Shaping The Human Habitat & The Future of Mobility in Smart Communities, with Mike Day

Hi #SmartCommunity Friends and welcome to Mobility March! This month I have 2 great episodes for you all about the theme of mobility. In this episode of the Smart Community Podcast, I have a great chat with Mike Day from integrated planning, design and placemaking practice Hatch RobertsDay. Mike tells us about his background in town planning and why he is so passionate about shaping neighbourhoods and making better places for humans and nature.

We have a great discussion about his aversion to the term Smart and the importance of long-term thinking in building sustainable, connected and liveable cities. Mike shares a great example of this regarding putting a train line in a new suburb, and how some governments don’t do it because they are caught up in short term thinking.

Mike and I explore how we can make more accessible neighbourhoods that privilege the transport modes of walking and cycling over cars, and why it’s town planning and design to blame for our current car dependence. We talk about the decline of kids walking to school and the importance of planning places and cities for children. Mike then tells us a bit about the history of Copenhagen’s intentional creation of a culture of active transport and what we can learn from precedents like that.

We finish our chat discussing the emerging trend of the distributed or hybrid workplace, the future of mobility in our neighbourhoods, plus the new dual mandate for Transport Departments of both movement AND place. As always we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it.

Connect with Mike on LinkedIn and Twitter @walkplace

Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community

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Podcast Production by Perk Digital