CityCollective

Ten years into building one of the most unique AEC firms in the world, City Collective Managing Partners David Cooke, RAIA, MPIA and Justin Kearnan, AIA talk about what it actually takes to move the needle on the problems cities can't seem to solve.  City Collective was built around a simple but radical premise: that the only way to solve a city's toughest challenges is to bring every discipline into the same room. In this conversation, Managing Partners David Cooke, RAIA, MPIA and Justin Kearnan, AIA walk us through the firm's holistic design approach, from writing their own economic pro formas to unlock housing deals, to championing the "missing middle" housing typologies that were effectively regulated out of existence for half a century. They share how City Collective operates as a single design culture across Australia and the United States, why they hire for people with roots in at least two disciplines, and what it looks like to bring sports and community infrastructure into the same equity-driven framework they apply to affordable housing.