Placemakers

The Quest to Make the Perfect Place

Imagine a place where you can stroll down the sidewalk, wave to yourneighbors on their porch, then pick up your dry cleaning or have lunch at the café.That’s the kind of walkable, compact, mixed-use community envisioned by thefounders of New Urbanism—including Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. But some people saythere’s a reason one of Plater-Zyberk’s developments played a starring role in amemorable Hollywood film about overly constructed reality.

Paid Podcast: Uniting a Neighborhood

Seattle’s Yesler Terrace was the first racially integrated housing project in the U.S. Today, it remains a multicultural nexus for the city. The Seattle Housing Authority and its partners at JPMorgan Chase have been hard at work rebuilding and rejuvenating this historic community’s infrastructure and investing in its economic sustainability. Join Brian Babylon as he explores how the city has tackled such an enormous revitalization project. 

When Good Placemakers Go Bad

George Leonidas Leslie was perhaps the most sensational—and successful!—criminal in American history. An architect by training, he planned and pulled off a series of record-breaking bank robberies throughout the late 1800s and arguably ushered in the modern heist. On this episode of Placemakers, producer Mike Vuolo explores the unholy relationship between burglary and the built environment.

A City of Blue Ribbons

Long before the Black Lives Matter movement swept the U.S., Dallas’ policechief tried to diffuse the anger and mistrust between minority communities andpolice. His reforms made an impact. The number of people killed in confrontationswith police fell, just as crime fell. But Dallas was still torn apart by racial hate lastsummer, leaving five officers dead and the city in shock. It fell on the police chief tobring people back together in the aftermath.

Live Free or Die

How does a small group of people change politics? The Free State Projectwants libertarians to concentrate themselves in New Hampshire and promotelibertarian causes. Thousands have already moved, and thousands more are on theway. But not everyone is happy to see them coming.