really terrible. And the city has some financial incentives, you know, pouring gasoline on the fire. And at the same time, we have a Historical Commission that is very, very pokey and slow. And there’s only just been a realisation in the US that we need to pay more attention to architecture from the, you know, non dominant culture, non dominant white culture. So, you know, preservationists are only just catching up with this idea that there are buildings that are important to black communities, to Native American indigenous communities, to ethnic, Jewish or Italian communities that are really, really important.
You know, preservation is complicated, because some buildings get preserved, because they’re exemplars of their architectural period. And other buildings get preserved because of the culture and history that they were part of. And so it gets trickier in making judgments about what should be preserved, if it’s not just purely aesthetics. Anyway, we, but we are starting to get better at this. So I came to write about this neighbourhood because I was horrified by these demolitions. And when the house next to the one Julian Abel lived in, I was slated for demolition, I was just horrified because it was a perfectly intact Victorian row. Every house had a cornice, there were there was all this detailing around the windows stone, what we call water tables at the base, you know, just, you know, it wasn’t like the greatest, you know, buildings of the time, but it was just this beautiful, you know, sort of rich red brick ensemble, then it survived through so many periods of difficulties, and somehow remained intact. And then some developer comes along and yanks one out of the middle of the row like, you know, bad tooth, and was about to put up this, you know, really benign building. So I began writing about that and about one of the things I’m interested in, you know, what are the forces that are driving these kinds of things, so I talked a bit about the tax incentives, lack of education, the lack of research into this neighbourhood, and I wrote a couple of articles. And then I’m very happy to say, the local Preservation Alliance, which is a nonprofit group, that lobbies for preservation, they hired a couple of researchers who did a really quick study of the neighbourhood and its importance and put together what we call a historic nomination. I mean, they did it so fast. But they really did like amazing research. And they just, they uncovered a lot of these important historical figures. And they really painted this amazing portrait of this whole community. I mean, because people were fairly prosperous, a lot of the men were professionals; that meant their wives could stay home and raise children and take them to after school activities. And all this like the social world, it was very little is… is known about a kind of middle class black life in America, we hear a lot, a lot about really poor black people, what we don’t hear about these achievers, that much. It was… it was just fascinating research. And it just painted such a rich picture of this community, which was really just right outside the very centre of the city, you know, you could walk to the downtown business district from…from this neighbourhood, I always love that. Julian Abel, he worked for a white architect called Horace Trumbauer. And he would walk to his office, in the downtown. Philadelphia is a very walkable place. So I just like to imagine Julian Abell, like going off every morning to his office, where he designed these amazing museums and cultural buildings. And Marian Anderson, this very famous concert singer, just lived a couple blocks away and a guy named Reverend Charles Tinley, who had a very big church and he…. He’s famous for writing the song, ‘We Shall Overcome’. He lived on the same block. I mean, you just cannot believe how many notable people could live on one one or two blocks within a short distance of each other doctors and lawyers and politicians, they were the premier, you know, a couple of blocks for the black community at that period. Even though there have been a number of demolitions and really unfortunate ones that has all now been stopped through the actions of the city council person representing that district, he put a moratorium on the demolitions while this preservation nomination is being completed. So I think they will, they will save, you know, some… some fabric, the complicating aspect of this. And, you know, this is also worthy of discussion, is, as I mentioned, the neighbourhood has been gentrifying in recent years, it’s become whiter again. And some people are, you know, asking quite reasonably, who are we preserving this for? Yeah, a lot of complicated issue preservation. You know, it’s really hard to preserve the community. Easier to preserve buildings.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah. That’s something, just as a side note, you said, the person who wrote ‘We Shall Overcome’, stayed… stayed in the neighbourhood. And in India, very interestingly, we have our own version of the song in Hindi. So a lot of us have grown up. extremely familiar. Yeah, it’s called ‘Hum Honge Kamyab’. Yeah. You know, we… we will succeed over you will, but quite literally, we shall overcome. Yeah, yeah. It’s travelled.

Inga Saffron
Charles Tinley, and he was a pastor. And his church was also walking distance from the street. It was a… it’s a magnificent church. Still exists today. I heard that in its heyday and had like 10,000 people. Who went to that church, and of course, I’m sure you know, and I’m sure your listeners know that We Shall Overcome was the anthem of the civil rights movement in the US. Reverend Martin Luther King, you know, would sing that during marches. So it’s a really important song and it was written right here in his house. His house wasn’t even on the Historic Register. That’s how much we overlook that part of our history.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I’ve never been to Philadelphia but when I was doing my research, it seems like there are a lot of initiatives and organisations in Philadelphia working towards raising a certain kind of awareness in the city about preservation of working quite literally towards, you know, advocating for better preservation practices in the city, so of course, you referred us to the work of I’m forgetting his name, who’s the director of the preservation programme at UPenn.

Inga Saffron
Oh,Randall Mason.Yeah.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yes. Randall Mason. Yes. And then we came across another organisation called Monuments Lab. And they’ve been doing some work as well. So to know that there’s all these different actors involved in advocating for preservation that it’s probably giving rise to a certain movement, the effect of it hopefully we see immediately or a few years later. But gentrification is something that I think is happening worldwide. Very sadly and being from a city that is India’s first world headed city. Just the other week there was this one article, we have something called the pol houses, so it’s a very tight knit urban fabric, which was essentially part of the fort wall. The city was within the fort walls and all the houses were designed in a way that extremely climate responsive, very close knit narrow streets. So the streets would be shaded, the houses were, you know, working perfectly with the weather and the climate and the climate. And there’s this one beautiful house in the Old City, I think it was… because it’s a UNESCO World Heritage city, a Grade Two building, if I’m not wrong, I could. So UNESCO has all these different grades that they assign to buildings of architectural or heritage importance. So there’s Grade One buildings which are like, you know, it leads to all kinds of policies, in terms of the changes that can be made to it or the kind of attention…so I think it was a Grade Two building. So still architecturally very significant and had merits to the way it was built. And because of some kind of oversight or ignorance, it was erased off completely overnight, wiped off. And then everybody, of course, suddenly wakes up once it’s gone.

Inga Saffron
Was it a private developer or the city or which entity tore it down?

Vaissnavi Shukl
I think it was a combination of the two. I think it was bought by somebody, and then it was reported by someone that there was a lack of maintenance or something. And it was eventually bulldozed by the city, if I’m not wrong. But it’s so ironic because the city does have a Heritage Cell, and there seems to be a lack of communication between the city authorities that erased the building and the city authorities that are working towards preservation. Like it’s coming from the same letterhead almost. So I do get it, in terms of how these questions of preservation often get very tricky, and very intermingled with larger issues with…your work especially, also focuses around questions and issues of urban planning. You’ve written a lot about city planning about bike lanes, parks, skyscrapers, museums.

Inga Saffron
It’s all connected, everything is connected.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And I get it, because you see when, of course, housing is one form of what happens when neighbourhoods get gentrified, but there’s also a lot of these, like other cultural institutions, which come in. Of course, as the city grows, as infrastructure changes, there are all these amenities that enter into the plan. But where do you see the intersection of preservation and urban planning? I’m thinking about it more, in terms of this, like a very wide, complicated nexus of public memory, and then questions of identity and place. And I’m wondering how preservation can be extended to the scale of a city. Without of course, marking it as, you know, UNESCO World Heritage, this or you know, without giving any labels?

Inga Saffron
Yeah, Philadelphia is technically a world heritage…Something, not the whole city. But the area where the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were written, that whole historic colonial area is a World Heritage Site. So you know, there are a lot of competing interests right now, and I’m sure you have the same ones in India, you know, there’s a huge demand for housing, you know, Philadelphia’s very big in land area. And as I said, most people live in these sort of row houses, or townhouses, some can, some can be quite small, some can be bigger. So it’s medium density. I mean, as American cities go, it’s quite dense, but, but there are people who have been advocating for more density and that’s why they want to tear down these houses and put up apartment buildings. They say, create more affordable housing. I’m a little suspicious of that, because we have a lot of vacant land here. I feel that we could go a long way to satisfying our housing needs by building on the vacant land and repairing existing houses. Philadelphia, which has about 1.6 million people, we have some housing pressure, but like if you’ve heard about San Francisco, or New York or Boston, where prices are really crazy, and middle class people can’t afford to buy, you know, houses, that’s not our situation here. You know, if you are in a middle class salary, you you can buy a house here, or rent the house. We have a lot of poverty and so it’s more of a problem for very poor people, but not because the housing doesn’t exist, it’s because we can’t afford it. So the issues are complicated. But you know, I’m of the belief that, first of all, an existing house, you know, has all this embodied energy, and it’s better for the climate to reuse it. And then secondly, I would argue that an existing house is always going to be more affordable than a new house, because new houses are expensive. And maybe you’ve heard of this group called the ‘YIMBYs’, which is “Yes In My Back Yard”, they’re very pro development. You know, they’re always arguing that the way to get more affordable housing is just to build like crazy. But all the new housing that’s built is not a, you know, very little of it is affordable, it’s expensive. So I would argue that existing housing is more affordable and better for the environment. And then you know, going to the question of preservation, Philadelphia’s a very humanely scaled and walkable city. It’s a grid city like New York, but with narrower streets and just very, very cosy streets with houses on both sides, very orderly. It’s just it’s very humane and wonderful place, and it’s very green. We have, you know, trees lining the streets. I think that’s, you know, apart from whether the building is great, not great, I think those qualities are worth preserving. And also, there’s so many layers of history because, you know, like, all American cities, you know, there have been waves of immigrants that have come here, that have left their mark their culture, there’s a neighbourhood in, what we call South Philadelphia in the southern part of the city, that was once heavily, heavily Italian. And when these immigrants came, they built these bags, you know, to help other immigrants, and they always built the banks on the corners, with like a curved facade to face so that you can see the bank from both directions. And, you know, it’s no longer an Italian neighbourhood, or, you know, only marginally Italian, but all those banks with their curved facades and their, you know, sort of Renaissance style stonework is still there. So you can see this, this, this past, the city’s past, now that it looks kind of gentrified, and there’s all kinds of ethnicities living there but you can see the layers of Italian culture in that city. You know, I think this is what makes Philadelphia great, just the layers and layers of time and if you know, if you know how to read the buildings, if you know what to look for you, you can just see, you could stand on a corner and see multiple errors of time. So few cities in America, you know, have this. New York is torn down so much. Boston is torn down so much in Philadelphia is one of the oldest cities in the United States, we have so much. And…and maybe because we have so much we’re like, Ahmedabad. We’re you know, we’re so casual about like, tearing down, we just think oh, we’ll have another one. But it’s, you know, I think Philadelphia’s greatness comes from its ensembles. I always hate the idea of preserving just one building, you know, just like one lone tooth. To really understand the city, you have to have ensembles. And let’s get back to the story of black black doctors row. Because part of what it made…made it so wonderful. And so evocative was the ensemble quality. And once you shoehorn in this you know, 21st century building, that’s a different colour, with completely different aesthetics. It’s so glaring. Not that I’m opposed to building you know, new I am, I love modern architecture. And I… I do think you have to be somewhat sensitive to the context. There’s lots of clever ways to do that.

Vaissnavi Shukl
When you’re talking about preserving an ensemble and not preserving something in isolation, there’s this, every single time this is one image that pops up in my head, it’s from this beautiful movie called ‘Up’. And it’s a very provocative image. It’s very profound how both of them are living in this tiny little house because they refuse to sell that plot of land and if it’s their dream house. Everything around it is torn down. There’s like heavy construction going around. And there’s all these like huge cranes, and a lot of, you know, construction workers, everybody’s going in and out. And it’s…it’s just Carl and Ellie, I don’t know, I think the wife’s name is Ellie, she’s passed away. And Carl is an old widower who has been staying in the house because he has memories of his wife out there. So before he flies away, he puts balloons to the house. It’s…it’s this image that always comes to my mind, how do we really look at it beyond the importance of one particular building and know that you can not take away everything else and have like a lone survivor in the middle of everything. I mean, we’re not…we’re not looking at it as a museum. You know, you’re not having a building as an artefact while everything else is changing. We’re looking at it more as I’m living cities that somehow have life into them and not just abandon downtown’s that are just like a nice book, walking.

Inga Saffron
Historic preservation is very challenging because there are, you know, you have to tease out a lot of subjective feelings you have. One of the good things that the US did was they developed a set of standards, I think they’re ten standards that are supposed to guide preservation, they’re called the Secretary of the Interior Standards. And so when the process is working well, the Historical Commission will…will get a nomination, which will have a long narrative describing the architectural qualities and the history of the building, and the cultural history. And… and then they’ll make an argument based on the ten standards, here’s why this building should be preserved. And then the commission which is made up of citizens will discuss it and evaluate it. And you know, reasonable people can differ on what is worthy of preservation. But I think when you have that framework of standards, it can help guide you, when you have clear objectives. Because sometimes people who love old buildings can get carried away. And you know, they just love it, because it’s familiar. Sometimes I hate to see buildings that I’ve passed for twenty years torn down, even though I know they’re nothing buildings, but you know, it’s like, it’s disruptive to my eye. But that’s not a good standard, you know, you have to be more rigorous than that. I think if you go about it, and kind of a scientific way, not not totally without any emotion, but a scientific way and establish a framework and standards, you can kind of figure out what is worth preserving, and how and make judgments based on that.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And hopefully, while doing that we somehow try to include people from various backgrounds and various phases of life and different trainings and different professions to set out those frameworks. I mean, you, for example, have been so instrumental in a lot of dialogues around preservation that have happened in Philadelphia, and in our previous conversation, something you said, I mean, made me think a lot because, I won’t say I’m a writer, But when I was in grad school, that’s kind of what we did. We were studying history and philosophy of design, and the only medium that we used was the return word, primarily. I think the first time we spoke, you refer to yourself as an instigator and not necessarily an initiator, I wanted to talk about that a little bit and about the tags that are often attributed to you, you are a journalist, you are an architecture critic, I would also call you an advocate. However, I think at the crux of everything, you… you are a writer, and you use the power of the written word to raise awareness and drive change and create accountability among, you know, people in the city and people who are responsible for the cities that we live in. I understand, of course, that at the end of the day, the scope of our influence as writers is directly connected to the audience one is reaching out to but you’re still recording a context, a place, a specific time and creating what will become evidence or an archive for the future. And that to me, is, is very powerful. What are… what are your thoughts on the agency of a writer and shaping cities?

Inga Saffron
I think it’s really important. You know, because by putting things into words, we understand. I think what a writer does is…is give people you give your readers the language to articulate and understand very complex events that are going on around them and to situate them in a context. Now, I should say, I’m not just a writer, I’m a journalist. That’s a specific category of writer. I mean, for one thing, I am a trained reporter. In the United States, reporters tend not to be participants, but observers. So you know, I wouldn’t lead a rally to save a building. Somebody else would do that. I also have the privilege of working for the largest media entity in Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Inquirer. So I have a pretty big platform. You know, it’s not a niche platform, it’s, you know, it’s a, it’s a general interest newspaper, website. So I do my advocacy. As an observer, I also have the ability to call up public officials, and ask them questions. I go to meetings, I interview a lot of different people. And I take all that research and incorporate it into my columns, which are written from my point of view. I’m not a, you know, what they call a straight news reporter. But I’m a columnist. So I, but at the same time, I work like a straight news reporter in the sense that I gather information from all sides, from public records. And then I sort of filtered through the prism of my point of view, and then I, I present an argument, that’s been my, my strategy. And, you know, I might write about other advocates, there are a lot of preservation advocates here and their work when I mentioned this historical nomination for black doctors row that was prepared by a nonprofit group. And I wrote about that group. And they… they were, when they did that nomination, they were actually responding to my reporting, because I sort of raised the alarms about this neighbourhood. And then they, you know, they had the specialised knowledge and historians to do that research, and to put together that nomination. So…so I revealed what was happening, the nonprofit responded. Politicians recognise the importance acted to freeze the demolitions. So, you know, all these, you know, what we might call the estates, but the fifth this day, all came together in this interplay between government, NGOs, the media, individual citizen advocates. So that’s a good example of how, I think democracy is supposed to work, in a local…local democracy doesn’t always work like that. But…and of course, that…that nomination hasn’t gotten a hearing yet, but I’m hopeful that it will. But… but yeah, I do as a…as a… as a columnist, I definitely see myself as an advocate. And like, just for the moment I choose what to write about and how I present it. It’s a very conscious argument based on my worldview, my principles, but as I said, is not enough going to lead like some crowd to City Hall, to protest. Somebody else could do that.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And speaking of nominations, you are a Pulitzer Prize winning author, and you were nominated thrice…thrice before you…

Inga Saffron
I was nominated three times or as a finalist three times I didn’t win and on the fourth time, I finally won. Yeah.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So that speaks volumes about the kind of reporting you’ve been doing and the kind of work you’ve been doing. My very nosy self is extremely interested in knowing what’s in the pipeline. What’s next for you and what’s next for preservation in Philadelphia?

Inga Saffron
Well, you know, it’s a…it’s a big struggle, preservation in Philadelphia, because Philadelphia after a long period of decline is growing again. And there is a lot of housing developments and gentrification. That’s often at odds with preservation and you know, money drives everything. There’s a lot of money to be made in construction. The city wants to see this construction, the city wants to see growth. They want to see more taxes, sympathetic to that, certainly. And so it’s very, very easy to sacrifice its own buildings. And so it’s a very, very difficult dance that is going on right now. Our current mayor campaigned saying he was going to be a preservationist and he has not been a preservationist at all. Unfortunately, you know, because it’s very easy to be seduced by all this development and growth. It’s hard to resist. And then the gentrification part. As I mentioned, this was a very segregated city. A lot of black neighbourhoods are the neighbourhoods that are on the frontlines of gentrified, gentrification people there would tend to earn less money. It’s very tempting for them to sell their houses and, you know, take what money they can, and, you know, developers come in. That’s…that’s been an issue. What happens to the community is broken up like that. I mean, people people talk about preserving the community, not just here in Philadelphia, but I mean, what’s happening with black neighbourhoods here is happening, you know, all over the country and yeah, and Latino neighbourhoods, and, you know, it’s kind of a hopeless task in a way to, quote, ‘preserve community’, because communities are always changing. You know, I mentioned a neighbour that used to be Italian then it was Jewish, then it was something else, that…that’s kind of the story of America, that we have all these, nothing is permitted here. Maybe other countries it is but you know, Americans are very mobile. You know, that’s our strength and our weakness at the same time. So that’s a big issue for preservation, you know, when the community disappears, then what are we preserving? I mean, I think the, you know, the fabric, the style of housing, they’re also important no matter who…who’s occupying. So I think that’s… that’s one thing in the future. And there’s so many issues here to write about, I think climate change is a big, big issue for how we build, of course, the climate, and yet another climate conferences happening right now in Scotland. Boy, we really, really deal with this issue in how we build the material for you. How we use streets, how we treat the automobile and how we treat transit, how we treat the land, the low lying land near… near rivers. For a long time, I was a big advocate of building along our rivers because they had previously been industrial and then when the industry went away, they were just vacant land. And I thought, oh a big city needs a beautiful waterfront, you know, development. Now I’m beginning to ask, you know, should we be building there? Because it’s going to cause flood. There was just a really bad hurricane that came through Philadelphia. And the water came within about a half block of my house. I live about, I’m going to say, maybe 600 feet, maybe 800 feet from the river. And I would say the water came about less than a 100 feet from my house. And I have a community garden plot. In a community garden on the river. And my community garden was under four feet of water. My neighbours had their basements flooded. And well, I’m sure you know about this stuff in India. It was terrible. It was just terrible. I don’t know if in the history of my neighbourhood, we’ve ever seen that amount of flooding. So you know, one of the things we have to talk about is that maybe we shouldn’t be building so close to the river. Maybe we should just keep that a foldable area. With parks , you know, you can building parks in the area that can flood. And can absorb flood waters. I know that’s a big issue in India maintaining the mangrove groves right?

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah they’re dying at a very rapid rate.

Inga Saffron
And they’ve been mitigation against flooding. So I think that’s a big issue when you’re writing about cities now, is…and heat islands and tree cover are really, really important issues. We have, you know, we still build surface parking lots and Philadelphia. I don’t think we can do that anymore because they’re their immense heat islands. And we have poor neighbourhoods with no tree cover. So those are the kinds of things we have to deal with it figure out ways that… we have a pretty good transit system in Philadelphia, but not good enough. And anyone who gets any money wants to buy a car. I’m sure you have that problem in India too. And all that driving and parking and street space is really contributing very heavily to climate change. So, you know, it’s funny when I started out as an architecture critic, I never thought I’d be writing about that sort of thing. But…

Vaissnavi Shukl
The question is, is it something that can be avoided? Or is it something that we can not…not talk about, regardless of what we’re doing in our lives, because it is at the centre stage of pretty much all human activity at this point. And it’s, there’s, there’s no running away from it.

Inga Saffron
Well we have to talk about it. I mean, people are very short term, obviously, you know, people, anytime I say something bad about cars, someone will write me an email and say, “But I need to park. I need to pick up my groceries, I need to do this.” I understand. I understand. But, you know, if we never make sacrifices, we’re never going to stop this. I’m a big bicycle advocate, by the way.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, I read and you’ve been advocating for a lot of bicycle lanes and in the way streets are designed and the way the new planning policies are implemented. That’s something they’ve been trying to do in India since a really long time. I mean, of course, recreational bicycling, cycling is a thing you would see a lot of people in the morning going for biking just as a way of exercise. But as you said, anybody who has any kind of money will want to buy a car and I’m guilty of that. I’m not saying I biked my way to the office or anything, but it is there some kind of correlation between wealth and prosperity and owning cars versus having bikes and that not being a symbol of you’re doing probably that well in your life. So, you are looked down upon, if you’re biking somewhere. I mean, I’ve been searching for a larger change in the way we as society think about transportation and sustainability. But…

Inga Saffron
I mean, it’s interesting that in the Netherlands, and Denmark, which are both very prosperous countries like everybody bikes, so funny how you get to a certain level of prosperity and then the rest by

Vaissnavi Shukl
And then it doesn’t matter.

Inga Saffron
Yeah, I mean, the good part is, you know, we are living in this delivery economy for better or worse and you can have anything delivered. So maybe every single person doesn’t have to get in the car and drive to the grocery store. Maybe they can use delivery vans can deliver them and maybe they would be electric. You know, so maybe that’s…that’s the solution because you know, obviously some things are heavy and can’t put them on a bike but we could explore you know more hybrid forms of transportation I think And that could be helpful and also very convenient Just takes a little…It’s hard to change your habits.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Apparently 21 days is all it takes but I don’t think so.

Inga Saffron
Is that what they say? 21 days to change your habits?

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah. We’ll see. I think it was a lot to be thought about and I think your use of the word delivery economy sets me up on a different tangent but that’s something for me to think about more. Well, Inga, thank you so very much for being on the show.

Inga Saffron
Thank you so much for having me and I hope we’ll see each other either Ahmedabad or Philadelphia or someplace in between.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.