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 Episode Links
Karen Blashek: https://www.instagram.com/kzblashek
Austin Home Magazine: https://www.austinhomemag.com/
Groundup Ideas: https://www.groundupideas.com/

Cities and Ambition by Paul Graham
https://paulgraham.com/cities.html

The City That Lingers by Ryan Puzycki
https://www.ryanpuzycki.com/p/the-city-that-lingers

Tokyo is Reinventing the Downtown by Making More Than One by Richard Florida
https://www.fastcompany.com/91314557/tokyo-is-reinventing-the-downtown-by-making-more-than-one

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.