Season 1 Episode 20:
ALISSA WALKER WITH CURBED SHARES HER STORY ABOUT BECOMING A JOURNALIST FOCUSSED ON URBAN ISSUES
Contrary to popular belief and the song, people do walk in LA and it is possible to live a car-light lifestyle there as well.
Show Notes
Alissa Walker is the Urbanism editor at Curbed and she authors the column Word on the Street, highlighting the pioneering transit, clever civic design, and game-changing policy affecting our cities.
She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a co-host of LA Podcast, a contributor to the KCRW show Greater LA, and a mom to the city’s two most enthusiastic public transit riders.
From her bio at Curbed…
“Alissa Walker connects people with where they live through writing, speaking, and walking. As the urbanism editor at Curbed, she authors the column Word on the Street, highlighting the pioneering transit, clever civic design, and game-changing policy affecting our cities.
For her writing on design and urbanism, Alissa has been named a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow and Journalist of the Year by Streetsblog Los Angeles. In 2012 her project Good Ideas for Cities was selected for inclusion in the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2015 she received the Design Advocate award from the LA chapter of the American Institute of Architects. She is also the co-founder of design east of La Brea, a nonprofit that has received two National Endowment for the Arts grants supporting its LA design events.”
We cover a wide variety of topics in this episode, including walking in LA, the impacts of Covid-19 on transit and transportation, bike share, and so much more.
Additional Helpful Links
Alissa’s May 20 opinion piece: Coronavirus is not fuel for urbanist fantasies: This moment should be about reassessing our broken cities
Alissa’s May 19 LA Slow Streets interview on KCRW
Alissa’s May 13 article about Covid-19 Impacting her family
Missing Persons “Walking in LA”
Curbed article on Bike Share
The Pandemic Has Turned Los Angeles Into a Walker City by Geoff McFetridge, NYTimes, April 23, 2020
“When this is over, I don’t want the traffic to come back. I want all this extra time with my family. I want to hold on to this quietness.”
“I want to see people walking our streets and not feel that their presence is somehow related to the world’s falling apart.”
Audio Production by Active Towns
A not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping communities create a Culture of Activity.
Creative Commons License: Attributions Non-Commercial No Derivatives 2020
Please consider supporting the Active Towns Podcast by making a donation or becoming Patron
You can reach John Simmerman at john@activetowns.org
Music: Indie a la Mode by Will Dan De Crommert and Reflect for Later by William L Newman both via AudioBlocks.com
