Recovering Our Neighborhoods with Seth Kaplan

In this episode, I connect with Seth Kaplan, author of the recent book "Fragile Neighborhoods" and a recent article "The Real User Interface: Recovering Our Neighborhoods," for a conversation about the challenges of our current community designs and how we can make our neighborhoods less fragile, or to channel Nassim Taleb, make our neighborhoods "Anti-Fragile" once again.

Seth argues that our planners and engineers have built a physical landscape optimized for cars but minimized for actual human relationships, suggesting that the automobile is arguably the technology that has made the biggest impact on our associational life while our spread-out community design isolates and divides, weakening the bonds that tie us together. This is especially problematic for children, whose opportunities for spontaneous free play—and the constructive friction that self-organized activities create—are further limited when the physical landscape discourages exploration. He emphasizes that having meaningful destinations within comfortable walking distance is key to building strong ties between us.

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Helpful Links (note that some may include affiliate links to help me support the channel):
👉 The Real User Interface: Recovering Our Neighborhoods post
👉 Seth's website
👉 Seth on LinkedIn
👉 Buy Fragile Neighborhoods book on Amazon or by supporting local bookstores here on Bookshop.org
👉 Strong Neighborhoods paper
👉 My Let Grow episode with Lenore Skenazy
👉 Anxious Generation website
👉 Strong Towns website
👉 Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) website

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Credits:
- Video and audio production by John Simmerman
- Music via Epidemic Sound

Resources used during the production of this video:
- My recording platform is Ecamm Live
- Editing software Adobe Creative Cloud Suite
- Equipment: Contact me for a complete list

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- Active Towns Website
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