Cityspeak

In the season finale of CitySpeak, Los Angeles City Planning Director Vince Bertoni shares some of the joys and challenges of running one of the largest urban planning organizations in the nation.

Eric Jaffe is the Editorial Director at Sidewalk Labs, an urban innovation company with a plan to tackle sustainability and affordability in cities around the world. Eric joins Max to highlight some of the company’s revolutionary technologies.

The design of school buses in the U.S. has remained mostly unchanged for decades, yet school buses make up the largest public transportation system in the country, moving 27 million children every day. Hear from Ritu Narayan, the founder and CEO of Zūm, a startup that has set out to give the yellow school bus a full system upgrade.

Doane Liu is the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Department of Convention and Tourism Development. His sole mission—to raise up Los Angeles’ status as a convention and tourism destination—has been dealt a serious setback ever since the coronavirus spread across the Southland. Max and Doane dig into the numbers and forecast just how long the decline in tourism might last.

How to solve as stubborn a problem as housing affordability? Perhaps start by putting an entrepreneur, a technologist, and a world-famous architect in the same room. Bjarke Ingels, Roni Bahar, and Nick Chim talk about their latest venture Nabr, a startup on a mission to put more people on a path to homeownership.