#024 Benjamin de la Pena - Agile Cities

On The Edge

In this episode I learned a lot from speaking with Benjamin de la Pena who has many years of experience in urban development, informal transportation, and agile cities. He was the first-ever Chief of Strategy and Innovation for the Seattle Department of Transportation. He initiated the first-ever city-wide Public Life Study to measure vibrancy and to understand how people use the right-of-way as public space. He chairs the Global Partnership for Informal Transportation; writes and curates a fortnightly newsletter called Makeshift Mobility, and, serves on several boards including the US Advisory Committee of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy I was introduced to Benjamin by Gina Lucarelli from the United Nations Development Programme whom I interviewed for episode 7 of this podcast last year, all about accelerating sustainable development, who told me about his unique work that sees the beauty and reality of informal transformation, and sure enough he was. Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bdelapena/ https://www.agilecity.co/ https://www.gpitransportation.org/ https://makeshiftmobility.substack.com/ https://www.itdp.org/