Episode one: Downtown LA and its unwritten history: Our guest is Kim Cooper. Kim edited Scram magazine in the early 90s up to the mid 2000s and co-edited the anthologies Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth and Lost in the Grooves.

This show I speak with Aaron Holm. He's the CEO of Blokable. The company manufactures "high-performance modular building assemblies that are easily customizable, with technology and energy efficiency built in." You might think that a 30-minute interview talking about modular homes might be kind of snoozy. But not so.

This episode I'm speaking with Brian Libby, a journalist and critic living in Portland, Oregon. Among the magazines and newspapers he has contributed to include The New York Times, The Atlantic, Dwell, CityLab, Metropolis, and Architectural Record. Brian is also a book author, filmmaker, and runs the popular Portland Architecture blog.

For more than a year I've been obsessed with Cincinnati, Ohio. While doing research on old churches being retrofitted as brewpubs, I stumbled across Taft's Ale House in Cincinnati's Over the Rhine neighborhood. From there, I went deep. The architecture. The flight to the suburbs. The abandonment.

Urban farms, or, farming in the city, on rooftops, vacant lots, front yards. I've alway been intrigued with farming in the city and the potential there to feed its people. A couple years ago I read Jennifer Cockrall King's book "Food and The City: Urban Agriculture and The New Food Revolution," and that's when ideas and the light bulb went off.

There are three questions on Max Grinnell's website that ask: How do cities work? Why are people both fascinated and repelled by cities? How can we improve cities? (Hint: It's not through ye olde fudge shoppes or super-precious cupcake stores.) However, Grinnell, this episode's guest, has some answers.

Start listening What exactly is a food forest? I wanted to find out more so I visited the Winslow Food Forest located on the border of Milwaukie and Portland, Ore. I visited in the fall, and even then, ...

For many, the suburbs are an easy target. For good reason. Many of the homes are ugly and out of scale. They promote sprawl and auto dependence thereby increasing obesity. They use tons of energy and are a huge drain on a city's infrastructure. They wipe out farmland.

You've heard of agriculture - and urban ag, or growing food in cities. And then there's architecture. And then, there's agritecture. Wait, agritecture? Yep. The brains behind the concept is Henry Gordon-Smithlaunched agritcture.com a few years back as a blog to help promote the fact, that yes, you can grow food in the cities, and look cool doing it.

What do design, branding, good bourbon, and a Norwegian architect firm have in common? It's the thread to this episode's interview with John Patrick Winberry, founding partner, chief wrangler, and architect at the UP studio. UP is a small, nimble boutique Architecture, Interior, and Brand Design firm that believes all disciplines can live together within a given project.

So, how is the DNA of a place defined? Is it the architecture? Is it the cool, hip shops? Park benches? It's some of that - but it's way more. What exactly is placemaking? This episode we're speaking with Daniel Hintz, Founder and Chief Experience Architect for The Velocity Group.