LAUREN GILGER: A few weeks ago, we here at The Show started something new. We took one of our round table conversations to you.
We held a live event called The Show & Tell at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix — to a packed house, might I add. And for our inaugural event, we focused on walkability.
Downtown Phoenix has finally happened. Condo towers, restaurants, entertainment venues and retail establishments now occupy once empty lots, and there’s nowhere to park — the sure sign of a thriving metropolis.
But can Phoenix ever be walkable? To talk about that, I was joined by David Crummey, a community advocate and transit expert who once told me he used to be known as "Mr. Downtown Mesa," as well as multidisciplinary artist Jen Urso. She often makes maps, which often explore the interplay between our urban and natural environments here in the Valley. And Arden Holloway. They are a transit planner with Valley Metro who has worked on light rail extension planning, and they do not have a car in this car-centric city.
We’ll be bringing you parts of our live conversation this week on The Show, beginning this morning.
[FROM THE SHOW & TELL]
LAUREN GILGER: OK, so I want to begin this conversation with a little bit of a flashback, because I think for anyone who has lived here for any significant amount of time, if you’re thinking about the growth of this city and the growth of particularly downtown, which is sort of this urban core that we’ve all been kind of trying to support for a long time.
It’s happened, right? Like, that’s the way I think we’ve phrased it in the language for this show. Like downtown Phoenix for a long time was like a ghost town. Does anyone — do you remember, any of you, what happened in downtown Phoenix after 5 'o'clock, 10 or 15, 20 years ago?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Nothing.
LAUREN GILGER: Nothing. David’s shaking his head. What did you ...
DAVID CRUMMEY: Oh, I used to live downtown.
LAUREN GILGER: Did you used to live in downtown Phoenix?
DAVID CRUMMEY: In high school, and so I would walk everywhere downtown. And nothing was open. There were a couple coffee shops that would be straggling on. But I would walk to the library and stuff. Not a nerd.
You know, when it was at the Phoenix Art Museum, and then when it moved to Burton Barr. And then I loved going across Hance Park and all of that. And I just — I loved it, and I’m like, "Man, Phoenix is made for walking, but no one is walking."
LAUREN GILGER: Let’s just remember what that was like, and now think about what it’s like today.
And if we’re looking at, you know, the massive growth that we’ve seen in this city, especially in downtown, and in various downtowns I think we should say around the Valley, "is it walkable" is kind of the question we’re going to focus on here. But I want to start with a slightly different question, and I want to start with you, David.
I don’t think the exact question to start with is "is it walkable?" I think we should start first with: What does it mean to have a walkable city?
DAVID CRUMMEY: So, humans have been in cities for 11,000 years-ish. That’s a little bit longer than I can remember. But humans get together in cities and do cool things.
It’s only been since about the 1950s that we’ve had this suburban experiment where we’ve completely, radically and very expensively shifted how humans live in cities. And so, the last 75 years have been an aberration in human history.
And to me, what walkable cities is, is really about: What does it mean to go back to being human and being in a place together to have shared goals, whether they’re economic or social, or what have you? But we gather together in places, in libraries and bars and coffee shops and just in parks, because we like being around each other, most of the time.
And what we’ve done over the last 75 years is really inhuman. And I think that that suburban experiment has failed, but we haven’t figured out how to, what to do about that failure.
LAUREN GILGER: How to get ourselves out of it, you think? OK, all right. We’ll leave that to lie for a moment, we’ll come back to these ideas.
Let me turn to you, Jen. You’ve mapped various things in the city. I mean, like, you’ve mapped Roosevelt Row, you’ve mapped cactuses, you’ve mapped Eastlake Park, like, my favorite, the "Running While Female in Phoenix" map.
But I want to talk about this one because I know you took a map of Phoenix once and you said you scraped out kind of the built environment, like the parking garages. What was left?
JEN URSO: Yeah, so I had no idea that who made that map would be a future client, so it ended up being kind of strange. But I took like the general tourist map of downtown Phoenix, and I think I scraped out all of the tourist destinations that were marked in the key, and then kind of did a performance walk around all the spaces that were left after that.
And it was sort of a way — like I’ve always had issues with authority, so it was like: How can I, you know, sort of deny what the city’s telling me I’m supposed to be looking at, what my destinations are?
And then the curious thing about that map, too, was what was left behind was like a lot of parking structures. So mostly the map was a map to parking. It wasn’t so much a map to like where would you want to go, where would you want to walk around to, what would that experience of walking be like?
And it just made me kind of angry. You know, I was like, "No, this isn’t what I want my experience of the city to be, this isn’t what I want people coming into the city to travel to." So, you know, that could have been a little bit of a push for me to start making maps that were like what I think is interesting about the city that I see on foot, you know?
LAUREN GILGER: Right. Like your cactus map, things like that. Is that what you’re talking about?
JEN URSO: Yeah, exactly.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, OK. Arden, I want to turn to you. You do not have a car, and this is I think a very car-centric city. That’s an easy argument to make. So tell us first, you know, what is it like to try to live in this city with no car?
ARDEN HOLLOWAY: So, I actually moved here from Tucson about two years ago, and when I was choosing to move here from Tucson, I had to think through: What is it going to be like living car-free in this city? And what are the criteria of the place that I want to live, that will help me to fulfill that goal?
It has been no easy feat to be car-free in Phoenix, but I will say that it has brought me a lot of beautiful experiences, I would say. I live in Midtown, and the reasons that I chose that area are because of the light rail access, because of the frequent service buses that run through the Midtown area, and also just thinking about where there are activity centers and different places to gather with people, just like Changing Hands, third spaces, and also access to grocery stores that I could bike to very easily.
And Midtown was the perfect place for that. Once I moved to Phoenix, my transit experience actually improved because of the light rail being regional and connecting Phoenix, Mesa and Tempe. And also, the buses were more frequent.
And in terms of walkability, the downtown area around Roosevelt, and also the Central Ave corridor, are both very walkable areas with pharmacies, cafes, bars, museums, like a lot of places to access that are walkable, with more shade as well.
As I have been car-free, I’ve realized as a pedestrian it’s difficult in other areas of Phoenix outside of those places. And one of my first experiences here was walking down Seventh Avenue on the sidewalk coming down from Camelback. There is no shoulder on that road, and that is kind of a harrowing experience being 2 feet from a vehicle.
So, I have found that being a pedestrian can sometimes be difficult in different areas of the Valley. But there are areas where walkability is being encouraged through transit-oriented development and mixed-use areas and kind of encouraging that human-centric experience that David talked about.
LAUREN GILGER: So, does not having a car here make you think it’s possible, like does it give you hope? You said you have had some beautiful moments kind of being in the environment and not being in your, you know, box of a car. Tell us about one of those.
ARDEN HOLLOWAY: One of the things that I’ve noticed is a lot of my friends live in areas very close together and develop like little neighborhood groups and, like, live in the same apartment complexes. I live with three different friends in a complex of studios. And we’re actually able to hang out by the pool together, go out to bars, go out to cafes.
And that has been one beautiful aspect of living on — like I live on Osborn and Central, and it’s very close to Park Central, so lots of access to restaurants and places where people hang out and spend their time. It’s definitely more difficult in the summer, gets really hot, for sure.
LAUREN GILGER: And we’ll talk more about walkability in the heat of the Phoenix summer, as well as the role of public transportation and pedestrian safety.
That was Valley Metro transit specialist Arden Holloway, along with David Crummey, a community advocate and transit expert, and artist Jen Urso.
We will bring you more of this live conversation at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix tomorrow on The Show.
LAUREN GILGER: ... A few weeks ago, we held our inaugural The Show and Tell event to a packed house at Changing Hands Bookstore in downtown Phoenix. This one asking the question: Can Phoenix ever be truly walkable?
Now that the city has reached a critical mass and we have a thriving urban core, an expanding light rail system and more hip restaurants to go to than you can count, are we anywhere near turning this car-centric city into a walkable one?
To talk more about it, I was joined by David Crummey, a community advocate and transit expert who has been embedded in downtown Mesa for years; as well as multidisciplinary artist and mapmaker Jen Urso; and Arden Holloway, a transit specialist for Valley Metro who navigates life in Phoenix without a car. We’re bringing you parts of this live conversation this week on The Show, and this morning we start with the all-important role of light rail, buses and public transportation.
LAUREN GILGER: I think walkability has a lot to do with public transportation, like being able to get to a place not in a car and then walking around and like being able to walk to get to the place that’ll get you there, right? I want to go to you, David, here because Mesa has been sort of an early adopter in the whole light rail thing, and one of the furthest out, right? So talk a little bit about your experience in in watching how light rail has changed that and connected it.
DAVID CRUMMEY: I mean, it’s really Phoenix that’s far from Mesa, not the other way around. It’s been a battle. During the initial 27-mile alignment, less than a mile actually ended up in Mesa.
And it was a conscious thing to barely have it in Mesa because they didn’t want it. The political interest was not to have light rail because it was bad and the poors and what what have you. But the other side of it, it was this promise that we live in a region. You know, like when Phoenix and Mesa, they all started about 7-10 miles from each other because they’re little farming communities and and they just grew up distinct. And so that was the promise of we’re a region.
And so that was the it was the No. 1 park-and-ride of all of Valley Metro’s light rail access. I purchased my first home not even a half mile from that station about six months before light rail opened, so I could access that and with the promise that maybe it would come downtown Mesa.
But that allowed me to go back to school, work in Mesa and then hop on light rail and go downtown Phoenix to work on my master’s. And that was great to be able to work, and then you would take a about a 30-minute nap, and then it would wake up right as we’re like hitting the ballpark and I was like, “Oh!” And I was always lucky I never missed my stop.
But but it was a fight, and even when just extending that three miles into downtown Mesa was another fight and and concern.
And to me, the promise of light rail that we talked a lot about at the time was about the economic driver, that this is a a defined public benefit that is fixed. It’s not a bus that can change, and so investment can follow that.
But for me, the light rail replaced the Red Line. And that was the busiest bus route in the entire Valley Metro system back in the ’80s and ’90s. It would break down in the summer, they had long buses, they had short buses, it was hot, it took —
JEN URSO: It went through the airport.
DAVID CRUMMEY: It went through the airport. And what happened is, for me, light rail is a transportation accelerator. It took a two-hour ride and made it an hour. And you think about the people that worked at the airport, at all of those places, and we gave them back two hours of their life every day.
And the idea that, oh, one, I don’t have to afford the um that transportation cost of owning a car. We all own a car, and it’s very cheap. But also time, and time is so important to us as humans — just to be involved civically, to spend time with your kids, your parents, your loved ones, to spend more times at a bar. Whatever you want to do, that time is so important and that’s what transportation does. It gives you time back.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, yeah, that’s really interesting. Jen, you I know said before the show that you rode that bus, that Red Line. And you’re you’re kind of an advocate for the bus system, though. I don’t want to forget that part of this conversation because it’s a bigger, probably, part of the public transportation picture in the Valley than just the light rail, even though that was such a topic of discussion and still is.
JEN URSO: Well, and I’m thinking what what you’re saying about the time aspect is it’s not just getting any time back, because like when you’re in a car, you’re perpetually engaged with driving your car and like dealing with other crazy drivers and worrying about like weather, your car is behavior, are you going to get a flat tire, all this kind of stuff —s tuff flying off trucks with things coming out the back.
And if you’re on transit — I know we’re talking about walking — but if you’re on transit, you can use that time for other things. So I would take the train or or the bus, and I would be reading a book, or I would be able to get homework or client work done or something like that, where it’s like your quality of time is different.
So it’s like how do you want to spend your time? Is it like a half hour in the car may be fast, but an hour on a train or a bus where you’re thinking and maybe having a conversation with a friend or something like that is is a completely different quality of life issue to me. For me, riding the bus has been, like I rode it as a kid all the time because we couldn’t afford to not ride the bus. And it was it was hard sometimes, but it was also an adventure.
So all of my best memories were usually like walking a place with my mom or even when I like I broke my arm as a kid, we had to take two buses to get down to the hospital. And it sucked, but I mean that you didn’t think about it sucking because you were on the bus. It was just the way to get there, you know.
LAUREN GILGER: And your arm was broken, yeah.
JEN URSO: And my arm was broken, and it hurt.
LAUREN GILGER: Arden, I want to ask you about this and about the development of light rail and how you think about it as someone who’s involved in planning that. Like, how do you think about the link between walkability and light rail and public transportation in general?
ARDEN HOLLOWAY: So I think that light rail probably a lot of us understand that light rail can lead to transit-oriented development, and it already has in the Valley. And one example of that is the CityScape development downtown. While downtown was already one of the more dense areas of Phoenix, light rail has allowed for transit-oriented development to flourish in developments like CityScape, in downtown Mesa, in downtown Tempe.
There are numerous mixed-use developments that include retail, high-density residential, and commercial uses as well that allow for those walkable spaces and those areas around stations that provide a walkable experience for transit users. And both light rail and streetcar can do this.
We actually — since 2008, when Valley Metro’s light rail system opened — there’s been $20 billion in capital investment along the light rail corridor. And that speaks a lot to the power of rail, to be able to provide that development and allow for a more walkable experience for transit users and people who have less access to personal vehicles.
LAUREN GILGER: You led me right to where I wanted to go because I think the other question there is about affordability, right? Because when you’re choosing how you plan a light rail line and where you want that really important capital investment, does it just end up supporting people who can afford to live near it? Because that makes everything around it more expensive. Whoever wants to take this.
JEN URSO: I don’t know if it’s going to go to a good place or not, but it’s like —
LAUREN GILGER: That’s OK.
JEN URSO: I felt like a big huge support of the light rail was that this was now transit that was accessible to people who were upper middle class. So it was like, being a person … who had taken the Red Line and then had to shift to the light rail, it was kind of annoying to be on the train and then all the people would get on for the Suns game or the Diamondbacks game.
LAUREN GILGER: You’re like, “You’re not real public transit users.”
JEN URSO: It wasn’t even that. Like, I’m I’m enthusiastic for anybody to take transit at any time, but it was more like like they didn’t know how to ride a train. They sort of stand in the middle, they take up lots of space, they like stretch out across chairs. And I just thought, it was so clear to me that this was appealing to people because it seemed like it was safe and it was approachable.
But if you had said to those same people, “Well, if you want to go to this other place that’s up the street here, just hop on this bus,” and they’d be like, “Hell no.”
For me, it’s that the light rail seems to be — it’s clean, it’s pretty, it’s so much money to invest into. And I think it’s very valuable. But the buses to me are the key to connecting things really within the city. And I honestly think — as a person who moved here in ’96 from the Philadelphia area, and I took the bus and the train everywhere there — it sucked here in ’96 to try to take the train.
And it’s so much better now. Like buses coming like every 10 or 15 minutes? That did not happen. I was one of those people waiting an hour for the Red Line in the summertime in Mesa. So, yeah, not good.
LAUREN GILGER: David, you’re shakingyour head. Oh, go ahead, Arden.
ARDEN HOLLOWAY: Yeah, I was just going to say that the bus network is really the backbone of a lot of our system, and it complements the other modes as well. We need a multimodal system to be able to like run the system and create that affordable experience.
JEN URSO: Yeah, and I think when a lot of people complain about the transit system here — I think a lot of people who don’t take it — and I’m always sort of amazed. I was thinking of this the other day with the way the buses work is that you can access a bus like every half mile. Like, you’ve got the 15, the 7, the 0, the 8. So no matter where you’re at, you’re accessible to like within a quarter mile of where you need to be.
And even for people who are in a wheelchair or, you know, have other kinds of disabilities, like they can still work that, and there’s also other kinds of systems for for them as well. But it’s possible. And because the city is so walkable, because you have such wide sidewalks. I mean, I tried pushing a wheelchair around downtown Seattle, and it was impossible. So we do have the ability to have that kind of access here.
DAVID CRUMMEY: When you think about walkability, that really benefits the people who can’t drive the most. And one-third of Americans don’t drive for one reason or or another: too young, too old, or disability. A third of Americans don’t drive, and we’ve created a city where you have to drive or rely on someone to drive for you.
And what does that mean for our kids as they’re growing up? What does that mean for the people that make our coffee and pour our wine and and clean our gutters and and all of that is that you’re you’re dedicating a huge portion of your income and your time to something that — how much of us sold our car when the last time you sold it for more than you bought it for? It’s a terrible depreciating asset that just keeps costing us money.
And the cost of the road infrastructure, we never think about that. We’re like, “Light rail’s too expensive. It’s subsidized” I’m like, “Have you seen a road?”
LAUREN GILGER: That was community advocate David Crummey, as well as multidisciplinary artist Jen Urso and Valley Metro transit specialist Arden Holloway at our live The Show and Tell event. We will bring you the final part of our live roundtable discussion on walkability in the Valley tomorrow on The Show.
LAUREN GILGER: But first, let's hear more of our live roundtable conversation on walkability in the Valley of the Sun. It's part of our first inaugural live event series called The Show and Tell, which we held before a packed house at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix.
Phoenix is an inherently car-centric city. But now we have an expanding light rail system, a thriving city center, and a host of cool restaurants and bars that make it feel a lot more like a real big city. But is it walkable, and what's it like to live here without a car?
To find out, we brought in a few experts from varying points of view: Arden Holloway, a transit specialist for Valley Metro, who navigates life in Phoenix without a car, as well as multidisciplinary artist and mapmaker Jen Urso and David Crummey, a community advocate and transit expert.
We talked about public transportation, light rail, and buses, and what it even means to have a walkable city. And then I asked them about a dark spot in this conversation: pedestrian safety. Phoenix is consistently among the deadliest cities for pedestrians, which really doesn't bode well for walkability. You'll hear Arden first here.
ARDEN HOLLOWAY: I can speak to this a little bit as a planner. So I think there are two main things that we can, two main categories, that we can put street improvements or improvements for pedestrian safety under, and one is street design. So thinking about how curbs are designed and what kinds of infrastructure we put in for pedestrians, so do we have a signalized crosswalk? Are we creating really wide lanes so that people are driving faster? Or are we narrowing those lanes so that people will more naturally drive slowly? This is not something that I do in my work, but it's something that I feel like planners, you know, study and talk about a lot.
So thinking about street design and also enforcing those rules once the built environment is in place to make sure that pedestrians are staying protected by that infrastructure. And light rail actually is a way to improve roadways. It's not just a way to put in a new transit line, it's also adding new pedestrian crosswalks, adding new signals, and improving even the sidewalks along the corridor. So there are a lot of different ways that we can improve pedestrian safety, and it's definitely difficult because we are sprawling, and that's how, you know, the Phoenix metro area developed. But I think that there are ways that we're improving the system that we have, and all of the cities in the Valley are working to improve this, so.
JEN URSO: I mean, I would love to see like an education campaign, too, that, you know, we've thrown up a lot of these like striped crosswalks with even with the lights, and that there's a sign above the light that tells you exactly what to do. Um, you know, "Hey, it's flashing, you're supposed to stop and then proceed," but no one pays attention to it. I feel like it would take such a small bit of effort from, you know, whoever it is, the city transit, whatever, of just being like, "Hey guys, here's how a striped crosswalk works, because we know that you don't have much experience with it."
LAUREN GILGER: It's like having putting in roundabouts, people are like, "What?" Go ahead, David.
JEN URSO: Yeah, they just drive over them, yeah.
DAVID CRUMMEY: I'll add that in Arizona, anytime there's an intersection of a road is a crosswalk, whether or not it's painted or not. And you are required to stop for pedestrians if they're there. How many people do that? I mean, I think about that blinking red light, and I think back to when I learned to drive my car, and I'm like blinking red light, that means you have to stop, treat it as a stop sign. And how many people do that?
Even like when we have our monsoons and there's a blinking red light when the power's out, people just blow through it. And I'm like, "This is how you die."
LAUREN GILGER: But I wonder if it's like a tipping point question, right? Because if we're trying to, you know, create a more walkable city and in which more people actually walk, you know, at some point, will people who are driving get better at that and, you know, not hit people?
DAVID CRUMMEY: So the carnage on our roads is a policy choice. Again, it's all, all a policy choice, right? This is what we decided to invest our dollars in. We want people to get somewhere faster. Faster a car goes, the more likely you are to die, whether you're in the car or out of the car.
But then the other thing is that our cars have gotten heavier, and we all remember our physics class in high school — you know, speed and mass equals bad times. And all of that is a, is just a policy choice. And, and the other thing that, you know, like talking about pedestrian deaths, one of the main reasons that we have wider roads that we choose to do in our at our local decisions, faster roads we choose to do that.
The other thing is that you notice that the, the front bumper height of cars has gotten higher and higher. And that means when you get hit by a car, if you, hopefully none of us do, instead of it hitting your legs and you tumbling up onto the car, it hits your chest and you go under the car.
LAUREN GILGER: So, I think the last major topic I want to hit on is about the heat, which I think we cannot avoid if we want to talk about walkability in this city, especially because it's getting hotter. As anyone who has lived here for a significant amount of time knows, climate change is making the city hotter, the urban heat island effect is making the city hotter, and, you know, sometimes it would be a lot easier to just sit in your air-conditioned car and go where you want to go, especially with kids.
And I think, you know, if we want to talk about master shade plans, I think that's all well and good, but I think this is such a big, big problem. I just wonder what you all make of this.
JEN URSO: I mean, I could tell you like my preparations for dealing with the heat when it's I have to go pick up my son and walk. I mean, I carry like an ice pack in my bag, I have like a mister fan, I wet my shirt down sometimes, I get my hair wet so that I'm cool enough. I mean, it's all pretty insane. But I also navigate by where I can find — where I know where the shade is. So if everybody would just please plant a freaking tree, like on the south side of the road.
You know, the city of Phoenix has been like giving them away for free and planting them for you, which has been great, and I've been working with them. I even created an augmented reality experience where you can see how a tree looks in your yard. So if you want to use that, you can like envision a tree.
You know, reducing the width of the, the street lanes, because riding your bike, walking, everything, you've got that radiant heat coming up off the roads. Um, you know, anything that will just be acknowledging the source of the sun in the summertime, coming from the south, I think in any kind of new building construction needs to seriously consider it. And, you know, I think — I feel like we've got these developers that come in from out of state and they're like, "Wow, sunshine, isn't it great?" And then they put a building that with like all glass and no awnings, and it faces the south. And I was like, "Who's going to work or live in this building?"
DAVID CRUMMEY: In Phoenix, the Sonoran Desert, the natural place of the Sonoran Desert in the summer is hot days and cooler nights. But what we've done is we've taken that hot days, and we've put a large piece of mass to absorb all of that heat that's radiated from our glorious sun during the day, and emit all night long back into it.
LAUREN GILGER: Arden, I will say the light rail cars are notoriously cool. What's your take on this question of the heat?
ARDEN HOLLOWAY: Uh, yeah, I think that we've — we've all talked about natural shade and, uh, planting trees, and there are master shade plans by many of the cities to address this issue and make sure that we're, um, designing cities that are resilient to the extreme heat. And, uh, in addition to natural shade structures, there's also, you know, built shade structures that are being put out on certain intersections and, um, at transit stops and also at park-and-rides as well.
But it is — it is an issue for sure. And there's a lot of work to be done. In terms of our vehicles, um, the light rail vehicles are, uh, unique in I think in our country and also the world in that they have, we have twice the units, or twice the number of AC units, of a typical light rail vehicle. So that's why they're able to stay cool. But, yeah, the answer is, you know, thinking about policy changes and implementing plans for shade that include both natural, you know, tree shade and also built canopies.
JEN URSO: And underground tunnels.
LAUREN GILGER: That was artist Jen Urso, Valley Metro’s Arden Holloway, and community advocate David Crummey, talking about walkability in Phoenix and the challenges to it at our first live The Show and Tell event at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix.
Our next edition of The Show and Tell will be next month on August 30th at Changing Hands in Tempe. It'll be hosted by my wonderful co-host, Mark Brodie, and they'll talk all about designing Phoenix. What makes a Valley building iconic?
Good morning, it's The Show on KJZZ 91.5. I am Lauren Gilger and we're back with the final part of our live community roundtable on walkability in Phoenix featuring transit expert David Crummey, multidisciplinary artist Jen Urso, and Valley Metro transit specialist Arden Holloway.
I want to end with a couple of bigger questions because I know you all have bigger thoughts about this issue. Like, what are we after in a walkable city? Like, is this at its core about wanting to live in a real community and actually interact with the people in it? Or do we not want that? What do you think?
DAVID CRUMMEY: I don't know if we want that. I mean, I want it and I know a lot of us, probably this room wants that. But but I think about like our so many of the issues that we complain about — affordable housing, homelessness, unsheltered homelessness especially — and you think about like, "Oh, the light rail, that's where it is." We have banned we have made so much of the Valley private property. You think about we have segregated ourselves in communities by race, by by economic class, by by politics. I think we're we're more racially segregated today than we were 70 years ago, which is bonkers.
But it's so much of that is the idea that, "Oh, don't go to wherever, Central and Thomas, because there's too many homeless people there." I've been out, I interviewed — we had some volunteers from Starbucks and we had someone for like 127th Avenue and Beardsley or something, that store — and and the same thing that the person downtown Phoenix talked about was how many people were coming into the stores to use the restroom, and things like, that's not a specific thing to any one spot.
You know, like I think about Civic, what was what's the the Civic Space Park? Civic Space Civic Space Park and the development that was right there that's now the hotel and Rozz Development Fund used to be there, used to have the skating rink. That used to be Patriot Park and that used to be where the homeless was, and it was scary. I don't know, I walked by it when I was 13, 14, and it was normal, but I don't know, I just was always walking by and that was normal.
But we got rid of that space, and we keep getting rid of spaces where homelessness is visible and keep concentrating it more and more, or pushing people. And and I think we almost like don't want the friction of knowing that our friends and neighbors are in trouble. And if we don't think about it, I think that there is this tendency to avoid all friction. But what is life but friction? Of interacting with someone else, about being challenged, and and to me, that's that's part of it is like how do you have a good time if you always know what you're gonna get?
LAUREN GILGER: I like that. Go ahead, Jen.
JEN URSO: We're so afraid. Like, you know, I don't know if it's COVID — I mean, I think this happened before COVID too — but that we're so afraid that something's going to happen, like, "Oh, I don't want to go there because it's going to be unsafe," or like, "What if like a homeless person talks to me?" Oh my god, you know they're people, they're actually human beings.
Um, and like like that, I don't know what image we're projecting of what is the most catastrophic thing that could possibly happen if you have to interact with somebody you don't really like or somebody who's kind of icky. But like that fear is like a privilege.
You know, like we we can have those fears because we're not actually in danger of anything except for maybe getting in a car accident. So, I mean, for me, a lot of this issue — and we talked about this when we were prepping for this — was like, what is our what do we want in life? Like, this isn't an issue about how we build our city or how we build our roads or whether we like walking in the heat.
It's like, how do you want to like actually experience life and human beings and and and what kind of society do you want to live in? It's like hard deep questions that touch like all of these aspects, you know, that that feed into our reason why we vote for, you know, a bigger, wider, faster freeway, or, you know, it's not necessarily we feel like we need to get somewhere fast but we're maybe being told like, "It's important to get somewhere fast," we're like, "Yes, yes, it's important to get somewhere fast." I don't know why, I don't know why what I'm going to do with that extra time, go home and binge-watch TV shows. Is that the quality of life that you want?
And I'm not saying that I don't watch binge-watch shows, but how am I actually experiencing life? How am I interacting with the world? Like, what kind of quality of experience am I having? And then, how can I like kind of build my life around that?
LAUREN GILGER: Does that make your your art richer, you think?
JEN URSO: I think so. And and to be honest, I feel like this comes from I can think back to walking to the grocery store with my mom or walking to the laundromat with my mom and her pointing out things to me like, "Oh look at the tiger lilies. Let's stop and watch the train go by. Let's count how many train cars there are." So, she like nurtured that sense of paying attention to the world around me and picking up on the most mundane, dirty, gross things that were never labeled that way to me, and just was beauty and life and, you know, experience.
LAUREN GILGER: All right, Arden, last word to you here. How do you think about these issues on that scale?
ARDEN HOLLOWAY: I guess what I'm picking up on is that like technology is partly, and the the way that we live our lives is leading to this avoiding friction with others, and not wanting to interact with other people as much. And I would add to that, that if you have a space or built environment that's encouraging you to use that space and to gather with others, that that will allow us to interact with each other more and um maybe come up against more friction um and lead with that philosophy that Jen’s mom taught her, you know, of paying attention and interacting with people who you might not with otherwise.
LAUREN GILGER: That was Valley Metro’s Arden Holloway alongside artist Jen Urso and community advocate David Crummey talking about walkability in Phoenix and the challenges to it at our first live The Show and Tell event at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix.
Our next edition of The Show and Tell will be next month on August 30th at Changing Hands in Tempe. It'll be hosted by my wonderful co-host, Mark Brodie, and they'll talk all about designing Phoenix: What makes a Valley building iconic?
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A crowd is expected to gather in Phoenix to mark the day. Among them will be Thomas H. Begay, 101, who is among the last two remaining Code Talkers. -
Cities around the Phoenix area are reducing their take on the Colorado River and leaving water in Lake Mead. Millions of dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act are helping ease the pain. -
The railway company says they are increasing their freight service frequency between Phoenix and the intermodal facility north of Dallas due to increased demand. -
Ahead of Diana Taurasi’s Ring of Honor induction this weekend, the Phoenix Mercury updated a street sign bearing her name and unveiled a new mural in downtown Phoenix. -
Shakira and Burna Boy closed things out with the official World Cup anthem of this year’s tournament. And one Phoenix dancer was hand-picked to dance with Shakira in the show.
