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 SchoolKevin 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 RealityKevin 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 better cities. They were inspired to go to architecture school, but they arrived there and realized, “This is not what I thought I was signing up for. I thought you were going to teach me how to design good-looking buildings in a nice city, and that’s actually not the program here.”Going back to what you spoke about with Las Catalinas, let’s talk a bit more about this “of our time” nature. You’ve got an example of a place that is not ashamed to copy ideas from other times, and it turns out to be quite lovely. But we’re not allowed to do that in architecture school.The Concept of Time vs. PlaceKevin Klinkenberg: One of the foundational principles in architecture school is the zeitgeist—the idea that everything we do must be “of our time.” You really buy into that when you’re 18, 19, or 20 years old. You think, “Oh God, yeah, we’ve got to capture the spirit of our time and reflect that in our designs.”When you get a little distance from that, you start to realize just how stupid and destructive that is. First of all, it’s stupid because anything any of us do is, by its very nature, of our time. Imagine the people you dislike the most—well, they are part of our time too, right? That’s part of the zeitgeist, but we don’t want to talk about that. There’s this purposeful exclusion of things that people may otherwise like or dislike just to reflect whatever the fashion of the moment is in school. In my six years in architecture school, I think the fashion changed three times.Our friend Steve Mouzon has a much more thoughtful and gentlemanly critique than mine. His focus is really on what we should actually be talking about: being “of our place.” That notion is not really considered very much in most architecture schools—the idea that place matters more than a time or an era.Seth Zeren: No, it isn’t. And I sometimes get crosswise with historic preservationists who adopt this same conception that new buildings near old buildings must look radically different, just in case we mistake the new buildings for old ones.At the same time, I look at neighborhoods of Greek Revival buildings and think, “You know, the Greek Revival was just an attempt to turn a Greek temple into a house, right?” It’s a pastiche. There are houses in Providence that are wood buildings with clabbered siding, but on the corners, they have created fake coining out of wood to look like big blocks of stone. It was a pastiche, but now that building is considered sacred and must be preserved. 100 years ago, we could do a pastiche where we played with old ideas and put them into a nice form that people liked, and it was okay. If we did the exact same thing today, it would be viewed as a great sin against the city and against design. It’s just bizarre.Kevin Klinkenberg: Yeah. Well, you see how circular this all gets. Once Mid-century Modern became fashionable again—and there’s a lot of mid-century stuff that I think is really cool and brilliant—people started copying those designs again. You start to understand how intellectually tortured you have to be to accept some things and reject others. Why don’t we just do what is pleasing to us? Why can’t we just do the things that we like and enjoy them? Why do we have to justify everything with some b******t theory?Seth Zeren: Right. So going back to your own education, it sounds like you came up inside the madhouse. How did you escape? What was your door out?Finding the Exit: From Indoctrination to SeasideKevin Klinkenberg: I’m not sure. It probably says a lot about the quirks of my own personality; I just tend to be overly skeptical of just about everything. But I got really interested at some point in Seaside, Florida, which was still very early in its development when I was in school. There wasn’t a whole lot built there yet, but it had started to captivate the attention of both the architectural and popular press.I started reading a little bit about it and reading some of the early things that Andrés Duany wrote. There was a particular essay he wrote for a magazine called Architectural Design (or AD, as we called it) titled “Traditional Towns.” It was only about four pages long, but I still have that copy in boxes because it completely resonated with me. I found it incredibly compelling.Because I was so deep in the indoctrination, I also found it very upsetting. It elicited a lot of emotion from me. I underlined a lot of different parts and started to really think about it. There were things he said that made me really angry because they went against what I had been thinking up until that time. This was around my third or fourth year in architecture school, but it made me stop and think.Then I started to look for more information. One year, a group of us took a spring break trip and went to Seaside as a day trip away from Panama City Beach. We got to walk around, and at that point, I was pretty much a changed person. Even though there were only a small number of streets built at the time, I really began to see, “Wow, you mean we could actually do this? We could build places like this? This is pretty cool.”Seth Zeren: Yeah. Sometimes it can feel like we are squatting in a city built for us by our ancestors that we don’t even know how to recreate. When you find a place like Seaside, that feeling of impotence falls away. All the nice cities, towns, and buildings were built by people in the past with roughly our same bodies, proportions, ideas, and words. There’s no reason we can’t build them again, or iterate on those designs. We don’t have to just start from scratch.Kevin Klinkenberg: Right. It’s not like it was all built by an alien race of human beings from 150 years ago who possessed so much more knowledge than we have.Seth Zeren: Yeah. If you could go back in time to your 20-year-old self, what do you wish you had been taught? Looking back, what would you hope an architecture education would look like instead?Rethinking the Curriculum: Business, Craft, and DrawingKevin Klinkenberg: It’s an interesting question. When I was in my 20s and still in school, we used to always critique our own education. That was a favorite pastime because it was such an involved degree. The architectural degree at the time was a five-year Bachelor of Architecture program that required about 200 credit hours. It was intense. Most of us actually took six years to finish because we’d take a year off from the design studio somewhere along the way, which I did as well.Now that I’m older and have some distance, there is still a lot about it that I think was really good. But there were certain things we had too much of, and other things I wish we had more of.Obviously, we talked about the indoctrination—it would be nice if that wasn’t so blatant. But I would also tell a younger person today to lean more into understanding the entrepreneurial and business world. So many architects end up hanging out a shingle or wanting to go into business, but they are afraid to because we weren’t educated in it. We didn’t have a single required business course in those 200 credit hours—not even basic accounting. It would have been nice to have some background there.It would also have been nice to have forced experience working in construction so you can really see, feel, and touch how buildings go together. I definitely benefited from making sure that I worked quite a bit during college. It was at a time when college was still pretty cheap; I had help from my parents to pay for the basics, but I worked to have my own spending money. I spent a good amount of that money traveling to other places.As a younger person, the more exposure you can get to different parts of the world and vastly different ways of doing things, the better. There was that trip to Seaside, but there were a couple of other international trips I took that really opened my eyes to the fact that people in other countries lived in very modern ways—with all the modern conveniences we had—but they lived in beautiful, functional cities where you could walk everywhere. That really affected me and galvanized me to try to figure out how to do that back home.Seth Zeren: I feel like for most Americans growing up in a car-dependent suburb, even if you read about it in a book, you can’t quite understand it until you go to a place where people can transact their lives on foot. We talk about this like it’s either an innovation or some sort of retrograde thing, but for 99% of human history, all the places we love were built by people who walked.Kevin Klinkenberg: Exactly. One other thing that just occurred to me regarding what to do differently: I occasionally talk to high school kids or people thinking about going back to school who are interested in architecture. One thing we run into a lot is really bad advice given by school counselors. A lot of them don’t necessarily know what this world entails or what skills you actually need.A really common thing said to people going into architecture is, “You need a lot of math and science.” I heard that a lot, and I tell people today that it’s just really not true. Most of your complex math and structural science is going to be done by computers anyway. Learn the basics, understand things, don’t be dumb—but you don’t need to understand particle physics or calculus to be an architect, even though we had to take it.What is actually helpful—and what I wish I had done more as a younger person—is taking the time to learn to draw really well freehand. That is an incredibly useful skill that you can carry with you your whole life, even in the age of technology and AI. The person who can pick up a pen or a pencil and draw convincingly with their own hands brings a lot of value to the table, and there’s immense personal value to it as well.Seth Zeren: You mentioned there were some parts of your architectural education that you thought were really constructive and productive. What were those?Kevin Klinkenberg: There’s a lot to the unique nature of the studio experience that was actually pretty good. The fact that you are intensely focused on projects teaches you to work hard. We spent a lot of hours working much harder than the average college student. That was always a joke on campus: “Which building is the architecture school? It’s the one with the lights on all night long.”It breeds a strong work ethic, intellectual critique, and deep thought. There’s a certain kind of open-mindedness to it that is really good, and there’s a real camaraderie with the people you go to school with because you’re spending so much time together. In the end, what I’ve seen with people who go through an architectural education is that they tend to develop great problem-solving skills. Whether or not they actually become designers or even stay in the field, it’s a fantastic basis for learning how to solve all kinds of problems.Seth Zeren: It’s the original “design thinking” program, I suppose.Kevin Klinkenberg: Yeah, for sure.Seth Zeren: Obviously, you learn some useful things in school, but when you look back, there’s a lot of other stuff you’ve had to learn. Is there any point in trying to fix the schools, or should we just embrace the school of hard knocks as the only real way to get people up to speed?Kevin Klinkenberg: No, there’s got to be value in fixing the educational process and making it more productive and useful. I think it would be incredibly helpful if we could figure out how to train young people into this world without needing six—or even four—years of college, especially in an age where everything moves so quickly. There’s absolutely value in finding a pedagogical process that works to train young people. But it’s also a total cliché because it’s true: you’re going to learn so much more the minute you start working in the real world. Your education level changes completely.Seth Zeren: Architecture, until quite recently, was an apprenticeship craft. Architecture schools are relatively new. If you wanted to become an architect 100 years ago, you would find a practicing architect, go work for them as a draftsperson, and learn to draw and draft. Then, depending on how that went, you would lever up inside the system. Even under licensure today, there’s an expectation that you have to have a certain number of hours of professional practice. You have to wonder: why do we require both a really long degree and a really long field practice?From a developer’s perspective, I want to teach you a certain basic, useful set of knowledge, and then I need to get you out in front of projects in the weeds dealing with real stuff. That is where the knowledge begins to accumulate. How do we give people just enough to be useful, get them out there, and ensure they are prepared to continue learning throughout their careers?Kevin Klinkenberg: When I had my architecture firm and we would interview and hire architects right out of school, it was interesting because you view things through a different lens. We came to a point where we didn’t care as much about how flashy someone’s portfolio was. We cared a little, but we ended up hiring much more based on attitude, work ethic, and whether they were teachable. That proved out really well for us. If you find people who have a good attitude and are teachable, they’re going to learn quickly and become very useful. But there are a lot of people who are very hung up on their “awesome design portfolio” and think they’re already great, and those don’t always work out so well.Seth Zeren: Right. It’s perhaps adversely selected by the way schools reward that “starchitect” mentality. When I got out of planning school and was working as a planner, I would meet architects. Before that, I had been at the Yale School of Architecture—a very fancy school—dealing with people whose studio projects involved designing a new parliament for Pakistan. Then I went into practice and met architects who were designing kitchen remodels. It’s a totally different thing, yet they’re the ones who have an actual business—renovating houses, building new homes, doing tenant fit-outs for stores. There are a lot of interesting design choices required to make those projects cost-effective, beautiful, and functional, but I didn’t see any of that in the academic architecture studios.Kevin Klinkenberg: Yeah. Coming out of school, there was one other set of decisions I made that worked out really well for me, so I always recommend it to young people: when you get out of school, go work for a small firm. Go work for a small firm where you can get experience doing a lot of different things, and you’ll be exposed to everything within three years. If you go to a really big firm, your skillset becomes very narrow, and there is a whole side of the business that you’re just never going to see.That worked out great for me. At the first firm I worked for, I was the fourth person on staff. Within two years, the list of projects I had worked on was extensive. In that world, to get a raise, you often went and got a job at a different firm after a few years. When I interviewed around, people were astounded by how many different kinds of projects I had worked on in that short time period. Not to mention, you get to see the marketing side of the business and all the internal operations that you will eventually need one day.Seth Zeren: Yeah, if you want to become a principal or lead a firm. Well, you’re not practicing architecture anymore, right? Speaking of leadership, you left the traditional architecture world and now you are running a business improvement district, Midtown KC Now. Tell us a little bit about what you do there and the transition from being an architect and designer to running a place management entity.The Three Legs of the Stool: Design, Policy, and ManagementKevin Klinkenberg: Yeah, sort of. Technically, I am still an architect; I keep my license active and I will never relinquish it—I worked too long and hard to get it! But you’re right, I don’t practice traditional architecture and haven’t for a while.It was a long and winding path to end up doing what I’m doing now. Around 2010 and 2011, things were very slow in the field due to the recession. I was in Savannah, Georgia, and I applied for and got a job running a downtown redevelopment authority for the city, which I did for four years. That was a whole different ballgame than being an architect, though there was a lot of urban planning involved. I leveraged as much time as I could to work on the things that I loved, but a lot of it was really about economic development and district improvement.As part of my own background, I’ve always had a knack for managing organizations and people, so falling into a role like that was fairly easy for me. It was very political, and there was a lot about that aspect I didn’t like, but it was also very interesting. As an architect, having a role where I could help shape the development of a city like Savannah was amazing. My role was small, but we played a part, people listened to us, and we ended up completing a new master plan for downtown Savannah that hadn’t been updated in decades, which had some great spinoff effects.When I moved back to Kansas City, I was hoping to stay away from the political world and get back into architecture and planning consulting. Then, the job opened up for the organization I lead now. I applied not completely sure if I wanted to do it, but I was offered the position and decided to take it—I had two little kids and it seemed like a stable move.We have an interesting organization. In the trade, it’s called a “place management organization,” and the overarching trade group is the International Downtown Association. We are a midtown group, which is downtown-adjacent. It’s basically a nonprofit involved in everything we can do to improve one small area of our city. In Missouri, they call them Community Improvement Districts (CIDs). We manage three of them, which feature clean-and-safe programs operating 24/7. I never in a million years would have guessed I would end up doing this—I’ve been in this job for six and a half years now. There are still opportunities where I can use my design skills to make physical improvements, but an awful lot of it is just public space management, and it has been a real education.Seth Zeren: You and I have talked in the past about how, for young people coming into this world, the emphasis tends to be either on design or on policy. But there’s a third leg of the stool—implementation and management—that doesn’t get nearly enough attention.Kevin Klinkenberg: Back in 2003, I was selected to be a Knight Fellow in community building through the University of Miami and the Knight Foundation. It was a program that Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk helped create. We spent quite a bit of time with Liz, and she always has a very succinct way of speaking about things. She explained that there are three legs to the community building stool: design, policy, and management.She used parking as an example. On the design side, you look at how big the stalls are, where the driveways go, and the landscaping. On the policy side, you look at the rules—how much parking is required and where it’s allowed. But then there’s the management side: who actually runs and operates the parking areas? Who ensures things get maintained and repaired? Who collects the money for parking fees?When she talked about that, it stuck with me my whole life. It’s such a simple concept, but it resonated deeply. I worked most of my life in design and policy, so the weird thing is that for the last six and a half years, I’ve worked primarily in management and experienced this specific corner of the world. It is incredibly impactful. One of my main takeaways from this job is that I wish more planners wanted to do work like this. Planners are uniquely set up to be good at these types of jobs because there’s a lot of community engagement, a wide variety of urban issues, and organizational management involved. Frankly, as a planner, it’s way more rewarding to do a job like this than to sit in a large city office reviewing permit applications all day long. To be blunt, this is far more interesting.Seth Zeren: You’ve written before about how you have much more impact, control, and ability to iterate when you’re working on a dozen square blocks than you do trying to work on an entire city from a downtown office building that you never leave. Tell me more about some of the projects you’ve been able to accomplish at that neighborhood block scale.Kevin Klinkenberg: There’s no question about it. One of the simple things we’ve done is a lot of small traffic calming and beautification projects. Most of the money raised through our CIDs comes from a combination of sales tax and property tax, and the bulk of it goes to staffing our security and cleanliness operations. But we are able to use a portion of it for placemaking projects. We use that money to leverage other city funds or donor funds to make a visible difference with traffic calming and small-scale street improvements. Six years in, you can really see the cumulative effect. The first year or two it’s hard to notice, but now it’s clear where it’s making a difference.These are not the sexiest things in the world, but they are highly impactful. We also get to work directly with local businesses to help them with branding, marketing, and management to improve the commercial district in ways that you just can’t do from City Hall.Seth Zeren: It is slow, but it accumulates. It’s a lot like our development work; I look at what I did this year and think we didn’t do that much, but I look at what we did over the last six years and realize we accomplished a lot. When I was a city planner on city staff, the best I could hope for was that the council approved my zoning amendment without adding too many weird changes. You don’t have a budget line to move shovels around, put up artwork, or engage at the management level.That three-legged stool Liz talked about is so powerful because our education systems place far too little emphasis on management—both private management (how to run a successful firm that delivers good design) and public management. We have planners stuck in the cul-de-sac of the planning department instead of being embedded across city government. Who’s running the Department of Public Works, the parks, and the traffic division? We need that city-building orientation in those operational departments.Kevin Klinkenberg: It’s the great mystery that nobody talks about. Everyone who is interested in cities wants to talk about policy all day long. Policy can make a difference—we just passed an ordinance to remove minimum parking requirements in a big chunk of our city, which is a great thing. And on the design side, cities are really good at raising $100 million through a bond issue to go build something cool. But nobody ever talks about who is going to maintain it, how we are going to fund that maintenance, and who the actual people are that will do the work. How do they do their jobs, and how do we decide if they’re doing a good job? We just don’t talk about it, but it’s vital because we can build the greatest infrastructure in the world, but if it isn’t maintained, it all falls apart.Seth Zeren: Absolutely. Why do you think we don’t do a better job of emphasizing management training early in people’s careers? Why don’t people get that bug?Kevin Klinkenberg: It’s just not sexy. It’s not nearly as glamorous as the other things. You can sell the idea that you’re going to change the world through great design or the perfect policy. Not many 18-year-olds are attracted to the idea of figuring out how to keep a specific block clean every day or determining which parking meter to buy. Right now, our organization is going through a whole logistical process regarding public trash cans, and we spend a lot of time talking about details like that.Seth Zeren: Right—what’s the best trash can to buy? What is the painting schedule for the buildings in the public park? Should they be painted every five years or every seven years? Yet, if no one is making those operational decisions, everything deteriorates.Kevin Klinkenberg: It really matters. The work we do is incredibly impactful in our corner of the city. We are probably bad at self-promotion and patting ourselves on the back to say, “Here is what we grind out every day,” except to the people who are intimately involved and know the score. But organizations like ours make a massive difference in their communities. It would be highly noticeable if we suddenly didn’t exist.Seth Zeren: People would definitely miss you if you were gone, for sure.Stepping back a bit, if we were giving advice to a young person today who wants to be a city builder—maybe someone in high school thinking about a career in these professions—what are three or four things you would tell them to focus on?Advice for the Next Generation of City BuildersKevin Klinkenberg: It’s probably a collection of things that might seem a bit unusual. There is so much more information available now than when I was that age—just on YouTube alone, the amount of educational content is incredible.First, I think there is incredible value in learning the design classics and understanding the foundational books about urban design that are 120 years old or more. They give you a baseline for thinking about design that stands the test of time.Second, there is real value in going out to see places and actually measuring the things you like—stopping and observing the world. When we all started out in New Urbanism, what captured our attention was that nothing was purely theoretical. If we saw a street that we thought was beautiful and pleasant, we would stop and measure every bit of it: how wide it was, how wide the parking lanes were, how long the stalls were, what kinds of trees were planted, the distance between the buildings, and the nature of the building materials. Being very specific about learning those physical elements is incredibly useful. I’m a big believer in experiential learning: get out into the world, figure out what you like and don’t like, and put pen to paper to understand it.Third, there is tremendous value in learning about economics and business as early as possible. The sooner you learn finance and how the economic world works, the better off you’ll be. You might not use it immediately, but having that knowledge is crucial. I didn’t get that exposure early enough in life. I knew the value of saving money, but I didn’t understand anything about development finance until I was probably 35 years old, much to my detriment. If I had understood it sooner, I was ready and eager to try some small-scale development projects in my 20s, but I didn’t know the first thing about it and was intimidated by it. The more you can learn about that at a young age, the better.Seth Zeren: Didn’t you just interview a 25-year-old on your podcast who is renovating a massive historic hotel?Kevin Klinkenberg: Oh my god, yes! He’s a very gung-ho, young local guy who just said, “I’m 25 and I’m going to make it happen.” I love that he’s aggressive like that; it’s kick-ass. But at 25, I wouldn’t have known up from down when it came to any of that.Seth Zeren: He’s a force of nature. If you look back at the biographies of some of the people who shaped our cities—both for good and for ill—they were often in their 30s and 40s when they started doing some of their most significant work. It feels like we have structurally made the pathway to being able to create real effects in the world longer and slower. I don’t know if that’s because of what we are teaching or the barriers we put in place, but we have this idea that it should take a very long time to get to a certain point. Throughout human history, people have proven they can get there much faster if we give them the right preparation and let them do it.Kevin Klinkenberg: No doubt. One of the recurring themes I like to feature on my podcast is people who have the audacity to just do things without looking for permission. They are just going to make things happen. We don’t emphasize that enough. There’s no question we’ve made a lot of things way too hard to do in city building, but you can still just go figure it out.I was thinking about the first major project I worked on when we started our own firm. It was a 260-acre traditional neighborhood development here in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, called New Longview. We designed it when I was 31 years old. That project is 25 years old this year. I go out there now and I’m amazed by how good it looks and how cool it is. Sure, there are things we didn’t do well and mistakes that happened, but a lot of it is just really good. I look back and think, “I was only 31 when I did that.” You don’t have to wait until you have decades of experience to do good things.Closing RecommendationsSeth Zeren: Well, Kevin, I really appreciate all the time you’ve given me today. I have a few quick closing questions before I let you go. What is one place that people should visit to learn more about building and running cities, and what lesson should they take away from it?Kevin Klinkenberg: I’m probably not going to surprise you here, but I think one of the most remarkable places is Savannah, Georgia. There is so much to be learned from it. Savannah was a very intentionally planned city designed in a gridiron fashion, which actually makes its DNA a lot more like the rest of America than many older, organic European cities. It’s a remarkable place that demonstrates the value of beautiful, high-quality public space, and shows just how great a walkable city can be in this country. There is a wonderful recipe there and so many lessons to be learned just by walking around.Seth Zeren: Absolutely. What is one book you would recommend to our audience?Kevin Klinkenberg: One book that has always stuck with me over the years is a little book called City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village by David Sucher. David is a developer in Seattle. It’s a very small, quirky, photograph-heavy book that he wrote in the ‘90s, and I think he has since published a revised edition. It’s filled with great little anecdotes and examples of small things we can do to make a city more enjoyable to walk around in. He had a brilliant way of distilling complex urban design concepts down into something very readable. It’s the kind of book you can sit down and read the whole way through in an hour, and I’ve always loved it.Seth Zeren: That’s a great one to check out. Lastly, what is one thing that is giving you hope for the future of city building?Kevin Klinkenberg: I think there are a couple of things. In spite of you and I frequently bemoaning the current state of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) and noting that it might not be the shining star it used to be, the reality is that a lot of what we worked on, talked about, and pushed for over the last few decades has successfully filtered into the mainstream professions.There is a lot about urban design, architecture, and building that is vastly better today than it was 30 years ago. If you compare the quality of a major urban redevelopment project today versus 30 years ago, there’s almost no comparison. Today’s projects are much better designed and executed, which is terrific.I also get a lot of hope from the increasing emphasis on the small developer and incremental development world over the last decade. The rise of the conversation around missing middle housing and incremental development is incredibly hopeful. I really think that’s where the action needs to be if we’re going to have successful cities and towns. We have a long way to go to figure out how to smooth out the systemic kinks and make it easier to execute, as you well know from personal experience, but the fact that this ethos is gaining so much mainstream interest now is fantastic.Seth Zeren: Yeah. Well, thank you very much, Kevin. It was great having you on the show, and I’m looking forward to talking to you again soon.Kevin Klinkenberg: Thank you, Seth. I appreciate it, I’m honored to be on the podcast, and good luck with it all.Seth Zeren: Thanks. Get full access to Build the Next Right Thing at buildthenextrightthing.substack.com/subscribe