Austin: From Counterculture to Culture | Karen Blashek, Austin Home Magazine
Austin's counterculture is still the ethos. The next chapter is what gets built on top of it. Karen Blashek, the editor-in-chief of Austin Home Magazine, took over a 21-year-old design publication with no editorial background and turned it into one of the city's most consequential platforms for naming what's already happening.
We ask why Austin's design talent operates one neighborhood away from its tech talent and neither knows the other exists. What the city is telling people and the cultural infrastructure need to make it all compound: storytellers, convening spaces, named districts, and a patronage layer.
Agenda
- 0:00 Austin Home as civic editing
- 4:22 Why Austin lives outside
- 15:04 Block parties and Old Sixth
- 21:02 Personality vs. values
- 27:07 Ground floors as infrastructure
- 32:10 The public space czar idea
- 37:01 Why Austin is a design capital
- 41:01 Naming districts that exist
- 45:07 Three roles every ecosystem needs
- 53:37 If you don't tell the story, someone else will
- 58:08 The patronage gap
- 1:03:37 Rising stars, the talent leak
- 1:09:50 Tech and culture flywheel
- 1:15:40 Naming what's already here
Guest Bio and Links
Karen Blashek
Austin Home Magazine
Groundup Ideas
Cities and Ambition by Paul Graham
The City That Lingers by Ryan Puzycki
Tokyo is Reinventing the Downtown by Making More Than One by Richard Florida
Karen Zabarsky Blashek is Editor-in-Chief of Austin Home Magazine, a Hearst publication covering the intersection of architecture, interiors, development, and culture in one of America’s fastest-evolving cities. She is also the founder of Ground Up, a creative studio for the built environment. Before returning to her native Texas, Blashek spent 13 years in New York where she led design for Kushner, one of the country's largest real estate developers with projects nationwide.
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