The New School for City Builders

Seth Zeren

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

  1. 1d ago

    The surprising truth behind why American roads are so dangerous

    About this episode What if the reason American streets keep getting built wrong isn’t that engineers are careless, but that a whole profession is missing from the room? In this episode Seth Zeren talks with Steffen Berr, a civil engineer trained in California who moved to the Netherlands to learn and practice in a human-centered transportation system. Steffen made the case in his essay “America Has No Transportation Engineers”: in the Netherlands, transportation engineers and civil engineers are educated on separate tracks and work side by side, while in the US, civil engineers inherit transportation decisions they were never trained to make, so those decisions end up hard-coded into manuals. They talk about why “double it for safety” fails on roads, how outsourcing spreads responsibility until no one owns a project, the role of professional licensure, how Steffen talked his way into a Dutch firm by learning Dutch in seven months, and why Morgan State University’s transportation engineering program is worth a look. Steffen also walks through a redesign of a crossing near Sacramento State, shares what he learned serving in Ukrainian air defense, and previews his forthcoming book on the science of movement. Links Articles * America Has No Transportation Engineers, Steffen Berr, Next City (also republished by Strong Towns) * American-Dutch engineer calls out root problem with American DOTs, Streetsblog USA profile of Steffen Books * Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, Henry Grabar * Recoding America, Jennifer Pahlka * The High Cost of Free Parking, Donald Shoup * The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs * On Movement, Steffen Berr (forthcoming working title) Organizations and programs * Arcadis, the consultancy where Steffen worked as a designer * City of Haarlem, where Steffen worked as a traffic advisor * Strong Towns, founded by Chuck Marohn * Morgan State University, Transportation & Urban Infrastructure Studies, home of an ABET-accredited B.S. in Transportation Systems Engineering * Sierra College and Sacramento State, where Steffen studied * ASCE Mid-Pacific Student Symposium, the student competition Steffen mentions * ASCE “Raise the Bar” (Policy 465), the push to require a master’s degree for licensure * HS2, the UK high-speed rail project * Not Just Bikes (YouTube) * BicycleDutch, Mark Wagenbuur * Jonathon Stalls / Pedestrian Dignity 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. Transcript Seth: Hello and welcome to the New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zeren, a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer in Providence, Rhode Island. This is a podcast about how we can transform the education of city builders. If we want to change how our cities and towns work, we need to change the people who run them. We need a new generation of city builders: architects, engineers, planners, developers, city managers, and civic leaders. We need a new school for city builders. Today I’m joined by Steffen Berr. Steffen is a civil engineer who designs transportation infrastructure to connect communities. Steffen has a BS in civil engineering in the US, but then moved to the Netherlands to learn and work in a human-centered transportation system. Steffen, welcome to the New School for City Builders. Steffen: Thanks so much for having me. I would say I’m still a recovering American civil engineer, but I became a Dutch transportation engineer. Seth: That’s going to be really interesting to talk about, that transition. The reason I reached out to you is you wrote a piece, maybe a couple of years ago now, for Next City entitled “America Has No Transportation Engineers.” That’s a spicy take. What do you mean? Steffen: That title is something that I thought about for a very long time when I was writing this, because I was trying to come up with how I could describe the problem in just a single sentence. I wrote this article after I had worked in the Netherlands for around two years. I’d worked for the private company Arcadis, which is a Dutch company that does civil engineering work and transportation work for Dutch cities as a private consultant. And then I was also working for the City of Haarlem, I believe, at the time. Working in the profession, I worked in the US industry, I worked in the Dutch profession, and I just noticed how projects were handled differently: the phases that projects would move through, how people would work on it. It differed quite a lot from my experience in the US. There’s lots of arguing in the US, and people say, “Man, these guys are uneducated, they’re stupid, they’re out of touch,” or “They’re bought by the car lobby,” or something like this. And I thought there’s a more fundamental issue here. How do I describe it? The conclusion I came to was that there’s a completely missing profession in the whole project delivery process in the United States. In the Netherlands, you have both transportation engineers and civil engineers working on projects at the same time. Whereas in the US, it seems like you only have civil engineers, not really any transportation specialists. It’s kind of like if you’re trying to build a building and you have a structural engineer and you don’t have an architect. That’s where so many of the issues in these transportation projects come from: there’s truly not a transportation expert who works on these projects. And the reason that these transportation experts don’t work on the projects is that we are not producing them at the university level, because there’s no separate education track for them. It was never about trying to call somebody unqualified or stupid. It was just saying people are trying to do something they haven’t been properly prepared for, and how could anybody do it if they haven’t gotten the proper qualifications? So it’s not necessarily a criticism of the civil engineers. It’s just saying that you need a civil engineer and you need the transportation engineer, and the transportation engineer is missing. Seth: That’s really interesting. Civil engineering as a concept, I’ve talked with other folks about this, comes out of the division between military engineering and civil engineering. The military engineers build the forts, civil engineers build the bridges and the roads, and so civil engineering as a discipline has come up as the civil side of building stuff. And today, if you go to a civil engineering program in the United States, there are a few different “specializations,” in air quotes, that you can do, but it’s generally a very generalist education. Everyone’s expected to take structures, everyone’s expected to take geotechnical, everyone probably has to take highway engineering; there’s that one class that people will take. Walk us through the different specializations that do exist in American civil engineering and why that’s not adequate preparation for what you’re describing as an alternate role. Steffen: Civil engineering has five classical subfields, as the US system is set up: transportation, structures, environmental, water resources, and geotechnical. Geotechnical focuses on foundations, retaining walls, things like this; soil is the most complex material in the world. Transportation is anything having to do with roads and streets. Structures is anything to do with upright structures. Water resources has to do with dams, aqueducts, things like that. And environmental engineering has to do with handling environmental issues on a large scale, like how to decontaminate a construction site. For example, if you had an army base with lots of toxic chemicals, how do we engineer the environment to make it safe again for other uses? So those are the classic five. I think you actually hit on something when you said a civil engineer will take highway engineering, and that goes to show you a lot. A civil engineer is going to know a lot about how to build the structure of the road itself: where the drainage pipes go, where the culverts go, what the slope of the road is, what the cross section of the asphalt surface is, how thick certain layers need to be. But what you’re not learning about is the nature of what’s using the road, and how the road itself needs to be configured in relation to everything else. Civil engineers take introduction to highway engineering, but in this class you’re not learning where highways are supposed to go. Are highways supposed to run through cities? What impact do highways have on cities? Are highways a better solution? Why only highways? If you make everything based on highways, maybe you’ll think of all roads as highways. In a way, you kind of answered the question right there: there are all of these pre-questions that need to be figured out before you even start building your road, and you need a professional to set them up and solve them. Instead of that phase, all these assumptions get made instead, for example that traffic will always grow, more roads are always better, wider is always better, and they get written into codes. So all of this real transportation engineering ends up basically getting automated and coded, and then the civil engineer takes over. A lot of times people yell at the civil engineer, but the real issue is upstream, where all of this has been automated because we’re missing the person who’s supposed to do this work. Seth: Right. If you’re an architect or a developer designing a building, you’re going to hire a structural engineer to make sure it doesn’t fall down. But you’re giving the structural engineer direction on how big it is, mostly what it’s made out of, and what uses are going into it. You’re giving them a bunch of parameters, and those parameters come from an awareness of a bunch of other values (economic value

  2. Sep 15

    You can just teach things: the origin of the Summer Studio

    Seth Zeren talks with Will McCollum (architect, urbanist, and founder of Citymakers Collective) and Christine Franck (architect, educator, and author; first executive director of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art) about what it means to be a "city builder," the gaps in professional design education, and the story behind Citymakers Collective's Summer Studio — the urban-design intensive Will and Christine built together, in partnership with INTBAU USA. 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. Organizations & Programs Mentioned * Citymakers Collective — citymakerscollective.org — Will’s organization; runs the two-week Summer Studio * Clever Communities Workshop — citymakerscollective.org/clever-communities-workshop — New economic-development workshop, Dallas area, September * INTBAU (International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism) — intbau.org — Global network; celebrated 25th anniversary in London * INTBAU USA — intbauusa.org — US chapter; co-organizes the Summer Studio with Citymakers Collective * Institute of Classical Architecture & Art (ICAA) — classicist.org — Christine’s former organization; runs its own summer program since 1992 * Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) — cnu.org — Referenced throughout as a hub for New Urbanist practice * (New) Urban Guild — urbanguild.org — Christine is a founding member * The King’s Foundation (formerly the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture / The Prince’s Foundation) — kings-foundation.org — Ran the first traditional-architecture summer school in 1990 * University of Colorado Denver, College of Architecture & Planning — architectureandplanning.ucdenver.edu — Christine established a research center here * Georgia Tech School of Architecture — arch.gatech.edu — Will and Christine both taught/studied here * Tulane School of Architecture — architecture.tulane.edu — Will’s graduate program (real estate development + M.Arch) * University of Notre Dame School of Architecture — architecture.nd.edu — Referenced as a model of a distinctive, non-mainstream program * Lew Oliver / Whole Town Solutions — wholetownsolutions.com — Will’s early mentor in New Urbanism Books Recommended * How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built — Stewart Brand (Christine’s pick) — Penguin Random House * Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity — Paul Kingsnorth (Christine, currently reading) — Penguin Random House * The Image of the City — Kevin Lynch (Will’s pick) — MIT Press * The Art of Building Cities — Camillo Sitte (Will’s pick) — overview; currently in print via Martino Fine Books, among other reprint editions * Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism — Robert Jan van Pelt & Carroll William Westfall (Christine’s pick) — Yale University Press, via Goodreads Also Referenced * Windsor Forum on Design Education: Toward an Ideal Curriculum to Reform Architectural Education (New Urban Press, 2004) — proceedings of an April 2002 gathering of architecture educators in Windsor, FL, including Christine’s own contribution. Christine’s write-up · CNU book review * The Boyer Report (Building Community: A New Future for Architecture Education and Practice, 1996) — mentioned in connection with the Windsor Forum as a landmark study on design education The New School for City Builders — Will McCollum & Christine Franck Seth: Hello and welcome to The New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zeren, a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer in Providence, Rhode Island. This is a podcast about how we can transform the education of city builders. If we want to change how our cities and towns work, we need to change the people who run them. We need a new generation of city builders — architects, engineers, planners, developers, city managers, and civic leaders. We need a new school for city builders. Joining me today are Will McCollum and Christine Franck. Will is an architect and urbanist based in Boston and the founder and driving force behind the City Makers Collective and its summer studio, which just wrapped up its second summer a few weeks ago. We heard about the summer studio from Sarah Biga and Jack Duncan in episode two, and we’re excited to get a behind-the-scenes look at how that got created. Christine Franck is an architect, educator, and author living in Denver, Colorado, and was instrumental in helping launch the summer school. Christine has a long history as an educator and leader in classical and traditional architecture and urbanism, including serving as the first executive director of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art, which also runs its own great summer school; as a founding member of the Urban Guild; and as a founding member and chair of the USA chapter of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism — better known as INTBAU. Will, Christine, welcome to The New School for City Builders. Christine: Thanks for having us, Seth. It’s nice to be back together with Will — we just spent two weeks in Charleston, as you know, so this feels a little like a reunion. Will: Yeah, it’s lovely to be here. Thanks. Seth: It’s a nice place to get to spend a couple weeks with friends looking at cities and buildings. So let’s start with both of you: I use the term “city builder” a lot — it’s the name of the podcast — and I’m curious what that means to each of you. Christine, why don’t we start with you? Christine: Sure. A city builder — city building, I think in a way, Seth, strikes me as distinct from placemaking. Placemaking’s good, but city building — and I’m familiar with your work and some of your ideas — I think is ultimately not merely about the mechanisms that are in place that create our cities, but that we’re actually creating the cities themselves: the civitas, the community of people who live in a place, who make a place theirs, who own their place. So it’s about the making of the city, not as a physical place, but as an entity within people’s communities. That’s what I think of as city building, and it’s what I hope I’ve always contributed to in my career as an architect and educator. Seth: I love that — the city is not just some buildings, it’s also the people who live within it. To be a city builder, I see it as — there are these city-building professions, right, that become these professional silos: architecture, planning, engineering, development. But to bring those together, and to think about them not just as building a physical place that we call the city, but also the broader community, the institutions, the business models, how you actually run this place... I feel like when I encounter students who see this larger vision, but then they go through professional education, they feel like they’re getting some partial, very thin experience. So, Christine, from your perspective, what does a young person need to learn in order to become a great city builder? Christine: I think, Seth, in many ways, one of the most important things a young person can do is actually just get involved with their community. I think we go through education, and so much of our university educations today are skills-based — it’s as if you’re going to university to get a degree in order to get a job. And I think that loses the idea of what a university education is meant to be, which is a very broad education. You might have a little bit of philosophy, a little bit of history, you might begin to think about what you want to specialize in. I really encourage students that I mentor to take a very broad career path and degree at the undergraduate level, and then, if they need to for professional certification — like becoming an architect — to specialize in a master’s program where they can make a very conscious choice. But I think this idea — and I know you’re concerned about this too — of the siloing of the professions... really getting involved with your community at whatever level that is. Will and I may share a story about one of our students on the summer program who is just recently out of high school and has created a group and is advocating for change in his city. I think the other thing I find with education is that students often come to me or to colleagues saying, “What do I need to learn? How do I do this?” And the fact of the matter is, people like myself, who got interested in these ideas thirty, forty years ago — we taught ourselves. No one is coming to rescue you. You kind of have to pick up, as Will has done with his colleagues at City Makers, as we did with INTBAU, as we once did with the Institute — you just have to pick up and do what you think needs doing. I’ll stop there. Seth: I think one of the things I’ve observed too is that in some sense people still feel like they need permission — they need the credential to work. And one of the things I’ve noticed when I’ve traveled and worked internationally is that that hasn’t been true in all places and all times. It used to be the case that many people would just do stuff, and it might be a very small scale — it might just be building something on their street: a wall, a shrine, a well, a market. It was just at this very incremental level, and it didn’t need to have imprimatur and all this history. That’s the meaning of vernacular urbanism, vernacular design and creation. So, for you, Will — what does it mean to be a great city builder, and what does a young person need to be learning if they want to walk this path? Will: I think a great city builder is active in their community. Like Christine was just saying, they take an active role in the creation of their own place. When we formed City Maker

  3. Sep 1

    City Manager as City Building Maestro

    Summary In this episode of The New School for City Builders, host Seth Zeren talks with George Proakis, city manager of Watertown, Massachusetts, about the winding educational path that shaped his career — from a civil engineering degree at Northeastern, to a master’s in public administration at Syracuse’s Maxwell School, to a master’s in city planning at MIT. George traces his rise from associate planner in Lowell to planning director in Somerville to city manager in Watertown, reflecting along the way on what actually prepares someone to lead a planning department or run a city: budget and personnel management, patience, team-building, and — a theme he returns to again and again — the value of pairing policy training with real design education. He also talks about teaching Planning in the Built Environment at Northeastern, what he’d change about city-builder education if he could start from scratch, and the growing crop of planners-turned-city-managers reshaping local government. Referenced Organizations * Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) — national organization mixing planners, architects, developers, and engineers * CNU New England — the regional chapter George has been involved with since it started * International City/County Management Association (ICMA) — professional association for city and county managers * MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) — where George earned his master’s in city planning * Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs — where George earned his MPA * Northeastern University — Urban Planning and Policy, MS — the program George now teaches in, alongside Northeastern’s civil engineering program where he did his undergrad * City of Watertown, MA — where George currently serves as city manager * City of Somerville, MA — where George spent 12 years, the last three and a half running the planning and development department * City of Lowell, MA — George’s first planning job, and where he later served as chief planner Referenced Books * Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back (PublicAffairs, 2025) * Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance (Avid Reader Press, 2025) Full Transcript Seth: Hello and welcome to the New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zeren, a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer in Providence, Rhode Island. This is a podcast about how we can transform the education of city builders. If we want to change how our cities and towns work, we need to change the people who run them. We need a new generation of city builders — architects, engineers, planners, developers, city managers, and civic leaders. We need a new school for city builders. Today I am joined by my good friend George Proakis. I met George back when I was a zoning planner in the Boston area, and he was the planning director for Somerville, Massachusetts. We would get together with the zoning planner for Cambridge and commiserate at an Irish pub. George is one of the planners I respect most. He’s an expert at both the technical and political aspects of the job, and a true example of a city builder on the public side. Today, George is the city manager for Watertown, Massachusetts, where he oversees all aspects of the city’s daily operations. He also teaches planning and the built environment at Northeastern University. Today, George and I talk about his education, his career trajectory, and glean some valuable nuggets of wisdom about how to become a great city builder. George, welcome to the New School for City Builders. George Proakis: Thank you. Thanks, Seth, for having me — it’s great to be here. Seth: It’s a real pleasure. So, George, how did you become a planner in the first place? What was your educational journey? George Proakis: My educational journey meandered through a couple of steps that landed me in the spot where I probably should have known I’d end up from a very early age. But nonetheless — I first thought I wanted to be an engineer. I went to undergrad at Northeastern for civil engineering. Northeastern’s great: they have a co-op program that lets you work in the real world. I did a minor in political science alongside the engineering major, and I worked three different engineering jobs during my time in school. The one clear lesson that came out of that whole experience was that I wasn’t supposed to be an engineer. I was always more interested in the policy questions behind the work. You learn transportation engineering as an engineering discipline, but I was the one in class pushing the social science questions. Seth: What about it was a bad fit for you? George Proakis: Well — what’s the policy that determines whether or not we build more bike lanes? What’s the real reason we’re doing this highway? Is it just because somebody ran the numbers, or did someone decide beforehand that this project was more important than another? Who’s that person, and what role are they playing? Seth: I feel like there was a moment in your class where you kept using the word “should,” and the professor said, “In this class, we don’t talk about shoulds. We’re not making value judgments here, George.” George Proakis: Yes. And the interesting thing was, I concentrated on the transportation side, and if you look across the engineering disciplines, transportation engineering is unique — you’re applying a lot more value judgment, even social-science-level questions, to your decision-making. It’s also the only engineering discipline where, once you get deep into the numbers, you’re actually trying to predict human behavior rather than something purely scientific. If you specialize in structures, your focus is on how the concrete holds up — sure, there’s some judgment in how much weight it needs to bear, but it’s still concrete. When you move into transportation, it’s about how many people will take a right and cut down a side street if a light is too slow. Suddenly you’re predicting human behavior, and that’s a different world than the rest of the engineering skill set. Seth: Yeah. George Proakis: It was fascinating, though. I had great professors and a strong engineering background. My conclusion at the end of that program was simply that I didn’t want to be an engineer. So I decided to get a master’s in public administration at Syracuse — a one-year, focused program where public management and that kind of engineering work come together. I left there with a job in Syracuse, working for a research company doing alternative energy and environmental policy — really interesting stuff. I did that for about three years. By the end, we were focused on two things: bringing electric vehicle companies to upstate New York, where we were about twenty years ahead of our time since no one was really building EVs yet, and encouraging the growth of the corn ethanol industry to support upstate New York farms — a fascinating economic development challenge in its own right. But rural economic development in farm country probably wasn’t the right fit for me. At some point I moved back to Boston, because it was home and where I wanted to be. I landed in the Fenway neighborhood, which is where my community-activist streak started. I got involved in some things there, got really interested in planning, and decided I wanted a master’s in planning. I did the program at MIT — which is how I ended up with two master’s degrees, one in public administration and one in planning. Seth: Double threat — no, triple threat: engineer, public administrator, and planner. That’s a real superpower mix. So what was your first planning job, once you had the degree from MIT? George Proakis: My first planning job out of MIT was associate planner for the city of Lowell. Half of that job was long-range planning — they were doing a comprehensive plan, a zoning overhaul, and neighborhood plan work. The other half was managing the projects coming before the planning board, which to this day I’ll tell people is the best first planning job anybody can have. If you’re sitting there processing projects moving through the zoning code — site plans, special permits, variances — meeting with people who say, “I want to do this on my lot,” or “I want to tear this house down and build twenty-two units — can I do that? Do the rules allow it? Does the land allow it? Will the neighbors allow it? Will the board allow it?” — working through those problems is a genuinely challenging way to learn every aspect of planning. I’ve always said that from that job you can jump into almost any other planning role, which is exactly why it’s such a valuable first one. That’s what I did for my first two years out of MIT. Seth: That’s what I did in my first planning job too, and then I jumped to the dark side and became a developer. So it’s a wide-ranging foundation for a lot of paths in city-building. George Proakis: Right — you can do that job for a couple of years and then jump to becoming a developer. Or spend a couple of years and move into affordable housing. Or get more involved in urban design projects. Or jump to the private sector and help rewrite zoning, because you know how it works. Or, if you’ve got an MPA like me, you can get promoted fairly quickly into managing people — which is what happened to me. Seth: So how did you get yourself promoted? You were a frontline planner in Lowell, and then at some point you became the director there, right? George Proakis: Yeah. I ended up director of the planning and zoning team, and then took a deputy director role over the whole community development and planning department. So I got two promotions during my time there. The first was to run the team I’d already been a member of — I got it mainly because the people above me were promoted and a spot opened up, and

  4. Aug 18

    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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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

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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

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