Shruti Shankar, AICP, on People-First Mobility Hubs, Mentoring, and the Beautiful Messiness of Cities

[00:00:04.520] - Shruti Shankar

When you think about city-making, you have to admit that it's a very complex system and everything you do has very compounded unintended consequences. So that's a very academic way of saying cities are messy, but we love the mess. That's what makes cities great. It makes them vibrant, interesting, unexpected places that often lead to a lot of sort of joyful things. And sometimes Relaxing a little bit of control and just letting people take ownership of cities in a way that's meaningful can lead to a lot of great outcomes.

 

[00:00:37.400] - Meghan Stromberg

Shruti Shankar, AICP, is the urban design director and an associate principal at Studio 111, an integrated design practice in Long Beach, California. Trained as an architect, working as an urban designer, and certified as a planner, Shruti brings a layered perspective to citymaking. one that sees policy, design, infrastructure, and everyday life as parts of the same complicated system. Hi, I'm Meghan Stromberg, editor-in-chief of the American Planning Association and host of People Behind the Plans, an APA podcast. In this episode, which we recorded at NPC 26 in Detroit, Shruti begins the conversation talking about mobility hubs. She explains what they are and what they can do for a region like LA. which is preparing for major events, including this past summer's FIFA World Cup games and the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. But she also brings the idea down to the sidewalk. But what does a mobility hub need to do for one person trying to make a safe, comfortable, convenient trip from one mode to another? That idea comes up again and again in our conversation. Shruti talks about cities as complicated systems And why that complexity can be a strength. Sometimes, she says, better city-making means letting go of a little control.

 

[00:01:59.840]

It means making room for people to shape places in ways that are useful, unexpected, and joyful. Finally, Shruti talks about the power of mentorship. That includes helping students and younger planners find their way, but it also includes peer relationships where professionals can brainstorm, challenge assumptions, and think through problems without needing to be right all the time. Shruti Shankar, welcome to People Behind the Plans.

 

[00:02:25.820] - Shruti Shankar

Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

 

[00:02:27.990] - Meghan Stromberg

Great. You're a part of this NPC-26 experience. One, I know you have to get your CM.

 

[00:02:33.690] - Shruti Shankar

That is true. It's very valuable.

 

[00:02:36.580] - Meghan Stromberg

But you also did a learning lab about mobility hubs. And I have to admit, I'm not conversant in what a mobility hub is. And I thought we maybe we could start there and you could tell us a little bit about what it actually is.

 

[00:02:50.180] - Shruti Shankar

Just for some context, we did a learning lab. It was hosted by myself and Amanda Chapman from Fair and Peers, which is a transportation planning firm. So between the two of us, we had transportation planning as well as urban design experience that we were trying to cover. And it was really fun. The title of the session was Hubs of the Future: Unlocking Community Mobility. And we were putting it together to both share and reflect on our experience designing and implementing mobility hubs in Los Angeles ahead of what's shaping up to be a very busy few years with a lot of big events coming to our region. So we have the Olympics coming in 2028. We have the Paralympic Games. This summer we're also hosting the FIFA World Cup. I think the Super Bowl is happening there. So there's a few things going on right now. And it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world to say, okay, we're LA. We're known for being a city that loves its cars, but we're having a lot of people coming here and we need to find ways to move people around. And so let's build mobility hubs.

 

[00:03:51.910]

The idea of mobility hubs started even earlier with really things like rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft coming on the scene, starting to offer these other alternatives that didn't fit in the traditional landscape of cities like LA. And so over the past almost decade, we have been slowly thinking more and more about how do you integrate these multimodal options to create hubs that become places where where you connect between modes. And so it seems like an obvious thing— let's design mobility hubs. But the more you dig into it, the more you realize there isn't really a definition for what a mobility hub is. Conceptually, it makes sense. It's a place where you go to switch modes. But that could look like a lot of different things. Think about it. Airports are mobility hubs, just at a different scale, right? The same thing happens when you go to a different city or you take a train to another city. Often those kinds of stations become hubs as well. But what happens when you get around your own city, when you go from neighborhood to neighborhood, district to district. If we want to move away from reliance on the private automobile and introduce other modes, could these ideas of localized hubs that provide access to those mode shifts in a convenient, easy manner be a good solution for that?

 

[00:05:09.520]

So that's the exploration. For Studio 111, where I work, this work started almost a decade ago when we were working on a project called The Block, which is a mixed-use destination in downtown Los Angeles. It was one of the first private developments to get directly connected to a metro station through an underground portal that was designed a long time ago. And so with that opportunity, we started thinking, well, how do we make this more of a hub? So we took a curbside lane that was closed for construction activity and repurposed it. At the time, Ubers and Lyfts were starting to come on the scene and were becoming a big point of conversation. And so we said, well, can we take this curbside lane, test a new bike lane there, introduce kind of a pickup and drop-off zone that's dedicated to these rideshare amenities, and then also have other mobility amenities like a bike share dock, a parklet for people to wait when they're waiting for pickup, things like that. So that got implemented and it kind of kicked off this work around mobility hubs very intentionally. And then since then, in partnership with firms like Fair and Pierce who do a lot of great transportation planning work, we've been looking at implementing more of these integrated mobility hubs throughout the region.

 

[00:06:22.020]

Currently, we're working with LADOT on a project to basically try and replicate these kinds of hubs. And so coming back to your question about our learning lab yesterday, we took a lot of our learnings from the kinds of tools and amenities that we were using to create a kit of parts for mobility hubs, present that to the people that were at the conference attending our session. And then we gave them case study examples of locations and said, how would you deploy a kit of parts here to create a mobility hub? And how would you conceptualize it?

 

[00:06:55.030] - Meghan Stromberg

And of course, it's about mode shift and a place for that to happen. But ultimately, it's about people.

 

[00:07:01.530]

It's part of a neighborhood.

 

[00:07:02.910]

So how do you put the people first as you design for all these logistics?

 

[00:07:07.950] - Shruti Shankar

Yeah, it's a great question. And that's been the thing that we've, at Studio 111, spent a lot of our time focusing on. And to kind of preface that, I'll say a few things. One is oftentimes transportation amenities especially in American cities, end up in kind of the leftover places. Once you have your freeways and your parking and all of your other high-priority uses, what's left over is where you get your train stations or your bus stops. So they're inherently not where people might find them most convenient.

 

[00:07:36.320] - Meghan Stromberg

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:07:37.030] - Shruti Shankar

So we're starting on the back foot here. Then you also have a variety of competing interests for things like curbside space or for, you know, roadway space. That all have to be managed, and that's not usually all managed by one entity. You have a variety of departments, you have business improvement districts, you have local businesses. There are so many different stakeholders that really have control over and are impacted by the public realm that it becomes a very complicated process to think about how do you navigate all of that in order to create the best experience for a person waiting for transit on the sidewalk or on the curb. So thinking very actively about all of those human-centered design experience of these hubs has been really critical. Because if we're being honest, if the hub feels unsafe, if it feels uncomfortable, or it's just a miserable place to be, no one's going to want to use that as a solution. And places like LA where there's also a very hot summer and it's 95 degrees out, and if there's a bus stop and it has no shade, anyone who has the choice to drive would make that choice rather than take the bus.

 

[00:08:45.670] - Meghan Stromberg

Of course.

 

[00:08:46.390] - Shruti Shankar

And so a big part of the toolkit of options that we shared with the attendees yesterday had to do with things like climate protection and weatherproofing. It had to do with placemaking and how do you involve local businesses or bring in community art or other things to make a place feel special and loved and safe. And then things that are more broad systemic urban design strategies Everything from making pedestrian-safe sidewalk environments to better lighting to trees, all of these other things that aren't directly connected to transportation or the mode shift, but are an integral part of what makes a hub feel welcoming and safe and usable.

 

[00:09:24.120] - Meghan Stromberg

Earlier you mentioned all the activities happening in LA, the FIFA World Cup, the Olympic Games, Paralympic Games.

 

[00:09:32.700]

What's the mood?

 

[00:09:33.980]

there as an urban designer watching this all happen and come together?

 

[00:09:39.580] - Shruti Shankar

It's pretty messy, I'll say that, but in good ways sometimes. I feel like there is a lot of energy, there's a lot of, I would say, enthusiasm to try and tackle sort of these big questions about what we're going to put forward to the world when we're on the world stage. And there's a lot of effort that is going into thinking about planning for the Games at a variety of levels. So for those who are not familiar with LA, LA County really has 88 jurisdictions within it. That's a lot.

 

[00:10:13.620] - Meghan Stromberg

Mm-hmm.

 

[00:10:14.170] - Shruti Shankar

And the Games are going to happen all across the county and in other places as well. And so there's a lot of individual stakeholders that are working on different aspects of the Games. So Metro, the Regional Transportation Authority has a big charge to get people to the games safely and conveniently, and it's expected to be a no-car games. That's a lot of pressure to try and find these other ways of getting people around. We've talked a little bit about that. But in addition to that, there's a lot of also hope and excitement around being able to showcase all the different communities and cultures that exist in LA and in the broader LA area. A lot of cities are trying to think about their cultural frameworks. We've been doing some work in partnership with the Arts Council in Long Beach, where my office is located, thinking about how best do we showcase what Long Beach has to the world when the Games come here. Everything from safety and security to convenience and access to showcasing, you know, everything that's here and the best of LA to the world. There's a lot of work going into it right now.

 

[00:11:18.210]

We're all just, I think, trying to connect the dots and trying to all row in the same direction.

 

[00:11:23.670] - Meghan Stromberg

I love that you admitted that it's kind of messy. I spent a little time on your website this morning, and there's a phrase there that says, cities are messy, we love the mess.

 

[00:11:35.470] - Shruti Shankar

Yeah, it's a funny thing to admit, especially as planners and designers whose job it is to almost control things. But I think when you think about city-making, you have to admit that it's a very complex system, and everything you do has very compounded unintended consequences. So that's a very academic way of saying cities are messy. But the second part, we love the mess, is really to also acknowledge that that's what makes cities great. It makes them vibrant, interesting, unexpected places that often lead to a lot of sort of joyful things. And sometimes relaxing a little bit of control and just letting people take ownership of cities in a way that's meaningful can lead to a lot of great outcomes. It's a very embedded kind of core idea in our practice. And this idea of placemaking together with an idea of incrementalism, so you don't try to define the whole city as one machine, but rather you focus on the parts and let the whole kind of emerge, has been a big part of how we try to think about cities.

 

[00:12:36.520] - Meghan Stromberg

Sticking with this concept of messiness a little bit. So thinking about American cities versus the cities you first started working in and maybe even grew up in, in India. Tell me a little bit about your experience as an architect in India and then coming to the US. I think you were a Fulbright Fellow that brought you to the US. Tell us a little bit about cities in those 2 places, what that feels like and how it is to work.

 

[00:13:03.070] - Shruti Shankar

It's been an interesting comparison between the work I did in India, which was more than a decade ago now. I think Indian cities like cities in other parts of Asia, have that like messy vibrancy which comes from just a lot of population density and also a little bit of open-endedness, if you, if you will, with city planning and the way systems are set up. And so you have a lot of that vibrant city life that is fairly emergent in some ways. What's lacking there is really the infrastructure and, and the systems that provide more broadly safety and improvements that can benefit everybody. So a lot of my work there as an urban designer focused on how do we redo our streetscapes and provide comfortable sidewalks for pedestrians and provide protection for street trees and consolidate utilities and make them more easy to access, but do all of that without destroying the life of the street that already exists. With your vendors and the different modes that already coexist there. And so that's a very different frame of mind from what a lot of the work that we've done here is focused on, which is how do we bring life back into those streets which have already been designed and engineered for everything but people.

 

[00:14:20.040]

You know, we think about cars, we think about fire trucks, we think about a variety of other requirements that are necessary and important, but oftentimes in that process we leave the people out. And so this idea of bringing some of the messy back into the city has been interesting as a different way of thinking about my work compared to what I was doing before.

 

[00:14:38.360] - Meghan Stromberg

It sounds like it's a little bit more sanitized maybe in the US. It's a fascinating thing to think about. You said you've been here for about a decade.

 

[00:14:48.350]

You're an urban designer.

 

[00:14:49.270]

You started as an architect. You are an AICP-certified planner, but you didn't go to planning school. Is that right?

 

[00:14:55.180] - Shruti Shankar

That's correct. I did a master's in urban design at the Sam Fox School at Washington University. Quick shout out for my alma mater. Fantastic program, but it was very much focused on urban design, not really a planning program.

 

[00:15:08.210] - Meghan Stromberg

So what do you think that perspective brings to your work and your work with other planners?

 

[00:15:15.510] - Shruti Shankar

That's an interesting question, and it's something I've reflected on a little bit in the recent past with some of my colleagues. Planning tends to often be process-driven and fairly linear, which are necessary to create clear, transparent, usable plans that are easy to enforce. But design is very rarely linear. It's a very iterative process where you're trying, testing, and constantly reworking your assumptions based on feedback from prototyping. Ideas. And there's a lot of value in that that I think has been important to try and think about with planning as well. And we are doing that even in planning. I think the rise of tactical urbanism has been great for the planning profession because it's allowed planners to be more nimble in some ways. I think there are still some challenges. Policy is not as nimble, for example. And some of the things I think about are how can we make policy more nimble by implementing more data and feedback mechanisms that can allow us to test things. It's a longer process, so there's inherently some challenges, but I think that being open to testing and iterating has been a big part of translating some of my design thinking into the planning world.

 

[00:16:33.430]

And then the other part, which again just comes from being a designer, is you're constantly thinking about the Thinking about the people, you're putting them right at the center of the process. And I know we do that a lot in planning terms, thinking about communities at large, but sometimes it just has to come down to the individual. And so bringing that focus back has also been really important.

 

[00:16:55.530] - Meghan Stromberg

Speaking of focusing on the individual, when we think Southern California, we think about the beaches, the beach life. Tell me a little bit about what's going on on the waterfronts and Long Beach and is it San Pedro? That whole area, right, has a lot going on in terms of the waterfront.

 

[00:17:12.590] - Shruti Shankar

Yeah. Studio 111 is involved in a number of waterfront initiatives in the past few years. And it's again been a very interesting problem to think about. And I call it a problem. It's really an opportunity. Because when you think about Southern California's waterfronts, you think beaches and you think surfing and you think recreation. And historically, they have always been about recreation. We still have 2 of the largest ports in the country, the Port of Long Beach, the Port of LA. They are very industrial, but they're functioning ports. And unlike in a lot of other places in the country, we don't really have a post-industrial waterfront landscape. And so in our work, we have been looking at both vision plans as well as redevelopment opportunities on waterfront sites like our project in West Harbor, where it's really been about how do you create an urban waterfront, a downtown waterfront that could have some of those more stereotypical imagery of what California waterfronts look like, but they really now want to be more about creating neighborhoods, creating public space, creating community-based places that serve the local population, that provide amenities, and that really make the experience of the water something unique and something special.

 

[00:18:33.510]

One of the projects we're working on is the Downtown Long Beach Downtown Shoreline Vision Plan, which is looking at over 300 acres of the waterfront, which are located all in what are called tidelands, which were formerly submerged lands. And there's an interesting sort of Venn diagram of issues we're working with, one of which is they are coastal lands that are meant for public access. So how do you preserve that and how do you really make it a place for community? The second piece of that puzzle is there's a lot of those areas have historically been supported by revenues that come from offshore oil drilling.

 

[00:19:12.430] - Meghan Stromberg

Hmm.

 

[00:19:12.910] - Shruti Shankar

And the state is looking at decommissioning all that oil drilling, which means significant revenue is going to be lost. So how do we then still think about this as an area that could find ways to support itself through other revenue-generating sources, whether that's visitor-serving uses, whether that's more marinas and docks? We already have a robust convention center with a lot of entertainment that happens in the waterfront. How can we expand on that and then balance all of that with serving the community and serving the people that are there every day. And then of course there's the idea of coastal resiliency, which has become more and more and more important. That's not an immediate-term problem, that's what happens in 50 years problem. But how do we start thinking about that in the context of everything we're trying to do within the next 10 to 15 years? It's fascinating to look at it from so many different lenses, and it's truly been a very participatory but also very collaborative process, working with the community, with the city, and other sort of experts to try and figure out this puzzle.

 

[00:20:12.590] - Meghan Stromberg

And it's not a bad field trip. Oh, it's great to go and research your work a little bit.

 

[00:20:18.280] - Shruti Shankar

Yeah. And actually walking on the riverfront here has been great to see what they've done with implementing wetlands and really creating an ecological framework for how a waterfront can function. So that's been fantastic.

 

[00:20:30.740] - Meghan Stromberg

I realize I never asked you very much about your work place about Studio 111. Can you tell us a little bit about the firm and what it's like to work there?

 

[00:20:39.570] - Shruti Shankar

So I've been at Studio 111 now for almost 10 years, and it is an integrated design practice. The simple way to say it is we have architects, we have landscape architects, and we have urban designers and planners like myself, and we all collaborate on projects that focus on city-making. And we talked a little bit about city-making and, and our philosophy of messiness of cities that informs all of the work that we do. What it translates to is projects that are architectural commissions like affordable housing projects or mixed-use developments or public spaces and projects like our West Harbor Downtown Waterfront project. We've also done a lot of public space design work like streetscapes. We've done parks. Our firm did one of the first parklets in Southern California way back when parklets were starting to emerge. Over the past several years, we've also been actively experimenting with how do you create active urban spaces, not just through design but also through programming and activation. And so when we moved into our office, which is in downtown Long Beach, the area was kind of a '70s outdoor shopping mall environment. It was very closed off and not really interfacing with the street.

 

[00:21:57.180]

Through the design of our own office, we started opening up more to the street. We kind of worked with a lot of different stakeholders to make the area feel much more walkable and pedestrian and active. We hit a wall during COVID when it all went away, and then since then we've been working on efforts to again revitalize the area, and that's taken a lot of shapes and forms. But one of the the biggest pushes on that front has been this idea of a design district in downtown Long Beach. We have a fantastic director of special projects and marketing called Sinead Finnerty-Pine, who kind of came up with this idea for a design district and really has put in a lot of effort to create partnerships with a lot of makers and creatives and businesses in downtown to do activations and programming. And we have art and design walks that happen quarterly. So in some ways, we see ourselves as stakeholders in our own community, and we spend a lot of time working on how do we make things better where we are. And a lot of those learnings then help us on projects we do elsewhere.

 

[00:22:52.110] - Meghan Stromberg

Speaking about learning and helping people, I want to ask you about the trajectory of your career, and I'm wondering who has helped you get there. And certainly, I imagine you've had mentors along the way. Can you tell us a little bit about those experiences? And then by now you're probably also on the other side mentoring other people. Can you tell me a little bit about how that's helped you in your career and then how you're giving back?

 

[00:23:19.390] - Shruti Shankar

I've had some great mentors, and I don't know if we've always defined the relationship that way. And I think it's kind of a squishy term sometimes, but it's really meant people who have taken the time to help and be a resource and provide feedback. You know, I've had those kinds of relationships in my past life as an architect when I used to work in India, but in my time here working at Studio 111, I've had some really great mentors. The partners of the firm where I work at, Alan Pullman and Michael Bonn, have certainly played a big role in that. I had a wonderful supervisor for the first few years of my time at studio, Shannon Heffernan, who was a sort of planner who was really the one that encouraged me to work towards my AICP and really think about the planning profession as a place where we could really have impact. I've learned a lot from the servant leadership mindset that Shannon brought to the work, and I've always tried to embody that in the way I operate. Because of that, it's been interesting to be on the other side of it, like mentioned, because there's sort of things that are easy to do by default.

 

[00:24:31.750]

I've always found it to be very enriching to work with students and people who are starting out in their career and really help guide them. But I think as I've also grown in, in my professional capacity, it's been wonderful to also be a peer resource. So I've thought about mentorship not just mentoring someone someone who's younger or more junior in their career, but now it's become actively about peer mentor relationships with other people in the profession, especially with women, because I find that oftentimes it's so beneficial to have someone that you could brainstorm with and challenge assumptions with and think through problems with without feeling like you need to be right all the time. And oftentimes that's what mentors have done for me, is just allowed me to think through problems myself and provided resource and support. And that's something I've found to be so beneficial for myself and for others that I would highly recommend it.

 

[00:25:29.840] - Meghan Stromberg

Well, Shruti, this has been such a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy MPC26 schedule to sit down and talk with me on People Behind the Plans.

 

[00:25:40.780] - Shruti Shankar

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed being here and you guys do such a great job. So thanks a lot for this opportunity.

 

[00:25:46.470] - Meghan Stromberg

Thank you.

 

[00:25:48.060]

Thanks for listening to another episode of People Behind the Plans, an APA podcast. If you want to hear more great conversations from experts from across the planning landscape, subscribe to the APA podcast so you'll never miss an episode. You can find People Behind the Plans on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find our entire library of episodes at planning.org/podcast.