Chris Yip  0:01  
Welcome to Coffee with Chris Yip, the official podcast of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto. I'm Chris Yip, the Dean here at U of T engineering. In each episode, I'll be sitting down for coffee with someone from our amazing global community to talk about what they're working on, and how it places us at the heart of bold solutions to design a better world. In this first season, I want to zoom in on "the why?" finding out what drives the curiosity and passion of our extraordinary community. Once you understand that, I hope you'll start to see what makes this place so special, and that you'll be inspired to make, innovate and create along with us. 

Building back better. It's a phrase we've been hearing a lot of lately, but it's a little vague. What should we build? Where should we build it? And how can we ensure we're getting good value for our money? Professor Shoshanna Saxe can help. She's an expert in the social and environmental impacts of large infrastructure projects, such as new transit lines for highways. Using data driven tools such as lifecycle analysis, her research helps us learn from our past mistakes and points us towards optimal solutions for safer, cleaner and more livable cities. 

Hey, Shoshanna, how's it going?

Shoshanna Saxe  1:18  
Good, how are you doing?

Chris Yip  1:19  
Good. So this is a big topic, obviously. How did you end up in this particular field? And what got you excited about large infrastructure projects?

Shoshanna Saxe  1:29  
Well, for me, it was a pretty circuitous path. I like to tell my students that...I think until recently, anytime you had asked me what I thought I would be doing in five years, I would have guessed wrong. In high school, I knew that I liked math, and I liked art. Maybe I should do architecture, or maybe I should do engineering. And I happened to be on a walk with my mum one day, and we walked by an interesting looking bridge and she casually said, "That's what engineers build." And I was like, "Yeah, in for that." But I wanted to do something sort of fun and kind of edgy so I originally thought, "Okay, I'll be a demolitions expert, I'll become an engineer and then I'll learn how to blow things up safely and responsibly." I went to my first structural engineering class and the professor, at least from my perspective, made the deeply non-strategic example of starting with building a suburban mall. I was like, "That doesn't sound very interesting or very fun and that's really not what I want to do." I had a really exciting geotechnics professor, and they were talking about how if you work underground soil is always different and hard and unpredictable. And I'm like, "Hard and unpredictable, that's what I want to do." And so I did a master's at MIT in geotechnics, worked on grants for seed storage, and I was always very interested in sustainability. And after my master's degree, I thought, okay, I've been in school for six years learning about engineering, I want to go engineer something. And I was very lucky and I got a job at Arup in Toronto. I was one of three people on the geotechnics team when I was hired. And after a couple months, because of a variety of people moving on and changing jobs, I was the only person on the Geotechnics team. So I was five or six months out of school, I was the only person working on geotechnics. We were building huge underground construction processes and so I ended up being very junior, but at a lot of senior meetings because somebody had to show up in person and we couldn't always fly someone in from New York. And over time, I realized that the questions I was more interested in than what's the friction angle of the soil was what should we be building? And how should we be building it? And what are the early stage decisions that are feeding into that? And how does that align with our long-term goals, particularly around trying to make a sustainable world. And that drove me back to grad school so after a few years of consulting, I went and got my PhD. And I didn't think I was ever going to be an academic because I wanted to be able to decide what city I lived in and just as I needed a job, a professor at U of T moved on and a spot opened up and I applied and you guys hired me - thank you very much - and here I am.

Chris Yip  4:07  
Terrific. And we are very happy to have you on faculty for sure. And I think we all have five year plans, and they always seem to be constantly changing and evolving the way cities do. I was thinking as you were going through, how do you think people envision cities back when the city of York - whatever - that Toronto was back in 1800s? How does planning change between what that was to where we are today?

Shoshanna Saxe  4:33  
That's an interesting question. I'm currently reading a book called Metropolis, which is the history of cities. And it starts many, many 1000s of years ago, so well before the city of York, but it sounds like a lot of the driving forces of cities have been fairly stable. Often cities were a central gathering point of lots of different skills and peoples and backgrounds and languages and that's what they still are today. A lot of what people thought they were doing in the city and a lot of the motive to build big infrastructure was an idea that the future could be better than the past. We could build sanitation systems and not have cholera epidemics in our cities, we could build transportation that would let people move around rapidly and have access to new places and it could be a different way of moving than before, we could build the new modern type of housing, which has been apartments or suburbs at different times. There was a lot of big ambition and big construction in the 20th century. I think right now, we're struggling with what we hope the future will be like we're having a hard time coming up with an image or a sense that we could build our way to something better and a lot of people saying what we want to have is preserve the way it was. And it's very hard to both imagine and follow through on really big things, when we're not driven by a vision that it's going to take us somewhere better.

Chris Yip  5:58  
Can you give me example, maybe of a mega project that you yourself have actually studied and maybe how you measured its social and environmental impact.

Shoshanna Saxe  6:07  
I did a PhD on two large projects; the holistic lifecycle environmental impact of the Jubilee Line Extension in London and the Sheppard subway in Toronto. And I did the two not so much as a comparison but just to have multiple samples because if you only have one, you don't know if what you're seeing is particular to that place, or is some sort of truth about the nature of the infrastructure itself. And so for that project, I looked at what was the environmental impact of construction itself in terms of you know, how much materials needed to go into building each project? What were the impacts of the construction processes and the disruption over time? And then once the project opened, what really happened? How did people change their travel patterns? What was the - in particular - the movement away from traveling by car to traveling on these new transportation lines? How much energy did it take to operate the lines themselves? So you build something, and then you need to put power and materials into it every year to keep it running, to keep the trains going by and the lights on. And then finally, what was its impact on land use? Transportation, especially rail transportation, has been known for a long time to be the most powerful tool we have to influence the pattern of where people live. So if you live in a big, low density house, you're using more heat to keep it warm, you have more lights to be able to see and you also tend to fill it with more stuff. The knock-on environmental impacts of choosing to build and choosing to live in low density places is really high. And so if you can combine rail public transit infrastructure with high density living, you get multiple benefits, both in terms of people's travelling behavior and also in terms of just at home construction. An apartment with shared walls uses less heating energy, things like that. And what I found was mixed for both the Jubilee Line Extension, and for the Sheppard subway. There was a lot of materials used in construction, and they were both mostly built underground and when you build underground, you need to use a lot of concrete to keep the ground out of the hole you made. And then over time, there wasn't necessarily as much changing to transportation, from car trips to public transit, as you might have wanted. In London this was in part because people were already taking public transit a lot so it was more about keeping things that way, as opposed to making a change. And in Toronto, there was a change, but the Sheppard subway only let people go a little bit west and then south. And so if you had to go more west, or east or north, it wasn't taking you where you needed to go and so people tended to still need to drive in those directions and once you're in the habit of driving, you tend to drive a lot. So if the public transit system isn't really taking you where you need to go, people, once they have a car, they use it. And the land use stuff was also more mixed, again, for opposite reasons. In Toronto, there was a lot of zoning control so there was only the ability to densify around particular stations for a few blocks and then after that the law said the area had to stay relatively low density. And in London, there were lots and lots of stations, so there wasn't necessarily a need to build right around those right away. So both probably paid back their greenhouse gas by now but there certainly was an opportunity to do better both in being more efficient in design and more aggressive in terms of building for mode change and land use intensification.

Chris Yip  9:39  
Yeah, it's a compelling and complex problem, right? You build infrastructure. It's difficult to remove roads, it's difficult to put a new transit because you've got built infrastructure. And I'm struck by - I'm not sure if you saw this - there was an article I saw that there's this new sort of $400 billion mega city that they want to build in the desert. You're smiling. Our listeners can't see this but Shoshanna is smiling right now - and it'd be interesting to sort of get your thoughts on that sort of what people are thinking of doing, let's just build somewhere where there's nothing.

Shoshanna Saxe  10:12  
The idea of perfecting the new technological city is evergreen and very old. Every time people come up with it, they think they're having a new idea. This has been around for all of urban history that I know of, and certainly has come up over and over and over again, in the 20th and 21st century. Cities are complex, and they're messy, and they're built on layers of themselves and that's part of what makes them beautiful and functional but it also makes them hard and difficult, and sometimes dirty and challenging, and things wear out. And so for a long time, people have wanted to bring order to the city. We have to make it make sense, we have to make a numerical, there's going to be some new tool, which is going to make it better and so we should start from scratch and build something totally new. And sometimes in history, they've taken an old city and raised it to the ground and built something totally new in the new logical order. Even in the 20th century, we saw this with some clearing people saying this is a bad way to do a city, we're going to knock this all down and build something better. The new $400 billion city, it's the same old idea and has many of the same pitfalls. One, in a resource constrained world where we're struggling with climate change, it's inherently unsustainable to start building from scratch like that, because you're consuming a huge amount of resources, you're wasting a lot of resources that have already been used, and you're turning natural land into human constrained land, you're just destroying the natural environment. So it's inherently a bad idea. But it's also really hard to do well because part of what works well in cities is that complexity, that layering, that learning with time. As Jane Jacobs had said, "A city needs both old parts and new parts", and when you build from scratch, you can't do that. And very logically, plan cities have really struggled. So if you look at Canberra, the capital of Australia, or Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, these perfectly planned cities tend to get the scale kind of wrong, and to not really take into account the way people really live in spaces, and have often tended to be really unpopular and need a lot of retrofitting. So I roll my eyes and smile at the idea, I think it's very unlikely to actually happen. Lots of countries that have tried this in recent history have given up in some way, have found that they don't succeed, and that you can't contrive a city, that it is made of forces more than just money and concrete.

Chris Yip  12:46  
Recovering from the pandemic right now, part of the investment the government sees, which is often the case when you're trying to come out of a challenging sort of national crisis, in the sense, is often investment in infrastructure where they want to build things, all these sort of shovel ready projects. What are your thoughts on that right now? How do you think the conversation is going? Are these strategic decisions? Do you think we're thinking big enough?

Shoshanna Saxe  13:08  
I have many thoughts on what we should build after COVID, or as we hopefully recover from it now. So I'm going to try and take them in turn. 

Chris Yip  13:17  
Sure. 

Shoshanna Saxe  13:17  
I think there's a couple questions. First off, one is, is infrastructure, a good way to invest? And I would argue yes, for a couple of reasons, one of which is that it leaves us with something lasting. So if we spend money to build durable goods, we can benefit from that from a long term. A lot of the infrastructure in North America was built as a reaction to the Great Depression and we still live with the benefits of the idea of saying at the time, we should build lots of stuff as a way to get people to work and invest in our country. So building physical stuff can have a lot of advantages and we have a huge infrastructure deficit in our country. Our population grew a lot faster than we built infrastructure and there's also been a change in the type of infrastructure we need as our population has gotten bigger and also, as we're faced more and more with the realities of both trying to mitigate, but also deal with climate change. So lots of stuff to build and lots of advantages of building. There then become a bunch of questions of okay, well, what should we build? And how should we spend our money? And how much money should we spend? And I would argue that we should take that in a couple steps. One, we should stop building stuff that gets us into trouble. The infrastructure that has created a lot of our modern problems like highways, we should stop building that, right? If you're in a hole, step one; stop digging. We have the connectivity we need in most of Canada. There are some exceptions in northern and remote communities but for most of the country, a highway or highway widening is a really, really bad idea. It won't give us very much economic return, if any, it's very unlikely to do anything for congestion, but it's guaranteed to do really disastrous things for the climate. Then we have to think about what can we do and on what timelines. Big infrastructure projects take a really long time to build. Even if we say we're going to throw a lot of money at it, we still need to do the studies and do the design and get shovels in the ground. And we want projects that are shovel worthy, as well as shovel ready. And things that are now shovel ready means they were going to happen anyway given the status quo. So if we want new, extra or better stuff that's outside the easiest path we were already on, we can't go just for the shovel ready projects because a lot of really great, excellent projects are not just sitting around, ready, fully designed. That's not how our system works. So now we better think about time. Big projects are going to take a long time, but they're also important. What do we do that we can do faster, right? We want benefits, we want to see them as soon as possible, and I'm going to talk about things like one to three years. You can't build a subway system in one to three years. Other things that you can do on the transportation side are, you can build a lot of rapid bus lanes, you can build a lot of bike lanes, you can help invest in getting the vehicles to make that possible. And so I'm hoping that in our recovery procedure, we'll see a lot of those types of things. There's other types of more social infrastructure that we know we need, we need more childcare, which is something the federal government and provinces are coming to agreements about. We want more access to nature, right? You can build a park in one to three years, you can also think about how to connect people to existing parks. So these are the types of things that like to see in the short term because it has the advantage of giving people something tangible they can feel, it will help people access the services they need, it will help reduce our environmental impact, it will help bring people back to shared infrastructure after the fear that drove everybody separate, it should help bring people back together, and also it lays the groundwork for people believing that we can build things, right? You hear a lot of fatalism about our ability to build big things like, "Oh, you know, that was something we did in my grandparents generation, we can't do that kind of thing anymore." Once you see it happening, you know that it can happen. And then if we can do this well, it gives us momentum to do the five year and the 10 year projects, which we also need.

Chris Yip  17:07  
So I know - I follow you on Twitter, and I follow you on a number of different media platforms - and I know you wrote a piece in the in the New York Times, actually, I think a couple times you've been in the Times, around this idea of of smart cities, and Toronto has had this - had a number of debates on smart cities, some of it good, some of it bad. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. What do people mean by a smart city in a sense? And what do you think is missing?

Shoshanna Saxe  17:35  
Smart cities mean different things to different people but at its core, the idea is something technological. And certainly that's what it's morphed into become, the idea that we could use tech and gadgets and robots and apps in our phones to make the city better, smoother, easier to access, cheaper, sexier, more exciting. It's an idea that, again, it's like the new city built from scratch in the desert. It's an idea that comes up again on cycles with slightly different names, we're going to take the newest idea and build a city that way. The technological city is deeply disconnected from questions of function. To say that in straight English, it won't work. And it won't work for all kinds of reasons but one of them is really just basic time stuff, right? I'm on my third or fourth computer since becoming a professor. If I was on my third or fourth office building, that would be ridiculous. We can't build cities the way we build tech, because they need to both work much more reliably, right? If your internet has ever cut out, you go, that's fine, I'm going to reboot it. If your water cuts out, these things are life critical. But two, its temporally inconsistent. We expect the physical things we build to last for a really long time. Say if a bridge needs to be replaced after 50 years, we think, "Oh my god, like, who messed this up? I can't believe we're replacing this bridge already." Tech has to be replaced every couple years and it rapidly doesn't work. People talk about privacy or access and what about people who don't have phones? Or what about people who don't want to be monitored all the time by the censors? And those are important questions, but I'm much more focused on, "will it work?" The other thing that frustrates me about this smart city or tech city discussion is that it's about the solution and not about the problem. So we're going to bring all of these sensors and robots and apps and it's going to be really wonderful, but we're not starting from the question of the problem. What's the thing we really want to solve? So if the thing that we really want to solve is, we want to be able to make buildings comfortable with using less energy for heating and cooling and we want to be able to resist more of the extremes that are coming with climate change. We want to stay cool, even when it's really hot, and stay warm even when it's really cold. There are lots of ways to do this that are passive, that don't involve technology or working parts and so are much, much less likely to break down. You can use awnings, so that in the summer when the sun is high, less light gets into your building. But in the winter, when the sun is low, it cuts under the awning. This is a technology that's been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years. You can use insulation, you can use the way you orient the building, you can use proximity of the buildings, old cities and hot climates the buildings tended to be really close together so that all the streets were shaded. None of this involves technology and none of it breaks down if the electricity cuts off or the internet doesn't work. So if we were starting with the problem and taking the problem seriously, we'd put on the table the suite of solutions from totally analog to totally tech and we'd look at them on their merits, right? Which one is easier to do, which one is faster to do, which one is cheaper to do, which one is more robust, and we would evaluate it and come up with the best solution and tech would very rarely win. But instead we're doing it backwards of people having the sense that the tech way is the cool way to do it and I don't want to be left behind out of the cool thing. And so I was feeling and seeing all of these things and finding it shocking that nobody has said them. And so I wrote in the New York Times, and they were like, "Yeah, this is something that should be said," and it got published. From an academic standpoint, it went viral and had a big impact on my life, and hopefully, an impact on the conversation. In February 2020, so very luckily just before the pandemic, I went with my family and the next generation, our kids, to Disney World. And for reasons I will not go into, my family has been to Disney World a lot. So we have been going since the 80s and on this trip, Disney World had become very smart. Everything was on your app, you wear a bracelet, it was supposed to be very seamless, and nothing worked. Every single day, we had some kind of major Disney failure. It was very comical. My brother got locked out of his hotel room because the app and the bracelet didn't work. And the only way to ask for help was on the app, but the app was broken. And whenever you called a person, they were like, "Have you tried the app?" and you're like, "No, but the app is broken." So he was locked in his hotel room for five hours and it was really illuminating. My family was teasing me the whole time. Any time something technological went wrong, we were like, "Oh, it's because we brought you to Disney World. We brought the person who wrote why smart cities are bad", but it was so illuminating. Di sney World -rich, people are only there on vacations, it's not dealing with any of the complexities in an uncontrolled environment with humans and all of their ways, it's in an easy climate, and things went wrong constantly.

Chris Yip  22:28  
One of the challenges, I think, for our community, and that being the community of engineers, is that how do we talk about these technical challenges and insights to a different, quite a varied audience? And I think the work that you do, and the impact that it has is, is one which extends much beyond the sort of classic engineering - civil engineering - community and really reaches out to politicians, city planners, transit authorities, and what is it like talking to and working with - I'm going to say collaborating - with those organizations, those individuals in being able to get across your thoughts and your ideas as it influences their decisions.

Shoshanna Saxe  23:08  
I mean, it's great working with people who are making important decisions about what we're building and what we should prioritize and where that money is coming from. That's one of the things I miss about being an engineer in practice, as opposed to in academia. My job is to think about ideas, which is a huge privilege, but to translate those ideas into reality, given I work on infrastructure, I need other people to pick up on them and follow through on them. Often people are really interested in these ideas. Sometimes they're very familiar with it, but want more of a quantitative understanding, or are hoping the research can spend more time on the problem than they are able to in their day to day jobs. Sometimes it's a totally new way of thinking of things that they haven't considered. A lot of my work is specializing in holistic impacts of how do we think both about the direct impacts of this choice? But how do we also think about the secondary and the tertiary impacts? And how do we wrap all of that up? And that's not how most people were trained. We're a very linear society; A takes you to B, we have this one problem, we'll solve this one solution. Thinking about things in circular or holistic ways is new and uncomfortable for a lot of people and so it's very fun when making presentations or talking to decision makers to try and talk about the connections and watch that for some people, it clicks and it's new but I never know if it's working or in what way it's working or what contribution is really being had. You never know how people interpret them or what they take away from it or what they find useful. My approach has been to take as many opportunities to work with as many people, share as many thoughts as possible, talk to as many people as possible in the hopes that for some people it will click and they'll build on it and take it forward. But I can't prove if they are, if they're not, and if you or anyone has insight, I would love that for my tenure file because it would be really helpful. (Laughing)

Chris Yip  25:05  
That's actually a great place to end off on in the sense that I think one of the most important things for our faculty, for our students, for our community - engineering community - to think about is how does their work translate into real world impact and across all sectors, whether it's a direct technical impact or whether it's actually a larger, and as you said, holistic social impact. And I think the research you're doing and the way you're able to bring different communities together and really look at these problems from such a broad perspective, is really important for where we're going to be in the future. Thank you so much for taking the time today to meet and to chat about this super important project.

Shoshanna Saxe  25:42  
Thank you for having me.

Chris Yip  25:43  
Thanks again for listening to Coffee with Chris Yip. If you want to catch up on past episodes, or make sure that you don't miss the next one, please subscribe. We're on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. Just look for Coffee with Chris Yip. You can also check out @UofTengineering on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn for more stories about how our community is building a better world. And finally, if you'd be inspired to join us, we'd love to welcome you. Whether you're thinking of taking a degree or working with us on a research project, you can find us online at engineering.utoronto.ca or you can visit our beautiful campus in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I hope I can join you for coffee soon.