Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

And it may be perfectly clear, or maybe I should mention, that I'm a city guy by nature.

I didn't grow up in a city. I grew up in the suburbs, typical American suburban upbringing.

But as soon as I got to move to cities, I realized that that's where I really belonged.

And I've gotten to live in some great cities here in the United States, Boston, Chicago,

Los Angeles now in Baltimore. And believe it or not, we've ended up talking about cities

quite a bit here on the podcast. This was never one of my intentions starting out, but turns out

there's an enormous amount of interesting things to think about these marvelously complex

human environments. We talked with Catherine Brinkley about the science of cities, why they take

the shapes they do in the particular ways and how to use that to make it better. Very early on

in the podcast, we talked to Jeffrey West about the relationship between scale, including density

and cities and other things that matter like innovation and creativity, which are concentrated

in city like environments. We talked to Will Wilkinson about cities and politics.

There's a strong polarization between the density of the environment you live in and where you

land on a political spectrum. And we also talked to Joe Walston about cities and the environment,

how urbanization, which you might think is sort of counter to environmental sustainability,

is actually the best way to create environmental sustainability because it frees up so much land

for other uses. So that brings us to today where we're going to be talking to Johanna Hoffman,

who is an urban designer and planner and thinker. So she's going to talk about how we can think about

what cities should be and how best to do that thinking. So in fact, a lot of the conversation we're

going to have is not specifically about this or that urban policy, although that gets there. But more

or less a methodology that we can use to think about this, which in true mindscape fashion,

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