An interview with urban creativity guru Charles Landry, who warns that Tel Aviv may be neglecting its “good vibes.”

Charles Landry describes himself as a strategic advisor to cities. “In my work, I try to combine the freshness of the outsider with the knowledge of the insider,” he says, “whilst being aware that, as an outsider, one can be ignorant, and as an insider one often does not see the wood for the trees.”

Considered an authority on harnessing the imagination and creative thinking to revive cities, Landry is the author of several books on the subject, including The Creative City and The Art of City Making. He was recently invited to speak at Tel Aviv’s Centennial Conference on Urban Sustainability in early April.

His presentation at the conference, which was received with tumultuous applause, reflected his unique approach to advising cities. Displaying a series of photographs, shot the day before during an eight hour stroll through Tel Aviv, Landry proceeded to draw a string of surprisingly insightful conclusions about the city, its inhabitants and its leadership.

For the most part, he liked what he saw. Tel Aviv, said Landry, has good vibes. However, he warned, there were signs that the city is neglecting itself and the very things that make it great, choosing instead to relinquish control over its ongoing evolution to real estate developers.

There were also personal reasons that brought him to Israel. Landry’s parents were German intellectuals, he explains, who helped Jews escape the Nazis, and were eventually forced to flee Germany themselves.

How would you describe what you do?

My intention is to stimulate, challenge and to provoke when I am giving a talk. Overall, though, I think of myself as an ideas entrepreneur.

My overall aim nowadays is to change the intellectual architecture. In simple terms, this means moving from linear thinking and looking at cities in a fragmented way to thinking in a more rounded way, where we see the interconnections between things such as economics, culture, the environment, ethics, values and social issues.

I try to help cities make the best out of themselves. My approach is to be a ‘critical friend.’”

What is our method? What kinds of things are you looking for in cities?

After looking at places for over 30 years, I have a battery of things in my mind that I am looking out for. But at the same time I just let the city come at me, so that I can feel it instinctively. The first feeling is whether things are saying ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ This is, so to say, my core methodology.

I look for things like: how are people interacting, is it easy to walk from place to place, how much asphalt is around (in most places far too much and the roads are ridiculously over-engineered), is this place more focused on the car or on people, is it put together by traffic planners or someone who understands vitality, is there appreciation of beauty? I look at how buildings hit the street. I ask myself ‘what kind of conversation is this environment having with me’, does it close off or does it open out?

Badly designed places and buildings exude a negative feeling. Energy, so to say, leaks out or drops, and you can see in these environments that they do not work well. Shops are unsuccessful, offices cannot be rented out.

What were your impressions of Tel Aviv?

I really liked some parts of Tel Aviv very much; indeed it had a very good vibe. My worry is that planners and developers are forgetting what is great about the city. Obviously the White City [is a great asset], but we must remember what was good about that style: the proportion, the human scale, a good level of density, a sense of intimacy with a sense of cosmopolitanism.

Instead of spending lots of money on some new big building, how about having an incentives scheme to redo the White City? That would put Tel Aviv on the global radar screen. What would have more effect, some basically not very interesting new building or a cared-for White City?

In essence the city does not look loved or cared for.

For instance, in some parts of Jaffa there was definitely a ‘no’ feeling, such as where the new developments are taking place and the Palestinian community seemed very wary. At the same time other parts of Jaffa were ‘ordinary’ in a good sense – life was just going on.

Equally, at the beginning of Rothschild Boulevard, where the new buildings are coming up, there was definitely a ‘no’ environment – a complete lack of understanding, expressed in the architecture, of how people respond to place, verging on placelessness.

We all know why this happens – a real estate logic that has been allowed to go wild. Of course, I love new buildings. But when they forget all urban design principles (and remember I am not an urban designer or planner or anything like that, I studied politics, history, economics), you know people have let themselves become detached from human desires and needs. These needs are interaction, communication, mixing. And this is the essence of the city.

Also importantly people want something that inspires and is aspirational, something that taps the soul and spirit. Often, planners think the performing arts centers or big galleries should fulfill that role, but they too often (even in Tel Aviv) are too imposing and difficult to relate to.

In your presentation, you discussed over-rationality and technical, linear thinking that seems to dominate the design of the landscape. Is that kind of thinking wrong?

You cannot grasp the dynamics of the whole, e.g. the city and how it operates, by looking simply at the parts. You need a whole systems view of things. Technical rationality is very narrow, does not understand how people experience things, or what the value of feelings are. But the city is of course an emotional experience. Technical rationality results in creating much of the depressing environments we have.

In your presentation, you described Tel Aviv’s skyscrapers as “isolated blobs” lacking any sort of interface with the street. What kind of effect do you think tall buildings are having on the way people experience this city?

You can have high buildings, no problem. The issue is: how do they relate to the street? You need to layer buildings back so that they do not feel overwhelming. The central issue is maintaining a sense of human scale. For instance, I got out at Hashalom train station [adjacent to Azrieli Mall] on my way back from Haifa, and the amount of roads was unbelievable.

Were you impressed by the plans unveiled by the Tel Aviv Municipality at the conference?

I didn’t get a real sense of what all these projects were about, but I did not notice that the projects were geared to making people feel ‘I could fall in love with this place.’

To me, as an outsider, it’s not about new building projects. Far more important to me was the sense that Tel Aviv needs caring for. Right now, it just feels as if nobody really cares. Everything seems geared toward big, built form statements. Given your immense potential that is a pity. Build on the assets you have without being nostalgic.

If you were hired by the city of Tel Aviv, how would you advise them to start thinking about planning for the next 100 years?

The first thing I’d try to do is to get them to think differently – to combine soft and hardware thinking. Now the city would probably find that irritating, so I would focus on their global opportunities and the competition, and how you could maximize your position in that.

My aim would be to humanize the city. This is the big danger and if it is not addressed Tel Aviv is in real trouble, given all the other dilemmas there are in being Israel.

By Jesse Fox. Originally published in The Jerusalem Post’s Metro supplement on April 24, 2009 as “Conflicting Vibes” (pdf, online version).

Above: Jerry Greenfield, Jesse Fox & Yair Engel (photo by Daniel Cherrin).

“Business is very involved in trying to influence policy, such as lobbying against regulations or raising the minimum wage. All of this is done to promote business’ narrow interests, and it’s done behind the scenes. Ben & Jerry’s takes a different approach. We try to do good deeds and act in the consumer’s interests.”

I caught up with Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s recently at Maala’s 2008 Corporate Social Responsibility Conference, where he gave a lecture about his (& Ben’s) fascinating journey into the world of responsible, sustainable entrepreneurship. Here’s what he had to say…

TreeHugger: Jerry, you just gave a speech to an audience of Israeli CEO’s and investment bankers about the Ben & Jerry’s model of social responsibility, which I would guess is quite a bit more radical than anything anybody else in the room is doing right now. How receptive do you think they were?

Jerry Greenfield: What I talk about at these kinds of events is based on our experience. I think sometimes people feel like Ben and I are trying to, well, pontificate is too strong a word, but direct people that business should be a certain way. What we are doing is sharing our experience of running a business in a non-traditional way. So usually I try to tell some humorous stories about how we started, how we didn’t have any training and we’re not your usual business people. We tried to run a business the way a person on the street would, at the beginning.

Most people in the US view corporations as selfish entities, and we didn’t want to have that kind of business, so we said we’re going to see if we can be different. So we try to let people know that you don’t have to do it the traditional way; you can do it differently – it’s possible. The tradition thinking is that environmental and social responsibility takes away from profitability, but our experience is the exact opposite. There are many people in the business world that would like to do that, but don’t know how.

I think it will become a competitive advantage, because that’s what consumers respond to. So often people are buying products and services and that they don’t really like, but they feel like they don’t have any alternative.

“If it’s not fun, why do it?” Jerry Greenfield at Maala’s 2008 Corporate Social Responsibility Conference.

TreeHugger: In your speech you said, “Business is the most powerful force in our society today… [It] has incredible power and influence over our society, all of which [it uses] in the narrow interest of business, which is to make money… We would not tolerate that from any other major entity in society, but it’s okay for business.” How do you think that went over with the crowd?

JG: I think businesspeople know how powerful business is, particularly big corporations. Business is very involved in trying to influence policy, such as lobbying against all sorts of regulations or against raising the minimum wage. All of this is done to promote business’ narrow interests, and it’s done behind the scenes – because it would be very unpopular if people knew about this stuff. Businesses want people to like them, which is why they spend so much money on advertising and marketing, to try to get consumers to feel good about the stuff they are buying.

Ben & Jerry’s takes a different approach. We try to do good deeds and act in the consumer’s interests. I don’t think the whole world is going to start acting that way overnight, but there are tangible benefits of doing it. For example, people that work for the company feel better about what they are doing, employees feel more motivated.

TreeHugger: After your speech, the CEO of one of the big cellular companies gave a presentation about the charity work that his company does, including donating to kids who are fighting cancer. He neglected to mention that his company’s cell phones and antennas are seen by many in Israel as a major cause of cancer! What will convince corporate managers to start moving the core of their business activity toward sustainability and social responsibility, instead of continuing along more or less the same path while covering it up with donations and greenwash?

JG: It’s really an interesting question – the core of your business versus these things on the side. I don’t quite know where to start. What we essentially figured out was that normally in business you think about cost, quality, time of delivery, things like that. We added another factor – responsibility for social and environmental impacts – as another fundamental thing, alongside price and quality.

Managers are trained to think in terms of these things, and when you add another factor, it adds another layer of complexity, which managers don’t like. Plus they may not even believe in these environmental and socially responsible things in the first place! So you may be asking people to do things they don’t believe in, and which they think just makes their job harder. Unless you have people in the company who believe in these things, its’ going to seem like a burden.

So I think it needs to come from the top. As important as it is to have these ideas bubbling up from [workers and consumers], the person at the top has to make the decisions. That person is looking at the welfare of the company, hopefully not just in the short term, but in the long term as well.

You know, when Ben and I started doing this like 20 years ago, these ideas were considered very fringe. Nowadays they are quite mainstream. That’s the way it happens. The companies that start things like this are the smaller, innovative, entrepreneurial companies. The big conglomerates are not leaders on this; they come on board after it’s been shown to work. That’s the nature of their role. They are behemoths who are good at making something bigger once it has already developed.

Sometimes people say to me, what do think about businesses who are doing good things, but only because they think it’s good for business. I say whatever makes businesses be more positive is wonderful. If they are just going through the motions, and good things are coming out of it, that’s okay.

TreeHugger: But at the pace these things are happening, are we really going to prevent the big ecological crises that people are predicting?

JG: The difficult thing with something like global warming is that a lot of times humans don’t respond until there is an emergency, and you cannot always see the real impacts of things until you are past the tipping point.

I’m not convinced that we can’t make dramatic changes quickly enough to dent those huge impacts. Carbon in the atmosphere – people say it’s beyond repair, that it’s too late. I haven’t really bought in to that line of thinking yet. I think you do the best you can, try your absolute hardest, and if you are successful – good. And if not, at least you tried.

“I’ve got 4 flavors here!” Jerry hawks his wares to conference participants.

I think real change is hard for any institution, it has to do with the nature of institutions. At Ben & Jerry’s, the biggest things for us in making our company more sustainable were the ingredients, the packaging, and, being a somewhat energy-intensive business, the freezing and transport of the product. That was the change that we made at the core of our business, the fundamental stuff. We committed to reducing our energy footprint per pint. You make a commitment and then you just make it happen.

I think that’s part of the answer to your questions – the issue of measuring success. Companies are really good at things they can measure. That’s a good way for companies to address sustainability issues: first commit, and then start measuring. You don’t know where to start until you take an inventory of your baseline.

TreeHugger: Do all Ben & Jerry’s franchises share your business philosophy?

JG: Absolutely. It doesn’t work if you have people throughout the company that don’t believe in it. We have a mission statement, which deals with our product mission, economic mission and social mission. All three are equally important. We wrote it back in the 80’s and there was this discussion about how to not put one of top of the other, so we ended up writing them horizontally.

The hard part comes when you achieve your financial mission for the year, but not your social mission. Is that a successful year? For it to work, the person at the top has to take these missions with equal seriousness.

You know, when we were coming up with this, it was not easy to convince the managers. Some thought it was great, some thought it was lousy. The question even came up: Does someone have to believe in the company’s social mission to be hired by the company? Isn’t that un-American, or even illegal?

The conclusion that we came to was that people can believe anything they want, but when they are at work, they have to be working to achieve the social mission no less than they are working to make a profit for the company. It’s part of their job. One thing that is different today is that it is completely accepted that this is the mission of the company.

TreeHugger: How did Unilever’s takeover of the company affect these things?

JG: Unilever has surprised me at how much they have allowed the social mission to continue. I don’t think they know how to do it themselves, but the current CEO, Walt Freese, has been there a few years, and he’s great. He believes in the mission, and he’s doing everything he can to make it central to the company.

Here’s an example. A year or two ago, the CEO decides he wants to come out with a flavor called “American Pie.” On the lid would be a pie chart showing the US federal budget. Military spending would be about 50%, and the rest would be all these little slices like environment, jobs, health care, whatever. And then on the packaging, there would be some information about how some of the military budget goes to Cold War weapons systems that are no longer needed, like the 10,000 nuclear bombs in the US arsenal. Now anyone would agree that 10,000 nuclear bombs is more than you would ever logically need. What happens after you drop 5? The country spends around $20 billion maintaining this nuclear arsenal. The packaging would ask if this is so wise – maybe it would be better to spend that money on children?

So Walt Freese goes to talk to his bosses at Unilever about this. I wasn’t there, but at some point he talks to his boss, who talks to his bosses. They talk to the lawyers, and in the end they decide that it’s okay. And “American Pie” came out talking about nuclear bombs on its packaging.

TreeHugger: What advice can you offer people who are thinking about opening environmentally and socially responsible, sustainable enterprises?

JG: I think the key concept is sustainability. That’s a word that is thrown about a lot these days, but human activities are not always thought about in terms of “is this sustainable over time?” I think we’re now reaching a point where this is THE question that is going to be asked about businesses. Global warming, whether you believe in it or not, has brought the issue of sustainability to the forefront.

The interesting thing about doing business in this other kind of way – a community-based business or an environmentally forward-looking company – is that you still have to do all the other business stuff well. Just because you are based on certain values, that does not mean you don’t need a great product, good marketing, distribution and so on. Nobody is going to buy Ben & Jerry’s if they don’t like the product.

Originally posted at TreeHugger.com on November 1st, 2008. Photos by Daniel Cherrin. Thanks also to Yair Engel, who participated in this interview as well.

Above: Jerry Greenfield, Jesse Fox & Yair Engel (photo by Daniel Cherrin).

“Business is very involved in trying to influence policy, such as lobbying against regulations or raising the minimum wage. All of this is done to promote business’ narrow interests, and it’s done behind the scenes. Ben & Jerry’s takes a different approach. We try to do good deeds and act in the consumer’s interests.”

I caught up with Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s recently at Maala’s 2008 Corporate Social Responsibility Conference, where he gave a lecture about his (& Ben’s) fascinating journey into the world of responsible, sustainable entrepreneurship. Here’s what he had to say…

TreeHugger: Jerry, you just gave a speech to an audience of Israeli CEO’s and investment bankers about the Ben & Jerry’s model of social responsibility, which I would guess is quite a bit more radical than anything anybody else in the room is doing right now. How receptive do you think they were?

Jerry Greenfield: What I talk about at these kinds of events is based on our experience. I think sometimes people feel like Ben and I are trying to, well, pontificate is too strong a word, but direct people that business should be a certain way. What we are doing is sharing our experience of running a business in a non-traditional way. So usually I try to tell some humorous stories about how we started, how we didn’t have any training and we’re not your usual business people. We tried to run a business the way a person on the street would, at the beginning.

Most people in the US view corporations as selfish entities, and we didn’t want to have that kind of business, so we said we’re going to see if we can be different. So we try to let people know that you don’t have to do it the traditional way; you can do it differently – it’s possible. The tradition thinking is that environmental and social responsibility takes away from profitability, but our experience is the exact opposite. There are many people in the business world that would like to do that, but don’t know how.

I think it will become a competitive advantage, because that’s what consumers respond to. So often people are buying products and services and that they don’t really like, but they feel like they don’t have any alternative.

“If It’s Not Fun, Why Do It?” Jerry Greenfield at Maala’s 2008 Corporate Social Responsibility Conference.

TreeHugger: In your speech to the conference you said, “Business is the most powerful force in our society today… Business has incredible power and influence over our society, all of which [it uses] in the narrow interest of business, which is to make money… We would not tolerate that from any other major entity in society, but it’s okay for business.” How do you think that went over with the crowd?

JG: I think businesspeople know how powerful business is, particularly big corporations. Business is very involved in trying to influence policy, such as lobbying against all sorts of regulations or against raising the minimum wage. All of this is done to promote business’ narrow interests, and it’s done behind the scenes – because it would be very unpopular if people knew about this stuff. Businesses want people to like them, which is why they spend so much money on advertising and marketing, to try to get consumers to feel good about the stuff they are buying.

Ben & Jerry’s takes a different approach. We try to do good deeds and act in the consumer’s interests. I don’t think the whole world is going to start acting that way overnight, but there are tangible benefits of doing it. For example, people that work for the company feel better about what they are doing, employees feel more motivated.

TreeHugger: After your speech, the CEO of one of the big cellular companies gave a presentation about the charity work that his company does, including donating to kids who are fighting cancer. He neglected to mention that his company’s cell phones and antennas are seen by many in Israel as a major cause of cancer! What will convince corporate managers to start moving the core of their business activity toward sustainability and social responsibility, instead of continuing along more or less the same path while covering it up with donations and greenwash?

JG: It’s really an interesting question – the core of your business versus these things on the side. I don’t quite know where to start. What we essentially figured out was that normally in business you think about cost, quality, time of delivery, things like that. We added another factor – responsibility for social and environmental impacts – as another fundamental thing, alongside price and quality.

Managers are trained to think in terms of these things, and when you add another factor, it adds another layer of complexity, which managers don’t like. Plus they may not even believe in these environmental and socially responsible things in the first place! So you may be asking people to do things they don’t believe in, and which they think just makes their job harder. Unless you have people in the company who believe in these things, its’ going to seem like a burden.

So I think it needs to come from the top. As important as it is to have these ideas bubbling up from [workers and consumers], the person at the top has to make the decisions. That person is looking at the welfare of the company, hopefully not just in the short term, but in the long term as well.

You know, when Ben and I started doing this like 20 years ago, these ideas were considered very fringe. Nowadays they are quite mainstream. That’s the way it happens. The companies that start things like this are the smaller, innovative, entrepreneurial companies. The big conglomerates are not leaders on this; they come on board after it’s been shown to work. That’s the nature of their role. They are behemoths who are good at making something bigger once it has already developed.

Sometimes people say to me, what do think about businesses who are doing good things, but only because they think it’s good for business. I say whatever makes businesses be more positive is wonderful. If they are just going through the motions, and good things are coming out of it, that’s okay.

TreeHugger: But at the pace these things are happening, are we really going to prevent the big ecological crises that people are predicting?

JG: The difficult thing with something like global warming is that a lot of times humans don’t respond until there is an emergency, and you cannot always see the real impacts of things until you are past the tipping point.

I’m not convinced that we can’t make dramatic changes quickly enough to dent those huge impacts. Carbon in the atmosphere – people say it’s beyond repair, that it’s too late. I haven’t really bought in to that line of thinking yet. I think you do the best you can, try your absolute hardest, and if you are successful – good. And if not, at least you tried.

“I’ve got 4 flavors here!” Jerry hawks his wares to conference participants.

I think real change is hard for any institution, it has to do with the nature of institutions. At Ben & Jerry’s, the biggest things for us in making our company more sustainable were the ingredients, the packaging, and, being a somewhat energy-intensive business, the freezing and transport of the product. That was the change that we made at the core of our business, the fundamental stuff. We committed to reducing our energy footprint per pint. You make a commitment and then you just make it happen.

I think that’s part of the answer to your questions – the issue of measuring success.

Companies are really good at things they can measure. That’s a good way for companies to address sustainability issues: first commit, and then start measuring. You don’t know where to start until you take an inventory of your baseline.

TreeHugger: Do all Ben & Jerry’s franchises share your business philosophy?

JG: Absolutely. It doesn’t work if you have people throughout the company that don’t believe in it. We have a mission statement, which deals with our product mission, economic mission and social mission. All three are equally important. We wrote it back in the 80’s and there was this discussion about how to not put one of top of the other, so we ended up writing them horizontally.

The hard part comes when you achieve your financial mission for the year, but not your social mission. Is that a successful year? For it to work, the person at the top has to take these missions with equal seriousness.

You know, when we were coming up with this, it was not easy to convince the managers. Some thought it was great, some thought it was lousy. The question even came up: Does someone have to believe in the company’s social mission to be hired by the company? Isn’t that un-American, or even illegal?

The conclusion that we came to was that people can believe anything they want, but when they are at work, they have to be working to achieve the social mission no less than they are working to make a profit for the company. It’s part of their job. One thing that is different today is that it is completely accepted that this is the mission of the company.

TreeHugger: How did Unilever’s takeover of the company affect these things?

JG: Unilever has surprised me at how much they have allowed the social mission to continue. I don’t think they know how to do it themselves, but the current CEO, Walt Freese, has been there a few years, and he’s great. He believes in the mission, and he’s doing everything he can to make it central to the company.

Here’s an example. A year or two ago, the CEO decides he wants to come out with a flavor called “American Pie.” On the lid would be a pie chart showing the US federal budget. Military spending would be about 50%, and the rest would be all these little slices like environment, jobs, health care, whatever. And then on the packaging, there would be some information about how some of the military budget goes to Cold War weapons systems that are no longer needed, like the 10,000 nuclear bombs in the US arsenal. Now anyone would agree that 10,000 nuclear bombs is more than you would ever logically need. What happens after you drop 5? The country spends around $20 billion maintaining this nuclear arsenal. The packaging would ask if this is so wise – maybe it would be better to spend that money on children?

So Walt Freese goes to talk to his bosses at Unilever about this. I wasn’t there, but at some point he talks to his boss, who talks to his bosses. They talk to the lawyers, and in the end they decide that it’s okay. And “American Pie” came out talking about nuclear bombs on its packaging.

TreeHugger: What advice can you offer people who are thinking about opening environmentally and socially responsible, sustainable enterprises?

JG: I think the key concept is sustainability. That’s a word that is thrown about a lot these days, but human activities are not always thought about in terms of “is this sustainable over time?” I think we’re now reaching a point where this is THE question that is going to be asked about businesses. Global warming, whether you believe in it or not, has brought the issue of sustainability to the forefront.

The interesting thing about doing business in this other kind of way – a community-based business or an environmentally forward-looking company – is that you still have to do all the other business stuff well. Just because you are based on certain values, that does not mean you don’t need a great product, good marketing, distribution and so on. Nobody is going to buy Ben & Jerry’s if they don’t like the product.

Photos by Daniel Cherrin. Thanks also to Yair Engel, who participated in this interview as well.