The New School for City Builders

Seth Zeren
  • 5.0 (3)
  • Society & Culture
  • Updated Weekly

Welcome to The New School for City Builders, a conversation about how we teach, train, and educate the people who build and steward our cities and towns. America is struggling: a housing crisis, climate change, forty thousand of our fellow citizens killed in car crashes each year, insolvent city budgets, sclerotic government, an epidemic of ugly buildings and streets and places not worth caring for. At the end of the day, our cities and towns are only as good as the people who build them and maintain them. If we want to change how our cities and towns work, we need to bring up a new generation of city builders. buildthenextrightthing.substack.com

Episodes

  1. 3d ago

    Sheinya Joseph on Rebuilding City-Builder Education

    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? She

  2. Aug 4

    A Modest Proposal: Colleges Try Teaching

    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 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: 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 poste

  3. Jul 28

    Incremental Development at The New School for City Builders

    Show notes: * Incremental Development Alliance * Range Co. 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 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

  4. Jul 21

    Why the History of Urban Form is Foundational for City Builders

    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

  5. Jul 14

    Engineering the New School for City Builders

    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 k

  6. Jul 7

    Practice Before Theory: A Different Blueprint for Teaching City Builders

    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 — bril

  7. Jun 30

    Anne Haynes on the Hidden Curriculum of City Building

    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 — a

  8. Jun 23

    Building a New School for City Builders in Florida

    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. 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. 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 r

    Building a New School for City Builders in Florida

  9. Jun 16

    Why the New School for City Builders

    This week friend of the pod Aaron Lubeck joins to interview me about the origins of this podcast, and in particular my piece: Toward a New School of City Builders. Thanks for listening! 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, an incremental developer and designer in Durham, North Carolina. Aaron has taught historic rehabilitation and sustainable design at Duke University and with the Incremental Development Alliance. He created the podcast for the National Town Builders Association, and he’s probably more responsible than anyone else for pushing me to start this podcast. In today’s conversation, Aaron will also turn the tables and interview me about the origin of this podcast and the need for a new school for city builders. Aaron, welcome. Aaron: It’s great to be here. Thanks for doing this, for having me on, and for getting this thing rolling. It’s exciting to see this idea progress through all its iterations. Seth: It’s so great to have you here. Out of that introduction, I should say I blame you most for this podcast — my wife too, probably. How did you talk me into doing this? Aaron: In fairness, it’s been a few years. I remember sitting with you in the airport in Cincinnati, both of us getting excited about this idea — the need for a new school, something more than a weekend workshop or a day class. There needs to be a place to send 18-year-olds who really want to build cities, and there just isn’t one yet. Some places get close, but there’s no single place. So many kids want to do this in some form — work on cities, build cities, solve problems — and there’s nowhere to go. There’s so much cool stuff happening, from what’s going on in Florida to the City Makers Collective and beyond, but there clearly needs to be a bigger vision. I think it percolated long enough, and you finally said, “I need to get these ideas out.” And here we are. Seth: That was sort of two thoughts. One — this is a good advertisement for coming to the Congress for the New Urbanism, because the most important ideas usually come from sitting in an airport at the end of a trip, or taking a long walk after lunch with a friend. That’s where the real ideas percolate. For anyone coming to CNU, I’ll be there in Arkansas in a couple of weeks. I think part of what drew me to this was a gap. I’m part of these one-off conversations with people about building new institutions, changing how we teach, creating new programs — but there wasn’t a forum bringing those conversations together. On the other hand, I keep meeting young people — 18, 22, 25 years old — who’ve discovered they’re interested in city building somewhere along the way. We don’t teach any of this in high school, so people stumble into it: watching YouTube videos, reading a book, going on vacation. There’s some inciting incident. I keep meeting people who got radicalized watching Not Just Bikes, then went to architecture school, then realized architecture school wasn’t doing anything like what they expected. So there’s a real need for a forum where young people can learn how to make the most of their education and what to look for in a program. Aaron: Wholeheartedly agree. And to reiterate — I’m so glad you started this podcast, because it’s narrow and specific. The ones that make a difference are usually on a narrow topic, and there’s nobody in this space. There are plenty of podcasts on urbanism, walkability, design, affordability — but nothing like this. This could evolve into a space people come to when they’re frustrated with the pedagogy — professors, students, families with kids interested in this stuff. So much has happened since Cincinnati, going on two or three years ago now. Brett Jones’s work in Florida, Nathan Norris’s community college program — which hits some of the gold standard we’ll discuss today — Will McCollum’s summer program in Charleston, which sounds incredible, and Ruben Hanson, who has a great podcast and is getting into teaching in Europe. I see all of these as green shoots. Before you answer — I know we’re doing a bit of an experiment here. Given my background hosting the Town Builders Podcast for the National Town Builders Association, a good way to plant the flag for this podcast and your website is for me to interview you, so you can lay out your thesis: what’s the point of dissatisfaction, and what do we do about it? So — Seth, why do you think we need a new school for city builders? Seth: Thanks, Aaron. A lot of this comes from my own experience. Like I said, we all have our breakthrough moment. For me — I’d studied climate science, was a geology major in undergrad, was thinking about grad school and PhDs. I’d also picked up a bug for sustainable design and green building. So I took an early online course — this was around 2006 or 2007 — through the Harvard Extension Program, on the history of the American city. Great course. I read Jane Jacobs for the first time, studied the history of American cities. Aaron: It’s her birthday today, incidentally. Seth: It is her birthday today. Happy birthday, Jane Jacobs — or as we like to call it, Urban Renewal Remembrance Day, when we remind ourselves of the dangers of hubris. Go put a wreath on a highway overpass somewhere. Say sorry. So that course got me excited about city building, but I was intimidated — I didn’t know how to draw, had no portfolio, didn’t think I could go to architecture or planning school. I was a scientist. So I went to a graduate program at Yale where I was technically enrolled in the environmental school but spent half my time secretly taking classes in architecture, law, and business. I got really interested in zoning and land use regulation, and ended up taking a job as a city planner for the City of Newton, Massachusetts — writing zoning amendments, reviewing projects. While on city staff, I started to see the whole city-builder ecosystem: on the city side, planners, engineers, police and fire, DPW; on the private side, civil engineers, architects, developers. Watching all these pieces interact, I was struck by the fact that we don’t understand each other. We don’t even speak the same language — different jargon, different goals. Aaron: There’s a stunning lack of curiosity sometimes. The silo-ization keeps it that way — “I don’t understand them, but it’s not my job to.” Seth: Right. Some people think their job is regulatory compliance — just follow the rules, whatever they are. Some developers just want to make as much money as possible and don’t care about long-term implications. Not everyone’s like that, but I’ll tell a story — we were working on improving a neighborhood village center, trying to improve walkability and pedestrian safety, and we kept hitting a wall with the city engineer. Every time we tried to change something, it was “this doesn’t comply with the regs” or “we don’t have the warrants for a stop sign here.” And we’d say, well, we’re trying to improve safety — what would you suggest? “Nothing, because none of these things meet my book.” And we’re left thinking, what are we all doing here? Aaron: Right — “the rule book says this.” There’s a reputation in every city for which profession is the most rigid and unbending about doing reasonable things, and engineers often get that label. There’s an understanding of the broader vision, but “that’s not my job, and the rule book says something different.” There are interesting proposals to fix this — calls for some kind of benevolent overseer who could cut through it — but really, it’s the silo issue you write about so eloquently in the piece we’re discussing today. Seth: Part of the problem is that cities are genuinely complex and do require specialized expertise. I don’t know how to make sure sewers drain correctly — someone needs that skill, and it’s a specialized job. There are a lot of these specialized roles. But look at how we train specialists: architects are in the school of arts and architecture, planners are in the government school, civil engineers are in the engineering college, developers are in the business school, activists are in sociology. Nobody talks to anybody, nobody shares the same goals. You can get an engineering degree without learning anything about urbanism. You can get an architecture degree without learning anything about development. You can get a development degree knowing nothing about design. These silos start early in people’s technical training, and they persist — you get your first job, and on some paths you pursue licensure, which requires apprenticing at an existing firm or having an accredited degree. Part of the reason the civil engineering curriculum has nothing about how a city works is that it’s not in the accreditation standards — there’s no room for it. You take four semesters of calculus but zero semesters on the purpose of a city. That’s driven by accreditation, so it’s very hard to change at the ground level. People arrive in specialized jobs with no sense of the whole team. It’s like a football team where everyone does their own thing with no shared playbook, language, or goals. Some specialization is fine and necessary, but without a shared framework, you get chaos — which is exactly what we have. Our cities aren’t functioning in a coordinated fashion. Aaron: This is getting a bit ahead of the horse, but two of your proposed solutions are a common core curriculum — giving people a shared liberal-arts foundation in what a city is and why it matters — and leadership training. At the end of the day, teamwork requires leadership. On a football team that’s obvious, but I don’t kno

  10. Jun 9

    Learning to herd the goat parade of development

    Thank you for joining me for the second installment of The New School for City Builders as I interview Sara Bega and Jack Duncan on Las Catalinas, studio education, building new architecture schools, and more. Please like and subscribe! 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 edited for clarity: Seth Zeren (00:02) 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 Sarah Bega, an architect, professor at Notre Dame Architecture School, and former town architect for Las Catalinas, Costa Rica. And for our first dual-guest podcast, Jack Duncan, also a Notre Dame architect, who helped launch an architecture program at the American College of Building Arts and is now at the College of Charleston. Together they are part of the founding team behind CityMakers Collective, a summer studio in Charleston, South Carolina, which is having its second summer starting this Sunday. So it’s very exciting — you’re both about to get right back into the thick of it. In our conversation today, Jack, Sarah, and I are going to talk about building new towns, building new schools, and the ins and outs of the studio education experience. Sarah and Jack, welcome to the New School for City Builders. Sara Bega (01:18) Thanks for having us. Seth Zeren (01:21) Great. Sarah, I saw you about a week or two ago in Northwest Arkansas at CNU, which was a ton of fun. You had just gotten back from teaching a semester in Rome — which sounds like a pretty sweet deal. Now you’re teaching at Notre Dame, the same school where you studied architecture. Can you tell us what the architecture program is like there, and how it differs from other architecture schools? Sara Bega (01:48) Sure. Notre Dame’s pedagogy in architecture and urbanism is founded on a classical philosophy and design process. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s always expressed in the classical language, but it’s a design process based on analysis and the study of precedent — essentially learning from the successes of the past so you can do even better in the future. We treat architecture and urbanism as a living tradition. We should always be working to improve it, bringing it into the next generation, and thinking far beyond the moment so that we’re not pursuing trends that put an inherent expiration date on a project. Instead, we participate in a larger culture — multiple cultures — and understand how context-based design really matters, both as a process and as a character. I studied at Notre Dame and was drawn to it because during my tour, I was told: “We teach you the rules so you can intelligently break them.” For someone who’s incapable of being obedient, that felt great. That philosophy has remained while the program constantly folds in new successes — it’s not stagnant. In Rome this past year, for example, we had even more emphasis on landscape than ever before. I just appreciate working with people who really care about the built environment, about contributing wonderful additions to our societies, and about always learning and doing better. Seth Zeren (03:35) That’s fantastic. What’s the semester like in Rome as a teacher? Sara Bega (03:41) Dreamlike. It’s a big ask for the students — it sounds cushy, but honestly, they have to balance a lot of travel, which is a good problem to have, along with the experience of simply being there. We all know how important it is to actually be in a place to understand it. They’re traveling all around Italy and constantly shifting in and out of their design headspace. It’s challenging — most of them are in an environment very different from where they grew up, learning as human beings to adapt, and simultaneously extracting design lessons. Not all of them are going to be doing work in Europe; it’s the precedent behind the precedent, so to speak. If you’re trying to engage American tradition and American classicism, you’re going to look at what those architects were looking at, which — given the history of the Grand Tour and the development of architectural language — has often been rooted in that region. As a professor, it’s a joy because students are engaging more sophisticated ideas than ever before. They’re not just picking Corinthian because it’s their favorite — they understand when it’s appropriate to articulate a column at all, or simply use the proportional system, and if you are going to use a columnar order, what character is appropriate and where it fits within the broader culture of that expression. I had mostly taught second years before, which is the boot camp and the engine room of Notre Dame’s pedagogy. Getting to teach third years and expand on those conversations in a different context was a real joy. And outside of studio, you’re just kind of floating around in heaven. Seth Zeren (05:48) Just hanging out in Italy. So Jack — you also attended Notre Dame. Sarah, you were an undergrad there, and Jack, you came as a graduate student. What was your arc? How did you end up there? Jack Duncan (06:08) That’s a good question. I actually didn’t go to college right after high school. I ended up working for Procter & Gamble for almost five years. I wasn’t a great high school student, if I’m being honest. So it was definitely a transition. When I was ready, I wanted to stay in-state and had always been interested in architecture, but in South Carolina we really only have Clemson, and the program didn’t quite fit my perspective on the built environment. I knew I wanted to come to Charleston — it’s a beautiful place, and a lot of us from the upstate, near the North Carolina line, would come south to the beaches. So I came here originally to study classics, and somewhat ironically realized after the first year that I didn’t want to teach. I couldn’t see another career path, so I started taking coursework that interested me: studio art, historic preservation, art history. A year later, my advisor Robert Russell said, “It looks like you could double-major in art history and historic preservation, and if you want to triple major or minor in studio art, you can do that.” So I said okay — I was a bit aimless, if I’m being real. I fell in love with architecture through historic preservation, partly because of where I was. I’m sitting right now at 12 Wool Street, and you just walk out the door into a beautiful environment. Come senior year, I interned for two architects here — Christopher Liberatus and Jenny Bedden — for about a year. They asked if I was going to pursue architecture, and I said I honestly didn’t know. I took another year off and went to the ICAA Summer Studio — I think it was one of the first after they revamped it. I met great people there, came back, and thought: yes, I want to be a classical architect. So I applied to the master’s program at Notre Dame — the only program I applied to. I said, if I get in, great; if not, I’ll go join a fishing boat or something. I got in, finished the program, and it was honestly the most life-changing experience of my life. Seth Zeren (09:36) This podcast is basically just an advertisement for Notre Dame — they should really be sponsoring us. So Sarah, after graduating you went back to Italy, and then someone told you to get on a plane? Sara Bega (09:54) Yes. It was actually my last summer before my final year of school. I did a research project — mostly as an excuse to be back in Rome. I finished it too quickly, in two or three weeks, and meanwhile the internship feelers I had out weren’t panning out. I thought, if I’m going to be a waitress in Marietta, Georgia, I might as well try being a waitress in Rome. I was trying to make that work. But it became moot when someone told me to get on a plane. I had a conversation with Charles Brewer, the founder of Las Catalinas — maybe eight minutes long. We said, let’s send you down there for eight weeks as an intern. When I got there, it was less of an internship and more of an interim situation. I had to quickly overcome panic and paralysis and just get the job done. They were kind about it: “You don’t have to be extraordinary, just duct-tape this thing together until we find the long-term person.” Then I went back and finished school — and it turned out I was the long-term person. So I graduated and flew down there two weeks later. Seth Zeren (11:28) So what is Las Catalinas? Sara Bega (11:30) So many things. Las Catalinas is a village with aspirations to become a town, on a hillside above the Pacific Ocean in northwest Guanacaste, Costa Rica. The core is car-free. That design choice stems from the pursuit of a built environment where, as Clay Chapman puts it, free-range children are possible — what we call “kid freedom.” The idea is that children can have a completely independent discovery of both nature and their community, without the need for constant parental supervision. Charles grew up deciding to be home when it got dark, and that was the experience he wanted to recreate. He first tested it at Glenwood Park, learned a lot, and then doubled down at Las Catalinas. The car-free core has been a resounding success. Seth Zeren (12:41) What is it like to be a town architect? Sara Bega (12:44) Fascinating is a good word for it. You learn so much about people and their egos. I had to do a lot of work

    Learning to herd the goat parade of development

  11. Jun 2

    The Big Lie of Architectural Education

    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 Kevin Klinkenberg, an architect, incremental developer, and urbanist in Kansas City, Missouri. Kevin is the executive director for Midtown Kansas City Now, the business improvement district for the heart of the city. He also hosts one of my favorite podcasts, Messy City. In our conversation today, Kevin and I talk about the disconnect between architecture schools and building places people love, the importance of hyper-local management of the city, and the future of city building. Kevin, welcome to the New School for City Builders. Kevin Klinkenberg: Thanks, Seth. I appreciate it and I’m looking forward to it. Seth Zeren: Yeah, I’m so glad to have you on. You and I have talked a bunch of times over the years, and I still think of you as a major inspiration for why this podcast exists in the first place. Kevin Klinkenberg: That makes me feel very good. If I can inspire anybody else to do a podcast, that’d be great. Seth Zeren: Well, your blog—which then turned into a podcast—was always a huge inspiration to me, too. Messy City is very much how I think about cities: how we have to get in the weeds, and how nothing’s really clean and perfect, and it’s better for it. Last year, you went on a vacation to a little town in Costa Rica, and you came back and had a bit of a viral Twitter rant on the “big lie” of architectural education. Why don’t you walk us through where you went, what your reaction was, and why this struck a chord in the online urbanist community? Las Catalinas and the “Big Lie” of Architecture School Kevin Klinkenberg: Well, thanks. I guess I should start by saying that the experience of going somewhere and seeing a new community that I liked was not exactly something new to me. But we had the chance to do a brief vacation in Costa Rica and spent a couple of days in Las Catalinas, which is a coastal new town built by Charles Brewer. Charles is a really interesting guy who made a lot of money during the dot-com boom, sold out of that, and then became a developer. He developed a really great project in Atlanta called Glenwood Park, and then decided he wanted to build a new walkable community in Costa Rica that was explicitly car-free. I remember hearing Charles talk about this at the time and I’ve watched pictures of it evolve over the years, but it’s now about 20 years into being an actual place. This was my first chance to visit. It’s just a remarkable creation. If you were to squint and not know you were in Costa Rica, you might think you were in an Italian hill town or Cinque Terre on the Italian coast. It’s such a unique and interesting place. What grabbed me—and why I wanted to write and talk about it more—was that walking around the place gave me the opportunity to reflect on the things I was taught when I was a much younger person in college. There are a lot of lines that you are given, a lot of things that you are led to believe in architecture school. Not the least of which is that the past is the past and we can’t do anything like that anymore. We are told we can’t do architecture that is inspired by or resembles architecture from 100, 200, or 300 years ago, and that we just have to embrace the ideal of the new modern city. That’s what architects and designers are supposed to do. When you go to someplace like Las Catalinas, you see a creation in the modern age built with modern materials and construction methods, but by someone who explicitly created a place that feels like it’s hundreds of years old. Obviously, it’s very nice and clean—it does not feel like a dusty old city—but it has very traditional architecture that reflects hundreds of years of architectural heritage. When you’re there, it just belies the whole notion taught in school. You’re just like, “Why the hell aren’t we building more places like this?” Because it’s just so nice. It’s beautiful, it’s inspiring, and it’s a lovely place to walk around and spend time in. We didn’t have our kids on this trip, but there were other people with kids there. I would love to take my kids there. It’s the kind of place where you could just turn your kids loose, let them run around, and you wouldn’t really worry about their physical safety. It really says so much in one fairly isolated little community about where a lot of our theories and practices of city building have gone. Seth Zeren: Yeah. I mean, it’s an inspiring place. There are a lot of these new towns that people are building and creating. I think when normal people who are not practicing city builders visit them, they’re like, “Wow, this is amazing. Why can’t we build this anymore?” In your Twitter rant, you pointed out that “what most architects don’t understand and would find crazy is that architecture school is mostly an exercise in ideological indoctrination. That in architecture school, you literally get poor grades for drawing a well-executed simple design based off of historic traditions that the majority of people would find lovely.” Tell us about that ideological indoctrination. Ideological Indoctrination vs. Business Reality Kevin Klinkenberg: It’s a weird thing, man. It really is weird. Looking back on it, it’s especially weird now that I’m older and I’ve had many years to reflect. When you’re in the midst of it as a young person, you’re just gung-ho and eager for the new thing. You like being challenged intellectually—or at least I did. I was a smart kid and I wanted to be challenged, so it was fun to lean into new ideas or anything that seemed interesting or inspiring. But I think most people who are not in our world would assume that you go to architecture school to learn about construction. You’d think you learn how buildings go together, how to design pleasant-looking buildings for clients, and how the business side of architecture works. It’s really amazing how little of that there actually is, and how much of it is what Andrés Duany used to describe as a Stalinist level of education. You are taught from almost day one the ideology of the Modernist movement of architecture. That carries through most of your education. There are some exceptions—professors who don’t necessarily believe all of that or grade that way—but most do. Most really buy into the slogans from the Modernist movement of the 1913s and ‘20s. It’s still very deeply rooted in architecture school that we are all supposed to lean into the modern age and set the past aside. It’s a really fascinating bit of indoctrination, and it’s a rare person who breaks free from it. To the point of what I said in the article, I had one really good friend in school—who’s still a good friend—who designed really nice-looking, simple buildings. The average person would look at them and go, “That’s nice. Can we build that?” Whether it was a house, a school, or a church, he would never get better than a C+ on anything he did. And it wasn’t because they were less well-thought-out than other people’s work. I think I may have told you this story before, but during my second or third year, we were always cramming, staying up late, and trying to finish projects. Everybody was cranky. By the time it’s 8:30 in the morning and you’re doing the studio critique of your project with your professor and guest reviewers, everybody is on edge or falling asleep. We had one student in our class who just didn’t do anything; he completely mailed it in. He posted a board up on the wall that just had a tiny little circle on it. He then proceeded to talk about his project and the “theory” behind it—which was just a dot on a drawing—for 45 freaking minutes. That was one thing, but then the professors took it seriously and had a real conversation about it! That was one of those moments where I was just like, “What are we doing here? This is a joke.” The rest of us created actual building sections and elevations, and we’re wasting all this time on somebody who just didn’t do the work. Seth Zeren: Right, I think you said at some point it rewards people who are good at b**********g. Kevin Klinkenberg: Yeah, absolutely. Seth Zeren: And I will say, as a developer, sometimes the result of this architectural education is that it can be hard to find architects who will design you a normal-looking building. It’s like maybe they were never taught how. Kevin Klinkenberg: No doubt, it’s a challenge. The studio critique part of it was definitely like a hazing exercise as well. It’s probably not as harsh now as it was in the ‘90s when I was there, but there’s definitely an element that teaches you how to become a good bullshitter and how to develop a thick skin. A lot of people don’t make it through all that; they just leave the profession because they can’t handle the feedback in studio. Then, a lot of the people who do stay tend to have such thick skins that they don’t really care what their critics say. You might even say it borders on megalomania in terms of what it encourages. It’s just fascinating because a lot of people think of architecture as a trade where you learn technology and skills. But the inside baseball of what it’s actually like in school is very different. Seth Zeren: Yeah, I have occasionally encountered young people who got inspired by watching YouTube videos about building

    The Big Lie of Architectural Education

  12. Jun 2

    Welcome to the New School for City Builders

    Hello and Welcome to the New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zeren. I’m a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer living in Providence, Rhode Island. 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. I love cities. I’ve always wanted to know why most old places feel great and most new places do not. I went to school, became a planner, and later a developer in my search to understand how to make great places—and then to start building them. But along the way, I learned something important, a place is only as good as the people. It’s people that design, build, and run our cities and towns. Getting the design right matters, but getting the right people in the room with the right skills, knowledge, and perspectives matters more. In my first job as a planner, I would often butt heads with our city engineer. Trying to make a main street more walkable, he’d retort: No, we can’t put a stop sign there. No, we can’t add a crosswalk. We don’t have the MUTCD warrants. The who with the what now? It was like we spoke different languages; even had different ideas of what the city was for, how it worked. And it’s really no wonder: architects are trained in the school of arts and architecture; the engineers are over in the engineering college; the planners go to the school of public affairs; the developers are in the business school; and the budding activists are over in the sociology department. You can get a degree in civil engineering without learning anything about what a city is. You can get a planning degree knowing nothing about development. And a business degree in real estate without learning anything about architecture or construction. These silos persist from the college curriculum to licensure and professional turf. A lot of what I learned about how to build a good building, city, or town I learned from the New Urbanists. The founders of New Urbanism recovered lost ways of building and reshaped the way we build cities and towns. But a generation later, the schools that train our city builders are largely unchanged. In a country of 340 million people, spread across 3,000 counties and 20,000 cities, towns and villages, we need more than a conference of a couple thousand people. Because our cities and towns are struggling: rising home prices, crumbling infrastructure, insolvent budgets, missed climate targets, sclerotic government, and too many ugly places not worth caring for. But there’s no law of nature that says things have to be this way. There’s nothing we messed up that we can’t fix, if we change how we work, and what we’re working for. That’s the purpose of this show. In each episode, I’ll talk with people who are rethinking how we learn to build cities. Together, we’ll ask questions like: * What should someone actually learn if they want to build great neighborhoods? * What knowledge and skills are missing from today’s professional training? * What educational experiences helped shape some of the best designers, developers, and public leaders of today? * And if we were starting from scratch, how would we design a school that trains the next generation of city builders? This podcast is part of a larger effort to imagine—and eventually create—that school. A place where people can learn the craft of city building through practical hands-on projects. A school where the disciplines are not siloed off from each other. A community that comes together around a shared vision for what makes a great place, and how to work together to get there. Because saving the world is a team sport. The future of our cities won’t be determined by policies or plans. It will be led by the people who know how to get s**t done. So whether you’re a young professional looking to learn from leading practitioners, or a student looking to make the most of your education, or an experienced city builder looking to give back by teaching the next generation, I hope there will be something for everyone who cares about how we build great cities and towns. If you want to be part of the conversation and support this movement, please like and subscribe on whatever podcast platform you prefer. Give us a 5-star review–no really, it actually matters! Share it around to your friends. Tout it on whatever social media platforms you frequent. I plan to keep the show free to listen to, but if you’d like to support us so I can keep it going, please consider joining as a paying subscriber at my substack, Build The Next Right Thing. Every little bit helps. Thanks for listening. And welcome to the New School for City Builders. Get full access to Build the Next Right Thing at buildthenextrightthing.substack.com/subscribe

    Welcome to the New School for City Builders
  • 12 Episodes

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

Welcome to The New School for City Builders, a conversation about how we teach, train, and educate the people who build and steward our cities and towns. America is struggling: a housing crisis, climate change, forty thousand of our fellow citizens killed in car crashes each year, insolvent city budgets, sclerotic government, an epidemic of ugly buildings and streets and places not worth caring for. At the end of the day, our cities and towns are only as good as the people who build them and maintain them. If we want to change how our cities and towns work, we need to bring up a new generation of city builders. buildthenextrightthing.substack.com

Information

You Might Also Like