Seth Zeren talks with Will McCollum (architect, urbanist, and founder of Citymakers Collective) and Christine Franck (architect, educator, and author; first executive director of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art) about what it means to be a "city builder," the gaps in professional design education, and the story behind Citymakers Collective's Summer Studio — the urban-design intensive Will and Christine built together, in partnership with INTBAU USA.

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Organizations & Programs Mentioned

* Citymakers Collective — citymakerscollective.org — Will’s organization; runs the two-week Summer Studio

* Clever Communities Workshop — citymakerscollective.org/clever-communities-workshop — New economic-development workshop, Dallas area, September

* INTBAU (International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism) — intbau.org — Global network; celebrated 25th anniversary in London

* INTBAU USA — intbauusa.org — US chapter; co-organizes the Summer Studio with Citymakers Collective

* Institute of Classical Architecture & Art (ICAA) — classicist.org — Christine’s former organization; runs its own summer program since 1992

* Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) — cnu.org — Referenced throughout as a hub for New Urbanist practice

* (New) Urban Guild — urbanguild.org — Christine is a founding member

* The King’s Foundation (formerly the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture / The Prince’s Foundation) — kings-foundation.org — Ran the first traditional-architecture summer school in 1990

* University of Colorado Denver, College of Architecture & Planning — architectureandplanning.ucdenver.edu — Christine established a research center here

* Georgia Tech School of Architecture — arch.gatech.edu — Will and Christine both taught/studied here

* Tulane School of Architecture — architecture.tulane.edu — Will’s graduate program (real estate development + M.Arch)

* University of Notre Dame School of Architecture — architecture.nd.edu — Referenced as a model of a distinctive, non-mainstream program

* Lew Oliver / Whole Town Solutions — wholetownsolutions.com — Will’s early mentor in New Urbanism

Books Recommended

* How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built — Stewart Brand (Christine’s pick) — Penguin Random House

* Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity — Paul Kingsnorth (Christine, currently reading) — Penguin Random House

* The Image of the City — Kevin Lynch (Will’s pick) — MIT Press

* The Art of Building Cities — Camillo Sitte (Will’s pick) — overview; currently in print via Martino Fine Books, among other reprint editions

* Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism — Robert Jan van Pelt & Carroll William Westfall (Christine’s pick) — Yale University Press, via Goodreads

Also Referenced

* Windsor Forum on Design Education: Toward an Ideal Curriculum to Reform Architectural Education (New Urban Press, 2004) — proceedings of an April 2002 gathering of architecture educators in Windsor, FL, including Christine’s own contribution. Christine’s write-up · CNU book review

* The Boyer Report (Building Community: A New Future for Architecture Education and Practice, 1996) — mentioned in connection with the Windsor Forum as a landmark study on design education

The New School for City Builders — Will McCollum & Christine Franck

Seth: Hello and welcome to The New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zeren, a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer in Providence, Rhode Island. This is a podcast about how we can transform the education of city builders. If we want to change how our cities and towns work, we need to change the people who run them. We need a new generation of city builders — architects, engineers, planners, developers, city managers, and civic leaders. We need a new school for city builders. Joining me today are Will McCollum and Christine Franck.

Will is an architect and urbanist based in Boston and the founder and driving force behind the City Makers Collective and its summer studio, which just wrapped up its second summer a few weeks ago. We heard about the summer studio from Sarah Biga and Jack Duncan in episode two, and we’re excited to get a behind-the-scenes look at how that got created. Christine Franck is an architect, educator, and author living in Denver, Colorado, and was instrumental in helping launch the summer school. Christine has a long history as an educator and leader in classical and traditional architecture and urbanism, including serving as the first executive director of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art, which also runs its own great summer school; as a founding member of the Urban Guild; and as a founding member and chair of the USA chapter of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism — better known as INTBAU.

Will, Christine, welcome to The New School for City Builders.

Christine: Thanks for having us, Seth. It’s nice to be back together with Will — we just spent two weeks in Charleston, as you know, so this feels a little like a reunion.

Will: Yeah, it’s lovely to be here. Thanks.

Seth: It’s a nice place to get to spend a couple weeks with friends looking at cities and buildings. So let’s start with both of you: I use the term “city builder” a lot — it’s the name of the podcast — and I’m curious what that means to each of you. Christine, why don’t we start with you?

Christine: Sure. A city builder — city building, I think in a way, Seth, strikes me as distinct from placemaking. Placemaking’s good, but city building — and I’m familiar with your work and some of your ideas — I think is ultimately not merely about the mechanisms that are in place that create our cities, but that we’re actually creating the cities themselves: the civitas, the community of people who live in a place, who make a place theirs, who own their place. So it’s about the making of the city, not as a physical place, but as an entity within people’s communities. That’s what I think of as city building, and it’s what I hope I’ve always contributed to in my career as an architect and educator.

Seth: I love that — the city is not just some buildings, it’s also the people who live within it.

To be a city builder, I see it as — there are these city-building professions, right, that become these professional silos: architecture, planning, engineering, development. But to bring those together, and to think about them not just as building a physical place that we call the city, but also the broader community, the institutions, the business models, how you actually run this place... I feel like when I encounter students who see this larger vision, but then they go through professional education, they feel like they’re getting some partial, very thin experience. So, Christine, from your perspective, what does a young person need to learn in order to become a great city builder?

Christine: I think, Seth, in many ways, one of the most important things a young person can do is actually just get involved with their community. I think we go through education, and so much of our university educations today are skills-based — it’s as if you’re going to university to get a degree in order to get a job. And I think that loses the idea of what a university education is meant to be, which is a very broad education. You might have a little bit of philosophy, a little bit of history, you might begin to think about what you want to specialize in. I really encourage students that I mentor to take a very broad career path and degree at the undergraduate level, and then, if they need to for professional certification — like becoming an architect — to specialize in a master’s program where they can make a very conscious choice.

But I think this idea — and I know you’re concerned about this too — of the siloing of the professions... really getting involved with your community at whatever level that is. Will and I may share a story about one of our students on the summer program who is just recently out of high school and has created a group and is advocating for change in his city.

I think the other thing I find with education is that students often come to me or to colleagues saying, “What do I need to learn? How do I do this?” And the fact of the matter is, people like myself, who got interested in these ideas thirty, forty years ago — we taught ourselves. No one is coming to rescue you. You kind of have to pick up, as Will has done with his colleagues at City Makers, as we did with INTBAU, as we once did with the Institute — you just have to pick up and do what you think needs doing. I’ll stop there.

Seth: I think one of the things I’ve observed too is that in some sense people still feel like they need permission — they need the credential to work. And one of the things I’ve noticed when I’ve traveled and worked internationally is that that hasn’t been true in all places and all times. It used to be the case that many people would just do stuff, and it might be a very small scale — it might just be building something on their street: a wall, a shrine, a well, a market. It was just at this very incremental level, and it didn’t need to have imprimatur and all this history. That’s the meaning of vernacular urbanism, vernacular design and creation.

So, for you, Will — what does it mean to be a great city builder, and what does a young person need to be learning if they want to walk this path?

Will: I think a great city builder is active in their community. Like Christine was just saying, they take an active role in the creation of their own place. When we formed City Makers Collective, with “City Maker” similar to “City Builder,” we were really intentional with that phrase because we wanted to be inclusive of all of the people who touch the built environment. I think a lot of times in discussions about cities we’re focused on urban planners, architects, developers — but there are community advocates out there who sometimes do better work than the professionals, people who own storefronts who contribute more to the civic environment than many others in the city. So I think being a good city maker is just being somebody who is trying to engage with that civic space, with community, and figuring out their specific way to plug in and make their place, their home, a little bit better.

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Seth: Reflecting on what you both said, I think one challenge we have in the way we structure higher education that prepares people for these professional roles is that most schools assume you’re getting a generic education — the engineering degree you get in the Southeast is going to be similar to the one you get on the West Coast, similar to New England. And part of that dynamic is that we actually denature it from the place that you’re in. We strip out the opportunities to be grounded in the specific place, institutions, and economy your school is in, because you want to make it maximally mobile and interchangeable with other institutions. And I think the way we’ve done that means that in the undergraduate curriculum, you’re often fighting the institution to really get your feet in the ground in the place you’re in. There’s obviously some variance — people are doing more project courses — but the curriculum still isn’t going to be, say, “Charleston architecture” in Charleston.

Christine: Just so I’m not misunderstood, I will say, Seth, I disagree with you, based on my experience teaching at universities and encountering a lot of different students along the way. I don’t agree with the idea that universities are providing an education that’s meant to be nationwide, and that they’re not engaging with their communities in project-based, locally-based design studios. I disagree.

Seth: Certainly, I think you’re right in the design studios — I see that a lot, that’s true. But what I’ve noticed, at least in the curricular offerings, is that I haven’t seen that dynamic play out as much. The urban theory is very similar in different schools; the engineering program curriculum is nationally standardized. So there are trade-offs between the project-based work, which does tend to use local projects, and the theoretical components, which I think tend to be more broadly shared. Do you think that’s true?

Christine: No — but Will knows I can be a bit contrary at times. I’ve taught in some of our classical programs, like the University of Notre Dame; I’ve taught with what was the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture, now the King’s Foundation; INTBAU; Georgia Tech; University of Colorado Denver, where I established a research center in their College of Architecture and Planning. I can’t comment on civil engineering or engineering programs, but when it comes to architectural education, planning, and urban design, my experience has been that while there are certain national standards being met by accredited programs, the programs are very much calibrated to their place, their traditions, the problems of that place — whether through the design studio or the engagement of local professionals in teaching professional practice classes. They’re very much geared to their place and locale.

Seth: That’s interesting. How would you contrast your experience in Colorado versus Georgia Tech between those two programs? In what ways were they similar or different?

Christine: So Georgia Tech — I was the Harrison Design Scholar, which was a program within the School of Architecture, though I may be getting the exact name of the program a little wrong. I taught a studio, co-taught it with Betty Dowling, and delivered various lectures. Will, I think, missed me by a couple of years. My experience at Georgia Tech — and I think of Georgia Tech as a fairly mainstream architectural program, distinct from highly specialized programs like Notre Dame’s program in classical architecture — was that our studio existed a little bit outside of the common studio culture, and I think that’s what drew students to it. In the course of our studio, we worked on understanding regional building traditions, particularly for residential architecture — and by architecture I’m always including urbanism in that description. The students then designed a project for an actual location and place near them; they had a choice of what they did.

Contrasting that to Colorado — I actually find that the University of Colorado, which again I’d call a mainstream and sound program, was far more place-based than at Georgia Tech, and that may just be because we’re so far away from everyone. We can’t easily hop on a train and go do a studio in New York City. But here we deal with very critical issues like water and water rights and wildfire — our natural resources feel much more present in mind than I ever found on the East Coast. Anyway — long answer there.

Seth: No, that’s interesting, and there certainly are important regional distinctions — that’s a helpful framework to think about them. So, Will, you and I have talked about how you came up in your educational experience. I was hoping you could walk people through how you got to where you are now — how did your schooling shape the evolution of your practice?

Will: Well, I’m not disagreeing with Christine, but I’ll provide a counterpoint. My journey was pretty curvy and all over the place. I joined Georgia Tech as an undergrad and studied there for four years. I studied abroad twice — one of those was in Hong Kong, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, for a semester doing studio design. Then I worked with Lou Oliver, who’s very deep in the New Urbanism world, and that was my real introduction to urbanism and urban design. I went back to school after a few years — at Tulane University — to study real estate development and get my master’s in architecture, and then went back with Lou until last year. That’s the high-level overview of my trajectory.

But having studied at three different institutions — two of them in the South in the United States, and one on the other side of the world — I’ll say there wasn’t much difference in the way architecture was taught in Hong Kong versus Georgia Tech. I think Tulane was more place-based — it’s similar to Colorado in that it’s a very unique environment. You have the river, and New Orleans itself is really the only big city within 500 miles, so it’s a unique place and they really leaned into that. But the theory behind the design of what they were teaching was consistent across all three universities, and the approach with which they approached place was also the same. Even where some of them had a bigger focus on place, it was often an outside-looking-in approach — let’s analyze this place and pick out the things we like and lean into that — which is subtly different from “let’s learn the traditions of this place and expand those traditions.” And I think that was something I had to unlearn over the years and lean into a little bit more.

Christine: I agree with you there, Will. I think that’s a big distinction between what I’d classify as mainstream — I’m speaking primarily from a school-of-architecture perspective — mainstream programs versus some of these more unique programs that have developed over the last thirty years or so.

Seth: Will, with the hindsight of how your career has evolved, if you could go back and change something about the programs you went through, what would you want to change to make them better for you?

Will: It’s interesting — I was always drawn to urban design. For some reason I was set on being an architect, but I was always fascinated by urban design. I actually had a class at Georgia Tech — an exploratory class outside the architecture program, where they let you create your own major within the university. Part of that was developing your own curriculum, and the one I put together for myself was a combination of urban design, economics, architecture, and development — all the things I’m interested in and pursuing now as an urbanist and designer, beyond just the scope of a building. I had one class in my six years of education on urban design. I wish I’d been at Georgia Tech when Christine was teaching, because just hearing a professor say “there is no urban design without architecture” — that was never said. You never really looked beyond the scope of your building in my design studios, in terms of — maybe what materials are they using next door, maybe you’d look at the datum line of where the windows are and use that as a base — but beyond that it was never really a consideration.

And I think that’s what I would change: knowing the context you’re operating in, understanding how to actually analyze that and understand the patterns you see, and learning from that — either taking that pattern and continuing it, or evolving it, or sitting in contrast with it, and understanding when you make each of those decisions and why. Those are the kinds of discussions I wish we’d had more of in architecture school.

Seth: So, Christine and Will — when did you two first connect? How did you first connect?

Christine: Well, Will had attended — I think along with Lou — one of INTBAU’s programs in the Netherlands. Am I right, Will?

Will: Yes.

Christine: This was one of INTBAU’s so-called summer programs, which have become very popular over the last decade, and I think Will and Lou specifically went because they felt there was a need for an urban-design-focused summer program in the United States. Obviously, the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art has been running its summer program since 1992, and it’s fantastic — its projects are urban-based — but, having run a number of these programs myself, they tend to be focused on teaching students the classical language of architecture, classical design and composition techniques. All of that is in the context of the city, its place, its urban setting, but they’re not doing larger urban design projects.

When I was running our summer programs, we did what I call live public projects — we worked on real urban design issues, and our students designed areas of the city or came up with demonstration projects for how you could conserve the character of a place while still allowing for development. We got ahead, for example, of the Meatpacking District and its future historic designation. Anyway, Will and Lou rightly understood that there wasn’t an opportunity for people who were more interested in urban design rather than specifically architecture. They attended one of our INTBAU programs, and then Will, I think, got in touch with our London office, where our secretariat is based, and described that he wanted to start a program. I think our first meeting, actually, Will, was over video chat while I was in the hospital taking care of my mother — remember that? We were in the waiting room, and it took us a little while to connect, but we had a great conversation, and I think we very early on established an MOU between our two organizations, to mutually support and assist each other. With the summer studio, City Makers is the lead on the program, in association with us, and I’m just sort of playing backup to Will and helping the program.

Seth: That’s fantastic. I wonder — I don’t know how many folks are actually familiar with INTBAU. Could you explain a little of its history, how it’s evolved, and what it’s been doing recently?

Christine: Sure. As you rightly got the whole name at the beginning — we are the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism. We just celebrated our 25th anniversary this past fall in London, October/November — Will and a number of City Makers Collective people were there to help celebrate, since they’re part of the INTBAU network. Robert Adam, the architect in England — the living, current Robert Adam — started INTBAU with a number of like-minded people, as I said, twenty-five years ago, in order to focus on the preservation, perpetuation, and advancement of local traditions. Not all traditions are good, but there’s a lot of embodied wisdom in traditional ways of doing things, and those traditions are wildly different in different places, among different cultures. Rather than focusing only on one tradition — such as the Greco-Roman Western tradition — INTBAU wanted to focus worldwide. We now have something like 35 chapters; we just added new chapters in Morocco, we have several chapters in South America and Central America, our US chapter, our Canadian chapter. We’re a worldwide, grassroots-based organization — all our chapters are different, and we all meet different needs in our various countries. Our US chapter is a little quieter because we already have great organizations operating in this space, like the Institute, the CNU, the Urban Guild, and now City Makers. We operate as a network first and foremost — we connect people to other people, and we promote good ideas and good things happening around the world. We’re a big organization; membership is free, I’ll say. If people want to keep up with what INTBAU is doing, you just go to intbau.org.

Thanks for letting me plug INTBAU, Seth.

Seth: Always happy to give people plugs — sometimes I feel like we’re an advertisement for Notre Dame, or INTBAU, or City Makers Collective, which is great, we’ve got to help get the word out. So you two met, you’ve got this idea of building a summer school in the US, similar to what was happening in the Netherlands and elsewhere, to do urban design. What was the market niche you were trying to fit? We talked about how the traditional programs weren’t providing what you were trying to do — but more specifically, what are you trying to provide that’s different from what you’d get in an architecture or urban planning program?

Building the Summer Studio

Will: I think the biggest difference, honestly, is that we’re offering a two-week program versus a four-year program. Our target market is people who have an interest in this but are either just exploring that interest, or trying to supplement the education they’re already getting, or even considering a career pivot. It’s an accessible first step that provides a foundation in the basic principles that make a place great. I don’t want to say we’re trying to hit a specific niche — it’s more that we’re trying to fill a gap in education where you don’t really have any programs that are that accessible. Two weeks — we’ve had people take two weeks off work to join us. That’s hard to do, but somewhat feasible for people thinking about a big change in their life. And it’s something college students can do while also having a summer internship. So our goal was to make something accessible that provided the foundation, and then send our students off in whatever direction they’re heading in their own careers and lives, with that foundation, able to carry those ideas forward.

Seth: That’s fantastic. So how did you develop the curriculum and pedagogy for the program? I know it took you — I was talking to you guys as you were developing this — it took a year of thinking this through, working on it, working on logistics. What became the core of the curriculum and the pedagogical approach you wanted to take?

Will: Originally — I’m not from an education background, so I leaned heavily on Christine and some of our other advisors who have that expertise. There’s also a book I have somewhere behind me: The Windsor Forum on Design Education, which was a gathering — when was that, Christine? Early 2000s?

Christine: Yes — I’m not sure if it’s pre-September 11th or after, but yeah, it’s back in there. 2003, maybe, Will?

Will: 2002, I just saw — in April. And that was a gathering of — I think Andrés Duany was the one behind that, Christine?

Christine: Okay, there you go — I was close. Yeah, so at the time there was an organization that Andrés Duany, John Massengale, and I think Ray Gindroz were working on starting, called the Institute of Traditional Architecture — ITA — which eventually merged into the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art. We brought them onto our board — that’s how Ray Gindroz, Liz Plater-Zyberk, and John Massengale joined our board. And Richard John, too — I shouldn’t forget Richard John, at the University of Miami, who had been at the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture, was also instrumental in starting that ITA group. As you’d see if you read it — Seth, if you haven’t got a copy of that, I’d get it and read it, I think it’s a very important report on the state of design education at that time, and where we all had very different opinions. Ellen Dunham-Jones, one of my former professors, who we were delighted to have teaching with us this summer — we posited two different ideas about architectural education, one from the classical perspective, one from a modernist perspective. She’d probably disagree with me even using the term “modernist” — she might not even want to put a term on it. Anyway, it was a very rich discussion, and I think Will has enjoyed looking at that book. Anyway, Will, you were talking a little about how we developed the pedagogy for the program, and I think we’ve made a lot of improvements between the first year and the second year.

Will: Yeah, so I took resources like this book, which is literally just a record of the conversations they were having in the early 2000s, and also looked back over my career and the things I wish I’d had some education on, and the things I’ve subsequently learned through CNU and through my work. It would be mischaracterizing what we put together if I didn’t say that we leaned very heavily on the INTBAU program in the Netherlands as well, for the base of our program, because they had a pretty solid program and they’re continuing to develop it too. The one I attended is called “Let’s Build a Beautiful City” — and of the INTBAU programs, Christine, I think it’s the only one I’m aware of that has that strong urban design focus.

Christine: Yeah, our Spanish programs do as well — they work specifically on an urban design project. And, you know, there is no urban design without architecture — the architecture and urban design are linked closely together.

Will: Yes. So we used some of those as models. I did a lot of research, talked to a lot of people. Our first year relied very heavily on lectures — we reached out to people across several different aspects of city building, city making, and had all these different perspectives come speak on that, and then the idea was that the students would take these ideas and relate them into a studio design project. We even had Zoom calls from different experts around the world that first year. It was a very collaborative development of the curriculum, and I think the first year was focused much more on how many perspectives we could get to influence the students. Our second year, upon some reflection and input from our students and faculty, we wanted to lean a little heavier on experiential learning. So this year we took the students out every morning and put them somewhere in the city, and asked them: What do you feel about this space? Are you feeling good? Are you feeling bad? What are the elements about this that you like? And then we taught them sketching, so they could communicate those feelings through drawing. So we were simultaneously teaching drawing skills as well as analytical skills, and I think we had a much stronger program because of that this year.

Christine: I agree. And, Seth, I think these summer programs — which have been going on since the first Prince of Wales’s summer school program in 1990, and if you look at the class of people who came through that program, it’s a lot of people who’ve gone on to have great impact in both education and practice — these summer programs operate in this kind of remedial space: we’re remediating what students are learning in schools of architecture and urban design, but we’re also supplemental, in addition to their professional track. This goes across all of these summer programs that have been happening. And in a way, when we started the Institute, these were seen as a bit of an end-run around the university system — you couldn’t learn about classical, traditional architecture or urban design in most schools of architecture, so we were just going to provide that. If you wanted to come and learn it, great; if not, we don’t have to fight NAAB or anyone else to get what we’re trying to do out there.

I think the other important thing about these programs is the seeds they plant — helping students, and by students I mean anyone from high school to mid-career or late-career professionals, realize that they’re not alone, that there’s a worldwide body of people who share a common criticism of the world we’ve built for ourselves today. We all have slightly different ideas of how to change that — I think they’re all valid approaches. Some of us are more architecture-focused, some more urban design, some more policy or finance — there are all different ways to come at fixing the problem. But whether you’re talking about classical architects who rejected their modernist architectural education and the results of the built world that education produced, or urban designers who rejected modern planning policy, I think there’s a common point of rejection and very different ways of thinking about moving forward.

I also want to share that one of the things linking all of these programs together, and that we’ve really focused on with the summer studio, is that we’re talking about place-based, tradition-based, practice-based education. We’re not spending time educating students about the theory of how to do something — we’re just teaching them how to do it. I want to give credit to Mark Gelernter, the former dean here at the University of Colorado Denver, who pointed out to me that this is one of the real differences in modern design education: so much of it is theory-based. As an example — a student at the University of Colorado described a design studio project where they were asked to select an object from childhood, extract principles from that object, and then use those principles to develop their design. This is very early in their design education, before they’ve had a chance to develop abstract thinking.

All architecture, all design is abstract by its very nature — you take an idea of something you want, put it on paper, and then build it, and that’s a process of abstraction from beginning to end. You don’t need to complicate that further by trying to teach theory in order to teach design. Instead of teaching theory, just teach students about good design. So I think this is one of the things that sets apart what we’ve been doing with the summer studio, and what’s common among these summer programs, and what I hope we see more of in design education: less theory, more practice.

Theory vs. Practice

Will: I’d like to tell a story to illustrate Christine’s point. At Georgia Tech, the first year is all hand-drawn drafting — you’re learning how to draft, how to communicate through drawing — so the design projects are very limited, if there are any at all. It was heavy on “let’s communicate as architects.” Year two is the first real studio you get.

Seth: Excellent.

Will: Both semesters of my sophomore year were focused on beauty — how do you translate the beauty you see in the world into architecture? The first semester, the prompt was how do you translate the beauty of herd movements — how animals move in groups — into a building. The second semester was how do you take the act of combing, like combing hair, and translate that into a building — how do you distill the beauty of those things that exist in the world into a building? I don’t necessarily think those are bad questions, but I think they’re questions for when you’re thirty years into your career and have all that experience to translate bigger ideas like that. But that was my first two design projects in school, and I think part of the reason I felt lost in school for so long was that it was so theory-based, I had nothing to grasp onto. It felt like I was constantly grabbing for whatever I could just to get through the studio.

Seth: That’s really interesting — to respond to both of you a little differently: Christine, it’s interesting that you say architecture is necessarily an abstraction process. I think prior to the eighteenth century, it was probably less that. There was obviously some amount of planning and design, but a lot of building was embodied — it was physical materials, and the designer was the builder. They had to know about bricks, they had to know about wood, they had to know about thatch, so they could build it.

Christine: They’re still abstracting. They have an idea in their mind of what they want to do — whether you’re a builder, an architect, or an urban designer, there’s a process of creating some idea of your end goal, even if it’s somewhat incomplete, and then putting that into the physical material, or into drawings, or a bill of sale, or some direction. I think there’s a process of abstraction always in design, and I don’t think abstraction is bad. So — there is a greater disconnect today, and I’d agree with you here, between the act of design and the act of building.

Seth: In college, I had the opportunity to work in a blacksmith shop — it was actually a ship’s smithy — and part of what we were doing was learning the basics of blacksmithing, but we were also making things for the museum we were housed at. We made a lot of hooks — that’s the classic blacksmithing training project, because it uses basically all the principal blacksmithing techniques, and you have a small object you can finish. I would never have thought that hook-making was an abstract process, unless you mean it in the sense of a platonic ideal — that there’s one true hook out there.

Christine: There is an idea of “hookness,” right?

Seth: Yeah, there is. I guess to me that doesn’t seem like an abstraction, though — maybe we have different ways of thinking about it.

Christine: I think you may not realize the degree to which — if we look at Alberti, Palladio, Vitruvius, even all our oldest texts — there’s an understanding that abstract thought is part of design representation. Even further back, we can look at figurines from the Stone Age — the idea that someone could take a human form and abstract that into a stone carving. I think this is what underlies a lot of human thought across different creative disciplines: the idea of abstraction, even if we don’t realize it. I agree with you that there’s less connection today, and I think that’s a problem.

Seth: Yeah, maybe the problem is the lack of embodiedness. To the extent there is abstraction, that platonic ideal — we’re not doing only that. We also understand the materials we’re working with, how they’re created, how they’re used through their life cycle, through direct action. This is the “architects should work on a construction site” problem, which they used to do basically until the twentieth century — that was pretty much always the case. But to come back to your point, Will — why do you think those were the questions your professor posed, essentially in the first year of studio? Was it because that’s what was interesting to a professor who was thirty years into their career? Or was it somehow easier than teaching mechanics — similar to why phonics isn’t fun to teach, because it’s kind of boring for the teacher? What do you think — why were they posing those questions?

Will: My cynical side says he’d just published a book about this, and the school was taking the cachet of him being a recently published author and brought him in to teach the second-year studio as a fundraising bullet point. That’s my cynical side. I have a little sympathy for it, because this was during the recession, when architecture wasn’t the profession to enter and funding was drying up and there weren’t many students — I get the pressures they were under. But honestly, that’s what I think the answer is: they brought him in for the cachet.

Christine: It was the fashion at the time, Will. I think this is something that really happens in design education, Seth — whatever the current way of doing things is, or whatever the latest starchitect is doing, filters down very quickly into design education.

Seth: So — you’ve mentioned a few programs, Notre Dame and a few others, that somehow manage to avoid, or at least follow different, fads. Why is architectural education, design education, so subject to chasing the latest thing? Why aren’t there more programs differentiating themselves? There’s only one Notre Dame — why aren’t there six?

Christine: That’s a good question. I think in some ways it goes back to the point you were making about the disembodied act of design, and I think one of the worst things that’s happened to architecture and our cities is the professionalization and the bringing of architectural education into the academy, rather than it being a mentor-based, mentee-based process of learning. I grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, and I thought when I went to architecture school at the University of Virginia that I was going to learn about making beautiful brick walls.

Seth: You’re going to build another Williamsburg — obviously, why wouldn’t you? It’s great.

Christine: I was naive — I was really naive. While I was in college, my family moved to suburban Northern Virginia, to the very edge of suburbia, in the late eighties, and my mother could not ride in the car with me — I was just apoplectic at what my profession had perpetrated on the American public, including my poor father, who was commuting an hour and a half each way to work in downtown DC.

I think, Seth, part of it is the attempt to turn architecture into philosophy and theory rather than practice. Because the fact of the matter is — and Liz Plater-Zyberk would say this — if we could just get architects to make plain old good buildings... Most of us are not going to make a great new cathedral. Most of us are just going to design good, quiet, background buildings that fit into their place. So when you think about what an architect or a builder needs to know to do that, it isn’t what you get in four years of architecture school. And I don’t in any way mean to say — this is where I go back to my point earlier — that I think what students should focus on first is a broad humanities-based education, where they learn the things that enable them to be a good citizen of their place. And then, in whatever way they can contribute — whether as a traffic engineer, an architect, or a shop owner — they’re contributing to the making of their place and community through that act, rather than the way education treats it today, across the board, which is that you get a piece of paper that allows you to specialize in something and get a job. That’s not really education — it’s more like very expensive vocational school.

Seth: Which is funny, because what we’ve also just described is the alternate way — the traditional way — which was apprenticeship, which is essentially a vocational education. You go and work in the blacksmith shop, or the architectural drafting studio, and you come up starting with the basics, and you learn more, and you learn more, and depending on your aptitude and energy, maybe you go off on your own, or maybe you stay in the shop, or maybe you go do something else. But that was the expectation. And my experience — both as a planner and as a developer — has been that school did only a little bit, and everything else is on-the-job training. So if that’s the case — if all we’re trying to do is prepare students to be good apprentices, because we can’t fix everything in school — then it stands to reason maybe we could do a little less, particularly a little less of the vocational-technical stuff in the program, and a bit more of that broad foundation. Because if you’re going to be a city builder or a city maker, you have to live with other people — politics is how you live together with other people, in a polis, a city, a town. This is a fundamental part of human beings living together in groups, and this is where literature, history, philosophy, theater, music, art — all of these things play into our ability to build good cities and towns.

Christine: This was the most important part of my education at Virginia. And what I think is important — like at Notre Dame, for undergraduates — they have a common first-year education. Both universities, and I’m not saying they’re the only ones, are very service-focused, and about understanding yourself first as a citizen in the world, and second as whatever your particular area of contribution is.

Seth: So, Will — what’s next for the City Makers Collective?

Will: I want to add to that last point a little bit first, because I think it’s important to recognize there are a lot of great things happening in architecture schools right now, and a lot of specialization that schools are doing to stand out from other programs — there’s been a lot of work on healthy buildings that some schools focus on, or sustainability and energy reduction. The biggest complaint I have about the state of architecture is that with modernism, and with the twentieth century, we as designers looked inward — what is the experience inside the building, rather than how does the building fit into its place. That’s really the only missing, or the biggest missing, piece in what we all complain about, about why we’re building bad buildings. For the most part, the buildings are actually a decent experience from the inside, if they’re designed by an architect — it’s just when you’re outside, seeing it sit in context, that we get upset, because it’s either surrounded by a parking lot, or sitting completely in contrast, in not a carefully done way, with the city around it. There are a lot of reasons for that, which I know we’re coming to the end of our time, so I won’t pontificate on. But I think that’s the real thing — if we can fix that perspective, and start having conversations about how buildings should sit in context with one another, how you should be designing something new in an old place, or even in an existing place — that’s the conversation architecture schools need to be adding in. But there’s a lot of phenomenal work being done around the country and the world in architecture — the profession has really advanced. We’ve just abandoned the civic aspect of design. That’s the real problem, in my opinion.

But to answer your question — what’s next for City Makers Collective: we’re continuing to develop and build our summer school. This year we had a fifty percent increase in students — I think we’ve reached our max, which is great. So now we’re focused on continuing to provide the best experience we can in two weeks, and being more intentional. We’ve had some conversations this year, now that we have an alumni class — and as of two weeks ago, two alumni classes — about how we can better support our alumni and celebrate what they’re doing. We have some incredible students who’ve come through, and we already have some great transformation stories. One student came in — he’d had his position eliminated by DOGE about a week before, this was last summer. He worked in public health, but had a love for cities and wanted to dig in and explore the intersection between public health and urban design. A week after he attended our program, the planning department within his organization saw that he’d been laid off, saw that he’d attended our program, and said, “Hey, would you be interested in becoming a planner, and bringing your public health knowledge to planning from a public health perspective?” So we had somebody make a career shift within a week of attending our program — we’ve had a couple of stories like that, which have been really exciting.

So what we’re thinking through is how we best support our alumni, in addition to continuing to grow the program. On top of that, we have a few workshops we hold outside of this — one we added this year is called the Clever Communities Workshop. It’ll be held in Texas, outside Dallas, in partnership with Nathan Norris and Zoe, one of our alumni from the first year, who’s heading that up. It’s focused on economic development — how economic developers and cities can set up incentives to both attract small business and really support small business in their communities, while also leaning into the good urbanism they have, and how those two work in tandem with one another. We’re really excited about that happening in September, and maybe expanding a few programs like that — Christine and I have been talking about the possibility of one or two others. So that’s what we’re working on in the short term.

Seth: That’s fantastic. Well, one last question for each of you — I’m wondering if there’s a book you’d recommend to our audience.

Christine: We might say something similar. I think How Buildings Learn is a great book for anyone interested in tradition and good design — the operative principles of the things we leave behind, the physical artifacts we leave behind in our world, and how the places they occupy connect with people. So that would maybe be my first recommendation. I don’t know — I’ve got a bunch of books on the coffee table right now. I’ve got, I think it’s Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity — I haven’t started reading it yet, but I’m really excited to. Anyway — How Buildings Learn, that would be my first recommendation.

Seth: That’s a great book — Stewart Brand, it’s a great book. Fantastic. Will, are you going to second the vote for How Buildings Learn, or pick someone new?

Will: I’ll pick something new. I’ve actually found, at least in urban design, that the best books were written decades ago — there are interesting things now, but the most informative for me were from decades ago. One is The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch, which is phenomenal — it explores three cities: Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles. They did these studies in the sixties where they brought people who lived there through the city and just had them point out the things that helped them navigate it, and then drew their own map of the area. Through those studies, they distilled down what are the things that keep us moving through a city, what are the things that help us understand where we are, and what are the qualities of a city that make us feel lost or like we don’t know where we are. It’s a really interesting, non-architecture book about how we think and navigate in cities, but it distills into points that are directly applicable to urban design — I love that book.

The other foundational book for me, especially when thinking about how to learn from tradition, is The Art of Building Cities by Camillo Sitte, where he went through the most picturesque villages and town squares in Europe, categorized them, and figured out what they were doing and why people like these spaces. For me, that’s the driving question I always ask, every time I go somewhere: do I like this place, and why? It’s so simple, but the way he breaks it down, the way he thinks about it, is foundational to that approach.

Christine: Since Will got two, I’ll add one more — this one’s more obscure, but it was absolutely fundamental for me, in my shift from a standard architectural education to understanding that I had something more important in the world to do than just make buildings. That’s Carroll William Westfall’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism. If there’s one fundamental idea that comes out of that book, it’s that cities are more important than architecture — and politics, not partisan politics, but the politics of the people of a place, are more important than architecture. So I’ll throw that out there too.

Seth: Thanks, that’s excellent — that’s the one I haven’t read, I’ll have to look that one up. Just reflecting and tying a bow around this — a lot between what you’re doing at City Makers Collective, and what’s in How Buildings Learn, The Image of the City, and The Art of Building Cities — all of these are observational books. We’re learning by observing the place, and then we develop principles from what we observe, which is sort of backwards from “I have a principle, now let me see if I can birth it into reality.” We’re working from observation, assembling through practice, observation, and noticing — that’s really wonderful.

Well, thank you both for being on and sharing more of the story of the City Makers Collective. I encourage anyone listening to check it out next summer — when do applications open?

Will: Towards the end of the year — we haven’t decided as a team yet, but I’m going to be pitching for December.

Seth: Okay, well, put it on your calendar — it’s going to be a competitive season this year, because, as you just heard, they’re full. So you’ve got to get in there early if you want to check out this amazing program. Will, Christine, thank you so much.

Christine: Thank you, Seth — thanks for what you’re doing.

Will: Yeah, thank you, Seth. This was wonderful.

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Summary

In this episode of The New School for City Builders, host Seth Zeren talks with George Proakis, city manager of Watertown, Massachusetts, about the winding educational path that shaped his career — from a civil engineering degree at Northeastern, to a master’s in public administration at Syracuse’s Maxwell School, to a master’s in city planning at MIT. George traces his rise from associate planner in Lowell to planning director in Somerville to city manager in Watertown, reflecting along the way on what actually prepares someone to lead a planning department or run a city: budget and personnel management, patience, team-building, and — a theme he returns to again and again — the value of pairing policy training with real design education. He also talks about teaching Planning in the Built Environment at Northeastern, what he’d change about city-builder education if he could start from scratch, and the growing crop of planners-turned-city-managers reshaping local government.

Referenced Organizations

* Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) — national organization mixing planners, architects, developers, and engineers

* CNU New England — the regional chapter George has been involved with since it started

* International City/County Management Association (ICMA) — professional association for city and county managers

* MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) — where George earned his master’s in city planning

* Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs — where George earned his MPA

* Northeastern University — Urban Planning and Policy, MS — the program George now teaches in, alongside Northeastern’s civil engineering program where he did his undergrad

* City of Watertown, MA — where George currently serves as city manager

* City of Somerville, MA — where George spent 12 years, the last three and a half running the planning and development department

* City of Lowell, MA — George’s first planning job, and where he later served as chief planner

Referenced Books

* Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back (PublicAffairs, 2025)

* Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance (Avid Reader Press, 2025)

Full Transcript

Seth: Hello and welcome to the New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zeren, a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer in Providence, Rhode Island. This is a podcast about how we can transform the education of city builders. If we want to change how our cities and towns work, we need to change the people who run them. We need a new generation of city builders — architects, engineers, planners, developers, city managers, and civic leaders. We need a new school for city builders.

Today I am joined by my good friend George Proakis. I met George back when I was a zoning planner in the Boston area, and he was the planning director for Somerville, Massachusetts. We would get together with the zoning planner for Cambridge and commiserate at an Irish pub. George is one of the planners I respect most. He’s an expert at both the technical and political aspects of the job, and a true example of a city builder on the public side.

Today, George is the city manager for Watertown, Massachusetts, where he oversees all aspects of the city’s daily operations. He also teaches planning and the built environment at Northeastern University. Today, George and I talk about his education, his career trajectory, and glean some valuable nuggets of wisdom about how to become a great city builder. George, welcome to the New School for City Builders.

George Proakis: Thank you. Thanks, Seth, for having me — it’s great to be here.

Seth: It’s a real pleasure. So, George, how did you become a planner in the first place? What was your educational journey?

George Proakis: My educational journey meandered through a couple of steps that landed me in the spot where I probably should have known I’d end up from a very early age. But nonetheless — I first thought I wanted to be an engineer. I went to undergrad at Northeastern for civil engineering. Northeastern’s great: they have a co-op program that lets you work in the real world. I did a minor in political science alongside the engineering major, and I worked three different engineering jobs during my time in school.

The one clear lesson that came out of that whole experience was that I wasn’t supposed to be an engineer. I was always more interested in the policy questions behind the work. You learn transportation engineering as an engineering discipline, but I was the one in class pushing the social science questions.

Seth: What about it was a bad fit for you?

George Proakis: Well — what’s the policy that determines whether or not we build more bike lanes? What’s the real reason we’re doing this highway? Is it just because somebody ran the numbers, or did someone decide beforehand that this project was more important than another? Who’s that person, and what role are they playing?

Seth: I feel like there was a moment in your class where you kept using the word “should,” and the professor said, “In this class, we don’t talk about shoulds. We’re not making value judgments here, George.”

George Proakis: Yes. And the interesting thing was, I concentrated on the transportation side, and if you look across the engineering disciplines, transportation engineering is unique — you’re applying a lot more value judgment, even social-science-level questions, to your decision-making. It’s also the only engineering discipline where, once you get deep into the numbers, you’re actually trying to predict human behavior rather than something purely scientific.

If you specialize in structures, your focus is on how the concrete holds up — sure, there’s some judgment in how much weight it needs to bear, but it’s still concrete. When you move into transportation, it’s about how many people will take a right and cut down a side street if a light is too slow. Suddenly you’re predicting human behavior, and that’s a different world than the rest of the engineering skill set.

Seth: Yeah.

George Proakis: It was fascinating, though. I had great professors and a strong engineering background. My conclusion at the end of that program was simply that I didn’t want to be an engineer. So I decided to get a master’s in public administration at Syracuse — a one-year, focused program where public management and that kind of engineering work come together.

I left there with a job in Syracuse, working for a research company doing alternative energy and environmental policy — really interesting stuff. I did that for about three years. By the end, we were focused on two things: bringing electric vehicle companies to upstate New York, where we were about twenty years ahead of our time since no one was really building EVs yet, and encouraging the growth of the corn ethanol industry to support upstate New York farms — a fascinating economic development challenge in its own right.

But rural economic development in farm country probably wasn’t the right fit for me. At some point I moved back to Boston, because it was home and where I wanted to be. I landed in the Fenway neighborhood, which is where my community-activist streak started. I got involved in some things there, got really interested in planning, and decided I wanted a master’s in planning. I did the program at MIT — which is how I ended up with two master’s degrees, one in public administration and one in planning.

Seth: Double threat — no, triple threat: engineer, public administrator, and planner. That’s a real superpower mix. So what was your first planning job, once you had the degree from MIT?

George Proakis: My first planning job out of MIT was associate planner for the city of Lowell. Half of that job was long-range planning — they were doing a comprehensive plan, a zoning overhaul, and neighborhood plan work. The other half was managing the projects coming before the planning board, which to this day I’ll tell people is the best first planning job anybody can have.

If you’re sitting there processing projects moving through the zoning code — site plans, special permits, variances — meeting with people who say, “I want to do this on my lot,” or “I want to tear this house down and build twenty-two units — can I do that? Do the rules allow it? Does the land allow it? Will the neighbors allow it? Will the board allow it?” — working through those problems is a genuinely challenging way to learn every aspect of planning. I’ve always said that from that job you can jump into almost any other planning role, which is exactly why it’s such a valuable first one. That’s what I did for my first two years out of MIT.

Seth: That’s what I did in my first planning job too, and then I jumped to the dark side and became a developer. So it’s a wide-ranging foundation for a lot of paths in city-building.

George Proakis: Right — you can do that job for a couple of years and then jump to becoming a developer. Or spend a couple of years and move into affordable housing. Or get more involved in urban design projects. Or jump to the private sector and help rewrite zoning, because you know how it works. Or, if you’ve got an MPA like me, you can get promoted fairly quickly into managing people — which is what happened to me.

Seth: So how did you get yourself promoted? You were a frontline planner in Lowell, and then at some point you became the director there, right?

George Proakis: Yeah. I ended up director of the planning and zoning team, and then took a deputy director role over the whole community development and planning department. So I got two promotions during my time there. The first was to run the team I’d already been a member of — I got it mainly because the people above me were promoted and a spot opened up, and I applied and had the chance to step into it. I do think one of my advantages at that moment was having both the public administration degree and the planning degree — that combination made it easier to step into managing people, managing budgets, and everything else that comes with it.

The second promotion came about because they were trying to carve out a role focused on long-range planning, and we designed it around what the department needed at that point in time.

Seth: Going back to your education — you had two master’s degrees, one in public administration and one in city planning. How were they different? Was there any overlap?

George Proakis: There actually was quite a bit of overlap in the two programs, most significantly in that both required backgrounds in economics and statistics — almost identical prerequisite classes in the first term. MIT was nice because they let you test out of those classes and take electives instead, which I was able to do since I’d taken the equivalent classes at Syracuse and retained enough of it over the four years in between to pass the placement tests.

I actually could have tried to test out of the intro classes at Syracuse too, since I’d taken a statistics class in undergrad, but I chose not to — I wanted the full range of the base program there. By the time I got to MIT, though, I was looking at all these interesting electives and didn’t want to redo material I already knew, so I tested out.

Seth: Yeah.

George Proakis: So that’s where the overlap is — that baseline background in economics, and in the kind of program design and statistical literacy that’s similar across both. But an MPA is largely about people management and budget management, while a planning degree goes much further into technical areas like housing, environmental planning, and design.

One of the interesting things about a planning degree is that you can do as much or as little urban design work as you want, depending on where you go and what the program offers — which is both something I find valuable and something I struggled with. I wanted more of that design background in my second master’s program, since I already had the other tools from the first one. So I took more studio design courses, and that’s really where I started to develop my biggest area of interest: the intersection between policy and design. Even though I don’t do that work day-to-day now, it’s still my core technical interest.

Seth: Right — and you’re not doing zoning review day-to-day now either, but you’ve done it, and it makes it a lot easier to understand how an idea becomes a building, and the government’s role in that. So, in an MPA program, how do they teach you the people-management and budget-management side of things?

George Proakis: Right, I’ve done it.

I took a course in state and local budget management — you work to build and learn the elements of it, with a lot of case-study research. You read about a place that had a financial challenge and work as a class to figure out how to solve it. There’s also an executive leadership course in the MPA program at Syracuse with two capstone pieces.

One — and I don’t know if they still do this, but it was pretty incredible — had a significant portion of the class build the federal budget as a group exercise. Everyone became either a department advocating for a certain budget, or part of the team reviewing them. I ended up on the Office of Management and Budget team, reviewing everyone else’s work and deciding what we should or shouldn’t fund. The poor kid assigned to the Federal Highway Administration had a lot of problems with me, because I didn’t want to build more roads — I was still very much a planner at heart, with the engineering degree, always asking why we wanted to spend billions building more interstates that would just fill up with traffic. There was a lot of back and forth on that one.

The other capstone was a group project to really understand how a federal agency worked and produce recommendations for it. We studied a farm soil science program run by the federal government and had to write a report with recommendations on how it should change. Together, those two projects gave you that core combination of department leadership and budget-building.

The MPA program at Syracuse also lets you concentrate in areas like environmental science and tech policy, among others. What’s interesting is that when I was there in ‘95–’96, the majority of the class was headed into federal jobs — Syracuse’s Maxwell School had long been a pipeline into federal administrations, and still is. I was offered a job in D.C. working for a federal agency. It’s very easy to step into that world, or into something like the Presidential Management Fellowship, and stay in the federal bureaucracy for a whole career — and you can do very well doing that. I just got the itch to go deeper into local work instead. Now, more than half the students graduating from those programs are interested in local government.

Seth: Yeah.

George Proakis: It’s great going to the ICMA city managers’ conferences and talking to students from Syracuse now, because they’re all saying, “I don’t want an internship in some federal agency — I want to come work with you in local government and help build budgets.”

Seth: I had that same sense coming up — that MPA programs, in curriculum, faculty, and students, tended to be focused on the federal level. Do you have a sense of why that’s changed in the last couple of decades?

George Proakis: I think there’s more of a realization now that there’s real opportunity to make meaningful change at the local level, and more people working there — more mayors and local leaders interested in doing innovative things than there might have been twenty years ago. A lot of local governments in the ‘90s were run by mayors with a pretty insular team of people from that town. It was tough to break into that world.

Meanwhile, the relationships between the schools and federal leadership were strong. One of my professors at Syracuse had been Secretary of the Navy and had run NASA — that was the kind of path into federal service the program produced. He was honestly pretty disappointed I didn’t take that federal job. I don’t know what my career would look like if I’d started as a budget analyst for the National Weather Service instead of working on environmental policy in Syracuse and eventually coming back to Boston. I know that path probably would have led toward the Senior Executive Service in the federal government eventually — a perfectly good career path in a lot of ways. I just found I could have more immediate impact at the local level. Maybe I was also too impatient at that age to wait through the promotions it would have taken to get there.

Take a job like the planning role in Lowell — you can see the physical impact of your work on day one.

Seth: Yeah, that’s one of the appealing things about working as a developer too, and really at any local scale — the work is immediate. There are plenty of annoying, slow, painful parts, but when you finish something, it’s not just a white paper on a shelf. There’s a rebuilt street, a new building — a physical object people can use. So you transitioned from staff planner to planning director. Obviously you drew on the budget, people, and policy expertise you might not have gotten from a pure planning degree. So what’s actually different about being a planning director versus a staff planner, day to day?

George Proakis: I think the biggest difference is that you’re immediately dealing with personnel and budget issues, from day one. The team I inherited as chief planner in Lowell included the conservation agent, a neighborhood planner who handled neighborhood plans, the planning-board associate planner — the position I used to hold — the city’s traffic engineer and his assistant, and two positions called Design Planner, one focused on parks and open space, the other a part-timer handling a catch-all of design work. A great little team of really capable people.

The first thing I got to do after being promoted to chief planner was backfill my old position — read resumes, interview candidates, and pick someone. I hired a kid straight out of grad school named Jamie Erickson, who’s now the town administrator in Natick, Massachusetts. His first job was backfilling my old role in Lowell.

From there, you mentor, train, and assist — but you’re still doing planning too. My colleagues call these “working manager” jobs: you’re not just managing, you’re deep in the middle of the planning decisions, helping guide where things go. It’s just that more of your day-to-day becomes staff and budget management. That’s the best way I can describe it.

Seth: So if you’re a younger planner who aspires to be a director someday, what should you be doing or learning to get there?

George Proakis: Most people coming into the planning world — especially with a planning degree rather than an MPA — need to really watch and learn how their director handles those things. There’s also a certain amount of patience required. Honestly, I think I would have appreciated spending another year as a staff planner before stepping up. Looking back now, I find it interesting that I’m twenty-four years into a public-sector career, of which I spent only two as a staffer and twenty-two managing staff.

I think the key is really watching and understanding how to be a good supervisor, and focusing on training. Throughout my career, I’ve had the chance to promote individual contributors into management roles, and I’ve always been careful, first, to make sure they’re genuinely good at those management skills, and second, to make sure they get the support they need to get better at it. The best manager isn’t always the best individual contributor. If you have a team of six or seven great planners, the one who should lead the team may be the best planner — or it may be the one best able to manage the outrageous personalities in the group and get the best work out of them. Sometimes the best planning mind is best used as an individual contributor, and that may be their real strength. You have to figure out which is which.

Seth: What kind of training and support do you give people as you bring them into a managerial role?

George Proakis: There’s a lot out there — online training, course training. Even places like the Harvard Kennedy School and Business School offer training classes and programs for people managing staff for the first time. A good HR office for local government will know where to find those resources. Through my career, and even now, when you get to promote an individual contributor into a director role for the first time, you need to make sure they have the skill set — and the training — to make that step successfully.

Seth: So you were a planning director, and then you took the leap to city manager. How did you navigate that transition?

George Proakis: I left Lowell for Somerville and spent twelve years there — the last three and a half running the entire planning and development team, about a 65-to-70-person group. At that point I realized my skill set and my time were being spent more on managing teams and getting great outcomes from them than on individual-contributor work.

I started looking around, wondering if there was something next for me, though I wasn’t actively searching. The way I actually got the city manager job was that the former manager in Lowell I’d worked for — who now does recruitment for city managers, and who’d honestly been telling me for years I should go into management — called and asked if I was interested in a job in Watertown. I thought it sounded interesting, so I applied.

It was a very public interview process — the city council interviewed the three finalists in a public session. I thought I wasn’t going to get it, because the other two finalists had been city managers in Massachusetts communities for years, and I’d only run a smaller team. But it became clear the council’s real interest at the time was in someone with a planning mindset in the manager’s seat.

Traditionally, most managers come up through the finance side of city government, but more and more planners are becoming managers now — there’s a handful of us in Massachusetts, and I think across the country you’re seeing more people with certified planning backgrounds stepping into the city manager role. There’s a strategic value in long-range planning and big-picture thinking. If a community is struggling financially, they probably still want someone with a finance background as their core skill set. But it does shift.

Seth: I’m curious — what was the specific reason they wanted someone with a planning background in that job at that time?

George Proakis: At that moment, the council had gotten the city’s finances to a stable place. They were in growth mode, both as an organization and as a community, and were in the middle of a comprehensive citywide plan. They wanted someone who could focus more on who we are and what we want to be, rather than just making sure the next budget number lines up. They’d seen me build teams — I’d added a whole division to the department in Somerville and gotten a lot accomplished there — and I think that’s essentially what they were looking for.

Seth: I can imagine the personality and skill-set differences are pretty significant between a typical city finance director and a typical planning director coming up — or a law director, which I guess is another path to city manager. Have you noticed distinctions there?

George Proakis: I have noticed distinctions, but at the same time, when I spend time with my fellow city managers, I think we’re all struggling with the same challenges now. Some are financial, and the rest are about communities that don’t quite know what they want to be or where they want to go, and need collaborative discussion to figure out their path.

I do think there’s a particular skill set around town and city center community-building that’s hard to find in a lot of small towns and small cities. One nice thing about being a planner-turned-manager is that I can put real energy into our downtown challenges — but that’s far from my only day-to-day responsibility.

Seth: Right — you’ve got to run the whole city. So are you hands-on with the budget yourself, or do you have a finance director helping run that, and you provide guidance?

George Proakis: I don’t actually have a finance director position. I directly supervise the city treasurer, the city assessor, and the procurement director. The auditor reports directly to the council, but she and I work very closely together. My internal team includes the deputy manager, the auditor, the treasurer, and myself, plus a budget analyst — early in his career, but really good, and the one who’s at every meeting putting the book together. Between him and the auditor, they run most of the numbers and bring me drafts.

They do the first round with the departments — meeting with them, spending time with them — and then bring me the iterations, refining the budget sheets down until it becomes a balanced budget.

What I really appreciate — and I think this is a very planning-centered strategy — is that our town has an organized annual process. We run a July 1 fiscal year, and starting in November, the council writes budget policy guidelines for the following year, giving me policy direction on what they want included. That lets me tie the budget back to council priorities directly. It’s a system that predates me, and I appreciate it because it keeps the council-manager roles very clear.

Seth: That’s an important distinction. If you’re a planner coming up — and I think this has already started to change — a lot of planning departments can end up with a fairly limited scope. You’re hemmed in by the engineers on one side, police and fire on the other, the budget director somewhere else. George is a super-planner, so he’s never had that limited scope, but —

George Proakis: I’ll add — even as city manager, it’s easy to assume, “Well, everyone works for me, I can just tell them what to do.” It’s actually not like that. You’re still negotiating between personalities and departments with particular needs and priorities as you do this work, even at the top.

Seth: That’s fair. What I experienced in the planning department is that usually only at the director level are you in a position to participate in that negotiation. As a staff planner, you often have to go up the chain to get things done — but a lot of planning work touches things well outside the planning department’s own bailiwick, so you need other people on board to actually get anything done.

And at least for me, I think it would be really beneficial to have more people with that planning perspective — both the technical experience and the broader sense of what a city is trying to do — positioned to negotiate with other departments, or even embedded within them, so that planning-minded people are spread across City Hall instead of all stuck in one department.

George Proakis: One thing I liked about Lowell was that the transportation engineer, despite the engineering background and title, sat under the chief planner’s team — right there with us every day. But yeah, you’ve captured the challenge: you’ve got to climb the org chart to build those relationships. It’s tricky, and tougher to build staff-to-staff relationships with the departments you need to work with. It can be done, and should be done, but it can be difficult and a little strange — and then you add the layers of the political situation on top of that.

The one piece of advice I’d give new planners coming into a community is to be patient enough to observe — ask a lot of questions. Go meet with the fire prevention officer, the building and zoning person, the traffic and transportation engineer, and just ask: what worries you? What concerns are out there? You may find common ground, or you may find the transportation engineer is afraid to authorize anything new or creative — or maybe they’re eager to. It really depends. It’s difficult to manage the culture of an organization from a staff-level position; you have to work through it carefully to figure out what you can and can’t do.

Seth: I think you’re pointing at something I’ve observed too, from my time as a planner and since. School gives you this impression that you’ll do rational analysis, arrive at the correct answer, advocate for it with good communication, and then pass a bill. What I discovered is that it’s all much more political than that — and we don’t tend to teach the skills of a political operative when we’re training planners. Maybe the MPA program was a bit more aware of that. What was your experience?

George Proakis: You’re right — life is a thousand times more complicated than that. I’ll give an example. I worked for two city managers in Lowell. The first came up through the political world — he’d been in the state legislature before becoming city manager. The second came up through professional management. In both cases, I never worked directly for them; there was always someone in the org chart between me and the manager.

But I spent a lot of time observing how each of them operated and what they were able to accomplish. Both got the job because the city council chose them to run the city. The first manager had a very intense political relationship — he’d grown up in Lowell, knew the individuals, and had a striking rapport with the council. For a period, the council essentially voted in lockstep with what he wanted. We passed an incredibly progressive, innovative zoning overhaul under his tenure, mainly because he was fully on board with it, and the council generally trusted the staff, so they didn’t spend much time diving into the details. It took Somerville seven years to do its zoning overhaul; we did Lowell’s —

I swear, to some extent, my boss got up that night, and I was sitting in the audience, and he basically said to the council, “George is here if you have any questions.” They knew that if I got up, I’d probably go on and on about how great the ordinance was, and they were almost afraid to hear me talk about it — so they just passed it unanimously without much discussion.

Seth: So this is where the legend of George begins — the rapid passage of the Lowell zoning ordinance.

George Proakis: It was one of those things where, deep down, I knew part of the reason the political culture in Lowell was willing to adopt such a progressive code was that the old-boy culture there still controlled a lot of what happened at the zoning board of appeals — so, to some extent, people could still get a variance for almost anything. I was aware that wouldn’t last forever, but I also believed that if we built a really good code, it would stand the test of time.

Twenty-four years later, Lowell is now reviewing that code. For twenty-four years it’s held — that’s a long run. I’ve told the person doing the current review that I’m genuinely thrilled to see it getting an upgrade, because even though I’m proud of what we wrote back then, it was twenty-four years ago. It’s time to look at it again and ask: is this still right? Does it still work for us? How have we changed? The basic core of the code has held up well, and I think its structure will largely survive this next amendment too — but it’s a good chance to see what still works.

Seth: So how was it different under the second manager, who wasn’t the political type?

George Proakis: I had a lot more split votes on the council. They’d hired him as a professional manager, but they wanted to flex their own muscles a bit more with him and his team. On one hand, I had to worry less about the politics of getting something to the council, because the internal administration was already in favor of getting good ideas in front of them. But I had to do a lot more work beyond that to actually get the council to vote the way we wanted.

We did the Hamilton Canal District under him — our big transit-oriented zoning district, the first form-based code I was involved in. We ran a massive public process to build a coalition of supporters behind us for each step of the council process, with a lot of community outreach and feedback shaping the code. That district should have been built out in about five years, but because of the economy in Lowell, it’s nineteen years later and it’s still being built — though the code is still there and still working.

Seth: So when you stepped into the city manager role yourself in Watertown — coming from Somerville, a strong-mayor city — and neither of those two Lowell examples quite matched what you followed — what was the most surprising thing about the job when you got there?

George Proakis: An interesting question. I think the most surprising thing has been how much team-building has become the key to being able to do what I want to do. Through attrition and changing circumstances, the vast majority of department head positions have turned over in the four years I’ve been there.

In each case, I’ve tried to be very careful about putting the right person in the role — whether an internal promotion or an outside hire — to make that department stronger, make things work better, and make everything tie together. The Watertown I inherited was a very well-run city, but it was also a place where department heads were very much the leaders of their own individual worlds, without a lot of interaction between them. The planning team could put together a comprehensive plan, and the fire department or public works might not even be fully aware of what was going on. When I did the Watertown Square plan, I brought the police traffic people into a meeting and said, “This is what we’re going to do — are you okay with this? Give me feedback, tell me what you want to see improved” — that kind of conversation was important to me, because I wanted to build the team as a whole organization, not just department by department, pulling together to implement the goals the city council hired me to accomplish.

Seth: That’s great. Looking back on your career — not that it’s over, you’re still doing great work — what was the best part of your educational experience, the part that’s informed and supported your career the most?

George Proakis: I’ll split that into two answers. The planner in me really appreciates the urban design background — I’m not an architect, so I’m not amazing at drawing, but being able to take design courses and really learn that side of the work has been an important part of my planning background. I may not be the world’s best designer, but I understand what pieces are necessary for good placemaking, and that matters a lot to me.

That said — in the arc of my career, where I spent eight years total in school between the five-year undergrad co-op program and two master’s degrees, the one year I spent at Syracuse getting the MPA is, without question, the skill set I use most in my day-to-day job right now.

Seth: If you could go back — knowing what you know now — and change anything about those programs, what would it be?

George Proakis: I probably should have done the two master’s degrees in the opposite order, but that’s beside the point. For me, honestly, it worked out really well — the path worked out.

Let me think about it a bit more. I don’t think there’s much I’d change. Inside those two programs, I got what I needed out of both. They complemented each other particularly well, and together they got me to where I am now — which I really believe is the right place to do the long-range, big-picture work that I do.

If I can speak about planning programs in general — those two programs were substantially different, but that’s partly how I built my own path through them. I structured my planning coursework as someone who already had an MPA, so any course I could have taken again from the first degree, I skipped in the second, which let me dive deeper into specific policy areas and into the design side of planning.

I need more planners with a design background — I don’t know how else to say it. It’s very easy to get a planning degree where you spend a substantial portion of your time doing what I did in the MPA program — great for me as a manager, but we need more planners who also have the design chops. There aren’t a lot of them in the field right now.

Seth: That’s really interesting — feedback for anyone who wants George’s job: go get a design background alongside your planning education. Outside of academics, what non-academic preparation has been most helpful for you as you’ve grown into being a city manager?

George Proakis: I think there’s real value in collaborative conferences and interactions between professionals in this field. I’ve been involved with the Congress for the New Urbanism, and its New England chapter, since it started, and I’ve been to every one of CNU’s national congresses since 2002 — do the math, that’s a lot of them.

I like working with that organization not because they build cute little places like Seaside — though I do find those interesting to visit — but because it’s one of the only national organizations that mixes disciplines together in a professional conference setting. You end up with planners, architects, developers, and engineers all together. Conferences of planners or of city managers alone are interesting and you can learn a lot there too, but I learn even more in a session or in a hallway at CNU, exchanging ideas with people who approach the built environment from very different backgrounds than mine. Listening and learning from them has helped a lot.

One other thing I’ll say has been genuinely helpful is board-review-type work — understanding what makes developers do what they do really helps when you’re figuring out how to actually do permitting well. You can write whatever you want into zoning, but if the finance markets won’t fund a project that does X, Y, or Z, it’s not going to get built. You can bring the greatest project in the world through a board review and get it approved, and the plans will look great to look at ten years later — if it never actually gets built, that’s not a win. The goal is to get the project built: to say, “We approved this because it’s consistent with our community’s goals — now go build it.” If you set up that structure wrong, it just doesn’t work. Understanding those interactions really matters.

Seth: Absolutely — CNU has been great for me too, for the same reason: a lot of different perspectives, and a conference where people are generally willing to disagree. It’s not a place where everyone’s just selling their services or riding the current fad, and that disagreement is really where I feel like I learn the most.

George Proakis: I went to CNU New England’s social event this week, and within five minutes I was in a debate about state policy around site plan review with someone there — a housing advocate. There was real friction, but we both —

Seth: Excellent — that’s the friction that generates heat.

George Proakis: — believe deeply in the importance of what we’re doing, even though we think some things should be different. We were really diving right into it, and that’s genuinely useful — to be able to have those conversations.

Seth: Right, but you actually learn something that way. If you already agreed with each other, there wouldn’t be much to learn. So — you also teach on the side at Northeastern, your alma mater. What course do you teach, and what are your students learning?

George Proakis: The course is called Planning in the Built Environment. It’s a great class because, ideally, about half the students are in the planning master’s program Northeastern started a few years back, which just got accreditation — a wonderfully flexible program that you can do part-time, which works well for people already in the workforce. They come in with really good work experience and a clear sense of where they want to go, and either a planning background or one they’re building, though they’re usually early in their planning curriculum.

The other half of the class is architecture students, usually fourth- or fifth-year, who have a great design background but haven’t been exposed to much of the planning side before. The class — with credit to Tim Love, the professor who taught it before me and laid a lot of the groundwork I still build on — is essentially the place where students from both programs get exposed to the interaction between planning policy and urban design: why do cities look the way they do? Why are places built the way they are? Why is Paris Paris, and why can’t Boston be just like it?

We dive deep into that, starting around the 1800s and coming forward to the modern tools of zoning, finance, and city-building. In the last week of the course, I’ve turned a big lecture section into a discussion I call “Managing the Modern City” — how a city manager can and can’t shape the built environment, and craft a place around where people work. I really enjoy it — the students give me new energy.

Seth: So you’ve been running Tim Love’s class for a few years now — what kinds of changes have you made as you’ve worked through it?

George Proakis: Tim comes from an architecture background, so he could dive very deep into the architectural side. I have enough urban design background to talk about that too, but I’ve spent most of my career on the policy side and on where those worlds interact, particularly around zoning. So I’ve added sections on economic development strategy, and I go a bit deeper into the impacts of zoning and land-use regulation on cities. I also added that section on city management as it relates to the built environment, and I’ve brought in a few guest speakers — some Tim used to bring in, and a few I’ve added myself.

We talk about what made certain projects work, about doing zoning reform, and about how local housing policy interacts with the housing crisis — that kind of thing.

Seth: What lessons or techniques have you found most effective in your teaching? What do students respond to, and get the most out of?

George Proakis: I teach a Monday night class, three hours long. I’ll tell you what doesn’t work: lecturing at them for three hours straight. I’ve gotten more and more convinced that a three-hour block can’t just be three hours of lecture. So I use a few tools in the toolkit that I think are genuinely helpful.

We put together a list of questions on the previous week’s reading, and I’ll have them break into small groups to work through them, then have each group present one question’s answer to the rest of the class, so they can dig in more. I also have them submit a short reading reflection memo for each reading — a page or two — often with a specific question meant to get them to take a position rather than just summarize.

One of my favorite readings, which I kept from Tim’s version of the class, is an intense economics-based argument that sprawl is actually good. I assign it and ask, “Do you agree or disagree with this author?” — it generates a lot of discussion.

The other thing I do, which I learned from a Lowell colleague and works really well, is pass out a note card at the end of every class and have everyone write down whatever’s on their mind. Then, anonymously — because I don’t want to put anyone on the spot — I’ll put some of those notes up at the start of the next class and talk through unanswered questions, lingering issues, or interesting thoughts that came out of the previous session. That gives students a feedback loop — a way to tell me “this is working,” “this isn’t,” or “we should have gone deeper here.” If five people write that they still don’t understand something, I’ll go back and spend more time on it the next class.

There’s also a group project that they present, and guest speakers who take a session — about four classes’ worth — so it breaks things up quite a bit.

Seth: I found the same thing when I was teaching — bringing in guest speakers really helps surface other perspectives. Sometimes I can say something, but it doesn’t sink in until someone else says it too.

George Proakis: What’s surprised me most is, first, how little exposure the architecture students have had to the regulatory and zoning side of their work before this class — it’s genuinely not on their radar until they take it, and then they’re like, “Whoa, there’s a lot of regulatory stuff here.” And second, how much the planning students learn when I put a private developer in front of them.

It’s easy for planning students to be development critics — to look at any private project and say it shouldn’t have been built that way, or it should have been all affordable housing, or there are too many parking spaces, whatever it might be. Then you bring in a developer and have them respond to those critiques directly: “This was the finance market, this was my company’s board, this was the limitation on my permits” — and suddenly there’s this whole other layer of context that, if you don’t know it, you don’t understand why a project turned out the way it did.

Seth: Right — but you’re not necessarily exposed to any of that otherwise. One of my critiques has been that developers are trained in the business school, planners in the planning program, architects in the architecture school, and activists in the sociology department — and nobody really learns how to talk to each other. They don’t spend much time together, and neither do their faculties. It’s not something we systematically ensure — the cross-training or the connections happen, but only occasionally.

George Proakis: I feel very lucky, as an outside professional adjunct, to be able to expose these students to topics and concepts they wouldn’t otherwise see in their other classes. I’ve gotten better over time at learning what’s actually in the rest of their curriculum, so I know where I overlap — a little on housing policy, but that’s about it. Most of the rest of the class is pretty unique to this course.

Seth: Right — you don’t want to duplicate what they’re already getting elsewhere. Given both your personal experience and your teaching experience — if you could start city-builder education over from scratch, what would you want it to look like?

George Proakis: I think spending more time on the design side, more time on the policy side, and more time on where the two come together would help. I still have twice as much material as I have class time for, even now.

There’s actually a second class I haven’t taught since 2019 — an economic development planning course I created and taught at Harvard for a couple of years, and would love to teach again somewhere. Economic development is a field almost nobody fully understands, and I think it’s a necessary link — connecting how people think about economic development with how they think about planning isn’t something students are exposed to in any real way.

Consider this: Harvard, as an institution, offers classes in almost anything — but during the two years I taught that course, it was the only course in the entire university focused specifically on urban domestic economic development. You could take a class on economic development in a rural community somewhere in Asia, but if you wanted a course on economic development in an American city, that class was it — there was nowhere else it was covered.

There’s been some movement on that front since — one of the program leaders at the Kennedy School tried to push a similar course, and I used to bring him in as a guest speaker; we talked about that gap. But I think it’s a gap in a lot of places. You go in thinking, “I’m going to be an economic development planner, I’m going to help bring in business,” and there’s no clear definition of what that actually is or how the programs work. Left to its own devices, economic development becomes “let’s give someone two hundred million dollars to build a new baseball park” — probably one of the worst ways to invest public money if you actually dig into the analysis. But I spent a little too much time as an activist in the Fenway in the ‘90s, so I have a few opinions on that topic.

Seth: You have some feelings about that, huh? All right — George, this has been fantastic, thank you so much for taking the time. One last question: is there a book you’d recommend to the audience — something you’ve read recently, or ever, that you think would be really helpful for people?

George Proakis: I’m constantly reading, and there’s always something new on my horizon. Lately I’ve been really interested in the places where people are starting to look at how bureaucratic process is creating obstacles to doing big things.

Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works is something I’ve read recently, which gets at how big projects seem unable to get off the ground. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance came out around the same time and touches on a lot of the same themes — the challenges we face making big things happen. I think that’s one of the most interesting spaces to be in right now, because if you care about city-building and place-building, those of us in government have to acknowledge that we’ve been layering regulation on top of regulation for the past twenty-plus years, to the point where systems are starting to break. We need to figure out what we really want and prioritize it — the answer to every problem can’t just be another rule layered on top.

That’s a place I want to spend more time on, on the education side — encouraging people to look at the whole system and what they actually want to happen. Why Nothing Works is a great book — an interesting perspective on the push and pull, particularly within the progressive movement, over what it is and who it’s for. The more we conclude that more government regulation is the answer to our problems, the more we find we actually can’t solve them. I’ll leave it there.

Seth: That’s a great place to leave it. Thank you, George, so much for coming on the podcast.

George Proakis: My pleasure.

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Show Notes

In this episode, Seth talks with Sheinya Joseph — architectural designer at Dover, Little Diversified Architectural Consulting and president of the Emerging New Urbanists (ENU) — about her path into architecture and urbanism, what her education did (and didn't) prepare her for, the programs ENU runs for young professionals, and what a truly interdisciplinary school for city builders might look like.

* Emerging New Urbanists (ENU) — website · The ENU Exchange on Substack

* Dover, Kohl & Partners — Miami-based town planning firm where Sheinya did her first internship

* Little Diversified Architectural Consulting — where Sheinya now works

* Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) — the broader New Urbanist movement and conference community ENU grew out of

* Incremental Development Alliance (IncDev) — website, trains small-scale developers

* Citymakers Collective — website, runs an in-person Summer Studio program for aspiring architects and urbanists

* Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America — the book both Seth and Sheinya point to for understanding how housing policy, zoning, and lending shaped today’s cities

* Chuck Marohn & Daniel Herriges, Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis — discussed in ENU’s book club

* M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It — also an ENU book club pick

Episode Transcript

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Seth: Hello and welcome to the New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zaran, a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer in Providence, Rhode Island. This is a podcast about how we can transform the education of city builders. If we want to change how our cities and towns work, we need to change the people who run them — a new generation of architects, engineers, planners, developers, city managers, and civic leaders. We need a new school for city builders.

Today I’m joined by Sheinya Joseph. Sheinya is a recent graduate of the University of Miami architecture program and an architectural designer with Little Diversified Architectural Consulting. She’s also the president of the Emerging New Urbanists, a nonprofit that supports young professionals in city building and those new to New Urbanism. Welcome to the New School for City Builders, Sheinya.

Sheinya: Thank you so much for having me, Seth. I’m excited to be here and to talk about my journey and experiences as an emerging professional.

Seth: You were on my short list of people I wanted to interview when I was putting this together, because I think it’s important to get perspectives from people at different stages of their career. The Emerging New Urbanists is a great group of people who’ve recently left school, so you can tell us the most about what school is like today — the good and the bad — and how it’s shaping careers going forward. You’re also doing a lot of tremendous educational work through ENU, so it’s great to have you on.

Sheinya: Thank you.

Seth: Sheinya, how did you come to be an architect?

Sheinya: I became interested in architecture because I think a home is one of the most fundamental parts of our lives — shelter is one of our basic needs. But beyond that, our homes are often where we feel most comfortable and where we build memories, and for many people it’s also the largest investment they’ll ever make. So I was really drawn to the opportunity to design those kinds of spaces for people, and I saw architecture as a way to create spaces that are not just functional but also meaningful. As I continued through architecture school, that interest expanded beyond individual buildings — I started thinking more about the neighborhoods and communities those buildings exist within. That’s where I really began to discover urbanism.

Seth: Did you know in high school, or before, that you wanted to do architecture?

Sheinya: I did. I knew in high school.

Seth: Do you have some note from when you were ten years old saying “I’m going to be an architect”?

Sheinya: I actually have a screenshot of a job posting from 2013 for an “architectural manager.” I saved it to research further — though I don’t think I ever did — but I still have that screenshot today and look back on it.

Seth: That’s your gateway moment. So when did you attend school, and how did that shape your career today?

Sheinya: I studied architecture at the University of Miami, and one of the things that really shaped my education there was how much the program integrated urban design into architecture. We weren’t just thinking about the building as an isolated object — we were always prompted to think about the context, the public space, the streets, and how buildings contribute to the larger environment around them. That really influences the way I approach design today: I think about architecture through a broader lens, especially around questions of equity and how the spaces we create can better serve the people who use them.

Miami gave me the best of both worlds — urban design and city building, alongside architecture. That experience also led me to my first internship at Dover, Kohl & Partners, which happened to be right down the street from the university. It was a great opportunity because I got to see that urban design and community-focused planning happening in practice, which further reinforced my interest beyond just individual buildings.

Seth: How did you find Miami? Are you from Florida, or did you seek it out?

Sheinya: I definitely sought it out. I grew up just outside of Boston, so I decided to find the farthest south I could get so it would feel like a five-year vacation — Miami was the answer.

Seth: So you didn’t really know what you were getting into, other than that you wanted to go to architecture school.

Sheinya: Yeah, I had no idea what I was getting into.

Seth: When did you graduate from Miami?

Sheinya: 2022.

Seth: Looking back four years later, what was the best experience you had in school? Was there a lesson or assignment that really reshaped how you thought?

Sheinya: I think the most impactful experience was studying abroad in Rome. Being immersed in a city with such a long history really changed the way I look at architecture and the relationship between buildings and the public realm — it changed the way I’ll forever look at cities. I grew up in a suburban town outside Boston, so living in Rome for those few months was a complete 180 from what I was used to. Being there let me see how plazas and neighborhoods work together over time, and how people today still interact with spaces that have existed for hundreds of years. It reinforced that it’s not just about creating a building — it’s about creating a place, or contributing to a larger place, and understanding how design impacts the way people experience their surroundings.

Seth: It’s interesting — my own journey was also shaped by time I spent abroad, including visiting Rome in grad school. It was mind-opening, because American cities, even our oldest ones, are pretty young — they’re like toddlers. Then you’re in an old city that’s been continuously inhabited for two thousand-plus years, whether in Asia, Africa, or Europe, and you can see the buildup of different periods — the evolution of design, architecture, the economy, how people work in that place. It’s really eye-opening. So that was the highlight for you. If you could go back, what would you change about your program, knowing what you know now, four years into practice?

Sheinya: I think architecture programs do a great job teaching design thinking and technical skills, but there’s an opportunity to expose students to more of the broader process of the built environment. Architecture is just one piece of a much larger ecosystem — understanding how projects actually work, things like development, policy, how financing can be a barrier, and how different professionals collaborate, would help students see how their work fits into the bigger picture. I think about that a lot, since I mentor students still in architecture school. A really valuable experience would have been a semester-long project that brought together students from different majors involved in city building — it would give you a taste of what it’s actually like in the real world, across all the different professions and disciplines, and how collaboration actually happens. When I left school, I didn’t know any of that — I just thought, “I’m an architectural designer, I’m going to make all the design decisions.”

Seth: Right — sometimes you don’t even know what you don’t know. In my first planning job, working with the city engineer, we technically worked for the same city, but it wasn’t clear we were doing anything related to each other — we were often butting heads. It would have helped both of us if the civil engineer, the architect, the developer, and the planning student had all had to collaborate on a project together and recognize each other’s strengths, blind spots, and personality differences — and learn how to manage across that. Because once you’re out in the field, you’re not empowered to just make decisions by yourself. That’s not even true if you’re the owner — you’re still in an ecosystem with lots of different parties to navigate and balance.

It’s an interesting challenge, because academic silos — even at Miami or Notre Dame, which are, I’d say, some of the better programs — are still architecture schools. You’re still doing mostly architecture. So the idea that you’d sacrifice any architecture time to bring in planning, economics, development, or engineering seems, on its face, like it would weaken the program — like you’d become a less capable architect. But is that really true?

Sheinya: That’s interesting, because when I left school, I found I was doing less architecture and more coordination — talking with city officials and community members. So I don’t think it would weaken the program; I think it would make it stronger, because now you’re taught to collaborate across the groups you’ll actually work with in the real world.

Seth: And part of what you’re describing — especially working with community members or politicians — is that so much of this work ultimately comes down to persuasion, conversation, and relationships. That’s not entirely teachable, but it’s not entirely un-teachable either. You could practice those things — improv, negotiation, whatever — and get better at interacting with people and navigating relationships. That would be tremendously valuable once you’re out in the world. It’s just harder to measure on a test, maybe that’s part of the problem.

You advise a lot of students today through ENU who are currently in these programs. Why do they come to ENU? What are they looking for from you?

Sheinya: I’d say most architecture students who come to ENU are looking for a community that broadens beyond architecture itself into city building and urban design. Emerging New Urbanists is a group of emerging professionals passionate about shaping better places and creating more people-centered communities. Our membership comes from a lot of different backgrounds — architecture, planning, development, advocacy, design, or just people who like urban design and urbanist communities — but we’re all connected by shared interests in placemaking, walkability, and environmental justice.

We bring people together from across the country, both online and in person, to collaborate, learn from each other, grow as professionals, and use their voice to explore projects and topics they might not otherwise get exposure to — whether through their current school, education, or practice. I think a lot of people come here for that diversification of community within a professional space focused on building better cities.

Seth: That’s beautiful — it reminds me I really ought to be doing more mentoring work with you all. You’ve asked me to come in before, and I should do it more, because the way you describe it is genuinely inspiring. People need support they may not be able to get inside their current program. What advice do you give to people considering going to school, or choosing between schools — someone who says, “I’d like to be like Sheinya someday”?

Sheinya: I don’t often advise people who haven’t started school yet — I haven’t come across that group much. But if I were to advise on picking a school: I went through a five-year B.Arch program, and I’d say that structure tends to be more rigorous and goes directly into design. Beyond that, I can’t say I have much unbiased advice — I’d just say go to the University of Miami.

Seth: Great insight — you should ask them to sponsor the show; we take advertisements now. Not everything happens in the classroom, though. What’s the best non-academic experience you’ve had that’s helped your career?

Sheinya: Emerging New Urbanists. I think that’s been the most meaningful experience. Early in your career — whether in school or after graduating — it’s very challenging to find a community of people who share your interests and are also trying to figure out where they fit in the field, especially after graduation, when you move to a new city and start a new job. You’re starting over. Being part of ENU gave me the chance to connect with other emerging professionals, and now, being part of the leadership team, I’ve grown not just as a designer but as an advocate, teacher, mentor, and community leader. I’d encourage anyone to find a professional organization that interests them.

Seth: That’s a really good point. I remember first encountering the ENU folks about three years ago at CNU. I’d been away from the CNU conference world for a while because of young kids and COVID, and when I showed up again — in Charlotte, I think — I realized I was no longer a young professional; I was mid-career, and I’d been away a while. It was great to see the energy and creativity coming up behind us. Sometimes in the CNU world — and this is true across a lot of professional worlds — there’s a cadre of senior people who’ve been around a long time, written everything, been to every conference, and everyone wants to talk to them. It can be hard to break in, because they all know each other and have for twenty or thirty years. But no movement or community can put all its hopes on the old guard — you need people coming up, and it can be hard to invest enough in bringing them in. So I was excited to see ENU on the scene, leading that with real intention and energy toward building structures that would last, not just a flash in the pan. How did you first get involved with ENU?

Sheinya: During my undergrad in Miami, working at Dover Kohl, I got introduced to CNU and started understanding what it was about. When I moved to DC for my first full-time job, I was volunteering for the CNU Mid-Atlantic chapter and looking for more growth — more emerging professionals to be around. The president of CNU Mid-Atlantic recommended ENU, saying there was an existing professional group I should reach out to. So I did, and it turned out they were actually looking for a new leader — they encouraged me to interview for the role.

Seth: So you show up and they’re like, “Congratulations, you’re the president.”

Sheinya: Pretty much — it was exciting, but also a little scary. You know how they say to be wary if you get a job too quickly? ENU at the time might have only been two or three years old, so it was very much still at the beginning. I saw an opportunity to grow something — not necessarily change the mission, but add to its trajectory — so I said, “I’m in.” Now I’m three years into a four-year term, and it’s been incredible.

Seth: That’s awesome. Do you have a membership roster? How many members does ENU have?

Sheinya: Just north of six hundred, spanning the country as well as Canada. We’ve been expanding rapidly.

Seth: So there’s real hunger for this. Do you have an age cutoff, where people get “promoted out”?

Sheinya: Sort of — we typically encourage members to have ten years or less of professional experience. It’s less an age cutoff than an experience cutoff, because past that point it can start to feel redundant; you already know a lot of what we’re covering.

Seth: Right, you want to keep it focused on people coming up. Walk us through some of the activities ENU provides for its members, and for the urbanism community generally.

Sheinya: We offer quite a few things. One of our more successful programs is mentorship. We’ve been running it for two years and are entering our third, following the academic calendar — starting in fall, ending in early spring. Mentors and mentees fill out an intake form about their interests and what they’re hoping to get out of the program, and we pair them for a year. Every quarter the whole group meets around a specific theme, prompt, or guest speaker, and we also encourage each pair to meet monthly on their own. It lets the torch pass down — emerging professionals learn from seasoned folks, and seasoned folks give back and learn from the newer generation too.

We also run a program called Urban Decode, where you essentially decode the urbanism of an area. It can happen in any city — we currently have one coming up in the DMV area on September 12th, and another in Boston the weekend of October 3rd. Emerging professionals in that region get together, or people fly in if they want to. We pick neighborhoods and projects that reflect what we want to learn about and push forward, and we bring in the designers, speakers, or developers involved to give tours and talk about the issues they ran into and what they’d do differently. It’s typically a two-day event, and we host a workshop where everyone is assigned a role and a set of limitations. You get a site and its zoning constraints, and you essentially run a mini charrette on the spot, negotiating with your group to make the project work. That’s actually close to the semester-long university project idea I mentioned earlier — I think it’s very helpful.

We also have book clubs, if anyone’s interested in leading one or discussing a book.

Seth: What books have you covered recently?

Sheinya: Escaping the Housing Trap, The Color of Law, and Arbitrary Lines — that’s what I can think of off the top of my head.

Seth: Those are great books, and really fun to discuss. When I was coming up — I’m a “seasoned professional” now, I suppose; that’s a nice way of putting the gray hair — a lot of growth came from connecting with people, learning from them, often people around your own age dealing with similar problems, meeting them at conferences, and reading books together. In school you have that built in — classmates, a whole world around you — but once you’re out in your apprenticeship, working for a firm or a city, you’re learning a lot but you may not have anyone to talk about The Color of Law with. Having a peer group to read a book with and talk through what they see, what they don’t, and how it might shape their own practice — that’s fantastic.

Sheinya: Absolutely. We also have the ENU Exchange, a newsletter written for emerging professionals by emerging professionals — check us out on Substack at Emerging New Urbanists. We let people write about anything they’re passionate about. It gives emerging professionals a place to find their voice, practice their writing, and talk about things that maybe aren’t being discussed elsewhere.

Seth: That’s great — a forum where people can experiment, share their experiences, and practice writing for a public audience. So here’s one of my questions: how does the experience of younger professionals today differ from previous generations?

Sheinya: I think younger professionals are approaching city building in a more interdisciplinary way. Many of us don’t want to be limited to one discipline — that’s kind of what ENU is all about. We’ve decided we can’t confine ourselves to one bucket when we have many skills and interests, but there isn’t always a space that exists for that. I also think we’re seeing more people interested in doing small, one-off projects, and that incrementalism is part of how the movement keeps getting stronger. I think that’s what differs.

Seth: I’ve been involved in Incremental Development Alliance and other developer-training programs myself, and it’s gratifying to share those “dark arts” with people from different corners of city building, because once you understand how development actually works — the challenges, constraints, and opportunities — you have real power to interface with the system directly. You’re not designing something or writing a policy and hoping someone else implements it — you’re going to do it yourself. You’re not waiting for someone else to fix it. So that interdisciplinary character is one difference. How does the ENU crowd differ from the CNU crowd more broadly, when you’re at a conference or event?

Sheinya: That’s a great question — I’m not sure I have a clean answer for that.

Seth: Some of it’s generational, but I think people also carry different sets of concerns. You mentioned environmental justice, and community empowerment is a big objective for a lot of people. Housing affordability has become the crisis everywhere now, and when you’re young you don’t already own a home, so you’re not insulated from it — which makes it harder. Among the people I talk to, that puts a sharp edge on a lot of what we’re doing. There’s urbanism because it would be nice, and there’s urbanism because otherwise we won’t have a home — if I can’t build housing here, my kids won’t be able to live in the town I grew up in, versus, well, my Main Street’s a little ugly. That matters too, but if the housing situation were more under control, we could spend more time on those other things. Same with city budgets — in the Strong Towns world, if a city doesn’t generate enough tax revenue to fund its liabilities, that’s a bigger problem to deal with first. A lot of this isn’t something one discipline can solve on its own — it’s a team effort involving relationships, communication, and persuasion.

It sounds like you’ve got one more year as president. What does the future look like for ENU? What are you hoping to accomplish, and is there a longer-term vision for where the organization goes?

Sheinya: I hope ENU continues to grow as a place where emerging professionals find community, develop leadership skills, and have meaningful conversations about the future of our cities. We’re always looking for people to join our leadership team — I know that sounds like a plug, but it’s not really where I was going. Serving in that volunteer capacity builds a lot of skills you wouldn’t build in a traditional architecture-firm setting. I hope ENU stays the place where people come to build networks and skills, so that when they move into the seasoned-professional part of their careers, they can look back on those networks and keep working together to implement what they’ve learned.

Seth: You’re building a thick network for people to draw on. I’m struck by your point about developing leadership skills — I think that’s something our technical degree programs largely don’t pay attention to. Part of that’s fair, since you’re young and they’re focused on training you for your first job. But we also want people who grow up to be effective leaders in their organizations, and it sometimes feels like we just don’t treat that as an educational goal we could actually work on. How has ENU helped you personally grow your leadership and people-management skills — and how has it helped the rest of the leadership team?

Sheinya: For me, it’s been huge — I’m not just managing people now, I’m managing an entire organization: budgets, taxes, the business-development side that you don’t necessarily learn about in design school, even though it’s arguably one of the most important things. There’s public speaking — in a leadership role you have to learn to speak publicly, communicate with people you’re forming partnerships with, and handle members asking questions or considering sponsorship. You have to learn persuasion — why should someone join, why should someone sponsor the organization. Beyond that: organizational skills, writing skills — it’s been an endless opportunity to learn.

Seth: A lot of that’s because you were sort of thrown into the fire — you walked in the door to say hi and they handed you a hat that said “president” on it, and you’re like, “What happened to me?” Do you have any practices, particularly among the leadership team, that help share that kind of learning across the people leading the organization?

Sheinya: A lot of it is peer feedback. We have regular leadership meetings, check-ins, and one-on-ones where our executive director and I ask the leadership team what gaps they feel they need help with. If it’s something we’re knowledgeable about, we do peer mentoring; if not, we find the resources to help. It’s a “figuring it out as we go” kind of thing — we don’t have a formal leadership curriculum.

Seth: You’re doing a lot of that checking in, communicating, and — evaluating is a hard word for it, but — working through things and really practicing managing and supporting people, and keeping people going. That’s super helpful.

Sheinya: Yeah — and for most of us, actually all of us, ENU isn’t our full-time gig; we all have full-time jobs too. So in our day jobs, we’re watching project managers and people senior to us talk, act, and make deals. You see how those things happen, and you may not get the chance to practice it in that moment, but you can bring those skills to ENU and try them out — negotiate what a partnership between two organizations might look like, or negotiate a space we’re trying to rent. And if it doesn’t work out, it’s not the end of the world.

Seth: So you get a lot of practice, fundamentally, doing something that really matters — and it’s not unrelated to urbanism, since it’s a lot about managing people, accessing space, running programming, persuasion, and education, all central to the day job too. For anyone listening with less than ten years of experience, you should be reaching out to Sheinya and crew — I’ll make the shameless plug if you don’t want to.

Part of the ethos of this show is that — and there are schools I hold up as examples, Miami certainly among them — there’s a general sense among people who’ve been practicing a while that we haven’t done enough to reform the structures of undergraduate and graduate education, so students come out really prepared to be effective, interdisciplinary city builders. Whether that’s Incremental Development Alliance doing online and in-person programming, or the City Makers Collective — which has been on this podcast and now runs a summer school — there are weekend programs, conferences, all these different pieces outside of school. ENU is one of them. I think there’s real opportunity both to reform existing institutions and to build new ones — whether fully accredited competitors or wraparound pieces that support and develop people.

If you could wave a magic wand, walk in the door, and they crowned you queen — what would a new school for city builders teach? What would it look like? What excites you about the future of city-builder education?

Sheinya: I think, for starters, expanding the definition of “city building” itself. When people think of city building today, they might just think of engineers, planners, or architects, but as we know, it’s so much more than that — so expanding what students even see as city-building careers would be an important start. Bridging the gap between real-world practice and academia matters too — we don’t learn about business development, or how the economy matters, or what an interest rate does to a project. Those are all things that would help shape the foundation of how a designer thinks.

Seth: And we’ll keep the trip to Rome, or some other fun city.

Sheinya: Somewhere in Europe.

Seth: I had the chance to live in Asia for a while, and I think there are interesting lessons in the experience of living in a city with a different kind of urbanism. It does two things. First, it shows you possibilities you might not have imagined otherwise — that people can, in fact, live this way. Their kids can still go to school whether they’re taking the train, walking, or biking; whether they live in a high-rise or a row house, it’s okay. You get a lot of ideas from those other lineages, other histories of city-making. But living abroad also gives you a lot of reflection on your own context — because it’s not like everyone else has it all figured out either. When you’re forced to step outside yourself and look back at your assumptions about what’s normal, you come back with a sense that things are more open-ended than you thought, and a better sense of what you’re really attached to, and why. Then you can start to balance the two. So part of it is that stepping outside, and seeing a city with a long history, well built up in layers, that you can really engage with — that’s all really valuable. We’ve got to keep the trips.

Sheinya: Absolutely.

Seth: One thing I muse about a lot is this tension: on one hand, it’s important for people to be generalists who understand how to work with other humans — that’s true. At the same time, we’re not going to get rid of technical specialists. The structural engineer still needs to know structural engineering, the transportation engineer still needs to do transportation, the architectural designer still needs to do architecture. My hope has always been that if they shared more in common with each other, there’d be less miscommunication and friction in the process — but we’re not getting rid of those specializations. So there’s always that tension: we need generalists, and we need skilled technical professionals, meshing together to do city building.

Here’s another idea I sometimes have: what if a school, if it’s in an urban environment, owned a strip of storefronts, and student clubs could run a small business out of one? It would give you that experience of running a budget, managing payroll, thinking about taxes — all the stuff that doesn’t exist in an academic curriculum but turns out to matter enormously once you’re out working. They could run a bookstore, a cafe, a record store, a gym — whatever. Part of the logic is that being a city builder is also about being a risk-taker. If you’re a small business owner in a city, I think you’re part of the city-builder team — you’re building up your business, contributing to the public realm, providing goods and services to your neighbors. We don’t tend to think of those people as part of the team, but they are. As a developer, I can’t do my work without business owners who want to open in my storefronts — it’s a symbiotic relationship. I think you’d learn a lot from having people excited about entrepreneurship as part of the mix, instead of scattering everyone across different schools.

Sheinya: Yeah — and I think that goes back to cross-collaboration. I really think that’s the most impactful and well-rounded way to gain that kind of experience, because most people who haven’t practiced yet probably wouldn’t even think about what a business owner has to do with any of this.

I also think doing community workshops, and actually going into communities, is a very valuable experience. Often, when you’re practicing design at a firm, you don’t get out on a charrette or meet the community members you’re designing for — you’re supposed to design for them without gathering their input.

Seth: Right — you’re not even on site. You’re at a desk somewhere across town.

Sheinya: Exactly. A lot of design decisions end up being shaped by the stories of community members — their history there, what they’re hoping for — because at the end of the day, I’m not the one who’s going to live there. I should be designing for the people who are living there and want to live there. In my undergraduate program, probably third year — which is actually how I met Victor Dover and the team — we went into a community in South Miami that was considering redevelopment of the last affordable-housing block they had. We talked with officials there, and that was a good experience. But had we taken it a step further and spoken with community members directly, asking what was going on and gathering more insight, that would have shaped how we ended up proposing a design for the project.

Seth: That’s a really good point. Sometimes when we talk about relationships, communication, and persuasion, we’re thinking about it at an elite level — persuading other professionals, or the city council. But I think the on-the-ground, observational and relational work — walking around a neighborhood and just talking to people, watching how they use a space, since they don’t always tell you what they do but you can watch and see — is a whole other skill set that’s extremely valuable for designing well for people and neighborhoods. It’s different from presenting at a city council meeting; it’s different from walking down the street and talking to people. Not the same job. But it’s that community-based work — it sounds like you were talking mostly to the movers and shakers, not out walking the neighborhood for a whole day, chatting with people, seeing how they were using it, getting that context. Jane Jacobs has a complicated legacy, but the core of her work was basically watching, walking around, looking, and talking to people.

There’s a lot of value in learning to communicate with people who don’t necessarily understand your architectural terms — and again, I think it’s totally teachable; you could run it as a studio course.

Sheinya: Absolutely.

Seth: Even something as basic as this: most people can’t read plans very well. If you’re an architect, you’re good at looking at a sheet of paper and imagining the building. But most people don’t look at a floor plan and picture the building the way you do. So you show someone a site plan on-site and they say, “What’s this?” and you think, “Isn’t this obvious?” — and they say, “No, not at all.” That’s a good lesson to remember: you’ve got some work to do to translate your ideas into a form of communication that works for the people you’re designing for.

Sheinya: Right — and that’s an important skill, because it teaches you to translate your ideas into a better form of communication for the people you’re designing for.

Seth: Well, this has been fantastic — thank you, Sheinya, so much for coming on. I love getting your whole story. I’ve got a few quick-hit questions to close. What’s one place people should visit to learn more about building and running cities, and what lesson should they take away?

Sheinya: Other than Europe — I’d say there isn’t a single large city I’d point to. I’d encourage people to visit neighborhoods experiencing change through incremental development, not just cities with major transformations. Places like Detroit, Cleveland, even parts of Northern Virginia and DC itself show that city building isn’t always about one big project that changes the scale of everything — it’s often about residents, small developers, and community organizations making improvements over time. I’d encourage people to look up what’s happening in cities near them, go walk it themselves, and take in the street design, the buildings, the people, and what they’re doing.

Seth: What’s one book you’d recommend to our audience?

Sheinya: The Color of Law.

Seth: It’s a good book.

Sheinya: One of the biggest lessons in that book is understanding that the places we live in today aren’t the result of accidental patterns. Many of our communities were shaped by deliberate decisions made through housing policy — zoning, lending, infrastructure. It’s an important reminder that, as city builders, we have a responsibility to understand history. If we want to create better, more equitable spaces going forward, we have to understand how we got here in the first place.

Seth: I have a confession — I don’t know how well you remember the book, but the first chapter or introduction is about a neighborhood in California: La Dera, where I grew up. I was reading it at my parents’ house, maybe ten years ago when it came out, and I got to that first chapter and thought, “Holy s**t.” I’d known a little of the history — that the neighborhood had originally been founded as a racially integrated community by a group of Stanford professors, and they couldn’t get mortgage insurance, so the whole thing fell apart and got redeveloped in a more conventional way later. The racial covenants were eventually removed, which I was actually a little bummed about — I wanted to go see them, but they’re not in the deeds anymore. It was a wild experience. But your broader point about the importance of history is really valuable. I’m in a city with a lot of legacy from urban renewal, and we’re getting to the point where it’s far enough back that people are forgetting it was a conscious decision made by real people, with real plans and policies — not some force of nature or inevitable economic process that just unfolded. It wasn’t “too bad, but it was going to go this way regardless” — they decided to do it, and then they did it. Now it’s far enough away that we’re forgetting it was carried out by existing institutions — the Providence Redevelopment Authority still exists and operates, but it’s starting to get disconnected from its own history. Part of why that history matters so much to me is that you can’t really understand a modern American city today without understanding The Color of Law, urban renewal, and all these other factors. If you don’t understand it, you can’t treat the problem or find solutions, because you don’t know why the neighborhood looks the way it does, why the streets are the way they are — you’re missing that context. It’s hard to treat the illness without the right diagnosis.

Sheinya: Exactly. For anyone who wants a shorter overview before diving into The Color of Law, I wrote an article called “Urban Planning Has Never Been Neutral,” which explores the idea that decisions about our built environment always reflect values and priorities — and asks whether we’re being intentional about understanding those impacts and using our roles to create better outcomes. It also gives a quick history of some of what happened. It’s on the Emerging New Urbanists Substack — feel free to leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

Seth: I’ll make sure it’s in the show notes — you’ve got a bunch of great links here. And last question: what’s one thing giving you hope for the future of city building?

Sheinya: Incremental development. As you mentioned, organizations like Incremental Development Alliance are helping provide the knowledge, resources, and support people need to take action. It gives me hope because I don’t think the future of city building is going to come only from large-scale developments or institutions — it’s also going to come from citizen builders, local leaders, and people who care deeply about their own neighborhoods. More resources are being made available for community members to learn these processes, and for people like me — trained in architecture but wanting to be part of the development process — to have the resources to learn and the opportunity to engage. It’s exciting that more people are coming in and joining.

Seth: That’s awesome. Sheinya, thank you so much for coming on the New School for City Builders — it’s been a real pleasure having you.

Sheinya: Thank you for having me.

Seth: The New School for City Builders is a production of the Educational Collaborative for Building Places People Love, and Build the Next Right Thing. Please like and subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts — these things all make a big difference in helping grow the show. And if you appreciate what we’re doing and want to help bring this school to fruition, please support us by becoming a paid subscriber at BuildTheNextRightThing.com.

About the guest

William Deresiewicz is an author, essayist, and literary critic. He taught English at Yale from 1998–2008 and was a graduate instructor at Columbia. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere.

* Personal site / newsletter: williamderesiewicz.com and deresiewicz.substack.com

Books mentioned:

* Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (2014; 10th-anniversary edition, 2024)

* The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech (2020)

* The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society (2025) — includes the essay “Why I Left Academia (Since You’re Wondering)”

The essay that prompted this conversation:

* William Deresiewicz, “Colleges, Maybe Try Teaching!” — Persuasion, May 2026

People, books, and institutions referenced

* Roosevelt Montás, Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (2021) — Montás’s memoir of encountering the Columbia Core as an immigrant from the Dominican Republic.

* Columbia’s Core Curriculum — the multi-year common-course sequence in literature, philosophy, art, and music that both Deresiewicz and Montás taught in. college.columbia.edu/core

* Harvard’s 1945 “General Education in a Free Society” report (the “Redbook”) — the postwar articulation of a shared liberal-education mission for American colleges and secondary schools.

* Harold Rosenberg, “Everyman a Professional” — mid-century essay on the professionalization of crafts and occupations, referenced in the discussion of theory overtaking practice in the arts and architecture.

* Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

* William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980)

* Zaytuna College — a Muslim liberal arts college in Berkeley, CA, integrating the Western liberal arts and Islamic scholarly traditions. zaytuna.edu

* The Catherine Project — a free, tuition-free online great-books program open to adults of all backgrounds. catherineproject.org

* Brooklyn Institute for Social Research — independent humanities courses for adults outside the university system. thebrooklyninstitute.com

* The Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life — a free, low-technology, live-in study retreat in Catskill, NY, founded in memory of Deresiewicz’s former student Matthew Strother. Small cohorts spend a week in seminar, shared labor, and communal life around a single great book. matthewstrother.org

* Deep Springs College — the small, labor-and-seminar liberal arts college that partly inspired the Strother Center’s model. deepsprings.edu

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The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity:

Seth: Hello and welcome to the New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zaron, a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer in Providence, Rhode Island. If we want to change how our cities and towns work, we need to change the people who run them. We need a new generation of city builders — architects, engineers, planners, developers, city managers, and civic leaders — and we need a new school to train them.

Today we’re doing something a little different. I’m excited for my guest, author, essayist, and literary critic William Deresiewicz. Bill is not an architect, planner, or developer, but he’s an insightful critic of higher education today. I first encountered Bill in graduate school through his book Excellent Sheep, a critique of the pathologies of elite education. He’s since written The Death of the Artist and, most recently, The End of Solitude.

I invited Bill onto the show because of a recent piece he published in Persuasion called “Colleges, Maybe Try Teaching.” In our conversation, we discuss the value of a liberal arts education, the rise of professionalization, and the opportunities for reforming — or reforming — higher education. Bill, welcome to the New School for City Builders.

Bill: Thank you for having me on.

Seth: It’s really exciting for me. Let’s start with a fundamental question: what are the liberal arts? Sometimes they’re framed as, “Oh, you go off to college, have a good time, stay up late arguing in the common room.” What are they, really, and why do they matter?

Bill: There’s some terminological confusion — the term gets used in a few different ways, though I think all of them are relevant.

Strictly speaking, the liberal arts include the humanities, but also the sciences and social sciences. In that sense, you’d contrast them with applied, vocational, or professional fields. The best way to define it: the liberal arts are the fields in which knowledge is pursued for its own sake — fields that create knowledge rather than apply it. So it’s the difference between biology and medicine, psychology and education, English literature and communications.

From that standpoint alone, you can see how the educational goals and methods would differ. If the purpose of a university education — whether a first degree or a second one — is free and open inquiry in the liberal arts sense, then it’s really about learning how knowledge is created, not just memorizing facts and skills. You don’t just memorize a biology textbook. A good professor — and I had biology teachers like this — walks you through the experiments that established what’s in the book, so you understand how knowledge is created and could, in principle, go on to become a biologist yourself. Every fact is a frozen argument, as I like to put it. All knowledge comes from argument — from gathering and sifting evidence and making claims in whatever medium is relevant to the field.

That’s significant on its own. But I think the way we usually use “liberal arts” now — especially the way you gestured at it — is to mean the humanities specifically: philosophy, literary study, art history, history, religious studies. Fields that don’t lend themselves to quantification or to amassing empirical knowledge the way the sciences and social sciences do. They aren’t always practiced that way in the academy, because there’s real pressure on humanists to act like scientists. But at bottom, the humanities address the questions that come to us as humans, not as specialists — the “big questions” or “eternal questions.” Questions of value rather than fact. What should I care about? What’s important? What does the good life look like?

Seth: You have a great line in your piece — that literature offers us not answers, but vivid ways of posing questions. We’re learning to argue, learning to question. I should say, laying my cards on the table: I was a history and geology double major, so I did the classic liberal arts thing, and I have plenty of criticisms of liberal arts education today that I’m sure we’ll get to. But your point that it’s not just knowledge transmission — not just “learn this skill and apply it,” but understanding where knowledge comes from, whether through the history of ideas or through running original experiments — that builds a muscle that turns out to be useful much later in life.

Bill: Right — although I want to distinguish two different contrasts here. There’s the first contrast within the liberal arts: learning how knowledge is created, versus just memorizing material the way you might in a professional program.

And there’s a second contrast within the liberal arts themselves: the humanities versus the scientific disciplines — the sciences and social sciences. In the sciences, you’re trying to establish empirical truth about external reality, whether that’s how an economy works or how the planets move. In the humanities — and again, they aren’t always practiced this way in the academy, unfortunately — the idea is to pose and address questions that don’t have empirical answers. You don’t check them off a list and move to the next question the way you might in physics. What is a good society? What is a good life? What does truth mean? We’ve always asked these questions, and we always will, because you never arrive at a final answer — you arrive at better ways of asking the question, ways that make you think more deeply. And you need that in all of life, not just your professional life, though I’d argue you need it there too.

I was also going to mention the origin of the term “liberal arts”: they’re the forms of inquiry appropriate for free people. In ancient Athens or republican Rome, it was the elite — the free citizens who ran society — who were supposed to learn the liberal arts. Aristotle contrasts them with the “servile arts,” where you simply learn to make a living. Because we live in a democratic republic, we believe we’re all free, and that was central to the idea of American higher education from the start: we are learning how to be free people. And I think the liberal arts — especially the humanities — are essential to learning how to be free and how to be citizens. Freedom isn’t just the right to choose your own life, though that matters. It also means collective self-government. We are not ruled by a tyrant.

Seth: We’re recording this just after the Fourth of July. On Saturday, I visited the State House here in Rhode Island — we have three copies of the Declaration of Independence in the state archives, and I got to take my kids to see all three on display. It was fascinating, because they were made at slightly different times: some typeset, one etched in bronze. You can see the evolution of how the document was used — one more archival, one meant for communication, easy to read once it’s posted on the town hall door. But the people who wrote it were steeped in these ideas — history, religion, philosophy, grammar, rhetoric, logic, the whole classical liberal arts tradition. That was essential to understanding what they were doing and why — including their entire concept of the tyranny they were rebelling against.

Bill: They were only able to do what they did because they had, in our terms, a very thorough liberal arts education in the history of thought and of political arrangements — they knew what had happened to republican Rome, for instance. And generally speaking, they were strong advocates for liberal arts education, because they knew their generation would pass and wanted to hand the country to leaders equipped to carry on the experiment. The idea of liberal education has been central to American higher education from the beginning for exactly this reason: how do you train the leaders of a free society?

Seth: With that foundation carried through in fits and starts, a lot of people — you included — sense that something has happened, that liberal arts education in America has declined or transformed over recent decades. What happened?

Bill: That’s a good question, and I think a few things happened. First, the practical side — going to college to get a good job — has always mattered, and it should.

But I think the decline really started in the ‘60s. The idea of education for civic purposes was discredited by Vietnam. Training in the Western classics was discredited as ethnocentric, as white supremacist or Eurocentric. Then, through the ‘70s and ‘80s, there was a broader withdrawal of investment from the public sphere, which included higher education. I won’t get the quote exactly right, but Ronald Reagan — when he was governor of California, having won office partly by running against Berkeley and the Free Speech Movement, promising to “clean up the mess in Berkeley” — said something like the state shouldn’t be in the business of subsidizing intellectual curiosity. As of around 1970, three-quarters of the cost of public higher education was paid by taxpayers. Last I checked — and it may be even lower now — a quarter is paid by taxpayers and three-quarters by families. Higher ed went from being treated as a public good to a private good: why should we subsidize you? And that’s when the student-loan system really got up on its feet.

The whole idea of the things we’ve been discussing — a philosophical, mindful, examined approach to life, shaping yourself through great literature, challenging yourself intellectually and morally — has drained out of society. I think we see the same thing in our attitude toward the arts. When I went to college in the early ‘80s, not every student felt this way, but those of us who wanted a certain kind of self-respect understood it was part of our job to read modernist novels and go to European art-house films. There was some pretentiousness in it, sure, but something real too — people found themselves in these things. When you met someone at a party who was majoring in anthropology, the reaction was, “That’s so cool, I wish I could do that.” By the time I was a professor in the early 2000s, meeting an anthropology major got you, “Why would you do that? You’re not going to make any money. That’s stupid.”

Seth: I started college in 2001. At my school, Williams, we had distribution requirements — other schools call it general education, which sounds about as unsexy as it gets: bureaucratic, boring. And yet there was a 1945 Harvard report on general education for a free society. A few years ago I read Roosevelt Montás’s book, Rescuing Socrates, about his experience as a professor. He came from an immigrant background — the Dominican Republic, I believe — and as a young man happened to pick up some Platonic dialogues someone was throwing out, and it changed his life.

Bill: Yes — that’s exactly it. He picked up a copy of Plato, and it changed his life.

Seth: He ends up teaching and eventually writes that book, which was really helpful to me because I had no real sense of Columbia’s core curriculum, where every student takes roughly the same set of courses. You lived that — you went to Columbia and taught in the Core as a graduate student.

Bill: I did.

Seth: Two years of literature, political theory, religion, mythology — done chronologically — plus music, art, science, rhetoric. That’s what an old-school common-core curriculum looks like. I never had that. What I had instead was more like a sad buffet — everything’s been sitting out too long, wilted, from yesterday.

Bill: The steam tables. That’s very well put. And yes — the reason it’s become that sad buffet, instead of something a school can proudly stand behind the way Harvard did in 1945, is that nobody believes in it anymore. Harvard’s purpose — general education in a free society, which is really just liberal education — made sense coming out of the war: they were envisioning a mass middle class and a new era of political participation, a shared story everyone would be part of. And the plan wasn’t just for Harvard; it was meant for all of American higher ed, even secondary schools — this is what we need to teach kids to make them the citizens this experiment in liberal democracy requires. Now it’s degenerated into a smorgasbord. Most professors, let alone administrators, no longer believe in a Western core curriculum — haven’t for decades. Most don’t believe in any core curriculum. And how are general-education requirements actually built? Every department wants its piece. It’s incoherent — there’s no central body sitting down to decide what everyone should know together. Nobody wants to do that.

Seth: That was my experience — if you’re lucky, you can navigate it yourself.

Bill: That’s most people’s experience. I’ll add: unlike someone like Roosevelt Montás, who taught in the same Core I did and genuinely believes in it, most professors teach general education with real reluctance. They want to be in the lab or the library, and when they do have to teach it, they’d rather teach their specialty. They don’t want to put more thought into it than they’ve already put into their research — they don’t want to prepare a course on the whole of Western literature, or even something broader in their own field than their narrow specialty.

Seth: Is that partly a consequence of how academics — how PhDs — are trained? You got a PhD and taught at Yale, but you don’t teach there anymore. What was your experience becoming a professor? What were you thinking, and what was it like trying to build a career if you didn’t want to spend all your time in the library?

Bill: If people want the full story, I have an essay linked on my website and included in The End of Solitude called “Why I Left Academia (Since You’re Wondering).” I talk a lot about higher ed, so people ask why I’m not teaching. I didn’t leave voluntarily.

I went to graduate school because I loved literature and wanted to study and teach it. I found out quickly those were the wrong reasons to go to graduate school in literature. As far back as 1989, the field was already intensely politicized — you were supposed to critique literature, not love it; to lecture it, not learn from it, as part of some grand utopian project of political emancipation that some people are apparently still pursuing.

It’s also a professional program, not really a liberal-arts one. You’re not supposed to just read widely — you’re supposed to read secondary sources and theory, and professionalize and narrow as fast as possible. All the incentives in academia are about publishing — “publish or perish” — specialization, talking to the small circle of people in your subfield rather than to a general audience like your own students.

Seth: I’ll link that essay — it’s excellent. So you were at Yale, but ultimately the field wanted you to be someone different than who you were, and you wanted to do something you cared about that your students clearly responded to — but it was a bad fit for the research-university model we have today.

Bill: When I say “they” wanted me to do something else, it’s less Yale specifically than the entire profession. I didn’t expect to stay at Yale — I thought I’d get a job elsewhere. But I wasn’t doing it right: I was spending too much time on teaching.

Seth: They weren’t shopping for that.

Bill: Right — I wasn’t doing it “right,” so I washed out.

Seth: That’s the title of your piece — you published this fascinating essay in Persuasion, an online Substack magazine, called “Colleges, Maybe Try Teaching.” I loved it — though I understand that’s their title, not yours?

Bill: That’s their title. I knew they’d come up with their own, so I didn’t bother with one. The way I thought about the essay — and really what they asked me to write about — was the relationship between liberal democracy and liberal education. That’s how the piece opens. But by the end I am arguing that instead of wasting an enormous amount of time on research that mostly doesn’t matter — some research is important, but probably less than ten percent of what gets produced — colleges should finally take teaching seriously.

Seth: I had an interesting conversation a few years ago with a friend who got an English PhD and is now a research librarian, since that was an actual job he could get. He described another model of the English PhD: finding a lesser-known author, tracking down their letters, and producing an edited collection. You’re creating real knowledge, just not highly theoretical knowledge — there’s now a book of that author’s letters. You’re adding to the edifice. That’s different from chasing the edgiest theory to get attention.

Bill: Sure — those are different professional strategies. There’s a component of literary study, of all the humanities really, that involves empirical work: editing manuscripts or letter collections, recovering overlooked authors. Side note: overlooked authors are usually overlooked for a reason. But nobody wants another book about Dickens or Shakespeare, so people go looking for some obscurity. To be blunt, that path isn’t the one that gets you tenure at Princeton. It might be a safer path, though I’d ask — how useful is it, really?

Seth: Probably not very. Maybe more useful to the world than the alternative, though. What you’re describing is that a lot of what’s been built up in higher ed is chasing a particular status system — you mentioned the Carnegie research classifications, how many institutions count as “R1,” top-tier research universities, and how that number has grown enormously in the last fifty years.

Bill: I don’t remember the exact figures, but yes — there’s been a huge expansion. There are now more than 500 Carnegie-classified institutions, and almost 200 of those are R1s — up from less than a third of that number as recently as the 1990s. And my point is: as has always been true, the lion’s share of significant research happens at a few dozen well-known, well-resourced institutions — the ones with the Nobel laureates. So what is all this expansion actually for?

Seth: What prompted the piece — they asked you to write about liberal education specifically?

Bill: They were doing a series on liberal democracy — that’s the core mission of Persuasion. They asked if I wanted to contribute, and I wanted to explore why liberal education matters for liberal democracy. The two words share the same root: free society, collective self-government.

I wanted to think harder about the purpose of liberal education. On the way to writing the piece, I gave a couple of talks — one at a branch campus of Portland State University, I believe an R2 institution. Even at a branch campus, professors there only taught two courses a term, at what amounts to a research-university rate, meaning they’re supposedly doing a lot of research. I told them — forgive me, but the research being done there is mostly unnecessary. They did not take it well. Every question afterward was about that one comment. Nobody wants to hear it. But it’s true.

Seth: You’ve written eloquently about professionalization, and you mentioned graduate education as professional education. Before roughly 1900, “the professions” basically meant law, medicine —

Bill: — and divinity, that’s right.

Seth: Right, those were the classic graduate educations you’d get at Oxford or Cambridge in 1700: medicine, law, divinity. So where did this profusion of professional degrees come from, and what does it produce?

Bill: There’s a great essay by Harold Rosenberg — one of my intellectual heroes, one of the great mid-century New York intellectuals, mostly remembered now as an art critic, though he wrote about all kinds of things — from around 1950, called “Everyman a Professional.” He describes how, in the postwar years, what had been occupations or crafts were turned into professions, often with dedicated professional schools built around them. A cop becomes a “professional” and might go to a college of criminal justice, especially if aiming to become a detective.

I went to Columbia Journalism School. Back in the day, journalists thought journalism school was nonsense. Artists used to think an MFA was nonsense too — there were a handful of MFA programs in visual art or writing at the end of World War II, and now there are hundreds of each. Rosenberg describes what professionalization does, especially to the arts: it introduces theory. He says something like — a cop becomes a “professional” once he has specific reasons for standing the way he does on a street corner. Theory means discourse, and we’ve seen discourse take over the world of gallery art — basically a cloud of words surrounding an object. I have friends who went to Yale’s architecture school who felt they were mainly learning how to make architecture talk, how to produce discourse — much the same thing that happens in an English PhD. You learn to talk like an English professor, which is theoretical, not aesthetic.

Seth: So because theory takes precedence over practice, the core exercise isn’t learning to paint better or mix your own colors — it’s learning to talk about your ideas, since that’s really what you’re doing: producing theory.

Bill: Right — you may not learn to paint at all if you’re doing conceptual art.

Seth: That’s so different from what happened to our own professions — architects, engineers, builders, developers, local politicians never went to school for this the way it’s done now. If you wanted to become an architect, maybe you took a drafting class in high school, learning to draw carefully and formally, then apprenticed with an architect at seventeen or eighteen. You did that for years; if you were good, you got promoted and given more responsibility. If you were wealthy, maybe your parents sent you to Europe to tour the Beaux-Arts academies — but probably not. That was it. Some people succeeded and could sell their work; others became very skilled draftspeople, and that was the game. Then we brought all of that into the university and formalized it. Other guests have told me that architecture school — and I’ve spent time there myself and seen it — amounts to justifying, for an hour, a line you drew for a building that doesn’t even have a front door.

Bill: Right — what had been craft traditions became academic professions. That’s exactly what you just described.

Seth: What worries me about higher education is this: in the building trades, we sometimes complain that professional guilds — civil engineers, say — don’t have to listen to anyone else, because they control their own education, accreditation, and licensure. They set the numbers and simply say, “It has to be done this way or people will die,” and the state enforces those guild protections on their behalf. So in your call for colleges to “maybe try teaching,” do the faculty even exist who could do that?

Bill: As I say at the end of the piece, that’s part of the problem — what I’m proposing is a bit crazy, because almost nobody is going to want to do it, and if we need good teachers instead of good researchers, the people currently in these jobs haven’t been trained to teach. Hopefully, in some future world, we can slowly turn the ship and start actually teaching pedagogy in PhD programs.

Seth: This is something other guests and I have discussed too: most of the people teaching in our field come from practice — they’re intellectually engaged with their work, often doing interesting writing or research that grows directly out of professional experience. They’re in the field, they have ideas, they share them, and the whole community gets better over time. Meanwhile, whatever the planning PhDs are doing over in the planning school —

Bill: — what are they doing? Mostly theory? Political material?

Seth: I’ve read a bit of it, and some seems relevant, but most of it feels completely detached from professional practice. And I suspect — at the risk of psychoanalyzing people, which will probably annoy them — that once you’re detached from practice, you lack the confidence that comes from actually having the skill of the trade. If you’re a planning PhD and you’ve never been a planning director, you’re missing something. What often happens instead is that a working planning director starts adjuncting for fun, and if they’re good at it and eventually retire from public service, maybe they come on full-time as a “professor of practice.” Students love them because they’ve got great war stories and practical advice — but they remain outside the academic hierarchy, a kind of second-class citizen. That was true at my own professional school too: only career academics were full, voting-rights professors, even though students were mostly drawn to people who’d worked in law, government, policy, and business. The full-time faculty in my program — environmental management at Yale’s environmental school — were doing excellent work on, say, the ecology of spider predation. Fascinating, valuable knowledge — but it doesn’t prepare you to go work for the Forest Service.

Bill: Right. The permanent faculty drift further and further from the reality of practice — people have said the same thing to me about journalism schools and MFA painting programs. Meanwhile, practitioners who might teach don’t have academic status. I also took classes in Barnard’s dance department — because it was New York, they could bring in dancers from major companies to teach. But a permanent position required producing “research” in dance, which was almost beside the point. The arts in general struggle to fit into the university for this reason.

But the larger point, which your examples bear out, is that a field should flow from practice toward theory — grounded in practice, with theory growing out of it and maybe refining it. The more a field becomes an academic profession, the more that flow reverses. You go to Yale’s architecture school and learn mostly theory, and come out without knowing how buildings actually get built or what the practical constraints of practice are. My friends who went there were genuinely angry about it.

Seth: Especially when you’re paying a lot for it. So if theory should flow from practice — I recently saw a job posting for a planning PhD at a nearby state college, and thought, in some alternate world that could be fun. But it requires a PhD, and I’d probably be better at that job than a freshly minted PhD with no field experience — except I don’t have the PhD or the academic publishing record, so it’s not even an option. Imagine an alternate world with a different assumption about what prepares someone to teach well — which is really your point: if the principal goal is teaching, then what matters most is whether you’re effective at pedagogy — curriculum design, classroom management, asking good questions, mentoring students.

Bill: Right.

Seth: Research is great if you have ideas — go for it. But teaching should come first, and that should be the basis for promotion. Which also means, instead of treating experienced practitioners as second-class adjuncts, we’d deliberately recruit people in their forties, fifties, and sixties who’ve actually done the work, and bring them in as permanent faculty.

Bill: Right — obviously we want teachers who are conversant with the field, but you don’t need to be a cutting-edge researcher for that. What you’re making me realize is that what’s true in your field — planning, urban design — is also true of the humanities. The sciences and social sciences grew up alongside the modern university; they’re native to it, and their business is producing empirical facts about the world. But philosophy, literary study, and religious thought predate the university by millennia. They only become “the humanities” once they migrate into the academy — and once there, they’re expected to conform to academic norms, meaning they end up pretending to be sciences. That’s a lot of what’s gone wrong in the humanities.

Seth: Everyone ends up with their own “lab.”

Bill: Right — and if you judge the humanities by scientific standards, they’ll always look inferior, because they’re not empirical or reproducible. But you’re helping me see that the same distortion happens to professions once they’re absorbed into the academy: they’re expected to comply with norms like theory driving practice, and they become denatured. The way to re-nature them — to reconnect them to their own nature — is to let practitioners back in, with real status and control.

Seth: I think of city building as a craft, not primarily an intellectual pursuit, because it’s rooted in a lineage — the way weaving carries a lineage of technique and style. And because it’s a craft, it has to actually work. Your ideas have to produce useful outcomes. If you’re making an axe, it has to be a good axe — it can also be beautiful or durable or expressive of local materials, but it has to do the job, or it doesn’t really exist.

Bill: Right — as opposed to designing buildings with no front doors. Everyone hates modern architecture — from Corbusier onward — because it’s driven by theory rather than by how people actually experience and use a building. I’d say the same about a lot of modern poetry: something’s wrong if intelligent people can’t even find your poetry intelligible, let alone beautiful — but it conforms to whatever theoretical trend dominates the discipline.

Seth: You proposed something in your piece that spoke directly to me. You acknowledge that people genuinely feel economic precarity — worry about building a career, supporting a family, buying a home — so we can’t pretend those concerns don’t belong in higher education, because they do. People want both remuneration and direction. But it’s possible to integrate the liberal arts with that professional or “servile” side of the curriculum. Your argument, if I’m reading it right, is: get serious about a common core again — and if that means engineering departments can’t mandate twenty required courses in the major, so much the better. I completely agree, because in our world, civil engineers often never took a single class on what a city actually is, yet they’re in charge of city roads, and they have to work alongside developers, architects, planners, and public officials. They were only trained within their own blinkers, so we shouldn’t be surprised the results disappoint us — city building is fundamentally a human enterprise. Our word “politics” comes from the Greek word for city.

Bill: Right.

Seth: So the idea of a shared common core that every student in an institution takes — not the only thing they do, and different institutions could reasonably design different versions — is appealing. What strikes me is that the trend toward double- and triple-majoring is partly driven by the fact that we’ve lost the courage of our convictions about a shared foundation, so specialization is the only thing left.

Bill: I think that’s right. That’s the sense I get from students — they don’t understand what the rest of college is even for. General education is just something to check off, because nothing has ever shown them why you’d want anything beyond specializing. So if some specialization is good, more must be better — add a second major, maybe a third. I once met a quadruple major who I thought was very smart, but honestly I thought he was a bit foolish, because there was no real human awareness there. We seem to have forgotten — or never realized — that we live in essentially the one country where you’re expected to study more than one thing in college.

Seth: Everyone else is jealous of our model, I’m sure.

Bill: Exactly. Very few students, or even faculty, seem to understand that we’re the only country set up this way — precisely because of the idea of liberal education for a free society. You major in something, but it’s not the only thing you study. The major used to take up maybe 40 percent of your coursework — say fourteen out of thirty-six courses. But because nobody believes in general education anymore, and there’s barely a core curriculum left anywhere, students only understand specialization, and they’re not using all that other room effectively. My point is, it’s not either/or — you don’t have to choose between something practical and the liberal arts. You can do both.

Seth: Meanwhile professional programs keep expanding to claim that territory, feeding their own enrollment and staffing, because nothing pushes back — nobody defends general education or the core, so there’s no opposition, and the professional program just keeps adding courses until ninety percent of an architecture or civil-engineering degree is dictated by the major.

Bill: Exactly right — there’s no resistance, so it expands to fill the available space. Though not every institution has to do this the same way. In my piece, I describe a general Western core — American, European, and global literature, history, and philosophy — but a program built around a specific profession could design its own liberal-arts core tailored to that field, whether it’s civil engineering or something else. The point remains: it’s not just preparation for life in general or for democratic citizenship — even within your profession, you’ll do better with a wider human and social awareness, able to think about deeper questions than simply how to pave a road.

Seth: These things matter partly because you live in a society — a city without people is a ruin, as I keep saying. If you’re doing “city stuff,” you have to deal with people, not just bricks, concrete, and wood. And if you’re dealing with people, you need to understand how people work — which is what literature is for. If you want to understand how humans work, read a book about people and their problems. That matters intrinsically, but it also matters practically, especially as you hit middle age and start asking what life’s purposes are — you’ll be glad you built that foundation earlier, when you had more free time than you do once you’ve got young kids, aging parents, and a demanding job, and less time to read.

Bill: I hope these aren’t complete clichés in your field — maybe the only two books people like me have read — but Jane Jacobs, and William H. Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. As I understand it, both were tremendously influential in your field, and both came from a very holistic, humanistic way of seeing.

Seth: They are, and they were. They were observers — paying close attention to what they actually saw. Both were, in a sense, amateurs — Whyte a bit less so — coming to the subject with fresh eyes and piecing things together from direct observation. The theory emerged from the field, not the other way around. Neither is perfect, but both are a tremendous foundation for understanding how cities work — not just the facts in the books, but the method itself.

Bill: Yes — and the sense that you’re hearing the voice of a human being, not a specialist. They bring everything to the table: their whole experience, their whole knowledge of life.

Seth: After reading your piece, I kept thinking about the word “reform.” I’ve also been reading a book on the Reformation, and I think what’s needed isn’t reform — it’s a reformation. A real disjuncture. I know others believe there’s more room for reform from within existing institutions, and I welcome those efforts — but I suspect even internal reform will be stronger with outside pressure pushing it, the way the Catholic Church faced pressure from the Reformation. I think we’re looking at something more like a schism — in purpose, methods, and the kinds of institutions we have. I hope, more than I fully believe, we’ll see a kind of Cambrian explosion of new institutional forms. You mentioned that different liberal-arts curricula could coexist — there’s a school I’ve read a little about, Zaytuna College, I believe in the Berkeley/Oakland area, building an Arab-Muslim liberal arts college that integrates the Western liberal arts tradition with the Islamic great-books tradition. One detail I loved: their physical-education requirement is drawn from a hadith — that you should teach your children to ride a horse, shoot a bow, and swim, because the Prophet needed horse archers. It’s arbitrary in a sense, but that’s part of its beauty — it’s specific, it’s theirs.

What I think got lost when the common core collapsed, amid the huge expansion of higher education — the GI Bill, the growth from a small, insular conversation into a shared story everyone was part of — is that people even twenty or thirty years ago were conversant in a shared lineage of biblical references, Greek and Roman mythology, Shakespeare, historical touchpoints, that even highly educated people today often don’t share. On one level, you could say, “So what — everything is equally valid.” Maybe. But if you actually want to understand the world, you have to grasp that everything done before you was created by people who were thinking within that shared landscape, and you can’t fully understand what they were doing without at least some of that context.

So I look at this as a Reformation moment — we may actually need to build new institutions. I’m not quite ready to nail thirty-five theses to Brown’s front door, though that would make a good publicity stunt. But there are things already happening. I know you’re involved in one new institution being built outside the traditional academy — the Matthew Strother Center. Could you say a bit about what that is and where it came from?

Bill: Sure. There are a number of these startups happening outside the academy — partly because, after Excellent Sheep, people tell me about what they’re building. Micro-colleges, humanities programs for adults — the Catherine Project is a wonderful example, an online program. The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research does something similar with more of a left-leaning bent — classes for adults.

I had a student named Matthew Strother, one of my favorites — a real seeker and intellectual who felt out of place at Yale, surrounded by people who thought he was wasting his time. He once told me, “It’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.” After graduating, he wanted to recreate the kind of real intellectual experience he’d managed to give himself in college, and found he couldn’t, once he was out. So he decided to build his own version. Then he got cancer, and died three years ago — but before he died, he’d thought the whole thing through. He and his wife had bought property in upstate New York, partly for themselves and partly with the idea that the school would eventually be built there. After he died, his wife — who’d worked in property development in New York and knew how to get things done — asked me to help get it going. We brought in others, including Zena Hitz, who started the Catherine Project. Scarcely a year after Matthew died, we were already running the first sessions, in the spring of 2024.

It’s free — that was one of his core principles; nobody pays. No technology during the retreats, which run seven days: phones away, nothing. We gather for three hours a day and spend the whole week on a single book. When I taught it, the book was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — the sessions were a bit longer then, so we spent thirty hours of seminar time on one novel, roughly three-quarters of a semester’s worth. The rest of the day includes shared labor, on the Deep Springs College model — kitchen work, long conversations over meals — and in the evenings, creative activities the students propose themselves: putting on a play, reciting poetry from memory, whatever comes up. It’s an extraordinary program, but very small — five students at a time, a few times a year. We’re trying to figure out how to scale it, but the intention was never to scale it too far, put it online, or move it into a lecture hall. A lot of programs like this sound wonderful and are wonderful, but what makes them good doesn’t scale.

I love your idea of a reformation, and I say at the end of my piece that this isn’t a time for half measures — I point to earlier moments in American history when radical changes were made to education. But it’s hard to picture that happening now. Starting a new institution is enormously expensive even before you get to attracting faculty and students. So I think this Cambrian explosion outside the traditional academy is great and necessary, but I’m not sure it will move from the margins into something larger.

Seth: That’s one of the challenges we’ll have to figure out how to solve. I have just a couple of questions left. You’ve taught a lot of liberal-arts seminars — could you share two or three of your favorite classroom techniques, the ones that really work?

Bill: I never really theorized my own practice — I was modeling myself, semi-consciously, on the best teachers I’d had, and it started with Socrates: you teach by asking questions. That may be a cliché, but I tried, as much as possible, to avoid making declarative statements. Asking a genuinely good question is hard — it took me a long time to learn how. It can’t be a narrow factual question with an obvious answer, like a quiz question. But it also can’t be so general that students can’t get any traction — if they respond at all, the answer is vague. You want a question specific enough to give students something concrete to think about — a few lines from the Odyssey, one particular feature of the text — but open-ended enough that there’s no single “right” answer to simply produce.

Once the conversation starts, the goal is to get students responding to each other and staying on the same point — there’s a tendency for students to jump around, and I’d say, “Let’s hold that thought — we’re talking about this right now. Who wants to respond to what was just said?”

Seth: So part of what you’re doing is training students’ attention — the same thing we all recognize in a meeting, when you’re mentally holding your own point while someone else is talking, waiting for your turn, which is a bad way to listen even though it feels satisfying. You’re getting students to genuinely attend to the conversation in front of them instead of getting lost in their own heads. Attention feels like a key thread here — observation, focus, perspective — training the ability to stay with a task, a person, or a conversation without drifting. That’s presumably part of why you take the phones away.

Bill: Exactly — and your sense of time changes when the phones disappear; it’s like being on a very good drug. The days feel ten times longer, in a good way. When you teach this way, you’re not just conveying material — you’re training fundamental habits of attention, of consecutive, logical thinking, of working through a problem.

The other main technique: a student says something half-formed, which is fine — they’re responding in the moment — and before letting the next student speak, you do a quick one-on-one exchange: “What did you mean by that?” “What about this thing that seems to contradict what you just said?” A real drilling-down that helps them refine the idea on the spot. That’s what it means to teach critical thinking — I know it’s a cliché, but that’s genuinely what it means.

Seth: The usual critique of the humanities is that they’re not rigorous — but what you’re describing is deeply rigorous. Not just the seven-day retreat, sitting in discussion, but picking apart two lines of prose for an hour without getting distracted, really working through the logic, the context, debating the meaning and its implications. That’s rigor.

Bill: Yes. I wrote once about teaching Portrait of the Artist — we spent an entire hour on the title alone and ended up discussing nearly every word in it. You’re exactly right that people assume the humanities are vaporous rather than rigorous, but they not only can be rigorous — they have to be. Think about legal training, if you’ve ever watched something like The Paper Chase — legal reasoning can be extremely rigorous without being scientific in the way physics is. This is exactly how the humanities work at their best — philosophers may be the best example. Philosophy majors score highest on the GREs, do best on the LSAT, and outperform biology majors on the MCAT, because a good philosophy education is fundamentally about rigorous logical thinking.

Seth: That’s a great place to end it. Bill, thank you so much for coming on the New School for City Builders — it’s a real pleasure to have you, our first guest who isn’t a city builder by trade, sharing something I’m deeply passionate about. Thank you.

Bill: This was fun. Thank you.

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Show notes:

* Incremental Development Alliance

* Range Co.

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The following transcript has been lightly edited for quality:

Seth: Hello and welcome to the New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zeren, a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer in Providence, Rhode Island. This is a podcast about transforming the education of city builders. If we want to change how our cities and towns work, we need to change the people who run them. We need a new generation of city builders — architects, engineers, planners, developers, city managers, and civic leaders. We need a new school for city builders.

Joining me today is Allie Quinlan, an architect, landscape architect, and developer in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I met Allie many years ago through the Incremental Development Alliance (IncDev), where she was an early instructor and, for the last three years, has served as executive director. She’s a principal at Range, an architecture, planning, and landscape consulting firm based in Fayetteville, and a small-scale developer in her own right. Allie, welcome to the show.

Allie: Hi Seth, thanks so much for having me.

Seth: I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. You and I have talked a lot about the importance of getting more people into development — so it’s not just run by the same old cast of characters. We need a lot more people doing this work. But before we get into that, let’s step back: to you, what does it mean to be a city builder?

Allie: We’d really classify this as the people doing the work — the doers. At IncDev, we think a lot about who our audience is, and we usually break it into three categories. First, the people who have a say over projects — the regulators and administrators: city planners, permit staff, fire marshals. Second, the ecosystem members — your banker, your appraiser, your designer, your consulting team. And third — maybe a third of the total — the actual doers, the city builders.

We need people from all three categories, but in a lot of places, people in the first two categories get really frustrated that nothing’s happening, that they’ve written all these good codes and no one’s using them. None of it works without the actual builders — the people willing to put their personal guarantee on the line, commit a couple of years of hard work, and see a project through.

Seth: Right. I see this play out on the developer side, but even in the public sector, you find people taking on that same entrepreneurial role — not waiting for someone else to solve it, but actually driving a project to completion. Navigating the bureaucracy, finding the money — it’s honestly very similar to being a developer. I think the mindsets are alike.

When I talk to people about this, there are a lot who are genuinely excited about actually doing the work — getting out there instead of just writing policy. But a lot of them, often younger people, struggle to figure out how to get in. What’s the entry point into being a city builder? So — first principles — what does a young person actually need to learn?

Allie: The first thing is that you can’t learn everything before you do anything. There’s no way to sit and prepare fully in advance. I’ll admit — Seth and I had a great chat before we remembered to hit record — and one thing we talked about is that even after years in the business, we both still feel a lot of impostor syndrome once we get into parts of real estate development outside our direct experience.

So the thing I want young people to embrace is: you just have to start somewhere. There are a hundred ways in, and a lot of them are bite-sized. You can get a job with a development office, work for a property management company — those are easy internships to land. You could work at a bank for a while on the finance side, which is actually a great way to see a huge variety of projects and learn what’s working and what isn’t.

One reality worth naming: you can get into real estate development without a lot of money. At IncDev we talk about “zero to three stories” as incremental development — and by zero stories we mean it literally. A snow cone stand. Renting a vacant lot and activating it with something low-cost. You’re learning how to get a permit, how to get water connected — all these small steps you have to go through. Pick any entry point. You just have to pick one and actually do it to learn.

Seth: That’s great advice. Going back to your own education — where did you go to school?

Allie: I did my undergraduate degree in architecture at the University of Oklahoma, then a master’s in landscape architecture at Virginia Tech, so I’m dual-licensed in both. After that I got into real estate development doing fix-and-flips — framing, tiling, renovations I learned from my mom. I got into it in a roundabout way, and for a long time I thought of it as just a hobby while I worked toward getting licensed for my “real job.” It turned out that hobby was just as useful as all the schooling.

Seth: I usually tell architecture students that one of the best internships they can do is with a construction company — not in the office, but out with a crew in the field. Because eventually your plans get built by someone who’s sweaty, the plans are upside down, covered in coffee stains — that’s who’s actually building your building. You need an intuitive feel for the people you’re working with, not just a nice air-conditioned office. You need to see what the materials are really like, what a job site is really like.

Allie: Completely agree — and it’s the same analogy we use training young architects: are your details “kind”? Have you been kind to the person who has to put this together, given the materiality you’ve chosen? We describe it as: would a hungover twenty-year-old in ninety-eight-degree heat be willing to build this the way you’ve drawn it? Because in reality, that’s who’s doing it.

Seth: Right. One thing that’s really changed about city building is the growing gap between design and construction. It used to be that if you were building a cathedral, the designer was on site. In vernacular construction generally, the person designing something was often the person building it, or a close relative — a tight connection, adaptive in real time. Now we draw a full set of plans, hand them off, say “build it,” and come back a month later to see what happened.

Allie: We get architects straight out of school who don’t know what a two-by-four is. We ask them to draw wall sections and they don’t know what the materials they’re drawing even are — it’s just lines on paper to them. Getting out on site, doing DIY projects even if the results aren’t great, gives you a real, visceral sense of what it means to carry a four-by-eight sheet of plywood up a ladder. You have to understand how buildings actually go together to build and manage them well.

Seth: [Construction noise outside] Even the jackhammer crew outside my window is proof — city building in action. The planner needs to go spend time with the DPW crew too and see how they do it.

Allie: That’s right — they’re out there getting it done.

Seth: So what advice would you give a current student — seventeen, eighteen, weighing college or grad school options — who wants to be a city builder?

Allie: It’s funny — I ended up at the state school where I could get a full ride. I started school early, stayed close to home, got in-state tuition, and took the best scholarship available. I picked a school based on those factors, not on where I “should” go. I actually got advice to go to Notre Dame — from a fellow Rhode Islander, no less — and ignored it because it was so much more expensive.

Looking back, I do sometimes wish I’d gone somewhere with an ethos more aligned to the kind of building I wanted to do. But it’s also important to tell kids: it hasn’t mattered at all in my career that I went to a school that’s just fine and good, not a top-tier CNU school. Wherever you go matters so much less than the effort you put into learning outside the classroom — experience, internships, jobs, reading, getting yourself into the world. That’s so much more important than the school itself.

Seth: People often ask me, as a developer, whether they should go to a real estate development master’s program. If you want to build skyscrapers, sure. Otherwise, don’t spend $100–150K and a year or two of your life on that degree — take that money and go buy a two-family house. Get started. Graduating without debt puts you in a completely different position.

Allie: Yes. My sister and I bought a house in college that we lived in and worked on — our first real fix-and-flip. We made money on it and rolled that equity into later properties. I picked my school partly because it left me debt-free, and that completely changed my ability to do projects later, because I could put money into buildings instead of loan payments. Unless you want to work on skyscrapers or big relationship-driven deals in a major city, the expensive degree just doesn’t get you anywhere.

Seth: That’s been my observation too. And developer isn’t even a licensed profession — no trade journal, really, beyond ULI and a few groups most people aren’t even part of. Compare that to planning, with its national conference, licensing, accredited degrees. Development is a much more open-ended system.

So how did you first connect with IncDev?

Allie: I was serving on a nonprofit development board right after I moved to Fayetteville from DC, where I’d worked on huge skyscraper projects and streetscapes. In Fayetteville, I got onto a lot of boards — the planning commission, the construction board of appeals — just by volunteering. One of the IncDev founders was a consultant for a nonprofit developer board I served on. I got to know them, joined the organization, took a training, and was asked to become faculty pretty quickly after — I think I was a second-year faculty member.

What I’ve always loved about IncDev is that it’s finding your tribe: a specific kind of small developer who’s scrappy, largely self-taught, entrepreneurial, and figures things out. You’ve got a building, you want to do something with it — none of this is rocket science. Ask for help, read the books, Google it, and you can figure it out. That wasn’t the world of real estate I’d seen working with big developer clients. It was refreshing to find people who don’t all agree, don’t share the same specialties, but share a deep philosophical belief that you can make your place better if you just show up and do the work.

Seth: Absolutely. People think of real estate as this hyper-competitive industry, and sometimes it is — I might compete with you for a site or a tenant. But most of the time we’re actually allies. If you’re doing good work in the same neighborhood I am, that’s great — fewer sites for me to figure out, and the street gets better for everyone. There’s a lot of camaraderie among developers — mostly we get together and complain: “the fire marshal made me put the transformer where?” It’s group therapy.

Allie: That’s exactly what we call it.

Seth: The real secret of city building is that we all just need more therapists — it’s all relationships and personal trauma. So — you’ve been with IncDev from the early days. How has the teaching and curriculum changed over time?

Allie: Significantly in some ways, and it’s stayed true to its roots in others. One of the biggest shifts: early on, we were a bunch of ragtag, pirate-minded small developers training other lone wolves to do things that were mostly illegal wherever we were working. Lots of code-hack solutions, ways to technically follow the rules while threading a very fine needle.

We learned that approach caused a lot of burnout — unless you have a very specific personality, a serious problem with authority, and enormous stubbornness (which a lot of us do), that path just wears people out. So it became more collaborative and holistic. Around 2018–2020 we started doing a lot more city-side training and consulting — trying to “prep the battlefield,” build a market for small development among regulators and ecosystem partners, and treat them as important alumni we needed on the same team.

Every community with a genuinely strong incremental-development market — and there are several across the country now, all feeling different — shares certain traits: someone in the planning office or mayor’s office who’s bought in, a financial environment with bankers willing to work with you, and a broader ecosystem of realtors, architects, and civil engineers who get it. That ecosystem is what cultivates a collaborative cohort of small developers actually doing the work.

So our original goal — train a thousand small developers — we blew past that years ago. We’ve now trained around 10,000 people across 33 states and two Canadian provinces, and roughly a third are active city builders. We’ve realized we also need to train that other two-thirds, the people around the small developers, just to make the whole path one percent easier.

Seth: The ecosystem metaphor has always resonated with me too — this whole collection of specialists, with the developer sitting in the middle. When I first joined a development firm, they told me real estate means being pretty good at eight other people’s jobs — broker, property manager, contractor, planner, lawyer, banker — because you’re managing this big team. I like to compare it to conducting an orchestra: I need to make sure all the instruments come in at the right time, and I should understand each one well enough to know how the whole piece works. But the ecosystem matters — I can be a great conductor, but if nobody can play their instrument, nothing gets built. If contractors don’t understand the design or bankers don’t know how to finance it, it doesn’t matter how good my idea is.

That’s part of the inspiration for a “new school”: right now we have siloed specializations — people come up in one silo, get licensed in that silo, protect their professional turf, and never really engage collaboratively with other professions. They just push their plans across the desk and say “deal with it.” That’s a bad way to build cities — it creates an ecosystem where it’s hard for anyone to do good work.

People need to learn each other’s technical skills where it matters, but also how to work with different professional personalities — engineers, architects, developers, and politicians all tend to cluster into different types. A city is a collection of all those pieces. If you try to flatten that ecosystem into a monoculture, it might be easier to crank out one kind of product — but it’s fragile. One bad beetle and your whole corn crop dies. You need a resilient, multi-track education that builds a shared language across professions.

Allie: I love that musical analogy — at first we were only training conductors, then sending them out to lead musicians who didn’t know what they were doing, or who were playing completely different styles of music. We had to teach everyone how it all fits together, and explain the ethos and the economics behind it — that this is really a return to how things were done for a long time, even though it’s not the status quo in most communities today.

There’s a lot of philosophical groundwork involved in bringing people back to something more collaborative, more holistic, more sustainable — literally, but also economically and socially sustainable. So much of how we’ve built for the last 60 years has been extractive, anti-social, even anti-human — everything feels broken and people don’t know why. Real estate training has to cover the nuts and bolts — cost segregation, 1031 exchanges — but also the bigger question: how do we build places where people can live better lives? I’d guess our training is about half technical knowledge and half about shifting how people think about the built environment, their local economy, and their own ability to shape their neighborhood and their own life.

Seth: Do you remember — you and I both gave Pecha Kucha talks at the Strong Towns National Gathering in Charlotte, four years ago? Yours was probably the best of the bunch. Mine was “landlords are the localist branch of local government” — a riff on what I call ethical landlording. People sometimes assume that being a developer or landlord makes you inherently extractive, and there are plenty of examples that reinforce that — every Hallmark movie has an evil developer tearing down an orphanage. But there are ways to be a good developer and landlord that benefit the neighborhood, your tenants, future owners, and the city — and you can learn to do that while still running a viable business.

Allie: There’s a lot of the world where homeownership isn’t the baseline assumption for building wealth or housing your family. Plenty of functional housing markets exist where renting for life is the norm — and with good tenant protections and ethical landlords, that can be a genuinely positive system. It can be more affordable to rent; you’re not stuck fixing your own water heater; renters can focus on their own lives and stay more mobile. Homeownership isn’t a neutral universal good for everyone. Which means landlords — local, corporate, governmental — will exist in some form. So the real question is how we build good lives for tenants and sustainable models for landlords at the same time.

Seth: I had a group of students here in Rhode Island working on how to explain the housing crisis, and one came up with the line “build it like we used to” — which appeals to our regional sense of nostalgia, but there’s real truth in it. We’re now generations removed from anyone who remembers the old system, so in a sense we’re archaeologically recovering it. That’s a lot of what the early Congress for the New Urbanism did — literally measuring old, beloved places with tape measures because we no longer knew the ratios: how wide the streets were, how big the buildings were. It was invisible knowledge.

I think the same recovery work is needed at the level of business models. We renovate a lot of Main Street mercantile buildings — shops below, apartments or offices above, built mostly between 1890 and 1920. I couldn’t tell you how to make that pencil out under today’s market conditions, even though it clearly worked back then. In some sense it’s a lost business model. I’d love to find a construction ledger somewhere — what did they spend on brick, on carpentry — because we like these buildings today, but we’ve genuinely lost the knowledge of how they were financed and built, socially as well as economically.

Allie: We’ve also legislated our way out of it being possible. It’s that old meme of a guy sticking a stick through his own bicycle wheel and then being shocked when he crashes — that’s our current building economy through zoning and building code. We’ve made it illegal to build that building, and we’ve overcomplicated everything.

I got into architecture partly because I love old buildings — most of my passion is adaptive reuse. I’ve taken apart a lot of old houses and put them back together. A Depression-era workers’ cottage built from leftover lumber, two-by-fours at thirty inches on center, maybe twelve dollars in materials holding up the roof — is it ideal building science? No. Has it sheltered generations of people well for a hundred years? Yes. We’ve gotten so fixated on an idea of perfection that it’s made everything worse. There’s a real case for simplicity — most of these older buildings are simple rectangles following the property line, cut into simple floor plans, barely any closets, wall sections you could sketch on a two-by-four on the ground.

I’m not anti-insulation, and code does matter — but Alex Horowitz from Pew told me a stat that’s stuck with me: from the 2012 to the 2021 International Building Code (roughly a ten-year span), the changes added something like a 10–15% cost increase for essentially no meaningful gain in energy efficiency, comfort, or long-term safety.

Seth: And there are millions of people happily living in circa-2012 buildings. They’re not dead. That’s the thing about treating the building code as some kind of minimum safety standard — it’s contradicted by the fact that almost none of us actually live under the current code. We live in 1970s houses with thin windows, and we’re fine. It’s not rocket science — people improve their homes over time as they get the money to do it.

Allie: I didn’t start out as a passionate deregulationist, but the longer I’ve worked trying to write and tinker with policy, the more I’ve concluded that the system, as it stands, isn’t helping. None of the places we love were built under today’s regulations — those regulations have effectively killed the possibility of building more of what we like.

Seth: We should have you back just to talk about building code — it’s a personal passion of mine, and you and I have spent plenty of time fighting for it with other people, if not with each other. So — where is IncDev headed next?

Allie: Our biggest focus this year is communications and storytelling. We have a rich network of people doing great work in wildly different ways, and we haven’t done a great job capturing and amplifying those lessons beyond informal introductions — so we’ve put real effort into gathering and distilling those stories for a broader audience.

We’ve also professionalized quite a bit this year, moving toward being more of a professional organization advocating for small developers, which has expanded into policy work — helping with several state bills, and playing a small role in a national bill that just passed (a very small role, so don’t overread that). We’re trying to connect what we see working and not working on the ground to better policy decisions at the state and even federal level, since it takes enormous time, money, and effort to make these changes one municipality at a time. We’re still doing all our usual training and technical assistance, and a lot more city consulting again — but the broader goal is building an ecosystem where small developers can thrive whether or not they’ve ever heard of us.

Seth: What broader lessons do you think IncDev offers for the future of city-building education generally?

Allie: The big one is: don’t narrow your focus too much. The years we defined incremental development and our own role too narrowly were the years we had the least impact. The years we broadened our view — how do we help everyone, make this work across every kind of community, get mortgage lenders and realtors and commercial leasing folks trained in the nuances — those were our highest-impact years. It’s such a generalist profession. The lesson is: invite everyone to the table, let people disagree, and keep your eyes on the actual prize — is the city better? If so, keep doing that.

Seth: This has been fantastic. A couple of closing questions. What’s one place people should visit to learn about building and running cities, and what lesson would they take from it?

Allie: [Laughing about being asked to pick a favorite] Honestly, you can’t go wrong — they’re all wonderful in different ways. One thing that’s been most useful to me professionally, oddly enough, was reading parenting books about communicating with and motivating toddlers.

Seth: I’ve had the exact same experience — toddler communication books have probably been my most useful professional development in the last ten years.

Allie: Exactly — it reframes how you motivate and communicate with people in a much simpler way. But as for place: you don’t have to fly to Italy or walk through Poundbury, as fun as that would be. You can sit down for coffee on a Main Street in Arkansas built before 1929 and just notice. That’s the best education a city builder can get — paying attention to the details. Where are the utility boxes? How wide are the sidewalks? Which side of the street do people walk on? How’s parking being used? Are the upstairs units empty? Are the storefronts well designed? Where’s the trash?

It’s not precious — people without formal education built lovely buildings, streets, and blocks everywhere, so you can find this everywhere, at every price point. It’s a mindset shift: noticing, documenting, paying attention, keeping a mental tape measure in your pocket — and doing it for a long time.

Seth: I have to ask — what toddler book would you actually recommend?

Allie: [Laughing] I’m a classic millennial parent, so I bought fully into gentle parenting — I loved Bringing Up Bébé. It took me a couple of years to realize that gentle parenting’s communication style — restate the problem, show empathy, then redirect toward a solution — is genuinely useful, but only if there’s real follow-through behind it. So now I’m a “gentle-ish” parent: velvet glove, but the glove comes off if it has to. I think I’m a velvet-glove communicator at work too — I’d love to be nice about it, and I will be, until I need to be direct. A lot of my work is negotiating on-site with contractors, city engineers, and fire marshals, and you need the same skills in parenting as at work: stay the calm, competent captain, and be willing to say no — and tolerate the whining that follows.

Seth: Absolutely — you have to tolerate the discomfort of someone being upset with you, declaring their life is ruined, this is the worst day ever.

Allie: [Laughing] “You’re ruining my life. This is the worst day of my life.”

Seth: Last question — what’s giving you hope for the future of city building?

Allie: How many young people are entering this movement, and how many mid-career professionals are flourishing in their own specialties. Some of our earliest IncDev faculty have spun off into their own niches, and it’s been genuinely joyful watching their success — and seeing how many of those relationships are still strong. There’s an abundance mindset in it: there’s wonderful opportunity everywhere, and so many people who care deeply, showing up every day to work on their place. That’s what gives me hope.

Seth: I love it — that’s a great place to end. Allie, thank you so much for joining me.

Allie: …

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In this episode, Seth talks with Paul Knight, architect and planner at Historical Concepts, about the study of urban form and why it matters for anyone trying to build better cities. Paul’s thinking was shaped by legendary Georgia Tech professor Doug Allen, whose course on the history of urban form is remembered by generations of students as one of the most formative classes they ever took.

Seth and Paul dig into why streets, lots, and blocks — not buildings — are the real “bones” of a city; how to read the hidden history embedded in a place; why practice should come before theory; and why base-12 might be a better fit for city building than base-10. They close with book and place recommendations, plus a genuinely mind-bending case for the 5,280-foot mile.

Show Notes:

* The Doug Allen Institute

* The Urban Form Standard

* Historical Concepts — Paul’s firm

* The City Shaped by Spiro Kostof

* The Architecture of the City by Aldo Rossi

* How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand

* Dozenal Society of America (dozenal.org)

* American Planning Association’s list of Great Neighborhoods

About the guest:

Paul Knight is an architect and planner at Historical Concepts, where his work focuses on land planning, zoning ordinance review, and town design. He is a co-founder of the Doug Allen Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving and advancing the work of his mentor, the late Georgia Tech professor Doug Allen.

Build the Next Right Thing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity:

Seth Zeren: Hello and welcome to the New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zeren, a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer in Providence, Rhode Island. This is a podcast about how we can transform the education of city builders. If we want to change how our cities and towns work, we need to change the people who run them. We need a new generation of city builders — architects, engineers, planners, developers, city managers, and civic leaders. We need a new school for city builders.

Joining me today is Paul Knight, an architect and planner at Historical Concepts. I first encountered Paul through his deeply insightful writings on the principles of urban form. I later learned that Paul’s work came out of his experience with legendary Georgia Tech professor Doug Allen and his class on the history of urban form. I’m so glad to have Paul on this podcast today. We talk about the study of the history of urban form and why it’s so important, what made Doug Allen’s class so meaningful for so many students, and some of the enduring — and sometimes surprising — principles of urban form that every city builder should know.

Paul, welcome to the New School for City Builders.

Paul: Thanks for inviting me.

Seth: It’s great to have you on — I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. You’re a great person to ask a question that comes up a lot on this podcast: what, or who, is a city builder?

Paul: Cities are built by many hands over many, many years. There are regulators, physical builders, designers — everyone has a hand in building and maintaining the built environment. So I’d say they’re all city builders.

Seth: Absolutely. You’re a city builder, I’m a city builder — we both work in this world where we’re participating in the creation and maintenance of the built environment. If a young person came to you today and asked, “If I wanted to be a city builder, what should I do?” — what does a young person need to learn?

Paul: I think one of the most important things to learn is a sense of scale. We’re so used to drawing a floor plan on paper, noting dimensions, or writing regulations — but relating those things to the actual physical world requires your brain to go back and forth between the two-dimensional world on paper and the actual three-dimensional world. That back-and-forth is how you develop a sense of scale.

Seth: Yeah — I think one of the challenges we see in city building is that people are too good at the paper or the spreadsheet and don’t understand the bricks, or they understand the bricks and sticks but not the spreadsheet. The challenge is doing both: understanding the paperwork and the physical reality.

Paul: Exactly. And knowing that everything has a consequence in the real world — knowing what those consequences are — is super important.

Seth: So let’s go back to your own education. Where did you go to school? Walk us through your journey and what you do now.

Paul: I went to Georgia Tech — graduated in 2011, but started in 2002, so I was there for nine years. I took a roundabout path. I started in astrophysics, which was a lot of fun, but I realized I didn’t want to do that as a career, so I transitioned into engineering. That got a little boring. One of my hallmates was studying architecture — she was building models and doing renderings, and it looked like a lot of fun — so I transitioned again into architecture.

Seth: By which point your parents were despairing that you’d ever graduate.

Paul: (laughs) My dad always said: whatever you study, it all relates. Something you learn in one domain you can apply to another. I’ve bopped around a lot, so I’m always thinking about how astrophysics and printmaking and classical rendering and architecture all connect.

Seth: All of Paul’s buildings are secretly aligned to constellations — that’s the secret truth of it. So you finished at Georgia Tech — did you stay for a master’s as well?

Paul: I did — a dual master’s in architecture and city planning. It was during undergrad that I discovered I was even interested in cities; I’d never thought about them before, just took them for granted. It was Doug Allen’s course, The History of Urban Form, that opened my eyes to how fascinating cities are, and how important the built environment is — not just in designing beautiful houses or buildings, but in figuring out how to regulate these things. Because the vast majority of what’s built out there doesn’t have a thoughtful architect behind it — a lot of it is the lowest common denominator of development, which is just a reflection of the regulations in place. Doug Allen introduced me to that idea. Now, whenever I walk around, I can see the regulations behind everything — that hidden order.

Seth: It’s interesting — I also didn’t think about cities at all until I was an undergraduate. When you’re young, you’ve lived in a place, or maybe a couple of places, and that environment — urban, suburban, or rural — is just the water you swim in. You don’t even know it’s a “thing.” It doesn’t seem to have a beginning, an end, or a trajectory, because you’re a kid.

Paul: Right — it’s just always been there. You’re born into it.

Seth: And there’s an interesting dynamic here: some city-building fields, like engineering and architecture, are things people commonly start in undergrad. But city building more broadly isn’t really accessible to people arriving in college, because they don’t have the context yet. I wonder if there’s anything we could do to make people more aware of the city as this broader project. I see some evidence that YouTube has had an influence — channels like Not Just Bikes or Strong Towns are entry points that get people excited, pitched to a lay audience.

Paul: Yeah — TikTok too.

Seth: So you were a budding architect, former engineer, recovering astrophysicist, and you end up in Doug Allen’s classroom. What were you thinking when you walked in? What was that class about, and how did it shape your practice and thinking?

Paul: I came into his course with no understanding or expectation at all about what it even was — it was just a required course. I didn’t know what urban form was.

Seth: That’s a good question — what even is urban form?

Paul: It’s the physical components of a city — the streets, lots, and blocks, and the buildings. Whenever I think of urban form, I think of the underlying foundation of a city — literally the boundary lines. That’s the basic framework. Even though when you experience a city you see buildings, walk into buildings, encounter land uses — and buildings are very important — buildings also come and go. They have a life expectancy; some last hundreds of years, but a lot only last a few decades. To me, that’s why buildings alone don’t capture urban form — they don’t have that staying power.

Seth: So what’s something that lasts longer than a building?

Paul: A street. Not the pavement — I mean the legal definition of a street: the right-of-way from one private property to another. That right-of-way is what delineates public from private property.

Seth: And those don’t move around much, right? Look at a city like Boston — a chaotic, confused mess. We joke that it’s because those were cattle paths that became dirt roads, then cobblestone, then paved roads — and now there’s a skyscraper next to what was a garden with a sheep pasture 300 years ago.

Paul: Exactly. That’s what’s so amazing about cities — you can actually see their histories. There are these incisions in the ground.

Seth: Like tree rings — they accumulate over time. If you learn how to read it, it’s a hidden framework you can suddenly see, and you can read the history of the place, and maybe even make some predictions about where it’s headed.

Paul: Exactly.

Seth: So — back to Doug Allen’s classroom. What were you expecting when you walked in?

Paul: Truly nothing. I just had to take the course. I sat down with my friends, and I honestly can’t remember what he said in that first lecture, but I remember feeling immediately captivated. We’d go to class three days a week, and we called it “Storytime with Doug Allen” — the way he talked about cities and histories, revealing all these hidden orders, was so captivating and compelling and fun. By the end of the course I thought: okay, I still love architecture, but man, this city stuff is pretty awesome.

Seth: I also took a planning course in grad school at the architecture school, and a lot of the architects really struggled with it — the mode of thinking was so different from studio courses. What was that tension like for you? You had to finish an architecture degree, but now you wanted to think at the city scale.

Paul: Yeah, there was tension. In architecture, there was a lot of emphasis on drawing, proportion, design, scale, diagrams — figuring out how a building should work. In the city planning school, there was much less of that and much more emphasis on theory — things like how to administer a zoning ordinance, giant land-use maps. I remember one of the first projects in the planning program: I was used to working with a scale, thinking about building footprints and dimensions. But my city-planning classmates had never picked up a scale or thought about how big buildings actually are. We were working on a land plan, and I remember thinking: how are you even drawing anything if you have no idea how big it is?

Seth: I’ve had that experience too, in my own teaching and professional work. There’s a big map, and people just draw rectangles on it — which is good, people should learn to draw rectangles on maps, that’s the beginning of wisdom in city building. But how wide is a building, typically? What does that width say about the interior space? There are rules of thumb that aren’t hard to learn, but until you’ve learned them, you’re just playing with shapes.

Paul: Right — you’re not actually working on the city. You’re just mashing shapes around without understanding the underlying framework.

Seth: Urban form, in that sense — and your work reminds me of the book How Buildings Learn, which someone mentioned as a favorite on an earlier episode of this podcast. Everyone should read it.

Paul: Mine too, yeah.

Seth: One of the things that book talks about at the building scale is that different parts of a building have different lifespans. Interior paint — we change that every five to twenty years. HVAC, maybe every fifteen to twenty. Electrical wiring, a bit longer. Windows, longer still. The roof, longer than that. And the structure of the building might last two hundred years, even though the toilets get replaced every twenty. Buildings have these layered life cycles. Step outside the building envelope and that logic continues: a parcel of land is longer-term still, though it can be merged or subdivided. A street is even longer-term, though it too can be moved. And beyond that, there are neighborhoods with real lineage, public spaces, and churches that can last for thousands of years. So even though what we see day to day — buildings, people, storefronts — moves on different timescales, there’s an underlying logic to the space that interacts with humans and society but persists like tree rings.

So — once we’ve learned to read urban form, why is it important to study if you want to build good cities today?

Paul: Because these “tree rings” are the actual structure of a city — the streets, lots, and blocks. They stick with us for a long, long time; they’re very difficult to change. Once you lay them down, they’re with us essentially forever. So it’s extremely important to get them right the first time — otherwise you’re making it difficult for future generations to operate within, say, the suburban sprawl you just built for the next thousand years.

Seth: I’d go a step further. I work in infill contexts, mostly in the city, so I’m encountering areas scarred by urban renewal — superblocks, disconnected street networks. If you understand urban form — what creates healthy fabric versus unhealthy fabric — you can learn generic lessons from the history of world cities about how that works. Whether you’re in the public or private sector, it’s valuable when deciding what increment of change to make to improve scarred urban fabric. If you focus only on shorter-term interventions — “we should just change the buildings” — you might miss that the parcel size is too big, or there’s too little street frontage, or there’s no way to travel through the area. Those are urban-form issues; if you don’t understand them, your interventions won’t really work, because the underlying problem is the urban form itself, not this building or that building.

At a different scale, this has obviously been important for people doing suburban retrofit — a lot of people at Georgia Tech work on that. Block size, in particular: you’ve got a big shopping center, you need to subdivide it — how big should the new blocks be, to make it into healthy, lasting urban fabric?

Paul: Should I answer that? Thinking back on city-planning theory, so much of it seemed to come out of nowhere — “here’s a good idea, let’s take it to its logical conclusion.” As a counterpoint, I always try to go back to the primary source — not the first edition of some book, or the author who originally had the idea, but the actual place: the actual blocks. This is work Doug Allen started, and I’ve continued it since studying under him — spending time on Google Earth, physically measuring places that work, places I’ve been to, places I haven’t. The APA has a list of great neighborhoods they’ve released over the years. Rather than me declaring what a great block should be, I go to these places, measure them, and let the answer come from that.

Seth: Right — what are the commonalities, what traits do they share?

Paul: Surprisingly many. Block size, to answer your question: blocks typically run between 200 and 600 feet on a side, with a perimeter under about 1,800 feet. Those numbers aren’t rigid — if you’re slightly under 200 or over 600, it’ll probably still work — but it puts you in the right ballpark. Blocks could be 2,000 feet, or 20,000 feet. Why are the great ones between 200 and 600?

Seth: Right, right. It’s interesting that there’s so much theory in both the planning and architecture programs. One theme on this podcast has been that academia tends to prefer theory over practice, with theory preceding practice — we learn the theory so we can then practice it. I think a lot of us in the city-builder movement are trying to reverse that: theory should come from practice. Observe a bunch of places, then see what you can learn.

For me, this was a big part of how I got into city building — I encountered Jane Jacobs. At the time I’d trained as a geologist. One of the things you learn in geology is that it’s an observational science — it’s hard to run experiments; you can’t create volcanoes or start a new Mississippi River just to see how it turns out. You observe what’s happened and try to work out the dynamics that produced it. I saw a real kinship between that and what Jacobs was doing — looking at the built environment and the people using it, and trying to figure out why, not starting from first principles or grand theory, just direct observation, building up a structure of lessons from there. Like any observational science, you get some hits and some misses, and you improve over time. But I think this principle — that practice should precede theory, that practice is where theory comes from — is a real challenge for how we teach these disciplines. You see threads of it in Strong Towns thinking too: do lots of small bets, see how it goes.

So, back to teaching — when you took Doug Allen’s class, was it just you who found it a revelation, or were lots of people inspired?

Paul: No, lots of people — one year it was rated the number one elective on the entire Georgia Tech campus.

Seth: And how many electives does Georgia Tech have — hundreds? Thousands?

Paul: I don’t know, it’s a big school. But yeah, everybody loved that course. I wasn’t special.

Seth: When you describe it — an hour-to-90-minute lecture, three days a week, from an older professor with slides — that’s so passé these days. Nobody teaches like that anymore; it’s not an “active classroom.” Did he start out with a slide carousel, or was he already on PowerPoint?

Paul: PowerPoint by then, yep.

Seth: I bet he started with slides on a carousel, though. Anyway — what you’re describing is that he’d learned to be a good storyteller, and I’ve increasingly come to think storytelling is a central skill in planning and architecture. You have ideas, goals, a vision — and if you look at the big names in planning history, Jane Jacobs, Daniel Burnham, Edward Bellamy — they’re storytellers. Some of them literally wrote short stories and novellas to popularize their ideas, because they had to convey not just the physical environment but how you live in it. What about his storytelling made it so effective? What was he doing in class that really worked for you?

Paul: It happened in the classroom, but also outside it — he made it immediately applicable. You think of a history course as “that’s how they did it back then,” all dead history. But maybe because cities have such a living history, we’d learn something in his course and then walk outside and immediately see it. I remember him talking about how boundary lines don’t actually exist — they’re a figment of our imagination, nobody’s out there stringing lines everywhere — but they end up existing anyway, rendered by things like chain-link fences, building walls, a mowed lawn. After he said that, I remember walking out and suddenly seeing boundary lines everywhere — thinking, that rusted old chain-link fence: that lot line has been there for 150 years. That’s amazing.

Seth: That makes a lot of sense. People need to learn skills, develop understanding, and take on new perspectives — and what he was doing was opening windows onto different views, one after another. That’s hard to do on your own; if you just wander around a city, you’d get a lot less out of it. There’s real value in having a skilled mentor tell you those stories and expose you to ideas you hadn’t seen — like taking the red pill in The Matrix. And the fact that a boundary line in Rome and a boundary line outside your classroom are part of the same lineage — it’s not dead history, it’s a lineage that keeps going.

Paul: He’d also go off on tangents — talking about how city building relates to tennis courts, whether they were clay or grass, the significance of grass lawns, then into the etymology of words — “intramural,” inside the wall; “extramural,” outside the wall. There were always these little nuggets sprinkled throughout the course.

Seth: Not to be too contemporary about it, but I wonder if that non-linear lecture style works partly because it makes you look like an actual person rather than running through notes — and partly because of novelty. In walkability, part of what makes a street work is that there are lots of doors, lots of storefronts, lots of scenery as you walk — you’ll walk twenty miles in London, but you won’t walk twenty miles past auto-lots in the suburbs. It reminds me of why short-form video is so addictive: it’s mostly similar to what you just watched, but occasionally very different, and that reward structure is what hooks human brains — the algorithm does it on purpose. A good lecture works the same way: mostly building up connected knowledge, but with the occasional tangent. Sprinkle it in at the right ratio and it’s probably far more effective — the brain thinks, “that was a weird lecture today, what was that about? I wonder what next week will be like.”

So — looking back — you’re now at Historical Concepts, an architecture and planning firm. Tell us about what they do and what your work looks like now.

Paul: Most of our work as a firm is high-end custom residential. I used to be involved in that, but I’ve since focused almost exclusively on planning work — working with small towns, municipalities, and developers on land planning (a thousand-acre land plan, or infill development), auditing zoning ordinances to show what’s working and what isn’t, and envisioning what development could look like in a place. So it’s a bit of design, a bit of rendering, a bit of zoning-ordinance writing — a little of everything.

Seth: If you could go back and change one thing about your education at Georgia Tech, what would it be?

Paul: I think we covered it already, talking about scale and going to primary sources. Looking back, I feel like I learned how to draw drawings, how to draw maps — I learned how to read theory and comment on it. I didn’t really learn how to make these beautiful places.

Seth: You keep using the word “beautiful” — was beauty a popular word in architecture school, or a forbidden one?

Paul: Forbidden. “Beauty? Ooh, what’s that — we don’t talk about that here.”

Seth: I had a similar conversation with Kevin Klinkenberg about this — you’d get a C-minus for trying to make something conventionally pretty, while someone else draws one line across a page, talks about it for two hours, and gets an A.

Paul: I know. I was just never into that realm.

Seth: Why is that so attractive to architecture schools? Why is the hard work of measuring a street and figuring out how it works less attractive than drawing a line and talking about it?

Paul: I honestly don’t know. In architecture school it’s all about novelty, being unique, standing out — if you’re looking at buildings that have already been designed, or measuring things that already exist, you’re not “pushing the envelope.” You’re supposed to imagine something that’s never happened before.

Seth: That’s interesting, because in engineering programs, nobody wants that at all — nobody wants an experimental bridge or dam. It’s all “color inside the lines.” Maybe it’s the artist’s assumption built into architecture — architecture is often housed in fine-arts departments. But the older lineage, up until around 1900, was really a craft — a lot of architects were craftspeople themselves, carpenters or masons — there was real overlap between trade skill and design skill, and people were much more closely connected across that spectrum. Now it’s very separated: the builder builds, the designer designs, and they barely know how to talk to each other.

Paul: Exactly.

Seth: If a young person were considering an architecture program, what advice would you give them about surviving it and getting the most out of it?

Paul: Just do what you want. I got so much flak for studying traditional architecture, wanting to learn the classical orders — but they didn’t fail me. So what if I got some B’s in some courses — you’ll graduate, you’ll be fine. Be passionate about what you want to study, and just do it.

Seth: No one cares about that after you graduate. So — after some time in practice, you helped launch the Doug Allen Institute. Tell us about setting that up, and about the Urban Form Standard you’ve been writing — which you haven’t finished, by the way; please hurry up and finish it, I’d really appreciate that as a personal favor. I also heard you on another podcast make the case for base-12 over base-10 in city building, which blew my mind — lay that out for us.

Paul: Sure — the Doug Allen Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit advancing the knowledge of urban form. All of Doug’s work and research is the seed for what we do. He spent so much of his time on his students and lectures that he didn’t produce much writing, and only shared his material with his own students. We want to share it with everyone else, and continue the research he would have done in retirement — but he passed away in 2016, which is when we founded the institute. If you go to DougAllenInstitute.org, you’ll find his recorded video lectures — which is amazing, because he only recorded them in the last year he was able to teach. He didn’t know he was sick when he started that year; he’d just decided to record the lectures. We’re very fortunate he did, otherwise we’d be trying to track down whether anyone in the audience had recorded it.

Seth: It’s a good reminder that we have a lot of individual people doing great work scattered around, without a great process for collecting and archiving it — people’s libraries and notebooks. It’d be a real shame for someone’s life’s work to end up at an estate sale with nobody knowing what it’s worth. And if they didn’t publish it — a lot of people are too busy doing the work to write it down — it classically falls to the disciples to write the book.

Paul: Exactly. His colleagues, friends, family, and former students got together to form the institute, to make sure his work lives on and keeps being implemented. In my day-to-day work, I’m always thinking about lessons from Doug Allen.

Seth: So, base-12. I was trained as a scientist, always on team “we should just switch to metric like everyone else” — it was a minor point of pain having to do fractions in carpentry in the U.S. But you made a compelling case that base-12 isn’t just a random holdover — it’s technically better in some ways, for city building specifically.

Paul: Let’s nerd out. Think of numbers as a tool, like a knife. The number ten is like a dull fixed-blade knife; the number twelve is like a Swiss Army knife with all your tools built in. Why? Because we don’t just use numbers for computers — we work with them in woodworking, architecture, geography, timekeeping — fields where we’re constantly dividing and subdividing. We’ve divided the earth into latitude and longitude, time into seconds, minutes, and hours, building materials into standard dimensions. Because we’re always subdividing these numbers, it’s much better if they divide cleanly, with as few fractions and decimals as possible. For example, 100 has about nine or ten divisors, but 120 has around fifteen or twenty.

Seth: What do you mean by that — like I can cut 100 in half to 50, or a quarter to 25, or into tens?

Paul: Right — 100 divides evenly into 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, and 100. But 120 divides into 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 20, 24, 30, 40, 60, and 120 — a lot more options. The ancient Babylonians knew this — they had a base-60 numbering system. That’s why we have 60 seconds in a minute and 360 degrees in a circle.

Seth: Which is why time is base-60.

Paul: Because it just works so well — you can keep subdividing over and over. The 5,000-foot Roman mile kind of sucks, but the 5,280-foot mile is amazing.

Seth: Which is the kind of number that, when you first learn it, makes you think: good lord, what were we doing with this random figure?

Paul: I remember wondering why a mile was 5,280 feet, until I learned that 5,000 can be subdivided about twenty different ways, but 5,280 can be subdivided forty-eight different ways.

Seth: Which matters — when you’re subdividing land for farms, it’s hard to give each of your kids 12.6 units, but easy to give them twelve. If it divides cleanly, you have more flexibility to subdivide or recombine and manage it. What’s the exercise you did with this?

Paul: Land is something that keeps undergoing subdivision — it passes from one generation to another; you might have two or three kids, and each of them might have one or two kids, and so on. So I took 5,280 and subdivided it into typical fractions — halves, quarters, thirds — repeatedly, generation after generation. With 5,000, you get five generations of subdivision before you run out of clean options. With 5,280, you get eighteen generations.

Seth: So you’ve got a lot more room before you run into fractions of an inch. You can’t even divide 5,000 by three — and being able to divide by two, three, four, five, even six matters a lot. Seven’s out — who cares about seven — but the small numbers matter.

Paul: Very useful, yeah.

Seth: Take a 120-foot-wide lot versus a 100-foot one. I live on a 50-foot-wide lot, and now I feel a bit bad about it — it’s very common for American cities to be subdivided into 50-by-100 lots, or 25-by-100 — that’s most of Manhattan. But none of those divide easily into thirds, or even cleanly in half: 25 feet divided in half is 12.5 feet, which is basically a single room with no space for a staircase — pretty tight. Whereas a 30-foot-wide lot gives you 15 feet — a skinny but totally functional townhouse.

Paul: Or a 60-foot lot can become two 30-foot lots, or three 20-foot townhouse lots.

Seth: Tremendous flexibility from base-12 thinking — that really blew my mind. If anyone wants to argue about base-12, Paul will take you on with his Swiss Army knife of subdivision powers.

Paul: There’s actually a Dozenal Society of America — dozenal.org, I think.

Seth: I should join. This carries down to the micro scale too — carpentry still uses fractions, and being able to divide into halves, quarters, and thirds (which you can do with 12 but not 10) is genuinely useful. Then there’s a further layer: these seemingly arbitrary units — why is a foot that long? Maybe it’s based on someone’s foot. Why is an inch that long? Roughly a thumb joint. That sounds totally arbitrary — a bit like saying money is a social construct. Sure, money’s a social construct, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t function. It’s arbitrary that units are based on the human foot, forearm, and thumb — but we do have feet, forearms, and thumbs, and our lives are built around that scale. Even Le Corbusier, the famous modernist who wanted to blow everything up and start fresh, built his Modulor system around a rather strange-looking human figure — it looks like a victim of some science-fiction slave society — but the human form is still this fundamental, irreducible unit for living in buildings and cities. The metric system, a product of the French Revolution and the birth of modern science, is very useful for measuring the distance between Earth and the stars, or the speed of light — great for astrophysics — but not for base-12 thinking.

Paul: Right.

Seth: In the same way computers run on base-8 or base-2 because of how bits work — on/off, ones and zeros — that’s the fundamental nature of the device. In the human-scaled world, our body parts help inform how big things should be. Stairs are often 12 inches deep and about that tall — because it’s a comfortable distance for a human leg to climb. What is that in centimeters? Neither of us has any idea — you’d have to calculate it, because centimeters aren’t related to human body parts.

Paul: Exactly. The meter is something like one ten-millionth of the distance from the pole to the equator.

Seth: A neat idea — basing it on a fundamental unit of the earth. Good job. But it’s not related to a human body part, which evolved with no attention at all to the size of the earth, the universe, or the weight of water.

Paul: I actually have a diagram as the background on my phone — a skeleton labeled with all my personal dimensions: how big my hand is, the height from the floor to my hip, my pace length. So whenever I’m out and about, I might forget a tape measure, but I always have my body with me.

Seth: Your body is always with you. When I was in graduate school — technically in the environmental program, since I was a scientist intimidated by design schools, so I snuck into urbanism through the back door — our field-training orientation involved orienteering in the woods, since we were ecologists. One thing I’ve kept from that is learning to pace. If you ever need to know how wide something is outside, you can get within about 10% just by walking it off — pacing is a powerful skill, and it doesn’t require any technology or subscription fee.

Paul: Definitely.

Seth: Paul, this has been fantastic — a couple of last questions to close us out. What’s one place people should visit to learn more about building and running cities, and what’s the one lesson they’ll take away?

Paul: I’m a huge fan of the typical American Main Street — late 1800s to pre–World War II. We had the template down; we borrowed it from the ancient Romans, and everyone — railroad companies, municipalities, land speculators — was working from the same dimensions, and it worked so well. These small, gridded towns have a lot of lessons to teach. Just go and pace out the blocks.

Seth: A lot of American urbanists get grumpy about American urbanism because of the gaps — we’re not as elegant as Europe or as dense as Asia, we can’t build bullet trains. But there is a real lineage of American urbanism, and we did blow a lot of it up after World War II with urban renewal and suburbanization — that was bad — but we also did a lot of genuinely good work, and we should celebrate and learn from it.

Paul: We did, yeah.

Seth: What’s one book you’d recommend to the audience?

Paul: One book that had a profound influence on me was The City Shaped by Spiro Kostof. That, along with Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City — both really emphasize the city as a living history, an historical artifact in the flesh: the idea that you can read all the decisions made over thousands of years by thousands of people, made manifest in the physical world. Along with Doug Allen, those two books made history feel real to me.

Seth: Last question — what’s one thing that gives you hope for the future of city building?

Paul: Related to everything we’ve talked about — cities take forever to build, and they’ve been around forever, and they’ll be around forever. Thinking on long timescales — not week to week, but millennium to millennium — pendulums swing back and forth. We complain about zoning ordinances and cars destroying downtowns and Main Streets, but that’s just a blip in the five-thousand-year history of building cities. We’ve got at least another five thousand to go.

Seth: Thank you, Paul, so much — great to have you on.

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The New School for City Builders is a production of the Educational Collaborative for Building Places People Love and Build the Next Right Thing. If you appreciate what we’re doing and want to help bring this school to fruition, please support us by becoming a paid subscriber at buildthenextrightthing.substack.com.

Show Notes:

* College of St. Joseph the Worker

* Crabtree Group

* Jacob on the Bottom Up Revolution

Build the Next Right Thing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Edited Transcript

Seth Zeren: Hello and welcome to The New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zeren, a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer in Providence, Rhode Island. This is a podcast about how we transform the education of city builders. If we want to change how our cities and towns work, we need to change the people who run them. We need a new generation of city builders — architects, engineers, planners, developers, city managers, and civic leaders. We need a new school for city builders.

Joining me today is civil engineer Jacob Hyman, PE. I met Jacob at the Congress for the New Urbanism in 2024 in Cincinnati — one of those great, fortuitous lobby connections that conferences are best for. Jacob trained as a civil engineer before going to work for Paul Crabtree, one of the best civil engineers building places people love in the entire country. In our conversation today, Jacob and I explore his background, his path through civil engineering education, his connection to New Urbanism and Strong Towns, and his insights about the importance of human formation in education.

Jacob, welcome to The New School for City Builders.

Jacob Hyman: Thank you, Seth. Very glad to be here.

Seth Zeren: It was great meeting you in that hotel lobby — that’s the best part of going to conferences, those fortuitous connections. You never quite know what you’re going to find, and it’s a lot of fun.

Jacob Hyman: That’s great. I remember our hallway conversation well, and I remember you talking about education back in ‘24. I thought, I want to chat with this guy — this is critical, being able to talk about the education question. So I’m really glad you reached out a couple of weeks ago about doing this podcast. You’ve kept the spark alive and kept fanning the flame of this important discussion.

Seth Zeren: Thanks, Jacob. We’re going to keep this fire growing and get some good stuff going. So — how did you become a civil engineer? What led you down this path?

Jacob Hyman: Sure. I’ll keep my answer focused on the civil engineering side for now, though as I’ve reflected on my own education, I’ve realized how incidentally I found my way into urban planning and urbanism.

I went to college from 2014 to 2019, at Florida State University — go Seminoles — and studied engineering at the joint FAMU–FSU College of Engineering. I went into civil engineering, and into engineering generally, because I was good at math, or so my dad told me. As a 17-year-old with a STEM inclination, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but my father encouraged me toward engineering.

I started at Florida State in 2014 in the general engineering track, taking math and physics, and didn’t declare civil engineering until my sophomore year. By the end of my first semester I already knew I wanted to do civil — which, as it happens, gets you closer to the urban planning side of things. From there I did a fairly typical civil engineering curriculum: concrete and steel, hydraulics and hydrology, soils, construction management, engineering ethics.

I graduated in 2019 with my ABET-accredited degree, which requires at least four years of professional experience before you can sit for your PE license. I got that experience through a master’s degree in engineering management while I was in the Air Force, through a year and a half working for a conventional engineering firm here in the Pittsburgh area, and then through the rest of my time working with Paul Crabtree. I got my license this past December — about six months ago now. That’s the big-picture journey.

Seth Zeren: Congratulations — passing the PE exams is a big accomplishment, a lot of work. What was the best part of your civil engineering education?

Jacob Hyman: Honestly, the engineering itself is fascinating, and I think I got a very good education in the fundamentals. There’s no “urbanist civil engineering” concentration — that doesn’t exist, unless you pursue some kind of independent, self-directed study. So I’m grateful for a rock-solid grounding in the fundamentals: understanding the concepts and equations behind the engineering, doing the math by hand rather than just running software.

It wasn’t heavy on the software side — all the CAD work I now do daily was learned on the job. But the fundamentals — the stuff running quietly in the background of every Excel spreadsheet, every Civil 3D design, every automated grading calculation — that’s what I got, and that’s what I’m most grateful for.

Seth Zeren: That’s great — not just “here’s how to use the application” without understanding what’s underneath.

Jacob Hyman: Right. I actually felt pretty inadequate going into my first engineering job, because I had very little CAD experience — I didn’t have many internships in college since my summers were taken up by Air Force ROTC. So my first job was largely learning the software for the first time. But I’d think back — oh, I learned the TR-55 method, I learned the Rational Method in school — and it was rewarding to see that knowledge translate into real-world work.

Seth Zeren: Looking back, what would you change about the program, knowing what you know now?

Jacob Hyman: That’s why we’re here on this podcast, isn’t it? My civil engineering program didn’t have tracks — no architectural engineering focus, no structural focus. It was one catch-all civil engineering degree. Some of my fellow alumni now do site engineering like me, others do dam engineering, bridge and structural engineering, and so on.

Seth Zeren: That’s a really interesting point. If you’re not in civil engineering, you don’t fully appreciate the breadth of what people with a civil engineering degree end up doing — from the steel in a skyscraper, to a dam or a runway, to site grading, to transportation and traffic engineering. In a lot of other contexts these would be entirely separate degrees, but here they’re all mashed into one.

Jacob Hyman: You’re right. When I was an undergrad — seven years ago now — I was drawn to structural engineering. I liked building with Legos and Minecraft, which is actually where my urban-planning interest began, and I’d also heard that structural engineers tend to be near the top of the pay scale in civil engineering. So I took every optional structural class I could. But seven years later, I’m doing site work exclusively.

Your PE license technically allows you to practice anything you’re competent in, but I’m not going to stamp a set of structural drawings — I don’t do that kind of work regularly, and I’m not going to take on that liability. So even though there was a point where I thought I’d go into structures, that’s just not how things turned out. And I’m glad — I’m doing the New Urbanist work now, which for civil engineers is mostly site-related. Even in developments where we admire the structural or masonry work — say, missing-middle housing — when people think about the engineering behind a New Urbanist development, they’re usually thinking about the streets, the roads, and the stormwater. That’s the site work we principally think about.

Seth Zeren: Let’s dig into that. What is it that you and Paul Crabtree’s firm do differently from typical civil engineering practice?

Jacob Hyman: I joined the Crabtree team in September of ‘23 — so this September will be three years. When I first joined, I told my engineering friends doing more conventional site work, “How is this New Urbanist work different from what you’re doing?” I thought that was a great question, and I’m still figuring out the answer, though almost three years in I have a better sense of it now.

Water flows at the same rate through a 48-inch concrete pipe at a 2% slope with a Manning’s n of 0.015, whether that pipe sits under a suburban McMansion subdivision or under a walkable, historic town like Seaside or New Urbanist community we’re trying to build today. The physics — the actual engineering — is the same. What’s different is that you’re building an actual place. The form of the street in a well-designed neighborhood is fundamentally different from the form of a suburban stroad, and that distinction is never made in engineering education.

Nothing in my required coursework touched on it — I only encountered urban planning because I chose those electives voluntarily to fill a humanities requirement. That’s what opened my eyes to the fact that we need to think about the places we’re making. What’s unique about New Urbanist engineering, philosophically, is that the places we build are meant to serve a person, not just a financial transaction. The calculations don’t change, but what we build does.

And the work pulls you beyond pure engineering into zoning and fire code — you start being asked to have opinions on those things, which engineering school never asks of you. Normally the only “opinion” you have is whatever code book the municipality has adopted. You don’t develop a critical eye for how those codes implicitly dictate street widths or the single-use nature of stormwater facilities. New Urbanist engineers have to cultivate that eye on their own, because it isn’t taught. So the difference isn’t really the engineering — it’s a broader understanding of how what you’re doing affects the end user, who is, after all, a person.

Seth Zeren: That’s really interesting — your point about getting beyond the book. My father is a mechanical engineer, and growing up around his work, then later encountering civil engineering myself, I felt a real contrast. The engineering I knew growing up was about technical problem-solving, building systems and machines — entrepreneurial, pushing the frontier of what we knew how to do. Civil engineering, by contrast, often felt like: here’s a table, I consult the table, and that tells me the width of the street. But we’re not just consulting a table — we have a real place in the world with complex inputs and outputs: rainwater flow, but also how people will interact with the place, its ability to generate tax revenue, and so on. But a lot of the civil engineers I worked with just said, “this doesn’t meet my table, I don’t have the warrant in the book to do it.” And I’d think — what happened to your brain?

Jacob Hyman: Right. With mechanical engineering — building a fast car, say — you’re thinking through the physics of what’s actually happening and how to make it happen. Civil engineering does have that same technical rigor in places — setting the orifices in a stormwater basin at just the right elevation so post-development flow matches pre-development flow, for instance. But it’s driven far more by what the municipal code says. In a lot of places we work, we don’t even get to do full modeling, because the code just specifies a minimum basin size for a given amount of disturbed land — even when our own modeling shows a smaller basin would work.

Civil engineers can lose the ability to really engineer within an overly regimented code structure, because it takes less brainpower — or a different kind. Reading and interpreting code requires its own skill, but it’s different from actually making good judgment calls about street widths and stormwater design.

Seth Zeren: So how did you end up taking urban planning electives alongside your engineering coursework?

Jacob Hyman: I think I fell into it. I was a Lego kid from about age five — my mother bought me sets meant for kids three or four years older, which probably had pieces I could have choked on, but she got them for me anyway, and I took to it immediately. That continued through my childhood, and then I got very into Minecraft. In high school — and I’ll admit I probably spent more time on this than I should have, looking back — I spent hours on a Minecraft server with strangers online, building a city. The server had plugins that let you claim and protect land, and you could actually become a “mayor” based on how many people lived in your city.

I built streets, sold plots of land, built a town hall, an arena, murals made of dyed wool — over fifty residences at one point, the largest city on the server. It was a real point of pride in high school. So I had cities on my mind heading into college, and one of the electives I gravitated toward, almost instinctively, was a freshman course called World Cities, through Florida State’s Urban Planning Department. I thought, I like cities, I’ve been building one in Minecraft for three years, let me learn about real ones.

I credit that course as a pivotal moment. I knew almost nothing about engineering going in, but I came to understand that civil engineers are the ones who build cities, and something clicked — spiritually, almost — about the good that a city represents. I decided: I want to build cities, I’ll do that through engineering, I’ll be a civil engineer. That was the first semester of freshman year.

That course was also the first class in Florida State’s four-class urban planning minor — there was no undergraduate major in urban planning there at the time. I took the second class the following summer, and it was while doing homework for that class, back in 2015, that I started researching questions online, read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and came across a website called Strong Towns. I never finished the minor — I got too busy with the civil engineering degree and my ROTC commission — but those were the seeds that blossomed six or seven years later.

Seth Zeren: You mentioned that firms like Paul Crabtree’s, doing New Urbanist civil engineering, have to do a lot of additional coaching and mentorship for people coming out of a typical civil engineering program. So what would need to change in undergraduate civil engineering education to make people more ready for this kind of work? Maybe it’s as simple as everyone needing an urban planning minor — though I doubt they’d all want that.

Jacob Hyman: Even within how civil engineering is practiced today, I could see several different specialties each needing their own version of a New Urbanist education. Civil site engineers like me design local roads and local stormwater infrastructure, but we’re not designing highways — that’s the transportation engineers’ domain, though we sometimes indirectly influence where highways go. Then you have regional-scale civil work — bridge engineering, dam engineering — which also intersects with land use planning.

There’s no formal education for any of these New Urbanist-oriented roles right now. I’d leave structural and geotechnical engineering a bit more to the side — geotech in particular is probably the specialty least connected to New Urbanism, no offense to geotechs. It’s a thankless task in some ways — I need to know what soil is under my road base, but it’s hard to leave your own mark there.

But broadly: right now, civil engineering students share a common core curriculum and then choose whichever humanities electives suit their taste — I did mostly music, since I like it personally, even though I don’t use it professionally. What if we flipped that? Instead of “choose your own adventure” humanities on top of a broad shared engineering core, what if the humanities requirement had a consistent urban-planning orientation, and the engineering side let students specialize earlier and more deeply?

Seth Zeren: So once you became a transportation engineer, say, you’d be less likely to shift into site civil work — whereas right now, right out of undergrad, you could in principle go in almost any direction. But then, as you said, people specialize anyway once they start practicing, because most firms are specialized.

Jacob Hyman: Right — I’m actually a good example, since I had no internships in undergrad, my summers were all Air Force ROTC, and I went straight into the Air Force after graduating. There’s a window right after undergrad when you’re green enough that you could plausibly go into any civil engineering track. But once you’re in a role for four years, moving up from staff consultant into project management and eventually your PE, you’re unlikely to switch — partly because of the specialized expertise you’ve built, and partly because switching, say from transportation to structures, would mean starting over and probably taking a significant pay cut.

There’s maybe something valuable about having that early freedom to explore, but I don’t know many people who make a dramatic specialty switch after a couple years in practice — especially if you did internships in different areas during undergrad, since by graduation a firm has probably already offered you a role based on what you’re good at and enjoy.

So the question becomes: how do we build more focused engineering tracks within the undergraduate degree, paired with a broader, more unified humanities and urban-planning education that actually teaches you what kind of world you’re building?

Seth Zeren: Right — what’s the point of the road? You’ll be the best person at designing that road, but it connects to and interfaces with the rest of the city.

I want to ask about something else I’ve noticed in this education conversation — in the architecture world, at least, it seems like religiously affiliated schools are the ones doing the most interesting, heterodox work: Notre Dame especially, but also Benedictine College, Andrews University. And I know you’ve had some experience with the new College of St. Joseph the Worker. Why do you think religiously affiliated institutions seem more willing to engage with city-building questions differently than most mainstream institutions?

Jacob Hyman: Great question — we’d need many more episodes to really dig into it. For listeners who don’t know me: I’m a Roman Catholic. I actually converted during undergrad, and it’s a bit of a journey — I was raised Jewish, spent time as an atheist, briefly as a Protestant, and I’ve been Catholic for about ten years now. I live in Steubenville, Ohio, about 45–50 minutes west of Pittsburgh.

You mentioned the College of St. Joseph the Worker — a small, fairly new liberal-arts trade school just wrapping up its second full school year. Students study the Catholic philosophical and liberal-arts tradition alongside training in one of four trades — HVAC, electrical, plumbing, or carpentry — graduating with enough hands-on experience to be readily hireable, and with paid summer work so they finish without student debt.

It’s interesting — some people in that college are quite drawn to New Urbanism, even working alongside plumbers, electricians, and HVAC techs. They’re reading Christopher Alexander and Léon Krier — literally, plumbers and HVAC techs reading Léon Krier — tied specifically to that Catholic ethos.

I can speak most directly to the Catholic tradition here. There’s a strong current of Catholic social teaching going back to 1891 and Pope Leo XIII — whose name our current pope, Leo XIV, took — that has wrestled with what industrial modernity means for the human person: what is the actual, lived reality of the places we’ve built, and does that correspond to the understanding of a person made in the image and likeness of God? In many ways the Church has argued that our places and social systems often don’t correspond to the human person.

Seth Zeren: I had a question in my notes: is there a Catholic way to design a street? The physics of water is the same in Rome as it is anywhere else.

Jacob Hyman: I think there is — and there’s also a beautiful multiplicity within it. There’s no single Catholic way to design a street, just as Christopher Alexander recognized many beautiful patterns for designing everything from a region down to a bedroom. But these are real patterns.

The Catholic philosophical tradition draws heavily on Thomas Aquinas’s reading of Aristotle — the idea that things have a nature, a form, an end. Not everyone agrees with that framework, but it’s why someone like Chuck Marohn identifying the real, distinct nature of a “stroad” is such a useful insight: it names something as having a genuine nature and purpose, distinct from a street or a road, even without using that philosophical language explicitly. Modernity has tended to flatten all of that — form and nature don’t matter, only whether something is efficient or usable. That flattening traces back to Enlightenment philosophical foundations.

Seth Zeren: We’ve talked a lot about the idea of “human formation” — a term I mostly hear in Catholic classical education circles. What does that mean, and why does it matter?

Jacob Hyman: It’s the idea that becoming a full human being is itself something you have to be formed into — you don’t simply arrive as a fully formed person. That’s not a uniquely Catholic idea; many traditions and cultures have their own account of human flourishing and what human excellence looks like. Catholic human formation in particular draws on both natural and supernatural formation, and on the idea that a person has a particular end — that we’re more than just our desires.

If all you care about is getting sushi delivered to your door — and I’m not immune to that desire myself — as a private individual in your own socially contracted little bubble, then you don’t have much reason to care what the world outside you looks like.

Seth Zeren: The way I’d put it: if we imagine an engineering school with more of a liberal-arts foundation — human formation is often tied to the liberal arts because studying philosophy, history, literature, theology, music, architecture, math, and science gives you a broader sense of what it means to be human, how humans have shaped the world, and how we understand each other and our society. Going through that kind of formation gives you a range of perspective on yourself, on other people, and on the society you’re part of — so that when you apply your technical skill, whether you’re building bridges or designing streets, it’s connected to a broader sense of human purpose, rather than just being an automaton building the biggest bridge you can and ignoring the consequences.

Jacob Hyman: Exactly. One thought that comes to me for the city builder is this: once you build the world, you have to live in it — and as you live in the world, you have to build it. Part of this is just economic reality — I’m a minority within a minority. New Urbanists are still a minority in the development world, and civil engineers are a minority within New Urbanism. There was a day recently where, across an eight-hour workday, I was working on projects in five different states.

Especially with New Urbanist work, we’re often trying to shape the surrounding culture — pushing back on codes, arguing for changes rather than simply developing to what the book already allows. For larger master-planned developments, there can be years of design work before anything actually gets built, so you may not see the fruits of your labor for years, which is frustrating.

Seth Zeren: I feel this too, as a developer — the same long arc. I have an idea, work through countless steps, maybe with a civil engineer, and hopefully in five years I get to walk in and welcome someone to their new apartment, or open the restaurant. It’s slow. But part of how we think about our own work is that you’re both building and living in it — you have to craft and create, but you also have to steward. The city was here long before I was — I’m sitting in a building older than I am, which will likely outlast me — so I have a temporary stewardship over this place, this building, this street, and I hope to pass it on better than I found it. That cycle of stewardship, craft, and creation is central to this idea. It’s not like getting your DoorDash order and being done — “I built the bridge, I’m finished, I don’t have to think about what happens next.”

Jacob Hyman: Right. Maybe that is the Catholic way of designing a street — Catholicism has been around for over two thousand years, so it has a long time horizon built in.

Seth Zeren: You’ve lived in Steubenville for a few years now and have been a leader in the local Strong Towns conversation there. What has being part of Strong Towns meant to you, and what has leading a local conversation taught you?

Jacob Hyman: For context — I’m not originally from Steubenville, I’m from Florida, but I’ve lived there for just over five years now. About two and a half years ago I went to my first Congress for the New Urbanism and my first Strong Towns National Gathering — we were both among the inaugural Pecha Kucha speakers at that kickoff event, actually.

It was there I first heard about Strong Towns “local conversations.” I’d wanted to do something more locally focused with these urbanist ideas, to help this small post-industrial Rust Belt town of about 18,000 people, and Strong Towns was exactly the model I was looking for. Over the past two and a half years we’ve done a lot of good work — I was part of a Bottom-Up Revolution podcast episode about a year and a half ago covering what we’ve built here, which I’d point listeners toward if they want more detail on Strong Towns Steubenville.

Broadly, I describe it this way: New Urbanists are the design professionals, and Strong Towns is more the lay citizen-activist side. It’s a good example of that same idea of building and living in the world — many passionate people involved in a local conversation couldn’t make a living doing urbanism if they tried. We’re fortunate to get paid to do this and go on podcasts about it. But being involved in Strong Towns gets at a deeper question: what does it mean to actually live in a city — to care about and engage with the place you live not because you’re paid to, but as a way of being?

It’s also meant getting to know others in town who don’t have professional expertise in this but are just trying to live well in the place, the same as anyone. As a design professional, you have a particular role to play in helping pull back the curtain on why places are the way they are, and in helping build a culture where people understand how their town got the way it did through decades of suburban-style development — and how they might build something different.

Practically, I now know my city councilors, and they know me. I know the city engineer, and he knows me by name. Steubenville is small enough that I run into these people at the grocery store, and I get to shake hands with city councilors and their kids and grandkids at the First Friday street festival where we table for Strong Towns.

I wonder if this is part of the education question too — but I think committing to the place you live, even if it means making less money than you could elsewhere, matters. Building the place you live might mean living there a long time before you actually get to build anything. It’s only now, five years into living in Steubenville, that I’m getting my first small contracts to do real engineering work here — to help make downtown more pedestrian-friendly. It took five years of living here, without earning a dime from local engineering work, before I could really come to know this place well enough to start building it. I had to live in it first before I could help build it.

Seth Zeren: That’s beautiful. I usually ask what’s giving people hope for the future of city building — but honestly, you’re giving me hope. I think one of the strange things about modernity is that we’ve professionalized city building — put it behind licensure and accreditation in rarefied institutions — so that most people simply consume a city or town built for them by a small group of city builders. That’s actually quite unusual in human history. There have always been expert builders, but there used to be a continuous spectrum of involvement — everyone participated in city building to some degree. And along with consuming the physical place, we’ve also started consuming its culture and community: we expect someone else to put on the festival, someone else to take care of the park. It takes a real cultural shift to realize that the “someone else” is you — that you have to do it, and no one is coming to save you.

Jacob Hyman: Yes.

Seth Zeren: And that, to me, is a big part of what Strong Towns has done — made that case constructively, in a way that brings people in to make that change.

Jacob Hyman: I agree. What gives me hope is that I’m trying to do it, and I see others doing it — young people especially. I’m 30, still young myself. If you realize that no one’s coming to save you, that you’re the one who has to fix your place — and if you don’t feel any real connection to where you live, then go find a place you can care about and start building there. If New Urbanists — the people who get paid to do this work — commit to living in a real community, a place with real life in it, that will help you see not just how to build the places people live in, but how to live in the places you help build.

Seth Zeren: That’s fantastic. Thank you again, Jacob, for coming on the podcast.

The New School for City Builders is a production of the Educational Collaborative for Building Places People Love, and Build the Next Right Thing. If you appreciate what we’re doing and want to help bring this school to fruition, please support us by becoming a paid subscriber at buildthenextrightthing.com.

Build the Next Right Thing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Show Notes:

* Aaron’s Substack: On Housing

* Aaron’s architecture & development practice (with Jenn Truman): Rocket Shop

* Olin College

* Deep Springs College

* Front Porch Republic

* Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Matt Crawford

* YIMBYtown 2026 in Raleigh NC

Build the Next Right Thing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity:

Seth Zeren: Hello and welcome to The New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zeren, a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer in Providence, Rhode Island. Joining me today is Aaron Lubeck, my first returning guest. Aaron is an incremental developer and designer in Durham, North Carolina. He’s taught historic rehabilitation and sustainable design, and with the Incremental Development Alliance he’s taught small builders. He also co-founded the National Town Builders Association podcast. Today we’ll be talking about his ideas for building a new school — ideas that are somewhat different from mine, which makes for an interesting opportunity to compare visions. Aaron, welcome to The New School for City Builders.

Aaron Lubeck: It’s good to be here. Feels like I was just here.

Seth: Yeah, absolutely — great to have you back. You and I have both been talking about building new schools and new educational strategies for teaching city and town builders and developers for a long time now. So let’s start with a basic question: what is a city builder?

Aaron: Great question. My design partner actually started a local pro-housing organization here in North Carolina called City Builder, which was founded on that same question. I’ll be hosting YIMBYtown in Raleigh this November.

I think a city builder is a risk-taker. There are people who are city-builder-adjacent — city-builder supporters — but the ones who obviously qualify are what I jokingly call “the bad guys”: the acronym — builder, architect, developer. But it’s also the shopkeepers, the storefront retailers. Those are all risk-takers. It’s the artists too — artists are entrepreneurs. They’re putting out art, making statements, trying to show their interpretation of the world, and people either buy into it or they don’t. That’s all entrepreneurial, small-business-like behavior.

This might be one of the things we disagree on slightly: I think risk-taking is integral to the definition. That’s not to discount the important work public servants do, but they’re not risk-bearing the way small-business people are, and I think that’s a core differentiator.

Seth: Absolutely. So if you were advising a young person who wants to become a city builder, what would you tell them to go learn? What do they need to be learning when they’re starting out?

Aaron: This isn’t a theoretical question for me — I have a 17-year-old and a 20-year-old exactly in this space, so it’s been fun watching them explore what they want to do and where. I share your core frustration: there’s really no great place to send a 17- or 20-year-old who wants to build cities.

Building a city is messy work. It requires Renaissance men and women who can see the whole picture, even though it also demands specialist skills. Schools tend to teach one facet of it while missing three or four others, which contributes to the siloization you’ve written about so well.

In my own practice — we redesign small neighborhoods and do stock plans for small builders — I had to teach myself to draw. I’m not great at it, but I can communicate ideas and solve problems with it, and that seems like a core skill I want both my kids to have. I was well into my thirties before I was comfortable doing it at all, but there’s no reason a 20-year-old can’t draw a basic site plan. It’s teachable — not even that difficult.

There’s a whole set of tactical skills like that. I think our generation was the first or second generation of American men who didn’t have technical skills and didn’t need them to get by. That pendulum is swinging back — for self-worth, for job opportunities, and honestly for happiness. People want to build things, want to do physical work again, whether as a hobby or for work. I hope universities start teaching that. The more elite the university, the less likely you are to get dirt under your fingernails — and there are a lot of kids craving that now.

Seth: A long time ago I was a high school science teacher at a boarding school right out of college. One thing that stuck with me: we had a shop teacher — husband of one of the English teachers — who ran five sections of wood shop, and the kids were thrilled to be using real tools and making things. It really highlighted the disconnect between how theoretical our learning usually is — we just talk about ideas — and the fact that when you go to work, a lot of that theory isn’t very useful, or you simply haven’t learned other things: hard skills, or soft skills about working with people.

You mentioned drawing. I sometimes describe it this way: you use words to understand ideas and people, you use numbers to understand the physical nature of the world, but if you want to understand space, you need to draw. Words, numbers, and pictures are the three systems we use to understand the world — and if you can’t manipulate shapes on paper, you don’t really understand space. You can’t think about it.

Aaron: That’s totally right — and if you can’t, you’re stuck. We see a lot of frustration around this, especially in bike planning, because so many of the advocates come from policy backgrounds. They don’t know how to draw a street section. So you’ll see a lot of sincere, dedicated activity — but then it hits the point where funding and commitment exist, and the plan has to be handed off to a traditional street engineer, and the whole thing falls apart. I’d argue that’s because the advocate couldn’t draw it out and carry it further themselves. Without those skills, you’re reliant on people who don’t care about your issue as much as you do, or who are fundamentally opposed to it — usually because of some dogmatic, siloed rule that conflicts with your vision.

So people get handcuffed, professionally impotent, because they can’t draw. I see it every day in incremental development — there’s no way to do urban development without drawing. I think every developer should draw. Not every developer I know does. But the ability to look at a lot and sketch out whether something could work — a napkin sketch — every developer should be able to do that.

Seth: It’s a huge part of my own practice. Our architects actually make fun of me because I do a lot of it in PowerPoint — at the end of the day I just need to know how big the rectangle is, and then I can draw other rectangles.

Aaron: Right — it’s rectangles all the way down. I teach a site-plan class for Duke students, many of them upper-level civil engineering majors, and it always amazes me: in two hours I can teach them to draw a single-family home on a 50-by-150 lot. If there’s time, they’ll add a garage, an ADU, and some parking. Mostly it’s hand drawing, tracing paper, coloring, scales — tools like a scale rule they’ve never touched before. But site planning is teachable in an hour and a half. It’s really not that hard. It’s a bunch of rectangles.

Seth: Right — just rectangles and measuring. I came up doing trace, and it was always funny showing up to a meeting with the architect holding my own trace — they’d get a little worried. But it’s given me a lot of power, because I can show what I want instead of describing it loosely — “the bathroom needs to be like this.” It also lets me do a lot of early conceptual design without paying anyone.

Aaron: Exactly right. And the more incremental you are, the less you can afford to walk into an architect’s office and spend one, two, five thousand dollars just to learn that you can’t do what you wanted to do. You need to be able to filter out nine of every ten projects yourself before you go to another professional. If you can’t do that, you probably don’t have the skills you need. It’s just not that hard to draw rectangles on rectangles, and everybody should be able to.

Seth: So why aren’t colleges teaching this? Why isn’t this happening today?

Aaron: Same reasons you’ve talked about. Both my parents have PhDs, I grew up in an academic household, and I’ve lived in seven college towns, so I could talk at length about why college towns don’t work. I think it’s gotten worse over time — universities are filled with genuinely brilliant people, but as the world and its data and technology have accelerated, people have become narrower and narrower in their expertise. That’s a huge challenge for development, which requires Renaissance men and women who can see both macro and micro, but certainly the whole picture. The deeper you dig into elite universities, the less of that you find. People are very narrow, publishing papers in a tight band, and detached from practical application — that’s just not what drives an academic day to day, especially at a place like UNC or Duke, which I’m right next to here in North Carolina.

Drawing is very practical, and in some ways it seems almost juvenile to elite academia — the more elite the university, the more practical stuff gets dismissed. I remember working on an environmental entrepreneurship program at Duke’s Nicholas School — a fun exercise. My thinking was: if people are going to start businesses to make the world more sustainable, entrepreneurship by definition involves sales, and sales is teachable. You’d find a class on sales at a place like Texas A&M. But there is no faster way to get laughed out of a room at Duke than proposing a sales class. Funny, but telling — brilliant people, but so research-oriented and detached from practice. That’s a real problem when you’re trying to teach basic, practice-based skills like drawing a site plan.

Seth: You said something interesting earlier — that we have an overabundance of theory that crowds out practice. Is that a sign we’ve gotten the order backwards?

Aaron: We’ve totally gotten it backwards. We didn’t discuss this much beforehand, but I don’t think theory and practice are equal-weight companions — one without the other gets lost, sure, and the elite schools (especially architecture schools) have a long reputation for teaching almost only theory. But I think the relationship is linear: until you know how a two-by-four goes together, you can’t really talk about the theory of how houses go together, or what houses mean. Practice precedes theory, and we see this reversed constantly.

Not to pick on Duke, but I remember students leaving undergrad who’ve never worked a day in their life, and then going straight to a consulting firm to coach other businesses. Maybe that works out for Boston Consulting Group or wherever, but it seems crazy. The idea of people writing zoning codes who’ve never read one, let alone written one —

Seth: Or never built a building under one.

Aaron: Right. If I were writing the rules from scratch, the people writing your comp plan and zoning code would be the ones who’ve practiced in your community for twenty or thirty years — ideally post-career people who’ve retired but understand the ecosystem better than anyone because they lived it. Practice precedes the theory; it’s the precursor to the ability to talk at a high level and understand the context and the history. The idea that 20-year-olds come out of current pedagogy with the ability to practice, built only on theory — I think that’s overwhelming nonsense, and it hurts our cities.

Seth: I went to a liberal arts college for undergrad, and afterward I felt this education had prepared me well for my last job — meaning, this would’ve been a great education if I were at the end of my career, in a leadership role, making complex trade-offs. That’s good, I don’t deny it. But it hadn’t prepared me at all for my first couple of jobs.

I see this a lot in the urbanism world too — some of the most interesting ideas come from people in or near professional practice, because they’ve actually seen things on the ground. For me, a big entry point into urbanism was Jane Jacobs. That was striking because I came up as a geologist — geology is a field-observation science. You can do some experiments, but mostly you’re out looking at rock faces, trying to understand how they got that way. Jane Jacobs was doing the same kind of observational work as ecology or geology: going out, observing the city, and piecing it together from what she saw, rather than starting from theory. If you get people out there drawing the city, holding a two-by-four, they can step back afterward and understand the concepts in a much deeper, more useful way.

Aaron: That’s right — you learn things. I remember teaching that site-planning class at Duke, and there was an undergrad working on a roughly 7,500-square-foot lot with rectangles and setbacks — we made him include a 25-foot setback — and he got kind of annoyed: “That’s a waste of land.” I said, “Got it — now you’re getting it.” Then we got into a whole conversation about the history behind rules like that. Once students are actually doing the work, they catch the bug.

What Jane Jacobs did was unusual — she was almost an anti-intellectual intellectual, and I say that with respect for people doing difficult academic work. She worked bottom-up, whereas so much of planning and academia goes wrong by staying top-down — avoiding the street-level question of what’s actually happening, what the human interactions look like. She was a journalist, not a practitioner, and her ability to understand the city as well as she did is remarkably rare, even today.

Seth: That points to another way to think about a better school for city builders: not being in the classroom all the time, but out on the street, practicing observation.

Aaron: Yes, exactly. That’s one of the things I sketched out when thinking about what this school could look like — and I think we overlap on almost everything here. Being out in the field, in the city, in the lab, on a habitat build site — you have to do things poorly before you can do them well. That’s what learning is. Go design a building your first week of architecture school and be terrible at it; there’s no better way to learn. I’m bad at clarinet because I don’t play clarinet — that’s how the world works.

Have you heard of the “inverted classroom”? A lot has changed with COVID and technology that’s now sort of blowing up traditional education, especially in the liberal arts. If you’re a history major, you can hit a button and get a 200-page book summarized, hit another button and get a unique-sounding analysis of it. It’s genuinely hard for professors to operate in that environment, because it’s so easy for smart kids to present work without learning anything — which feels disrespectful of good faculty and good minds.

There are a couple of fixes. One is bringing back blue-book essays, so students can’t use AI and are forced to actually write — whether by hand or on a disconnected typewriter, doesn’t matter. The other is the inverted classroom: you might have the best lecture on framing recorded by someone in Sweden. Watch it on YouTube at home. The classroom becomes homework, and class time becomes the actual lab — construction drawings in studio, framing a wall, working with plaster molds, whatever applies to city-building. The professor isn’t lecturing anymore; they’re helping with your project. The physical, in-person lecture might mostly go away — and that could be great, solving both the AI problem and the need for tactile, physical work.

Seth: Without necessarily giving up the parts that work. One thing we’ve seen is that big open online courses have low completion rates. What we’ve had to relearn is that part of how we learn is in groups — we appreciate classmates working alongside us, a mentor, a relationship with a teacher adjusting things in real time and holding us to a standard. So we’re not giving up on having a personal relationship, a teacher, a classroom — just the trappings left over from a different way of operating.

Aaron: Right. I have a son who’s ADHD and started high school right as COVID hit — a disaster, putting a kid on a computer for eight hours a day. He’s thriving now, but I still hate it when he takes online classes; it gives me flashbacks. There’s something to the camaraderie you lose — college is partly about creating a fraternity or guild, people sharing tough common experiences. Ideally that’s being in the field building things, but it might also be shared struggle through tough, technical lectures.

So I could see this evolving into rooms of ten or twenty people watching the great Swedish framer’s lecture together on YouTube, rather than alone. In the version of a city-builder institute I sketched out — two-year, four-year, and five-year tracks, roughly associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s for the sake of tradition — as people move up, there’s a real need for leadership training, which is unusual for most professions. This field is messy and hard; there are days you don’t want to get out of bed. You need strong people, and most colleges aren’t really in the business of building that kind of personal strength.

One way to address that: as students get older, they give back to younger students — juniors, seniors, and grad students serving as TAs. If the lecture’s online, maybe a senior is in the room guiding the discussion before students go back to the professor to work in the lab. I think that ecosystem of giving back is critical to teach, and it mirrors real-world practice — most people in this industry do civic work of some kind.

Seth: One idea I’ve worked on is a rigorous work-study component, for two reasons. First, higher education is far too expensive, partly because labor costs have risen quickly. So a work-study component would have students contribute to the school’s own administrative and operating functions — grounds crew, building maintenance, painting, processing applications, managing mail, hosting events. Event management could be run largely by students, with one adult coordinator, and students could skill up over time — giving tours as a freshman, and by senior year emceeing the speaker series, making sure the food’s out and the chairs are set up. That’s not just a cost-saving mechanism — it’s a way of giving people real responsibility and building leadership.

Aaron: I love it. There’s a humility function there too — worth bringing in Matthew Crawford’s writing on trades work. It’s like: “Welcome to the City Builder Institute. We’re going to train you to be an elite, special-forces-level city builder. The mop is over there.”

Seth: Right — like The Karate Kid. You start out painting the wall, fixing the fence. You’ve got to do some unglamorous things first.

Aaron: It’s a bit like Deep Springs College — I don’t know the full details of how they operate, but they take incredibly smart students, keep a very low faculty-to-student ratio, and put them out in Death Valley milking cows, reroofing barns, whatever needs doing. There’s something to that model, and what you’re describing has a real Deep Springs quality to it.

Seth: So you’ve actually sketched out a model for a school like this. Walk me through the origin story of your version.

Aaron: I started working on this after we talked about it in Cincinnati a few years ago — I’ve had the same frustrations with general pedagogy that you have, with some overlaps and some differences from your model. I liked the idea of two-, four-, and five-year programs that borrow the shape of accredited models without necessarily needing accreditation — students, even ones who don’t care about accreditation, are already thinking in terms of “community college,” “bachelor’s,” “architecture master’s is five years,” so that framework is a helpful starting point.

Like you, I had a core and then some community-oriented add-ons we can get into. My core training was more technical than yours — I really like your classics-and-context approach, the “why does this matter” purpose-based framing. That’s attractive, and missing from most education now unless you’re doing a humanities degree — you’re not reading the Federalist Papers otherwise. With America’s 250th anniversary coming up, there might be a window to get some buy-in on that kind of thing.

My original core was more like: home building 101, financing, project management, principles of architecture, engineering utilities. If I redid it now, I’d make it more liberal-artsy, like yours. Half the classes would be core, and electives would be things like drawing, building science, license prep, schematic drawing, case studies, leadership, architectural history.

When my daughter was looking at architecture schools, she gravitated toward ones with more architectural history — which happened to be the schools associated with traditional architecture and training. I was a history and poli-sci major myself, and I was talking with someone last year who put it well: history alone can bore you to tears, but history through the eyes of an artist is interesting. There’s something to understanding the world through human interpretation — through art history and architectural history — that’s both more compelling and closer to the actual field of practice we’re talking about.

Seth: Right — and if part of what we’re teaching is observation, you need architectural and urbanism history to interpret what you’re seeing. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of buildings — you don’t recognize that a style implies a certain time period, or understand how a street might have changed over time, or read what the utilities are from the manhole covers. You need a knowledge base to be an effective interpreter of the city.

Aaron: Exactly. Not everyone has the stamina for pure technical grinding, and purpose-driven content moves people. We see this in engineering all the time — “here are the rules, go do the thing.” A close friend’s son basically gave up on Virginia Tech’s engineering program, which is hard and, for him, boring, and switched to psychology. That’s fine, but there might be great engineers who’d have stuck it out with more context and purpose built in.

Seth: It’s interesting you say that. I once talked with the founding president of Olin College, a new engineering school started in Massachusetts about 25 years ago — probably the youngest engineering program in the U.S. by decades. Part of its origin story was a big study into why American engineering schools weren’t producing what industry needed. In the late ‘90s, researchers noticed engineering programs were losing a lot of students — and not necessarily their weakest ones. Often it was their best students, and the reason was that the work felt pointless. Students were put through years of basic physics and calculus they’d rarely use in practice — unless they became structural engineers — and lost sight of the purpose.

So Olin tried to get students into the workshop in their first semester, streamlining some of that foundational coursework. You still need foundational physics and math, but if you never connect it to purpose, you lose the most creative, interesting people — and that weakens the profession overall.

Aaron: What’s easy to lose sight of is that we’re all builders — you build a family, a business, a garden, a house. Whether in private or public practice, we all want to build something better. It’s no surprise great students drop out if the only thing they’re “building” is a test. That doesn’t feel like an accomplishment the way building something tangible in a lab does.

Matthew Crawford writes about this in Shop Class as Soulcraft — how trades work is good for the human soul, because you’re fixing things, humbling yourself before the materials, the history, the tools, what you know and don’t know, and figuring out what you don’t know so you can solve the problem. That humbling process is a real antidote to narcissism. I’ve never met a narcissist plumber — it kind of solves itself. Some of the most personality-disordered people I know have zero technical skill; they’re frustrated because they can’t execute, can’t see a problem and fix it, whether it’s policy or a leaky pipe. I think Olin got that right: giving students the chance to build and fix things is soul-satisfying, builds strong people, and helps them stick with otherwise grueling training. If you’re just doing calculus every day, some kids get through, most won’t. If they’re doing calculus and building things, more will.

Seth: This touches on a distinction I wrestle with — what’s your internal conception of what a city or a building actually is? For a lot of designers, the city is art: novelty, creation, personal expression. For a lot of policy people, it’s ideas and big theory. For me, I’ve come to understand it as craft — like carpentry, blacksmithing, gardening, farming. In a craft you’re still creating, still engaging with current problems, not just looking backward. But it always exists within a lineage — you’re carrying forward ideas, lessons, and techniques from the past, updating them, not making a hard break from them. Craft, I think, almost necessarily implies utility — there’s a customer, someone who’ll use what you make. Ideally it’s also beautiful, but the disciplining factor is that it’s not merely meant to be looked at — it has to be useful to people.

Aaron: That’s utility, exactly. I’ve always put it more simply: the difference between art and architecture is utility. You can build a beautiful sculpture that makes a point — that’s art. You can build a building that does something and is beautiful — that’s architecture. And architecture is arguably more challenging, because the rules governing utility are unforgiving.

Seth: They really are — real, fundamental limitations. Sometimes that can feel constraining.

Aaron: For most people it’s actually empowering — partly because I’m self-taught, but I think this is broadly true. I work much better with guardrails. Give me a blank sheet of paper and tell me to design a sixplex, and I’m lost. Give me an actual sixplex with real problems, and I can solve that all day. A lot of us work better with constraints, and in city-building the constraints are basically inherent to everything you build. Kids often work better with that too, even when it’s frustrating.

Something else that doesn’t get taught: my design partner, Jen Truman, just taught a studio at NC State rooted in the practical — a single-stair studio, where nine upper-level students explored what single-stair reform might look like in North Carolina, tied to an actual legislative discussion happening in Raleigh right now. That town-and-gown connection was great to see. It’s amazing how little students generally know about building code — a wonky thing to teach, but rarely taught. Eric Kronberg is the best I’ve seen at this: he can scan a zoning code and tell you that 80% of your problem is going to come down to five things — identify those, and you can have a real discussion. Elite architecture programs generally aren’t teaching those constraints: how to find them, what they mean, why they exist, who changes them, how you get relief from them.

Seth: That seems like a golden opportunity for theory to follow practice. If someone like Eric is deeply enmeshed in the real challenges of zoning and building at the practical level, over time he starts to see patterns — it actually simplifies. My own financial models used to be more complex; now they’re getting simpler as I gain experience, because I’ve learned there’s really a small set of variables that matter. If those look okay, I can build out a more complicated model — if they don’t, it’s probably not worth pursuing. Kronberg has developed that same pattern-recognition with zoning, and you can imagine that expertise turning into a genuinely useful theory of how the city works and where the real opportunities and constraints are. I agree that building code is this unfortunate black box that colleges and universities don’t take seriously — and it’s turning out to be an incredible limiting factor on all our otherwise happy ideas. If we spent real time engaging with it, we’d learn more about city-building than we would from top-down conceptual approaches.

Aaron: Totally agree. And here’s an unpopular opinion I’ll die on: Eric Kronberg knows more about how to fix his city’s zoning code than any planning professor at Georgia Tech — even though Georgia Tech has great planning professors — because he’s the one living it day in, day out. Practitioners just know more about the problem than the theoreticians.

The other piece I had in my schematic, which we haven’t touched on: students should do a Habitat build every two years. In a five-year program, by the time you’re 22 you’ve built three homes. Forget everything else you learned in the classroom — if you’ve built three homes by 22, you’re going to be far ahead of your peers. Another idea: code workshops. Hand students a code book — “It sucks. Here are three real problems in our town: parking requirements are causing this, single-stair rules are blocking that, the fire code is making streets unsafe for pedestrians and cyclists. Find the problem, propose a solution, build a strategic plan to get it fixed. See you in two weeks.”

Seth: That would be fantastic — again, learning how to actually effect change. We’re not working with wood or plumbing here, but with laws — not talking about them conceptually, but handed an actual code book: learn to read it, interpret it, craft changes to it, then think through how those changes move through the real public-policy process. What board has to sign off? Who’s on it? How often do they meet? Who do those people listen to?

Aaron: Exactly right. So much of the actual practice — I look back on my 25-year career and realize 75% of my time has gone to things that have nothing to do with my core competency of designing and building homes. But when you’re doing reform work, you have to think about who the decision-makers are and what motivates them. It’s really a policy job — so much of this work is policy.

Seth: Politics, really — treating politics as a serious craft, not just an academic subject. You were a poli-sci major; I think there’s a limit to treating politics as a purely intellectual exercise. It’s a practical enterprise. Some of the oldest books about living in cities are about politics — the word itself comes from the Greek polis, city-state. Living together with other people is a complicated, difficult challenge, and we should treat it seriously — not just as an intellectual exercise, but as a practice you can learn and get better at.

Aaron: Right — and you know this from being a planner, and you’ve seen it with architects: this isn’t taught in architecture school. You will run into a code issue that threatens your project, and a lot of the job is code interpretation and fighting to get your project through — arguably more of the job than drawing beautiful buildings or detailing stairwells. That’s barely taught at all. It could make a great architecture studio: here’s your building, already designed — now here are your real problems, and we’re going to run a mock hearing where the “planning professor” tries to shoot you down, followed by a critique of how you held up under pressure. That’s probably more valuable than the traditional design-then-critique format.

Seth: That’s a much more realistic experience. Thinking back — you’ve got young people in your own life considering this path — what from your own education played the biggest role in your growth later?

Aaron: I was a history and poli-sci major, following my parents, who are both liberal arts academics — such a strange path, because I really hadn’t thought about architecture in twenty years until I found an old note my mom saved: apparently I said I wanted to be an architect at age eight. Funny how I ended up here anyway.

The liberal arts education did teach me a few things: how to think, and how to write — I came out of high school not being great at writing, and doing fifty ten-page papers for demanding professors made me much better. That’s paid off — I write quite a bit now, wrote a book about our work, which opened doors to teach at Duke and to get involved in the new urbanist world, advocacy and design work. All of that traces back to the ability to communicate — a constant thread through podcasting, writing, blogging.

College was also a time to collaborate. My son, who’s at App State, got heavily into music, and playing with a variety of musicians mirrors grassroots city-building and Jane-Jacobs-style city observation in a real way. Good musicians listen first: what’s happening here, what’s the tradition, how are they doing that — those are triplets, interesting, how can I add to this, how can I make it better? That same spirit plays out in urbanism and design. It wasn’t anything formal, but I got a lot out of music in undergrad.

Seth: So if you could give advice to a young person pursuing this today, what should they do?

Aaron: Get somebody to underwrite your school, then go to it. Kidding — but until then, the more you can get your hands dirty, the more you’ll learn compared to anything in a classroom, and that’s become even truer over time. Get out, put your eyes on as much as you can when you travel to cities. Take a notebook. Draw, draw, draw — you’ll be terrible at first, then you’ll get better. It’s fun, and the ability to translate what your brain sees to your fingers is a genuinely joyful, empowering skill, not unlike music.

I’ve learned so much from conferences — anything CNU-adjacent. If you haven’t been to a Congress for the New Urbanism event, go. It’s full of people fighting the good fight, building walkable places that mean something, working against the grain. The offshoot groups from CNU are where some of the most fascinating conferences happen now: the National Town Builders Association for big new-town developers, the Incremental Development Alliance (now led by Ali Quinlan) for small-scale developers, and the Guild, which has really taken off among the best new-urbanist architects. You meet the best people, see a different city, put your eyes on something new — the pace of learning at those events is so much faster than any classroom.

The one thing they can’t give a young person is tactile work. I wish I’d been building homes at 22 — I’d be so much further ahead now. There’s no reason a 22-year-old can’t build. I met a kid at NC State after a lecture — a stoic, fit, monotone farm-kid type, looked like a future general contractor. He said he liked what I’d said about incremental development, was thinking about that path, was a sophomore in engineering, and was already building two duplexes — wanted my advice on career path. I told him: you’re a sophomore building two duplexes, you don’t need advice from me, you’re going to be fine. Those opportunities exist — anybody in undergrad can join a Habitat crew and learn how a footing goes in, a beam goes up, windows go in. Where else are you going to learn that?

Seth: Getting your hands dirty in the field — fantastic. Let’s do a few quick hits to close out. One place people should visit to learn about building and running cities — and what’s the lesson they’ll take away?

Aaron: My favorite, which I cite a lot and have been lucky to visit a couple of times, is Barcelona’s Eixample. It’s a perfectly gridded set of roughly 400-by-400-foot blocks — a magical place that captured mixed-use, human-scaled development while also being one of the densest places in the world, around 100,000 people per square mile. Mostly six- or seven-story buildings, incredible ground-floor storefronts wrapping the block, internal courtyards, some private and some public, plenty of Gaudí buildings scattered throughout. It’s remarkable that this was planned around 1857 — fifty years before electricity — with the foresight to anticipate the modern world. Maybe partly luck, but brilliant regardless.

There’s a woman, Alicia Peterson, who goes by “the courtyard urbanist” on social media, pitching these ideas in her hometown of Chicago and around the country, because courtyard housing delivers green space, density, meaningful architecture, mixed use, and small-business opportunity — affordably, which is the key. There’s a lot to learn there. Barcelona also has great people, great food, great weather — just a good place to go.

Seth: On my bucket list — I’ve never been. What’s one book you’d recommend for someone learning to be a good city builder?

Aaron: So many good ones, but I keep coming back to Matthew Crawford. I got to meet him briefly at a Front Porch Republic conference at Baylor last year — all his writing is excellent. His most influential book is Shop Class as Soulcraft, especially valuable for parents whose kids probably aren’t headed for a PhD-academic track, which is most of us. There’s a real calling — not necessarily to go get a plumbing license, but to understand craft, the value of working with your hands, how that builds stronger people, gives pride in your work, your city, your family. He writes so clearly about why that matters, and why it matters even more now, as AI comes for a lot of jobs that don’t require tactical skill.

Seth: What’s one thing giving you hope for the future of city-building?

Aaron: Tough one — I’ve got a reputation as an eternal pessimist, so every once in a while I need to force some hope through. I keep meeting more and more talented young people doing amazing work. Having just turned 50, I’ve got two generations behind me now in this field, and you can see millennials stepping into leadership. Sophia Dara just took over Emerging New Urbanists, and I’m sure she’ll be celebrated in Northwest Arkansas — really talented. Passing the baton at CNU has always been a challenge, so building that momentum with younger people matters. Somewhere between millennials and Gen X, the YIMBY movement got founded and has done incredible work fixing zoning codes at the local and state level. I think the younger generation is about to take some real swings at building code, to make cities better and more urban. That’s not our fight anymore — it’s theirs to fix — and I have faith they will.

Seth: Pass it down. Thanks again, Aaron — really appreciate all the hard work you’re doing, and all the conversations we’ve had over the years about how to build better schools for city builders.

Aaron: Thank you for having me. I couldn’t be more excited about this podcast, and I hope to be the recurring champion, the repeat guest. Seriously — as you keep workshopping this, it’s great to bring people back on, keep it open-book, do some whiteboarding. I want to support this in every way I can.

Build the Next Right Thing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Seth: Absolutely — thanks again, Aaron. This has been The New School for City Builders, a production of the Educational Collaborative for Building Places People Love, and Build the Next Right Thing. If you appreciate what we’re doing and want to help bring the school to fruition, please support us by becoming a paid subscriber at buildthenextrightthing.substack.com.

Show notes:

* Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein

* 70 Acres in Chicago: Cabrini Green

* Third Ward TX

* Here Comes the Neighborhood

* MassDevelopment's Transformative Development Initiative (TDI)

* CitySeed (New Haven)

* BU Metropolitan College — City Planning & Urban Affairs

Edited Transcript

Seth Zeren: Hello and welcome to The New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zeren, a recovering city planner and neighborhood developer based in Providence, Rhode Island. In this podcast, we bring together insightful thinkers, creative doers, and wise teachers to reimagine how we train city builders — the architects, engineers, developers, planners, managers, and civic leaders who run our cities and towns. Because our cities and towns are only as good as the people who run them. If we want to change how they work, we need a new school for city builders.

Joining me today is Anne Haynes, a city builder who has worked in architecture, planning, real estate, and economic development — from New York to Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, and Texas, in cities big and small, in fast markets and stalled markets. Anne, welcome to the show.

Anne Haynes: Thanks, it’s a pleasure to be here. Always fun to talk with you, Seth.

Seth: I’m excited to hear what you’re working on now. You and I have known each other for more than ten years — we first connected when I was in Massachusetts, working for a developer after leaving the planning side of things and trying to figure out how I wanted to grow my career. You were launching a really interesting initiative in Massachusetts called the Transformative Development Initiative, or TDI, through MassDevelopment — a new way of thinking about economic development in places like the older “Gateway Cities,” the legacy industrial cities that have struggled economically. Tell us what TDI was, what it is now, and how the idea originated.

Anne: I’m thrilled the program still exists — it’s gone through several cycles, and it’s been great to come back to Massachusetts and see it thriving. The genesis was twofold. On the personal side, I’d come to MIT Sloan for an MBA with an idea about building a connected network of hyper-local economic development coordination, based on my experience leading an economic development agency in New Haven — where Seth and I actually overlapped. The core insight was that small cities don’t have enough capacity on their own to move the needle on community and economic development, let alone real estate. So the question was: could cities coordinate instead of compete?

That was the thesis behind my time at Sloan, and I was looking for a job where I could work across multiple cities. At the same time, there was a piece of public policy moving through the ranks — the Transformative Development Act for Gateway Cities — under Governor Deval Patrick, with Greg Bialecki and Marty Jones, the CEO of MassDevelopment, asking how the state could make investments in Gateway Cities that did double duty: not just funding activity, but catalyzing it.

As I was leaving Sloan, that opportunity came together. The state had funding to allocate toward a pilot based on the act. Originally the idea was simply to put more real estate development dollars into these cities. But from my experience in New Haven, I knew you had to start from the inside out — build these cities’ capacity to actually use real estate investment well, not just receive it.

I was at the table as the act was being finalized, and once it passed, I worked with the board and Marty Jones — a great leader who understood the need to build an engine, not just make investments — to convince MassDevelopment to try something new for the organization. They’d always done real estate technical assistance and funded important community infrastructure, but they’d never worked from the municipality’s point of view, as a true partner. That’s how we built the program.

It’s been eleven years now. It turns out cities love it, because you’re bringing capacity to the table alongside investment dollars, and you’re working with sector partnerships that can keep things moving after the program ends.

Seth: Right — MassDevelopment is this big state funder. Their instinct is to write checks, make grants and loans, invest in individual projects. That’s how they normally operate.

Anne: Right, like a big bank. But here’s the interesting byproduct: TDI actually became a pipeline generator for additional investment opportunities. In a way, it cultivated the field to do the work that was MassDevelopment’s core business in the first place.

Seth: So instead of just finding projects to write checks for, you’re putting people with real skills into these towns — the TDI Fellows. I actually applied for a TDI Fellow job once — that’s how I first met you.

Anne: You would’ve been great!

Seth: They gave me a counteroffer at my job and I didn’t end up coming over. How it goes. But the idea is putting a person on the ground in the community, with institutional support from your office, training, and a fair amount of independence — they’re not walking in with a fixed portfolio of responsibilities. That frees them up to go out, prospect, make connections, figure things out — and ultimately generate business for the bank, since they’re creating projects MassDevelopment can later finance.

Anne: And for other local banks too — it’s about building that bridge. Especially in a city that’s economically stalled, frozen — not necessarily out of negative groupthink, but a kind of negative self-perception. The fellow came in as a disruptor, but a constructive one. The fellow also became “Switzerland” — a neutral party people needed in order to reconnect the wiring.

Seth: Right, because they had no history with anyone — no baggage of “we tried this before and it didn’t work” or interpersonal friction that builds up in a lot of communities. They could come in fresh. I remember us talking about the importance of being entrepreneurial within the public sector — not just checking boxes and following procedure, but actually going out, hunting for opportunities, setting up coffees, walkthroughs, making connections. A funder usually thinks in terms of writing checks for projects. But if the surrounding ecosystem — city government, private sector, supporting institutions, consultants — isn’t healthy, you won’t get deals in the first place.

Anne: Exactly. And investing in the ecosystem is less tangible — there’s no clean “I made a $10 million loan and collected interest” story. But a functional ecosystem is what generates more loans down the road. Part of it is shifting the zeitgeist of a place, injecting some positive energy that gets reinforced as people participate and move things forward. It has an almost ephemeral quality, but the energy in these cities really did shift.

Seth: You had to get the water moving again. Tell me about the kinds of people who became TDI Fellows — their backgrounds, the skills they brought, and how you developed their expertise in these roles.

Anne: In the first year — and you were part of this too, Seth — we looked for the best and brightest: creative, entrepreneurial, willing to take risks, willing to throw themselves into a place deliberately not their own. They were chosen by us together with the local partnerships, but intentionally weren’t from those cities. Character came first, but we also wanted mid-career people — enough background in planning, economic development, law, or real estate to have two or three years of relevant exposure, but not so far along in their careers that they needed a conventional next step. We wanted builders — people who saw this as a chance to create something from scratch.

Each city had its own needs, but it wasn’t a precise matching exercise — every city needed some real estate development capacity, some business development capacity, some planning support. So at the cohort level we tried to cover that range of experience, but at the individual level it was more about finding the right chemistry between the fellow and the town’s partnership.

It was designed for people roughly ten years out of school who wanted broader, landscape-level exposure rather than a siloed role within one organization — and we talked about it from the start as a professional skills accelerator. In three or four years, you’d get more experience than in any single job. It wasn’t really training or education in the traditional sense — it was about accelerating your effectiveness as a city builder.

Seth: So you’re marrying two sets of interests — the fellow doesn’t get paid a ton, but gets an incredible, fast-moving learning opportunity, thrown into the friction points of the system with a lot of latitude to act. And the cities get a kind of extra capacity they otherwise couldn’t have. One thing I always wonder, though — if this is so valuable, why can’t a municipality just create the position itself?

Anne: A couple of reasons — maybe eight. Most cities couldn’t attract this kind of talent, whether for budgetary reasons or cost-of-living mismatches, and they didn’t have the political room to add a position like this. On top of that, I don’t think cities really knew what kind of ombudsperson they needed on the ground. I also don’t think a fellow would have been as effective working directly for the city, because a city is a regulatory, political entity — it can’t be neutral Switzerland. Trust had to be built fast, and that’s much easier from outside city government. Our goal was to demonstrate enough value that cities might eventually create a permanent position — but likely through a structure outside the city itself.

Seth: That makes sense. So you recruit these mid-career people with real backgrounds, and then place them in cities on their own — almost like a wilderness survival exercise, but with institutional backup. I toured your fellows around Providence a few times to show them our work. What kind of ongoing training and support did you provide?

Anne: We looked at a number of fellowship models while building the program. In my first three years, I didn’t have the budget to hire help, so it was lean — we took trips together, spent real time building a culture around this very specific role. Beyond being their boss, I was more of a coach: an ideating partner, a connector to other resources within the organization or partner state agencies, someone trying to sense when they needed outside help — at which point we’d bring in a technical assistance provider or consultant.

It was highly individualized, and that worked well when we had three fellows. Once we had ten, it got harder. By the time I left, after about four and a half years, there was more internal infrastructure to support fellows, and as the program grew under my successor, that hyper-personal coaching model became even harder to sustain — though it’s still essentially what the role needs.

One of the best training practices we used was improv training — full-day workshops with a trainer I’d met through MIT Sloan’s leadership program. It does two things: it builds the confidence to be present and adaptable, which matters enormously, and the underlying mindset builds trust quickly with the people you’re working with, because you can’t just give a yes-or-no answer. It’s the “yes, and” muscle.

Seth: Yes — the combination of “yes, and” plus really listening and building on what other people offer, instead of feeling threatened by it or feeling you need to find sixteen things wrong with it. That’s fantastic.

Anne: It was very successful. Now that I teach at BU — I taught in the city planning program before — I’ve brought touches of improv training into the classroom, because in any externally facing role, these are critical skills. It’s real-world, on-the-ground training, and I think any city builder needs at least one stretch in their career that gives them that landscape view. For me, that was leaving twelve years of architectural practice to work inside a mayor’s office as a building-typology expert — and that exposure to how a city actually functions unlocked the whole picture for me. The Fellows program gave people that same kind of view.

Seth: That’s a perfect transition to the next thing I wanted to ask about — your own path. Part of what I’m doing with these interviews is understanding people’s educational and career paths, both to help others follow in their footsteps and to help us think about how to improve city-building education. So — what skills do city builders actually need?

Anne: They need to understand the system, without necessarily being an expert in any one part of it — in fact, it’s almost better not to be, because over-specializing makes it harder to see how the pieces fit together. That’s partly a skill and partly just lived experience. I jokingly call myself the headless horseman of career moves — I see an opportunity to learn, get curious, and jump in with both feet, often before thinking through the consequences. But you need that entrepreneurial instinct.

A few points in my life taught me the most. One was working for the City of New York — being on the client/city side taught me why decisions get made the way they do, including factors like an official’s reelection or the budget cycle. A lot of developers never learn that context, and without it you don’t really understand the environment you’re trying to operate in.

Seth: I remember as a staff planner in Newton, working on a major zoning reform — a multi-year process in a very meticulous town. I’d made a little Gantt chart with certain months highlighted, and someone asked what those columns were. They were elections — because we were going to pass a legislative item, and the timing mattered. It hadn’t occurred to staff that this was as much a political question as a technical one, and the politics had to be part of the analysis.

Anne: Exactly — you and I are cousins on that front, because I always mark the specific mental-shift periods around elections, or worse, the four months before, when you’re deep into “silly season” and don’t want to be pushing anything serious.

The other formative experience was architecture school — I chose Yale specifically for its building project, because I didn’t just want to design something, I wanted real, experiential knowledge of how things actually get built. And separately, I think the deepest lesson came from launching a nonprofit in New Haven — what became CitySeed, a long-running farmers market organization that’s since become an anchor for food-based entrepreneurship and wealth-building, with policy recommendations that have spread statewide and nationally. It started small — convincing two neighbors, then four, that we needed fresh food in an underused park. Going through the actual motions of an entrepreneurial venture — understanding what builds community and what it takes to create something sustainable — was foundational. I don’t think I could do what I’m doing now without having created something, not just supported other people’s nonprofits and community infrastructure.

Seth: That’s an interesting parallel to the Yale building project. A small number of architecture schools require students to actually build something, and they all should — every architect needs to spend a summer on a construction site, if only to learn that construction workers read plans differently than architects do. Designing a house and then physically building it with your classmates teaches you what’s possible, what’s hard, what’s easy, in a way that’s just not available conceptually. The same is true for community development — you can learn the concepts, you can learn how power moves through a city, but until you actually launch something yourself — even something as modest as organizing your friends for an event — and go through gaining buy-in, navigating bureaucracy, documenting everything, the real skill, which is implementation, doesn’t fully land.

Anne: Exactly — and that organizing dimension is something I think has been lost a bit in the modern urban development profession. We actually used to describe the fellows as “community organizers for economic development.” It really was an organizing role, with all the emotion that comes with it.

Seth: And combined with the improv training, there’s also a sales element — the confidence to walk into a room and ask someone for $50,000. I don’t love that part, though I’ve gotten better at it. A lot of people simply won’t do it, and that’s a real barrier if you want to do this work, public or private. Asking for development financing and asking for farmers-market funding are, fundamentally, the same ask.

Anne: Right — though it’s not just about the numbers. Your relationship to money is different when you’re spending or raising your own dollars versus someone else’s. Starting CitySeed, we had to pool our own money just for basics — begging, borrowing, and stealing for legal advice. When it’s your time and money on the line, priorities get real very quickly.

Seth: That mirrors development — it’s our money, my brother’s money, on the line. If I mess up, Thanksgiving gets awkward. That sharpens your focus; you can’t just say “we’ll take extra time, spend extra money, it’s fine.” You have real obligations. Were any of these political or organizing skills actually taught in school?

Anne: Not really, no — beyond the building project, which was mostly about learning the trade of building and bonding with classmates. Around the same time, in parallel, there was an evolution that became the Yale Urban Design Workshop, which gave students experiential, practice-based work with real community groups and clients. That was critical for connecting what we learned in school to a real feedback loop with the outside world. I was part of the founding group that organized that into a more formal structure. Twenty years on, it’s become much more deliberate — there’s now an annual convening that brings together clinic programs from across the graduate and professional schools, since we were all serving the same clients. Law school talking to architecture school talking to public health — and now there are actual interdisciplinary classes at Yale where students from different schools work together on shared projects. Learning to work across a true cross-sector partnership — not just your own field — is itself a skill that has to be built deliberately.

Seth: Which is exactly what happens the moment you land in the public or private sector — as a planner, you’re suddenly working closely with engineers, fire officials, politicians, none of whom were in your department in school. Same for developers.

Anne: Exactly — and any opportunity that builds that muscle matters, because the language barriers between fields are real.

Seth: Let’s walk through your path. You trained as an architect and practiced as one before this winding road into full-spectrum city building.

Anne: Don’t just call me the headless horseman — call it interesting, one day’s growth at a time.

Seth: The most interesting people usually follow a strange path. So — undergrad in architecture at Virginia, then Yale for your master’s?

Anne: Yes, Virginia for undergrad, Yale for the master’s. One thing I find interesting about your pre-interview questions is they focus on where — but for me, the more interesting axis is when. I’m part of a generation that came in just as the field was shifting toward more urban thinking. The 1960s and ‘70s had plenty of community-development thought, but academia hadn’t caught up structurally — there were urban planning programs, heavily policy-focused, but no real urban design degree programs, and economic development was a class, not a degree.

Architecture, as a siloed field — and as the path career counselors and family pointed me toward, given my skills — made sense. I said I wanted to be an architect at age three; to this day nobody knows where that came from, since I only have one distant relative in the field. But for me it was always about cities — I grew up in the Boston area, my mother taught nursery school in Back Bay, and my earliest memories are of that dense urban environment. Architecture was simply the most direct path to working in cities at the time, and I don’t regret it.

Over my sixteen or so years in school and practice, architecture shifted from being the choreographer of the urban environment toward a much more technical discipline — sustainability, energy performance, the tectonics of buildings. Meanwhile, urban planning, urban development, even landscape architecture absorbed more of that bigger-picture urban role.

Seth: So architecture gave up the “master builder” role to some extent.

Anne: I’d call it further specialization, a product of the times — not abandonment. Though if you compared AIA conference programming from 1985 to today, you’d find far fewer sessions on urban-scale design now.

Seth: That tracks with a broader pattern we’ve noticed — city-building professions used to be far less siloed. An engineer might also do landscape work or architecture; people moved fluidly across scales. Now you often hire an architect essentially to solve code compliance — fit the unit count into the right shape, satisfy building and fire code — which pushes the work toward narrow technical problem-solving. The same has happened in engineering: it’s less “what’s the best solution” and more “does the fire truck fit down the street?”

Anne: Exactly. As architectural training, what I loved was its systems thinking — the way a building, and all its sub-consultants, had to come together to solve something. By the end of my time in practice, I’d get into a bit of trouble for negotiating a design fee but then effectively taking over the client’s role, because my clients often didn’t have the capacity to do their own job. For a public high school I designed in New Haven, I ended up helping schedule the building’s use myself, because I needed that information to plan the spaces and the client couldn’t supply it. So even in this hyper-specialized world, the training itself held up well — it was practice that got harder to specialize within, mostly for financial reasons.

Seth: Historically, architecture as a craft was closer to “master builder” — design and construction management combined, working for a patron expecting real performance. We’ve made the work more complicated since, which has changed how it’s structured. It puts me in mind of architects who become developers — they bring systems thinking and design fluency that a lot of developers lack, while also learning the developer’s skill set. They’re still grounded in reality — making payroll, paying contractors — it’s not an unlimited-budget art museum. But integrating design thinking into development tends to produce genuinely higher-quality work.

Anne: Very much so. And I think architects — more in practice than in school — are taught they’re just one cog in a much bigger wheel, even though they actually have enormous transferable skills; we just don’t speak the language of other fields well enough to demonstrate that. Development is a good example — straight out of school, I tried to get a developer to hire me and couldn’t. But once I got to business school and started CitySeed, I realized how much the fundamental architectural process — iterative design, what we now call “design thinking” — was directly applicable to those other pursuits. It was validating to see how transferable that discipline really was.

Seth: I feel similarly about my development work — a lot of my skill with budgets, how money moves, and space planning (since we’re often our own client) comes from that design background. There’s also the orchestration piece: if you’re leading a project, you’re coordinating a dozen trades and professions, each with its own language, goals, and payment structure. Your job is like conducting an orchestra — making sure everyone plays their part at the right time so the whole thing sounds right. So — what made an architect with design ambitions decide to get an MBA?

Anne: It had always been somewhere in the back of my mind. In architectural practice, you tend to get sorted onto either a management track or a design track, and I’m a designer — I wanted to stay there — but I also loved the management side of getting the best possible design built. After years at the City of New York and running an economic development nonprofit in New Haven, I realized the one language I didn’t speak was finance. I was working with a lot of companies in New Haven and didn’t fully understand the corporate mindset around finance, or what these increasingly multi-geographic companies were actually willing to do for the cities they operated in — I was seeing a growing distance between companies and good corporate citizenship, which is something I’m still wrestling with.

Seth: I see that pattern here too.

Anne: It’s a real problem for most cities. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, good corporate citizens — family-owned companies rooted in the place they operated — built a lot of our infrastructure, often just out of practical business sense, not even philanthropy. They built worker housing because they didn’t want workers showing up late. We’ve largely lost that anchor.

Seth: And those companies were locally owned and lived where they worked — sponsoring the Little League team, giving to the library — not weighing their charitable giving between Providence, New York, or Paris.

Anne: Exactly. All of those threads came together when I had the chance to take a year and do the Sloan Fellows program — a full-time, one-year program rather than an executive program, since I knew I’d get too absorbed and wouldn’t use a part-time format well. I loved it. It put me with people from every kind of industry — another landscape scan, really. Most of my classmates worked for national governments around the world; I was the only municipal-government person, though there were several people from Singapore — which is basically Providence on steroids, or really a city-state.

Seth: If only Providence had those resources.

Anne: Highly recommend the program, though it isn’t cheap.

Seth: What did you take away from it, and how did the pedagogy differ from architecture school?

Anne: It mostly deepened what I was already doing rather than teaching me brand-new processes — the entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial journey inside a corporation is, structurally, a lot like design thinking; I just hadn’t had that vocabulary before. It was more an infusion of content — how investment actually happens, that kind of thing — than a new pedagogy, since I was already operating fairly entrepreneurially without knowing the term for it.

Seth: If it were today, could you get that content dump from AI instead, or does the cohort experience matter?

Anne: No — the cohort is essential. It wasn’t just case studies, valuable as those were; it was learning through lived experience. You’d learn the theory of system dynamics, but then hear directly from a classmate who’d used system dynamics to solve and build buy-in around a real problem inside a large corporation. Working with 110 people from around the world — only twenty of us American — let me see current events and economic development through a huge range of international lenses simultaneously. I’ve always loved travel, so that part felt almost dreamlike.

Seth: So even though you needed the content and examples to round out your intuition, it wasn’t simply information you could get from a library card — you needed a community of learners, each bringing their own background, teaching and challenging each other, building momentum together. That’s hard to replicate without other people.

Anne: Exactly. Ten years later, some of my closest friends in the world are from that program — partly because, unlike architecture school, where there’s an undercurrent of competition since everyone’s in the same field, this program’s diversity meant we could learn from each other without competing, and people have gone on to start companies together. It was wonderful. But it really was about gaining the vocabulary and systemic understanding I lacked — finance, and things like how intellectual property gets generated and capitalized on for local economic development, how institutional anchors function within their environments. Learning through benchmarking and real examples.

Seth: Fascinating. You’re teaching now too, at BU. What’s your course?

Anne: I teach in the urban planning program at Metropolitan College — the night school — specifically the capstone, traditionally the final class before graduation, meant to bring everything together in a real, practice-based experiential project. This was the first year it ran over a full year instead of a single semester, which is a big improvement — one semester was never enough time to go deep enough for a meaningful learning experience.

Seth: Right — when you’re in school, wrapping a whole project in three months feels tight, but once you’re out in the real world, three months barely gets a project off the ground.

Anne: Exactly — and even a year wasn’t quite enough for true real-world conditions. The students built a community engagement plan; we’d describe the ideal broad version, then say, “we actually have one month — how do we scale this down realistically?” We worked through BU’s Metro Bridge program, which connects students to real community conditions, partnering with East Boston’s Maverick Square, which the whole class fell in love with. Over a year you can build real relationships with organizations, institutions, property owners, and businesses in a commercial district.

It being the first year, we’ll refine the syllabus. One thing I learned from my architecture years: I want at least one quick charrette each semester to keep ideas flowing — fast, even unrelated to the main project site — because over a long stretch, people settle into a pattern, and you need to periodically shake that up.

Seth: When I taught real estate development at BU’s Metropolitan College, it was a short course, and I found I needed to build in multiple learning cycles rather than one big semester-long project — a small project, then a medium one, building up — because students were exposed to a lot of material but hadn’t practiced it enough times to execute it well by the end.

Anne: Exactly what we found. This past semester, I had students start their report’s outline and brainstorming, then go do the actual engagement work over spring break — we’ll move that timing around — and when they came back to the report, they brought fresh perspective from having stepped outside their own thinking. Then they did a quick rewrite, built the final presentation to nail the narrative, then went back to the report once more — and presented twice instead of once, which really helped, since practicing the narrative multiple times pays off. With AI in the mix, written assignments became less central — parts of a report could easily be AI-assisted, and by year’s end students had gotten better at prompting it — but that live, in-person presentation, the act of actually formulating your thoughts out loud, is something I want built into nearly every class: not just discussion, but a practiced two-minute explanation of whatever the topic is. That’s arguably more valuable than writing skills, though both matter.

Seth: One thing I’ve learned over my career is that good ideas matter — bad ideas get implemented and do real harm — but ideas alone are useless if you can’t persuade people. Relationship skills, communication, rhetoric, storytelling are just as critical to being an effective city builder.

Anne: Completely — you have to be a people person, and bring other people out to be people persons too, especially now that we’ve all retreated indoors so much, through digital life and otherwise.

Seth: We don’t talk to each other anymore. This has been great — let’s wrap with a few quick hits. What’s one place people should visit to learn about building and running cities, and what should they take from it?

Anne: An actual place... Honestly, seeing as many places as possible matters, but not just checking boxes — sit in a cafe and actually observe people. I also follow cities on social media to see how they communicate as institutions. My huge crush, and I hope your audience doesn’t all descend on it at once, is Marseille — practically the biggest “Gateway City” there is, and the municipal government there has made real, impressive progress over the last fifteen years.

Seth: So the recommendation is: get on a plane, sit in a cafe in Marseille, and read the city’s social media.

Anne: Well — and actually participate in what the city’s offering, not just observe. I’m genuinely impressed by it.

Seth: Love it. What’s one book you’d recommend?

Anne: Honestly, I’m not as much of a reader as I wish I were, and lately I read a lot of fiction that has nothing to do with cities. But I’m currently listening to Nudge again, and I think it’s excellent — there’s so much human motivation, prompting, and nudging involved in city building that it’s directly relevant. I also love documentaries on urban themes — I used to show them in class. The redevelopment of Cabrini-Green in Chicago has a fantastic documentary that leaves you hanging on what actually happened. There’s also one on Project Row Houses in Houston’s Third Ward, and one on the Wynwood Walls in Miami. Honestly those teach me more about cities than most books do — I talk more than I read.

Seth: Last one — what’s giving you hope for the future of city building?

Anne: Honestly, I have more concerns right now, given how inward-turned our culture and cities have become so quickly. But my hope is that people are going to get tired of their living rooms, their DoorDash, their convenience habits — I already see a growing trend of people choosing real-life experiences with other people, especially diverse groups. It’s still small, just popcorn here and there, but I think — especially as AI reshapes daily life — human interaction is going to drive a new wave of urban experience. I’m hopeful, even though I think we’ll have some turbulence before we get there.

Seth: That’s a great place to end it. Thank you, Anne, for coming on the podcast.

Anne: I was thrilled to do it. Thanks, Seth — always fun to end the week talking with you.

Seth: The New School for City Builders is a production of the Educational Collaborative for Building Places People Love, and Build the Next Right Thing. If you appreciate what we’re doing and want to help bring the school to fruition, please support us by becoming a paid subscriber at buildthenextrightthing.substack.com.

This week on The New School for City Builders, I’m joined by my good friend Nathan Norris to talk about our work together designing a new degree program for Lake Sumter State College in Florida. I hope you enjoy it!

Seth Zeren: Hello and welcome to the New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zeren, a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer in Providence, Rhode Island. This is a podcast about how we can transform the education of city builders. If we want to change how our cities and towns work, we need to change the people who run them. We need a new generation of city builders — architects, engineers, planners, developers, city managers, and civic leaders. We need a new school for city builders.

Joining me today is my good friend Nathan Norris. In 2003, he co-founded the urban design firm Placemakers and continues to advise new town builders through the City Building Partnership. He is the past CEO of the Downtown Development Authority of Lafayette, Louisiana, and today serves as the Economic Development Director for the City of Claremont, Florida. He’s a Fellow of the Congress for the New Urbanism and a co-founder of the Urban Guild. Nathan, welcome to the New School for City Builders.

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Nathan Norris: Thanks so much, Seth. Great to be here.

Seth Zeren: Great to have you. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. Nathan, I want to start in a funny place — you were a JAG officer. How did you become a city builder?

Nathan Norris: Because I was a JAG officer, actually. The story’s a fairly short one. I was on active duty in the Army, then got out and practiced law as a litigator — and I was having a great time. After a couple of years, I figured I could go back into the military part-time, so I joined the Air National Guard. I knew I wouldn’t be sent to some swamp in Louisiana for annual training; I’d probably just be sent to Europe. And sure enough, my first two-week assignment was in England.

When I arrived, they said, “Sorry, we can’t use you — we’re physically moving our office this week, and next week we get a new boss. Just enjoy yourself.” So I nerded out, walked across the parking lot to the library, and started researching how to build a city, town, or village.

The reason was that my father had suggested I invest in a company claiming they were going to build new towns. Having grown up around Washington, D.C., I was familiar with Reston, Virginia, and Columbia, Maryland. But everything I read was saying those were old news — the new thing was called New Urbanism, or traditional town planning. They talked about these traditional neighborhood developments I’d never heard of, and I became completely fascinated. I could not stop reading.

I had lived in military housing that reflected every decade since the 1890s, and when I started reading about planning, I thought: this conforms with my experiences. I just didn’t know what was going on behind the scenes.

I went to high school for a while in Omaha, Nebraska, and my best friend was stationed in Paris at the time, so I got a three-day pass to visit. I was blown away. But what I had just learned before going was that it was illegal to build Paris in the United States. That sent my brain into a strange place, because I was in the military thinking I was defending freedoms we had more than anywhere else on earth — and here I was finding out we can’t build these places.

As an attorney, I asked a basic question: if we’ve been the richest country the world has ever seen since World War II, what great city, town, or village had we actually built in that time? And that’s when I knew I had to get on this. That’s what I needed to do with my life.

I dove in with intense focus — following everything I could read, visiting every place I could. About seven months in, my wife said, “Nathan, you’re getting a job in this business within three months, or you need to take it down a notch.” Fortunately, about six weeks after that ultimatum, I was offered the opportunity to go work on a traditional neighborhood development. That’s how I got involved.

Seth Zeren: That’s great. So when you show up at this traditional neighborhood development for the first time, you’re an attorney — but you’re working alongside architects, engineers, planners, and developers. I think one of the important things in this conversation is to define our terms. How would you define what a city builder is?

Nathan Norris: A city builder is someone involved in building a city in some capacity — but you can’t do it well if you don’t understand how to design, develop, and maintain a city, town, or village. Cities, towns, and villages are all made up of neighborhoods, so it’s really just a question of what character a neighborhood has.

The core problem is that nobody involved in typical development in the United States understands how everything fits together. We’ve created a system where everyone is a specialist. A city builder, by contrast, is a generalist — someone who knows a little about every piece of the equation.

Those pieces include design (architects, landscape architects, engineers all design things, whether they think of it that way or not), development, utilities, construction, finance, sales, maintenance, and government approval. If you don’t have people at every step who understand the bigger picture, they’ll be making mistakes they don’t even know they’re making — because they never received an education in how you build a city, town, or village.

Seth Zeren: That corresponds with my experience. I’m a better developer for having worked as a planner and spent time with designers and architects. I still hire an architect for my projects, but I have insights that help shape that work. I know how to push back with an engineer — though it’s hard to win those fights.

I sometimes use the analogy of saving the world as a team sport. On a football or soccer team, people play different roles — some specialized, some generalist — but the team works when everyone understands the goal and what the other positions are doing. When people don’t share a common goal and don’t understand each other’s roles, they’re constantly in conflict even as they try to move the ball down the field. Does that make sense?

Nathan Norris: Yes — it’s very much a team sport. So many people have their hands in the process that one pair of hands can mess it up for everyone else.

When I first became an urbanist, the biggest impediment most people saw was that zoning codes wouldn’t allow you to build anything urban. You could only build suburban or rural. We’ve largely overcome that hurdle in most places, but now even when the zoning allows it, you run into staff who don’t understand how infrastructure relates to what’s being built or redeveloped. So it’s another battle you have to fight — because someone simply doesn’t know.

We’ve seen codes get the rules right, then languish or even get repealed — because they didn’t have developers or administrators experienced in urban development to implement them well.

That’s what gave me such motivation early on. My very first job in this field was Director of Marketing and Sales. The most rewarding experience was an hour when the developer brought his entire team out to a street to decide: do we keep this as one street, or split it into two?

He asked everyone for their perspective — me worrying about sales, the architect about how it affected buildings, the landscape architect about the landscape, the accountant about the money, the development director about the spreadsheet, the engineer about safety and liability, and the developer holding the long-term vision. Everyone had a completely different angle. And at the end, the right decision was made because he wanted all those perspectives.

Now imagine if you had all those perspectives in a single person — how powerful that would be. That’s ultimately where we need to get: people who are sensitive to what everyone else is thinking, so they can do their own job better as a result.

Seth Zeren: When you understand the ecosystem of other professions and share a common goal with the people around you, you can really make a great place. Your example of going to Paris as a young person — being blown away, then learning it was essentially illegal to build that in the United States — really drives home how we convinced ourselves we couldn’t do it. Our professionals taught themselves: we don’t know how, it’s not safe. All in opposition to what we see in the world around us.

Nathan Norris: It was crazy.

Seth Zeren: So if you were advising a young person who wants to become a great city builder, what are the key things they need to learn?

Nathan Norris: You need to understand the different steps involved in going from a blank piece of land — or a place you’re going to redevelop — to a finished city, town, or village.

The piece that’s weakest right now, the one that needs the most widespread adoption in any curriculum, is design. It’s actually been difficult to figure out how to teach design comprehensively.

I never thought growing up that a street was anything more than a road. I didn’t think: this is public property, like a city park, and we get to decide what happens in this right-of-way. We could turn it into a park if we wanted — it’s community property.

Understanding how you design a street is genuinely complex. How wide is the travel lane? What do you do with parking? With transit? With cyclists? With pedestrians? Every time you adjust one element, it affects something else. Transportation designers often aren’t taught how to build a city in school, so they don’t know that a small tweak to a road can undermine how the whole community functions.

Take a historic main street — if you run a high-speed arterial through it, you’ve killed it. A main street is where people walk to shop. If cars are moving fast enough to kill you, it doesn’t work.

So: first, understand design.

Second, you need to understand development — which is a broad term covering finance (how do you pay to be in the game?), construction (you can’t propose ridiculous things to build), and markets (how do you sell?).

Third, you need to understand government. Like it or not, in the United States, real estate development is a political act. It’s controlled by laws. A city council or equivalent body makes decisions about your project. Whether you like it or not, the government is your partner. You have to get permissions to develop, and if you don’t understand how government works or how the people running it think, you’re going to struggle.

Fourth, I’d argue you need to be a good observer of how people act, behave, and live. You have to understand humans.

I didn’t understand how to design a downtown until someone explained that you only need to understand two key characteristics of humans. First: we can adapt better than any other species — that’s why we have so much control over our environment. Second: we bore easily.

I had never thought of it that way, but we bore easily. And when you think about successful urban environments like downtowns, one of their great advantages is that if they’re set up well, they maximize your potential interactions with other humans — the one thing that never bores us. Blank walls make a lousy downtown. Clear windows where you might see other people, see things to buy or do — that’s what makes a great downtown.

So understanding human behavior isn’t just a soft addition to this education. It’s foundational to knowing what to build and how to build it.

Seth Zeren: There’s almost a psychology and behavioral economics to living in cities. And you won’t find a psychology class in an engineering degree or an economics class in architecture school, so those perspectives on how people think, choose, and interact are being lost.

Nathan Norris: Shakespeare said, “What is the city but its people?” I always compare designing cities to performing open heart surgery. It takes years to learn to do that. I’ll argue every day that designing cities is more complex than open heart surgery — because of the number of people involved and the intersecting engineering, financial, and social forces at play.

And you might look at a charming downtown and think, “That looks easy to replicate.” But how many great examples do we actually have of people building a downtown from scratch these days, compared to a hundred years ago? They were doing it then with far fewer resources.

Seth Zeren: Every little town had a great downtown a hundred years ago. Today accomplishing that feels remarkable.

And I’d add: cities require constant care. It’s not like finishing surgery and watching someone recover. Buildings fall apart, businesses move, streets need repair, needs change, markets evolve — there’s always more work to be done. You have to think long-term, because short-term decisions have long-term consequences.

Nathan Norris: The easiest example in our lifetimes is retail — how radically it’s changed. If you go back to 1957, the new tax laws and road-building patterns opened up strip shopping centers. Then every decade or so, something shifts. Now I watch TV shows that glamorize 1980s malls. I remember when those malls were brand new and exciting. Our society changed, our technology changed, and our cities have to change too.

The challenge over the last thirty to forty years is that we’ve frozen development in amber, codifying rules that prevent natural evolution. That’s what our generation and future generations will pay the price for — legal agreements and physical layouts that prevent us from doing what actually makes sense today.

Seth Zeren: So if you were talking to a young person today who wanted to become a city builder, what advice would you give them about making the most of their education?

Nathan Norris: It depends on the person, because different people learn differently and have different abilities.

I recently advised someone who had just gotten into a phenomenal master’s degree program, and I told him I thought it was a mistake. He was taken aback, and I explained: when you’re in your 20s, most people aren’t being paid so well that they can’t afford to do something else. That’s your opportunity to learn.

My general advice is: if you already have a clear idea of where you want to end up, go work for the people you respect the most — even if they pay you nothing. That’s far better than paying a school tens of thousands of dollars for a degree.

That said, if you’re someone who doesn’t have access to that kind of opportunity, you need a foundation first. And unfortunately, there aren’t many places — if any — that teach the generalist knowledge we’ve been describing: a little about everything, across design, development, finance, government, and human behavior.

My strong advice: get that generalist foundation first, then do a deep dive into a specialty if you want. And when you’re looking for who to work with, find people who are doing the best work and who genuinely enjoy teaching.

My most recent business partner is an architect I started out mentoring. I realized how talented he was and we started collaborating on projects, then became business partners. It’s been the most rewarding professional experience of my career — because he was teaching me as much as I was teaching him. We were having genuine breakthroughs together in understanding how to do things in the development world.

Seth Zeren: That’s interesting, because while formal education can be useful and give a good foundation, a lot of the real innovation and hard thinking happens in an apprenticeship or mentorship context — working inside firms with people who are both in practice and intellectually engaged. The interplay of practice and thinking can be incredibly effective.

So if you have a solid base, you can build from there — work in the field, figure things out, pursue further specialization if needed. Rather than hyper-specializing in undergrad, before you’ve built that generalist foundation.

Nathan Norris: The person I advised recently had two paths. One: he was talented enough to write a book filling a niche in the sociology-of-urbanism space that doesn’t yet exist. I offered to guide him on that. He came back shaken — I had thrown him off his original plan. Then a week later he called back excited: he’d been offered the opportunity to work for two years alongside someone at the top of the field, toward the end of their career.

I said: do it without hesitation. Because older professionals are often the most eager to share what they know — they’re thinking about their legacy, what they want to pass on, what they wish someone had told them when they were young. My generation had to figure most of this out on our own. There was no textbook anyone could hand us.

Seth Zeren: There still isn’t.

Nathan Norris: We’re working on that. Education has always been my passion. I always believed it should be easier to learn this material, apply it, and then teach it to others.

Seth Zeren: So Nathan, you and I are building a new degree program together. What are we doing? Why can’t existing schools achieve this vision?

Nathan Norris: We’re doing what can’t be done elsewhere — which is unfortunate.

I was brought into conversations about educating people in New Urbanism and traditional town planning about twenty years ago. I was the oddball in the room because everyone else was an academic. About ten years after those early conversations, I reached back out to those people and asked: why haven’t you been able to get your institution to truly change course?

They all said the same thing: “Nathan, I had no idea how difficult this would be. The inertia is so great that I couldn’t do it, and I don’t see how anyone can.” And these were people at top-tier universities.

There are a couple of places today — Notre Dame being the most well-known in our circles, with Stephanos Polyzoides and others who’ve built something remarkable there — but that’s rare.

The institutional obstacles are real. First: you can’t expect an institution to teach new content through faculty who don’t understand it. How is an existing professor supposed to enthusiastically learn and then teach a topic they never studied?

Second: turf battles between programs. If a real estate development master’s degree starts teaching design, the architecture school gets defensive — “that’s our territory.” The structure of universities, organized by specialty school, creates built-in interest groups that resist pulling disciplines together.

Third: accreditation. Everyone wants an accredited program that leads to a real degree. But the entire accreditation system is built on one premise: making specialists. The idea of a program that blends everything together breaks outside the entire trajectory of education over the last fifty to seventy years.

The only students at top universities who successfully get a generalist education are those allowed to design their own degree — and the faculty tolerates that because it’s just one student doing something interesting. If it became a whole program, there would be resistance.

Seth Zeren: A hundred years ago, at least in undergraduate education, you might study physics, sociology, philosophy, and Greek — depending on your interests and who was on the faculty. We’ve professionalized ourselves into these boxes.

So you believe we can’t fix it from within — too much inertia, too many entrenched interests.

Nathan Norris: Too much inertia, too many special interests. The good news is that the substance of what we’re talking about has become part of planning curricula in more places over the last thirty years. But most planning schools still aren’t teaching design the way they did before the 1950s. And without design, even a well-trained planner has limited power.

Seth Zeren: So walk us through how we got to where we are now and what we’re trying to accomplish.

Nathan Norris: Both of us have spent years trying to create educational institutions that could provide this kind of education.

In 2016, I started an initiative called the City Building Institute. The idea was to bypass the university system and go private, funded by people who understood the mission. I went down that path, it got sidetracked, and it never came to be. But the desire to create a place where we could teach people to be generalists never left me.

Then — about five years ago — Andrés Duany introduced us at Seaside. He came over and said, “Nathan, you need to meet this guy.” And there you were, sitting on the steps outside the Seaside Institute. We shook hands and started talking. That began our ongoing discussions.

Separately, I connected with someone actively involved in a state college here in Florida — and he happened to be on the board. He said that at the state college level, there’s far more flexibility than people think. The one constraint is demonstrating a nexus between what you’re teaching and local economic needs.

In our case, we’re in a region where real estate development is the number one economic engine. So the question was: what could help that engine run at a higher level? And the answer is people — people going into local government as planners, economic developers, city managers, and engineers; and people going into the private development sector.

Here in Florida, property rights mean you often can’t mandate what developers do. If developers don’t understand how to build well, and have no staff who do, they’ll default to what’s easiest. So we need to fill the ranks of both the public and private sides with people who understand this. And right now, there’s no school that will teach them what they need to know.

Seth Zeren: And the other piece is the incremental developer — the small-scale builder.

Nathan Norris: Yes. If you have this generalist understanding and you’re young, you have a wonderful opportunity to become what I call an incremental developer. If you understand a little about everything and you start small — one building a year, leasing it out — and you have thirty years ahead of you, what does your position look like at age 52?

If you go from 22 to 52 and build or acquire one property every two years, you have fifteen buildings — all generating revenue. Look at Dan Camp in Starkville, Mississippi, who slowly acquired buildings one at a time in the Cotton District near Mississippi State University. After thirty years, he owned an entire neighborhood. He made it so desirable that living there actually improved people’s social standing as students. And it’s also a great business. It works on every front.

Seth Zeren: So we’re creating a two-year associate’s degree. When you first approached me last fall, you and I sketched it out over a couple of hours on the phone. What are the main components of the curriculum?

Nathan Norris: First, I have to say — I had no idea we’d be able to figure out the big picture in about two hours. But both of us had been independently thinking about this for a decade or more, so we weren’t coming to the table empty-handed.

We figured out that it takes about 45 credit hours to produce a solid generalist understanding — not deep expertise in everything, but enough to understand how the big picture operates. Combined with general education requirements, that makes it a two-year, 60-credit-hour program, with 45 hours specialized for this curriculum.

We divided the content into four areas:

Design. You have to understand how the built environment is shaped.

Development. You need to understand how things actually get built — and that includes finance, because the form of what we build almost always follows what can be financed.

History. If you don’t understand how we got to where we are, it’s harder to fix it and harder to know what to avoid. There’s also a practical dimension: being able to look at a building and understand roughly when it was built, why it was built that way, and how forces like defense, water transport, railroads, and the automobile shaped cities over time. That helps you read the landscape in a way you simply can’t without that background.

Government, law, and codes. We also cover infrastructure, so you understand utilities and streets. And we weave in sociology — crime, public order, the social dynamics of neighborhoods.

But what’s distinct about this program isn’t just the content — it’s how it’s taught. A lot of the learning happens outside the classroom. You can give a PowerPoint on urban design, or you can walk outside and learn more in an hour on the street. This is not a virtual program. Students will be together in person, making observations in real places, because so much of what we’re teaching requires being there.

At the same time, everyone who comes into this program already has lived in a city, town, or village their whole life. They already know a lot about place — they just don’t know why it works or doesn’t. So when the aha moments hit, they’re powerful.

Seth Zeren: And the assignments are designed to be concrete and applied. When I teach real estate development, I come as a practitioner — I can tell stories from what happened that day or last week. Students are incredibly receptive to that. And it shapes the assignments: I’ll tell students to call a real estate broker and schedule an actual tour of a property on the market. Go do it.

Nathan Norris: That’s the other key element of this program: a heavy dose of visiting lecturers. Our networks across the country are strong, and we’ll bring in practitioners — remotely and in person — who are doing the real work. Students won’t just hear from a couple of people; they’ll hear from dozens of contributors across the two years. That combination — how pragmatic it is, and the breadth of voices — is what makes this genuinely different.

Seth Zeren: When do you think we’re going to have this thing up and running?

Nathan Norris: Potentially August. We expect formal program approval in about seventeen days, with no reason to think it won’t come through. Accreditation follows over the summer.

The unknown is enrollment. We want a cohort of twenty students. This is not a program you do on your computer at home — students need to be here in person. The cohort model matters: these people will build bonds and learn together that will serve them socially and professionally for the rest of their careers.

If you’re in your twenties and would have dropped what you were doing to be part of something like this — that’s who we’re looking for. And we already know local people who are eager to be part of it. We just need to find the right twenty people.

Seth Zeren: Is there a way for folks to find out more?

Nathan Norris: The easiest way right now is to reach out directly. You can email me at [email protected]. A month from now we’ll have a website up with more details. But it is a big decision for anyone to make, and I’m happy to walk people through the specifics.

One thing we didn’t mention: because this is going through a state college, it’s incredibly affordable. Compared to most programs of this quality, there’s at least one missing zero in the price.

Seth Zeren: An incredible opportunity. Let’s do a few closing questions for fun. What’s one place you’d recommend people visit to learn more about building cities?

Nathan Norris: I can’t give you just one, because the honest answer changes constantly and depends on where you’re coming from. When I got involved in this field nearly thirty years ago, everyone said you had to go to Indianapolis. Then it was Chattanooga. Then Carmel, Indiana. Now it’s Northwest Arkansas. The right answer depends on your city, your stage, and the current moment. I’m not going to be pinned down on that one.

Seth Zeren: Excellent attorney answer. The lawyer is still in there. What about for me — I think about my own formative experience backpacking in Europe with a friend when we were young and broke. We were sitting in a street café in the Grand Place in Brussels, drinking beer and eating fries — as you do — looking at the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall. It looks symmetrical at first: a big tower, two wings, ornate detailing all over. But you sit there long enough, and you realize it’s not actually symmetrical. The windows are different on each side, the dormers are different. You start seeing layers of symmetry and asymmetry that reward attention.

You could spend hours looking at one building. It taught me a lot — before I knew anything about urbanism — about the value of design and craftsmanship, and about the balance of opposing forces. Symmetry is comforting, but pure symmetry becomes boring. The layering of order and surprise is what makes a place hold your interest. There’s a lot to be said for sitting in a place and really observing it closely. You get things out of that you can’t get any other way.

Nathan Norris: Absolutely. And what you’re describing about humans — we bore easily, but great design gives us layers to discover. That’s what Andrés Duany captures when he talks about maximizing the chance of encountering other humans or discovering something new. It’s not just aesthetics; it’s how humans actually work.

Seth Zeren: Last question: what’s one book you’d recommend?

Nathan Norris: The first thing I require of anyone I mentor isn’t actually a book — it’s a resource. I have them go read the DPZ Lexicon, which you can find free online by searching “DPZ Lexicon.” It’s essentially the vocabulary of place — about 75 pages, dense, and not easy to get through. If you can’t get through it, you may not have the drive for this work.

Beyond that, the book I return to most is The Architecture of Community by Léon Krier. It has so much in it that you won’t absorb it all on the first read. Every time you come back to it, you get something you missed before. That’s the best kind of book to learn from.

If you have a shorter attention span, I’d recommend the book about Seaside put together by Dhiru Thadani. It’s enormous — six or eight hundred pages — but it’s composed of short two-page articles. You can read one or two a day and gradually build up your understanding of all the different elements that go into making a great place. Visitors to Seaside feel that it’s special but often don’t know why. A book like this reveals how much love and thought went into every decision — and that’s the reason it feels special.

Seth Zeren: Great. Nathan, thank you so much. I look forward to talking again soon. We’re working on this curriculum right now, and it’s going to be great.

Nathan Norris: School starts in August, my friend. School starts in August.

Seth Zeren: If you’re interested in learning more about what Nathan and I are building, reach out to us. I’ll include contact information in the show notes. Thanks very much for listening.

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