Category: Interviews

Doug Gordon is a co-host of the popular podcast The War on Cars. He is also a writer, public speaker, TV producer, safe streets advocate and passionate believer in cities for people. He has written for The Guardian, The New Republic, Salon, Curbed, Jalopnik, The New York Daily News and Streetsblog.

As a TV producer with credits for PBS, ABC, Discovery, History, Travel and NatGeo, Doug knows how to tell a good story. Through his communications consulting business, Brooklyn Spoke Media, he has advised nonprofits and mobility companies on communications strategies that make the case for safer, smarter streets. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife Leora and their two children.

Natalia Olszewska: Welcome, Doug! Please tell us a little bit about what led you to start The War on Cars podcast.

Doug Gordon: My background is in television production, and I have worked on many different shows, mostly documentaries, with a focus on science and history. I was always interested in cities and safe streets, so I also did a lot of advocacy work in my neighborhood, pushing for bike lanes and bike parking.

Over time, I did more of that and started writing about it because my background in television often involved explaining complicated issues to general audiences. This skill translated well into my activism.

A lot of the issues we’re interested in are complex, and regular people don’t always understand them and can’t be expected to. So I started doing a lot of writing and explaining about how things work and how they could work better.

Ankita is committed to building a future where all children and families thrive and flourish. She has over ten years of global experience working on her mission through partnerships with city agencies and the private, non-profit, and philanthropic sectors. She is the Director of Climate Program at Capita, an independent, nonpartisan think tank with a global focus. Previously, Ankita served as the Knowledge for Policy Director at Bernard Van Leer Foundation. She led a multi-functional team responsible for sharing tools, knowledge, and resources for advancing early childhood policy that supports the well-being of children and caregivers in cities.

Michal Matlon: You work on creating cities that are good for children. What does that mean?

Ankita Chachra: Nurturing environments and loving and attentive caregivers are the cornerstones of a healthy, happy, and thriving childhood. Babies need food, sleep, and security, and much of that depends on the caregiver, given their limited mobility in the early years.

Going even further, there are studies that point out how a woman’s mental health during pregnancy and her chronic stress have a direct impact on the outcomes for the child and their development.

This aspect of psychology fascinates me because how well we can take care of children inherently depends on how well we can care for adult caregivers and their mental health.

Davide is an architect and director of TA Tuning Architecture in Milan, a team involved in applying neuroscience to the design of buildings and urban spaces. He is the founder and director of the Neuroscience Applied to Architectural Design post-graduate program at the IUAV University of Venice. Davide is also a director and co-founder of an architecture magazine Intertwining and author of the book Tuning Architecture with Humans.

Natalia Olszewska: How did you become interested in the application of neuroscience in architecture?

Davide Ruzzon: I’ve always been interested in psychology. At the end of college, I was tempted to pursue a psychological route at the university in Padua. However, I decided to enroll in the architectural university because my father, being a builder, influenced me in that direction. I happily embraced this path during my life.

The passion for human behaviors, needs, and complexity always interested me. I read Freud and explored classical psychology approaches. Around twelve years ago, I met Juhani Palasmaa at a book festival. We connected over a glass of red wine, and he urged me to pay attention to neuroscience, describing it as intriguing.

Sophia is a passionate advocate for designing cities that prioritize the well-being of both people and the planet. As a Director at Gehl, an urban design practice on a mission to create more equitable, healthy, and sustainable cities, she leads the Foundation and Philanthropy Team. In this role, she guides her team in shaping change in neighborhoods and communities towards better health. Sophia’s commitment to enhancing the quality of urban spaces stems from her background as an anthropologist and deep understanding of the human experience within the built environment. Her expertise ensures that urban transformation processes result in lasting social and health impacts.

Michal: Let’s start with your story. How did you even begin to think about people, cities, culture, and the connection between those?

Sophia: I’m from California, from a hippie, tiny town. My father was one of the first cohorts in the Peace Corps; he lived in a Mayan Indian village in Guatemala. It had a transformative impact on his life. He raised me with a global outlook despite our small, closed town. 

He instilled in me a curiosity about culture and the world. That’s why I went into anthropology, to understand. I went to university in Portland, Oregon. I studied community development and cultural anthropology.

When I was in university, I studied abroad in Copenhagen. I was very interested in architecture and urbanism, and I was interested in the role that urban environments play in people’s culture and experience of the world. Why is it that certain environments shape people’s everyday decisions?

Keith (he/him) is an Associate and Senior Director of Experience Outcomes for the global design agency Forge Media and Design. He holds a master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies from York University. He serves as a Fellow at McLaughlin College with peer-reviewed published works in Taylor and Francis Architectural Science Review. Keith is a member of the BrainXChange Design and Dementia Community of Practice, a board member of the Canadian Healthcare Infrastructure, a guest lecturer for the Ontario Association of Architects, the Neuroscience Applied to Architectural Design program in Venice, and other organizations. He’s also the founder of COUP, The Community of Unlikely Partnerships.

Natalia Olszewska: Keith, your journey through the world of design is special. You focus on the experiential aspects of design. What does that mean and how did you get there?

Keith Francis: I always thought there was a relationship between creativity and how it affected the human experience. It was often frustrating to work in a creative field where aesthetics, color palette, form, materiality, all of those things were leading the discussion. Especially when that happened at the expense of people who felt absent from the process.

The design palette was generally placed before the lived experience of people, whether they were neurotypical or neurodiverse or different cultures. I always felt that it should have been reversed.

Cleo Valentine is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on examining the impact of architectural form on neuroimmunology and neuroinflammation. Cleo received her MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies from the University of Cambridge, MSc in Sustainable Urban Development at the University of Oxford and Bachelor’s in Urban Systems and Economics from McGill University and the University of Copenhagen.

She has worked as a computational systems designer at Open Systems Lab (formerly Wikihouse), has held positions as the Neuroaesthetics Fellow at The Centre for Conscious Design and as a guest tutor at the Royal College of Art and the Architecture Association in London. She is currently an associate at Cambridge Architectural Research Ltd., where she provides consultancy services on public health and architecture.

Natalia Olszewska: I’m excited to talk to you because this is going to be a conversation where we can dive deep into human physiology and how it relates to architecture. What brought you to neuroarchitecture in the first place?

Cleo Valentine: My interest in neuroarchitecture comes from both my academic and personal experience. I first studied at McGill University in Montreal, where I did a program called Urban Systems.

It was at the intersection of urban studies and human geography, examining how people move through space and how urban environments evolve over time. It gave me an interdisciplinary approach to studying architecture and cities.

While at McGill, I had the opportunity to study at the University of Copenhagen on an exchange program. I became interested in going there after watching ‘The Human Scale’.

Working at the intersection of architecture and neuroscience, Tye Farrow is a world-recognized pioneer tackling how what we create gives or causes health. With award-winning projects around the globe that enact salutogenic design – design that actively incites health – he is the first Canadian architect to have earned a Master of Neuroscience Applied to Architecture (University of Venice IUAV), has a Master of Architecture in Urban Design (Harvard University), and a Bachelor of Architecture degree (University of Toronto).

Natalia Olszewska: You’re the first Canadian architect who studied neuroscience applied to architecture in Venice. What pushed you in this direction?

Tye Farrow: It started with our practice, Farrow Partners, which involves work with knowledge organizations, health organizations, and value-based companies with a clear purpose.

Early in my career, I began understanding the relationship between architecture and its effects on people and health on different levels. Health, for me, is like a table with four legs. And its four legs represent different ways design impacts life around it.

First is design’s impact on the natural environment. We designed some of the first and largest LEED projects in Canada, of their typology. Then we began to understand design’s impact on our physical body. You may know the New York City Active Design Guidelines describing how buildings can encourage you to move and be physically active.

Anjan Chatterjee is a Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and the founding director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics.

He received his BA in Philosophy from Haverford College, his MD from the University of Pennsylvania, and his neurology residency from the University of Chicago. Formerly Chair of Neurology at Pennsylvania Hospital, Dr. Chatterjee’s research interests include neuroaesthetics, spatial cognition, language, and neuroethics.

Anjan is the author of The Aesthetic Brain: How we evolved to desire beauty and enjoy art.

Natalia Olszewska: Anjan, could you tell our readers about your background?

Anjan Chatterjee: I’m a neurologist and a cognitive neuroscientist. For over thirty years, I’ve studied spatial attention, language, and the relationship between language and space. I’ve done work in neuroethics because advances in neuroscience have ethical implications for how we live.

I have also been working in neuroaesthetics for over twenty years. When I started in the late nineties, there was almost nothing in the scientific literature on this topic. If you look at the publication rates in neuroaesthetics and neuroarchitecture, there was an inflection about ten years ago where the field started to take off.

Susan is the founder and executive director of the International Arts + Mind Lab, a pioneering neuroaesthetics initiative from the Pedersen Brain Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Her work lies at the intersection of brain sciences and the arts and how our unique response to aesthetic experiences can amplify human potential. She is the co-author of Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us with Ivy Ross, Vice President for Hardware Design at Google. 

Susan is also the designer of the Impact Thinking model, an evidence-based research approach to accelerate how we use the arts to solve problems in health, wellbeing, and learning. In addition to her role at IAM Lab, she also serves as co-director of the NeuroArts Blueprint project in partnership with the Aspen Institute.

Natalia Olszewska: What’s your story, Susan? When did you start to think about the brain, art, and architecture?

Susan Magsamen: When I was little, my twin sister had a farming accident where she almost lost her leg. We were always close, and it was very traumatic for us both. It separated us because she had to stay home for a year, and I had to go out into the world without her. And what was crazy about that is that I’m an introvert, and she’s an extrovert, so our roles were reversed.

Before the accident, my sister wasn’t an artist, but she started making art partly because she was bored. She also realized that she had a deep fear from trauma stuck inside of her. And she couldn’t talk about it because there were no words to express it. At that time, fifty years ago, we didn’t know much about Broca’s area of the brain and how it can shut down because of trauma.

Gábor Bindics studied cultural management at the University of Pécs and alternative energies at the Budapest University of Technology. He worked at the National Portrait Gallery in London and founded a silent cinema in Paris. He is the founder of the Cultural Centre Dunaj and the Švihaj Šuhaj cycle courier service. He is currently leading the project of the Old Market Hall in Bratislava and working on the project of reopening the Grössling Baths.

Michal Matlon:  Gábor, you said that what interests you the most is how spaces impact social life. Could you tell us when you first realized that spaces could have this impact? What made you think about it?

Gábor Bindics: Fifteen years ago, I was living in Paris. Together with my friends, we set up a cinema in the center, near the Luxembourg Garden. We found an unused space and looked for its potential. But to see this potential, we first had to understand the space well.

An architect usually responds to such an understanding with architecture. But I was interested in how we could work with this space without adding mass. That’s when I started reading about the philosophy and sociology of space.