Highlighting the ways in which the pandemic’s disruption is unleashing innovation, panelists share their hope for streamlining public-private collaborations to solve some of the region’s housing, transportation, and equity challenges.1
TPR excerpts an August 7 City Age: Silicon Valley Digital Roundtable moderated by former Santa Monica city manager and Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles, Rick Cole, with San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, and San Jose State University President Mary Papazian who discuss the status of urbanism, infrastructure, and design in Silicon Valley. Highlighting the ways in which the pandemic’s disruption is unleashing innovation and entrepreneurial bureaucrats, panelists share their hope for streamlining public and private sector collaboration to solve some of the region’s most pressing challenges of housing, transportation, and equity.
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If there's one thing that I hope you remember it’s that critical infrastructure is not just roads and bridges; it is social housing and social cohesion. Obviously, our roads and our bridges need investment, but so does our need for affordable housing, so does our need for a sense of fairness, a sense that families can support one another and that social cohesion is part of infrastructure as well.
Rick Cole: We have this moment to think. And that's actually a rare opportunity, not to predict what the future will be, but rather to think about what we agree on. How do we use this time and what's the role of the academic sector in driving a conversation or consensus about getting Silicon Valley's act together on infrastructure? How do we involve the brains of the tech sector in solving some of these big challenges?
Mary Papazian: We really think that as a public university in the heart of Silicon Valley —right in the downtown core of San Jose that draws students and employees from across the region—we face, on multiple levels, all of these issues. We're a perfect space for bringing the various stakeholders together and really looking beyond the immediate disagreements toward future goals.
We now have more millennials and Gen Z than we have baby boomers, so we're in a transitional moment. My new nieces, who were born in May, are going to be 80 in 2100. So, our frame of reference isn't just the next five or 10 years, the truth of the matter is that we have people with us now who will live to see the next millennium. Educational spaces are a way to move the goals even a little bit further out. And it's less threatening when you can look a little further out.2
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If we set those goals further out so that the immediate threats of change aren’t there, then I think we can bring the stakeholders together and lean into longer-term solutions. Once we have agreed on longer-term solutions, we can then break it down into the short-term steps. I would start there, with education at the core.
- 1. Source: PlaNetiZen
- 2. Climate change is still a reality for us, and our newer generations know this. It will create an urgency for them that means that cities won't go away. They will still want an integrated transit system and to be able to live in places where they can sometimes commute and sometimes stay at home.