Welcome to NVIDIA's AI podcast where we discuss all things related to artificial intelligence.
And today we're going to talk about how AI and other technologies can be applied to cities and towns and the places we live and work.
And to help us talk about that, we have Lynn Richards, the president and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism.
Lynn, welcome. Hello. Thank you for having me.
And also joining us is Chuck Marone, president of Strong Towns.
He's calling in or Skyping in, I should say, from Brainerd, Minnesota.
Chuck, welcome. Hey, thanks so much for having me.
I'm happy to be here. And in the booth joining me is Brian Caulfield from NVIDIA's editorial team.
So we have a full house, as it were, and we're going to talk about houses and buildings and streets and all kinds of things.
Lynn, let's start with you. You've had this idea, and it's probably been percolating for some time, that we're on the verge of a new way of planning cities.
And From your vantage point, what makes you think that and why now is this sort of? coming to the fore for you?
Let me start with the last question. It's coming to the fore for me because of this year, the Congress for the New Urbanism will be hosting our 25th annual gathering in Seattle.
So what we've been finding in preparing for the Congress is the realm of artificial intelligence, the realm of... augmented reality and virtual reality and the technology is increasing at such a rate whereby almost planners, architects, urban designers are rendered irrelevant.
And that certainly has been news to me engaging in this preparations for the Congress.
It's only through that research and that kind of preparation that I began to see the whole scope of it where you can have artificial intelligence and that can read an entire city's zoning code and building ordinances and design a block that is perfectly legal.
And without any planner, without any architect, without any urban designer. where you can look at through augmented and virtual reality, design what a new streetscape will be, including the buildings on the side, how wide the streets are, the cars, and you can enter that street. through this virtual reality.
And then if you're using augmented reality and you're like, oh, you know, it's not really quite working.
All right, let's heighten the buildings by one story.
Let's lower the buildings. Let's widen the street.
Let's narrow the street. Let's put in more street trees.
So with a few clicks of a computer keyboard, you can already see then what the final product will look like.
It takes tactical urbanism to a whole new level.
You started off that thought by saying that architects and planners and designers are becoming... irrelevant and it sounds to me that what you it's there's a danger that they do but what where are you even seeing evidence that that's happening because Just because, like you say, just because a building's legal doesn't mean that anybody wants to work in it or live in it or walk past it on a street.
There are a number of tech firms, and I'm probably going to get these wrong, that are already in the process of designing cities. and they're hiring coders, they're hiring all the realm of tech folk, right?
And they are not engaging with the urban designers.
They're not engaging with the urban planners.
They're like, we've got the codes. We don't need those folks.
That's where I think it's dangerous. Now, whether or not Now, whether or not we all agree with that or not, I'm sure there's probably folks in Silicon Valley say, well, you know, you're, you're taking out a middleman, you're, you're going direct the planners, you know, you come up with a plan, you pass the codes, boom,
Now let's go rumble. But I think that there's a je ne sais quoi quality that planners and urban designers – bring to the conversation.
Yeah, you bring not just soul, but you make these things work.
I mean, we saw this over the past century where the technology of the automobile has Cities have been redesigned around it.
We've had all kinds of effects that if you're an automotive enthusiast, you would not have anticipated.
The other piece too is around public realm.
So much of what new urbanists do and placemakers do, city builders, whether you call it New Urban Nurse or Smart Growth, I don't get hung up on that, is around creating a sense of place, right?
And you know it immediately. You're like, oh, I want to hang out here. where the streets are crowded with people, not, you know, mothers with their children, older folks as well as the 20 somethings, right?
That diversity. As this AI comes in, as this augmented reality, virtual reality, You know, Google is advertising these new goggles that you put on virtual reality as all of that. comes into play, it's going to be increasingly important for us to design And build places where people can gather and to have that human priority, to have those connections, to have those real person interactions.
Sounds like there's a great opportunity for technology to accelerate your movement if we can kind of understand how new urbanism and technology really intersect by helping people use virtual reality to see these places.
I think that's absolutely right. I think this movement, that's why I say we're on the verge of a disruption.
I think it brings a whole bunch of opportunities.
I think it also brings a sense of a few challenges that... that any technology adopted in a wholesale manner can absolutely lead to some unintended consequences.
And the biggest unintended consequence that we need to look at with this is this issue of equity.
Will this technology be available for all people, all communities, all neighborhoods that are designing this?
Will this become Will this increase the distance between the haves and the have-nots?
Will this lead to greater gentrification or stratification?
Chuck, let's bring you into this. Are these technologies from where you sit, are they tools to be leveraged for the future and for everyone, or are they… things that we need to use, but use, I know, with a certain amount of wariness.
I think this discussion is fascinating because it really ties into a lot of the dialogue we're having here in this country and in places where you see disruptions around the world. between what I would call like an institutional way of doing things and a more decentralized, almost chaotic way of doing things.
Uh, you know, when, when Lynn talks about these things and I love Lynn, I love, I mean, I'm a, I'm a member of her organization.
I have been for a long time. I'm, I'm a proud new urbanist.
When we talk about these things, we're almost talking about them in the context of existing institutions and how they might deploy these technologies to get very kind of institutional ends to them.
A lot of what we see though in the technology realm is actually a destruction of institutional power and institutional authority and institutional processes.
As she was talking, my mind kind of went to the smartphone revolution, which in our lifetime is probably the most dramatic shift in a short period of time, how we use technology.
I mean, I remember when I was a kid paying for long distance phone calls, And when I started to run my own business, we had to advertise in the yellow pages because if you didn't pay money, to the yellow pages and get your listing in there, you were going to be left out of the people looking for the type of work we did.
Now, who pays to be in the yellow pages anymore?
You go on Google, you get your listing. There's all kinds of different places that would rate you.
It's very almost anti-institutional. in the sense that it's very democratic and broadly spread out.
I think that if our institutions embrace these notions as a way to essentially continue on in the process that they've been using, which I would argue – and I think Lynn – would argue in a lot of cases has turned out very sterile and not to build very great communities.
It's been very transactional in terms of its approach. we're gonna fall short.
But if we use these technologies to, in a sense, empower people at the very block level to start building places that they would find a desirable and beneficial, then I think we'll start to get closer to the true revolution.
And by the way. I think the disruptive nature of this is the fact that if institutions don't do the latter, if institutions don't push this down to the block level, I think the very nature of the technology itself is going to do it for institutions and you're going to have those kind of things imposed on these bureaucracies that are not adapting quickly enough.
What AI is really good at, and I'll extend that to deep learning, is learning things and then acting upon what it's learned.
So I've learned how to drive, I'm a driverless car.
I've learned how to save energy in a factory, so now this factory's running more efficiently.
What, in terms of making our block-by-block existence better—
What do you think these learning systems can learn and then help us do?
I do think that part of the way that our institutions work today in the city planning realm is really based off of the environmental regulations that came out of the 1970s, which had a lot of emphasis on process.
So we want to propose something. We have a community meeting.
We have a public hearing. We have. collect public input and formally respond to it.
It's very process, process, process. I think where AI can help us is actually looking at the way people live because the way people live is very divorced from the process.
We can go around our cities right now and see lots of places where people are walking where there are no sidewalks and there's like a goat path through the ditch because so many people have walked there.
Yet when we go through the formal process and the engineers and the planners all come out and design whatever street it is, whether it's a progressive street or not –
They tend to design it based on certain standards they have.
I think AI can actually come up with a design that says like, here's where people are actually walking. actually using this deep learning there's an opportunity for machines to see things that planners don't but people on the street see every day And I think reveal those things to decision makers.
Like, look, you're blind to the fact that that many people are walking here now a you know we can pick that up from their cell phone pings we can pick that up from you know whatever type of data set we deploy and uh you know you're missing out on an opportunity now that essentially in your in your institution is, is beneath you, it's, you're unable to see, you're kind of blind to it.
Here it is. And that blindness, as you've pointed out, has led to cities that for decades have been very sterile compared to what we had 100 years ago.
Well, we build things through a process.
It's very transactional. And the transactional nature tends to kind of lower it to the lowest common denominator.
And as Lynn will attest, Cities are alive places.
They're chaotic, they're messy, they breathe, they live, they're alive.
And when we treat them transactionally, we miss out on that life.
There has been considerable research on what works to create an active public realm.
And Jan Gehl, You know, a Danish architect and urban planner is probably at the leading forefront of that. designed a checklist, a 25-question checklist, and to quantify it about what creates an active public realm.
So when you are able to take that soul that we've been talking about, that je ne sais quoi, and begin to assign quantitative and qualitative attributes to it, Now, Jan Jegel is just one piece.
If you can one person, one institute, one firm.
If you can then assign an AI module to that, all of a sudden it can be replicated and scaled up.
If AI can figure out the work – and Yangel I mentioned is because he's really – leading the path, the space between the buildings, right?
It's more about the buildings and the street.
It's about that space in between. To have a module dedicated to just that and to get it right once, all of a sudden now it can be scaled up. in ways, in multiple hundreds, thousands of cities and neighborhoods and streets and blocks.
We've struggled in city building about size and dimensions.
The transportation engineers say you absolutely have to have a 13 to 15 foot lane width and it moves and when we build roads that are that wide you have higher speeds, and Chuck, you know this better, but you also begin to destroy the public realm.
You begin to destroy that sense of place.
You're building a city for cars to move cars efficiently from point A to point B, not necessarily to move people efficiently from point A to point B. When you begin to use AI and some of these public realm modules, you're able to design a creative space that celebrates not only makes room for the pedestrian, which is what the complete streets policy does is say,
Pedestrians need to have a place on the street, but it actually celebrates the pedestrian.
It prioritizes them. Once we start building cities that do that, then we're going to achieve the outcomes that we're looking for.
So you're saying that the technology has drained some of the soul from our cities?
And now we have an opportunity to use technology to breathe some of that back in.
The technology that we've used, as Chuck will say, is all of these manuals.
I mean, Chuck knows this. He's better off.
You've got the green book. You've got the red book.
You've got this book, that book. Here are the standards that you have to meet.
It's binary. It either is 13 feet or it's not.
It doesn't take into place the context. From what I understand, the emerging technology in AI is able to pick up on the nuance, able to pick up on the context. you're able to take a module like Yang Gil's 25 characteristics, which are both quantitative and qualitative, plug that in, and begin to design a street that truly is a beautiful, complete street.
Here's the tough part, though, about that.
When we look at Jan Gehl and a lot of the great work of the new urbanism, I think The brilliance of the new urbanism is that the early new urbanists went back to traditional cities that worked really well. and said, what are the characteristics of these places?
The actual like dimensions of sidewalks and spacing between buildings.
What are the things that made these places work?
I think we're having a hard time now, and the newer are on the cutting edge of this.
I mean, they're figuring this out better than anyone, but where I think AI can help us democratize this and spread it out to a broader group of people is that we don't live with a blank canvas.
We don't live in a lot of the cities that a young gal would start with.
We live in these really kind of messed up insolvent, despotic places.
I mean, that is what the vast majority of the American landscape is today. and we have to find a way to start to retrofit those into places that function, and function financially, function for humans at a human scale, function as economic ecosystems.
And it's hard for us as planners, it's hard for us as urban designers and engineers to take 25 principles or 25 points or a code book or whatever it is and apply it, I think it's, in a complex system, much more going to be beneficial to us to have some type of non-biased maybe entity, and AI, a deep knowledge kind of thing, look at these systems and help reveal truths for us that maybe aren't apparent either by looking historically at things or looking at just basic principles and Right, and those truths, I think they vary from place to place, right?
So what goes on in Tokyo is different from Rio, is different from... the Bay Area.
And I think what's really interesting about applying AI to this is the resolution that you can go down to.
So from 25 that you can go up to... 250 million points of reference and then turn the dials on some of those and see where you get. project that CNU just launched is a project for code reform.
And New Urbanists, Smart Growth folks, the American Planning Association, have been working for 20 years to help cities and towns to revise their code to enable great places.
And so much of that work actually hasn't been around enabling a great place.
It has been around guaranteeing a great place.
So taking into account all of that nuance that the sign ordinance has to be this, that the sidewalk has to be this. you know, this wide, this big, et cetera, at this height with ratio at this level.
And what that has done is that it has created a gap between those cities and towns that can afford to bring in the most talented and creative. urban designers and code writers to those towns who don't have that ability.
So this artisanal code, which absolutely will give you a fantastic place, but how many cities and towns can afford that?
And so what AI could do, potentially, because I absolutely agree with with Chuck about the nuance, but what it could do is it could boil it down to get us 80% there.
It might not get us 100% there, but get it 80% there at a much lower cost.
And so that way you're scaling up, you're almost creating like a McDonald's, that type of industrialization, whatnot, for great places.
And you could create different models of what a suburban community would look like.
What a rural area, what do we need to do when a hurricane comes through?
How do we rebuild? issue about reducing the cost that cities have to go through now to create great places is one where I feel that AI has a tremendous opportunity to move forward.
We've gotten this wrong a fair bit. Some of the great places that we like, it seems like planning was sort of willy-nilly and happened over centuries.
What is so hard about it? You said it yourself, right?
That 100 years ago in the 1920s, We mostly got it right.
You had thriving cities. You had an active public realm.
There was soul in all of these places. So what happened?
Well, the folks who, for great intention, said, you know what, we probably shouldn't have houses. right next to factories, right?
So we started doing the zoning. Even just looking back 40 years ago, The amount of regulation that has changed, this is what makes it so hard, is the vast degree of regulation.
And a lot of it is contradictory, that your subdivision ordinance tells you that you need to manage your stormwater in this way, but then your stormwater ordinance tells you you need to do it in another way.
That the street design standards say that your street needs to look and act and function in this way, But again, your subdivision ordinance tells it into something else.
Then you bring in building codes. that there are so many different codes and requirements that it becomes practically impossible to create a place that has the soul.
And then you bring on, even after you get everything at the municipal level, all the requirements right, then the banks say, well, I don't care if the city doesn't require parking.
I'm a bank, I'm loading you money, and I know that parking is absolutely critical to having a successful mixed-use building or to having a successful retail outfit, so we're gonna require you to put in parking, but the city has just now gotten rid of the parking requirement.
Where are you gonna put the parking? And it's this vast degree of regulation that is making city building so hard. when it got its start, again, back in the teens, in the 1920s, out of just good public health reasons.
Apartments should not be next to factories.
We probably should do something about our waste here, again, for public health reasons.
And it has evolved to such a point that developers, city planners, everybody is feeling that their hands are cuffed.
So how do you back off of those regulations?
That's the question that we're really facing now.
I think that we reached a point in the evolution of cities and understand that cities for a long time evolved with constraints. fiscal constraints and human constraints and technology constraints.
I mean, we could only build buildings so tall.
We could only build things so quickly. And a lot of those constraints just went away all at once really in the kind of earlier part of the 20th century.
All of a sudden, we were incredibly affluent.
All of a sudden, we could build huge buildings.
All of a sudden, we had earth movers that could move massive amounts of landscape. and reshape them.
And all of a sudden we had these institutions that had this mandate to create growth and jobs. with a development pattern as the mechanism to do that.
And so in a sense, we have had six, seven decades of where evolution of cities has gone away And we have essentially given over to a class of professionals or a small group of people. what the shape and the growth of our cities would be.
Yeah, and you've spoken eloquently how we've created landscapes too sterile to support the support the tax base needed to pay for the upkeep of the infrastructure.
You can create not only as a service for all, ugly, but it doesn't create enough economic value to support itself.
Yeah, we maximized our short-term transactional gain at the expense of our long-term financial resiliency.
And so a lot of our places right now can experience a lot of growth But financially, they're really frayed and fragile.
They don't have the money to fix the sidewalks, to fix the roads.
But we can go build a bunch of new stuff because-
We've got plenty of mechanisms to do that.
Let's talk about another technology that has had unintended consequences, the car.
You both have some great insights into this.
What does it mean when cars have the intelligence to drive themselves, to park themselves? to get out of the way, how can we redesign our cities intelligently to kind of advance the core insights the new urbanism has been talking about for 10, 15, 20 years now.
Robin Chase, the founder of Zipcar, lays out the nightmare scenario around self-driving cars. that you have a self-driving car.
So you have your car drive you into downtown where you have lunch and then you send the car back home because You know, you don't need to park it because it's self-driving.
It goes on home and you tell the car to pick you up two hours later.
So the car comes back two hours later. So now it's three trips now.
But you're not quite done with lunch. You're having a great chit-chat. ask for a second glass of wine and you tell the car to circle around a little bit more and then it comes and picks you up and then you go home.
That is not. That is the nightmare scenario of self-driving cars.
So what happens now if you're able to combine the sharing economy with the self-driving car economy? where instead of everybody having their own car, you have neighborhoods that have cars or that everybody, is able to tap into a different car system.
All of a sudden, the space that we have used for our cities For parking, the parking garages, the surface level parking lots, oh my gosh, those are just craters.
Cleveland, it's a great place to park. Driveways, et cetera, all of a sudden now you're freeing up that space for other uses. because you could almost have a car working all the time if it's a self-driving car.
So the trick in self-driving cars – and I'm not even touching the public safety aspects of it because I certainly don't want to get – hit by a car or have um or have my child or been hit in the past three times yeah three times um uh and i'm still here to tell the tale um But how can we design it in such a way that we are, again, maximizing the efficiency?
And so I'm encouraged by the rapid rise in and Uber and Lyft and then the sharing economy.
And if we can begin to pair that with the self-driving cars And again, ensure that our city's regulations, et cetera, are keeping pace.
And I think that we're getting to a spot in my lifetime, certainly in my son's lifetime, where parking garages perhaps are a thing of the past.
And think about all of that space in your central business district where parking garages just go.
We began this conversation with your idea, Lynn, that we're on the verge of a new way of planning.
Let's assume that we get it right. How will we know that that this is working.
I can tell you as a single parent and as a parent who works full time, that we'll know that we get it right when our lives become easier.
Right? That I was thinking about the year that I spent in Cambridge.
I would pick my son up from school and it was about a two-mile walk home. which is a long walk, but it was just absolutely lovely.
And on the walk home, he's like, oh, the library book came in.
Let's go pick it up, mom. Drink all the milk.
We need to get more milk. Did I tell you?
Because kids do this all the time. Tomorrow I've got swim class.
I need a pair of goggles. And just on the walk home, you're able to pick all of this up.
What happens if all of our lives become easier?
I'm sure Chuck has 8 million stories of shuffling between two girls, getting to soccer practice, I've got to do the run, crap, I've got a call in 15 minutes. the juggling that everyday Americans do, particularly those in the lower socioeconomic brackets. is tremendous, it's killing us all.
We will know we're being successful if that juggling If that juggling burden is lessened just a little bit and the quality of our lives, our humor interactions, our daily interactions. the burden is lessened and the quality increases.
Chuck? I agree. I do think that when we look at technology, it's always been a double-edged sword.
And I think we... do a disservice to history if we just consider that this will definitely be a positive thing.
I think we have to be aware. of the fact that over-the-road truckers are, what is their long-term prospects for job employment?
If you live in a rural area, That's one of the higher paying jobs and there's a whole class of people now whose jobs are very threatened.
I live in a small town, we don't have Uber here.
When I visit big cities, I use Uber. I sit back and I say, you know, well, what's the difference between this and a self-driving car for me?
There's really not much except the fact that someone isn't getting paid behind the wheel.
Someone with a lot of capital to invest in a fleet of self-driving cars will make a lot of money.
But that will not be as distributed. So I think we have a risk here. of if we continue on the trend we are continuing on, of having the gains for this largely go to a few, having people who enjoy professional lives and live affluent lifestyles, appreciate the conveniences, but create a lot of distress for a lot of other people.
And I think if we focus on these advances in technologies, as Lynn said, making our lives better, I think that they should, in an ideal way, give us more free time, give us more disposable income, give us better lives.
And the history of technology in this country has not been that.
And I actually think this is where Our conversation needs to go beyond just a fetish with technology and actually get into some larger social.
Yeah. Yeah. Some larger social economic conversations that generally are our absence from our obsession just with technology.
It is a double-edged sword, but we absolutely need to get to this degree of of better lives, more disposable income, that you're not worried all the time.
I think of the juggling burden. Well, you go back to the ideas that came out of the 1930s.
John Maynard Keynes, which we largely live in a world dominated by his economic theories, His view of the future was that by the time you got to the 70s and the 80s, people would be working a lot less.
They would have a lot more free time. Our corporations would actually evolve to be more like universities.
What has actually happened is that, you know, we we see women entering the workforce and that means now it takes, you know, two women. earners in a family to pay the mortgage instead of one.
You know, it didn't result in leisure time.
It resulted in us working more. Our corporations haven't become like universities.
Our universities have become like corporations.
And I think if we don't. step back and have a deeper conversation about some of those things. a lot of the social upheaval that we're feeling right now with globalization and changes in technology They'll continue to work for a smaller and smaller group of people, but a larger and larger group of people are not benefiting from that.
And I think that is the the essential component here that we need to find a way to get to.
On a related note, it's one thing that we're doing at NVIDIA is building a And one step of that process is everything is simulated so that you can literally strap on a VR goggle and see exactly what that looks like.
And having sat in on a number of public meetings about zoning changes and about city planning.
I was struck by how useful that would be to a conversation where you've got a room full of 100, 125 people each with different interests.
If you could show them what it looked like rather than come to them with the decision, are there opportunities here to – to use AI and VR and augmented reality to open up the conversation about a city to create a city in speech before we start putting down concrete?
I think absolutely there's an opportunity to do that.
But I do think that the challenge is... is that you want to bring that technology, bring that opportunity to all communities.
It can't just be for a neighborhood or a city at a certain socioeconomic demographic, it absolutely has to be also for the economically distressed communities as well.
And that's going to be challenging. They may not trust it as much.
They may be unfamiliar with the technology.
There's going to have to be a lot of listening and learning as you build through that.
But if we're going to do something like that, it can't just be for a few select people. you know, opportunities.
It has to be kind of more broadly. I mean, I think if there's any lesson of the last election cycle it's that we need to listen far better than we have and and maybe some tools that we've been discussing can help us do that and gather the sort of the points of view and the information and the ways people move through their world and what could help as opposed to what can just help me.
I think too, and I don't want to be like the Debbie Downer of the conversation, but when you look at it in the context of the election, a lot of places that kind of voiced frustration in this last election are places that on paper are the most financially insolvent.
The places with the greatest amount of infrastructure in place, for example, the most number of streets per capita and the least financial wherewithal to be able to maintain and take care of those things and so as as we think about ways that this technology can improve cities and urban areas.
I think that's wonderful and I think there's a lot that we can do. uh, half X country is, is not living in, in that kind of, uh, an environment.
And I think, by actually stepping back and saying, okay, how do we start to use some of this stuff to get a better understanding and help people understand their own places and their own decisions better, I think is a real key question.
I've worked with many cities where we sat down and showed them just on paper here's how this decision to do this very short-term thing is going to have this very negative long-term impact on you.
And then they went ahead anyway, because the broad cultural conversation was going in that direction.
I think if we can take some of those insights That planners, engineers and others can gain from this and then distribute that in a broader way to people and let them interact with it and let them discover it for themselves.
I think our cultural conversation can improve in a lot of ways, especially in places where we are experiencing distress.
So you're saying in some ways we have a gap between the infrastructure which is which we've got a lot of, even in areas that are distressed, and the intelligence to make sure it adds real value.
Yeah, and we're actually in a place, I mean, I interviewed the Department of Transportation head for the state of Iowa. last year.
And he said flat out, he goes, we are going to have less road miles in a decade than we do now.
Our system will contract. And that's really the place that a lot of our cities are in.
How do you have that conversation? The conversation of actually having less than you do today That's a really tough one.
And I think some of these things can help us envision what that transition looks like.
But again, getting to the outcome, it may be fewer lane miles, but it perhaps may be greater mobility.
Because the outcome that we're seeking in building roads is not, again, to move cars from point A to point B. It's people.
And so how will even a small town, Topeka, Kansas react to having fewer lane miles But if their mobility has increased, that's the piece.
Nobody gets up in the morning and says, I can't wait to sit in traffic.
Cross the board. You will not find any – presidential supporter on either side of the aisle that said, yeah, I want more traffic jams.
I want to pay a higher tax rate. These are some truths.
So the question is, how do we design our cities Again, to get the outcomes of what people want.
People want a sense of community, of neighborhood-ness.
Even in the suburban areas and the single-family detached homes, there is a deep desire to have a sense of community, to have a neighborhood.
People want to interact with others. Folks want the ability to have access to move, to get to where they need to go. in an efficient and not very expensive manner.
They wanna be able to live the lives that they want.
They want safety, not only for themselves, but for their children.
So you think AI is important, not just on the surface, but to help understand all this data from 8, 12, 14 different buckets? bring it together and use that superhuman ability to find patterns to connect the dots. to create infrastructure that meets people's needs so we have less waste and more value.
We actually could solve half or more of the congestion problems in this country just by getting rid of traffic signals. which is something we could do.
I'm for that, yeah. Yeah, we could do with AI quite easily.
And I really do think that there's an opportunity here to, as Lynn suggests, get more for less, right?
And to me, I think if we can have the conversations in that context, They're going to be really, really productive.
And get more with less, because it sounds to me like we are facing a phase now where some things will be contracting, some places will be contracting.
It's a question of doing that in the right way and doing it in a way that becomes, you know, the smaller jewel of a place as opposed to just a smaller place. and letting people, actual people who live on streets and blocks and in neighborhoods be part of that evolution.
Have it kind of be decentralized from institutions. so that we're actually together working to build our places.
And I think that will be the beautiful, if I could like, Spell out a utopia with AI.
That would be the beautiful utopia I would love to get to where people could work together to build their own places.
How can we get AI in terms of planning and community design and development across all ranges and types of communities.
That's the great equalizing opportunity.
Well, with you two on the job, I feel better about all this.
Lynn Richards, Chuck Marone, thank you guys so much.
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