Hi, I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. The world's cities are engines for culture, knowledge, and community. These days, they're at the center of public health and racial inequity crises at the same time. How could they be built back from these upheavals, but in a better way? How should

they be engines for inclusion? Architect Vishan Chakrabarthi has some ideas, and it's all about

putting people at the center when we design solutions for our cities. He's in conversation at TED 2020

with Ted's design curator, Chi Pearlman.

So when we launched the Build Back Better interview series, we knew we wanted to take a hard look at how we might build back our cities after the pandemic.

Now, we're still in the midst of a health crisis, but our streets are no longer empty canyons.

Instead, they're filled with protests, and the urgency of healing our urban fabric has only been magnified.

I'm pretty passionate about cities.

I tend to prefer to live in them.

I see them as our engines of culture, commerce, knowledge,

community. But I also ask, how can they also be our engines of equality and inclusion?

So we have someone here today who's thought about these questions his whole career.

Vishan Chakabardi is an architect.

He's urbanist.

He's an educator.

And he was the director of planning in Manhattan in the aftermath of 9-11.

So he has seen crisis before.

He's the founder of his own architecture firm.

And in just a few weeks, he'll be taking the reins as dean of Berkeley's College of Environmental Design.

So, hello. Welcome, Vishan.

Hi, Chi. How are you? Good to see you.

Oh, so happy to see you. Welcome. I imagine you're in deep thought about so many things right now, but give us your sense of what you're thinking about cities in terms of how they are struggling and how they might recover from both a health and an equity crisis that we find ourselves in.

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