The New School for City Builders

This week friend of the pod Aaron Lubeck joins to interview me about the origins of this podcast, and in particular my piece: Toward a New School of City Builders. Thanks for listening!Seth Zeren: Hello and welcome to The New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zeren, a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer in Providence, Rhode Island. Joining me today is Aaron Lubeck, an incremental developer and designer in Durham, North Carolina. Aaron has taught historic rehabilitation and sustainable design at Duke University and with the Incremental Development Alliance. He created the podcast for the National Town Builders Association, and he’s probably more responsible than anyone else for pushing me to start this podcast.In today’s conversation, Aaron will also turn the tables and interview me about the origin of this podcast and the need for a new school for city builders. Aaron, welcome.Aaron: It’s great to be here. Thanks for doing this, for having me on, and for getting this thing rolling. It’s exciting to see this idea progress through all its iterations.Seth: It’s so great to have you here. Out of that introduction, I should say I blame you most for this podcast — my wife too, probably. How did you talk me into doing this?Aaron: In fairness, it’s been a few years. I remember sitting with you in the airport in Cincinnati, both of us getting excited about this idea — the need for a new school, something more than a weekend workshop or a day class. There needs to be a place to send 18-year-olds who really want to build cities, and there just isn’t one yet. Some places get close, but there’s no single place. So many kids want to do this in some form — work on cities, build cities, solve problems — and there’s nowhere to go. There’s so much cool stuff happening, from what’s going on in Florida to the City Makers Collective and beyond, but there clearly needs to be a bigger vision. I think it percolated long enough, and you finally said, “I need to get these ideas out.” And here we are.Seth: That was sort of two thoughts. One — this is a good advertisement for coming to the Congress for the New Urbanism, because the most important ideas usually come from sitting in an airport at the end of a trip, or taking a long walk after lunch with a friend. That’s where the real ideas percolate. For anyone coming to CNU, I’ll be there in Arkansas in a couple of weeks.I think part of what drew me to this was a gap. I’m part of these one-off conversations with people about building new institutions, changing how we teach, creating new programs — but there wasn’t a forum bringing those conversations together.On the other hand, I keep meeting young people — 18, 22, 25 years old — who’ve discovered they’re interested in city building somewhere along the way. We don’t teach any of this in high school, so people stumble into it: watching YouTube videos, reading a book, going on vacation. There’s some inciting incident. I keep meeting people who got radicalized watching Not Just Bikes, then went to architecture school, then realized architecture school wasn’t doing anything like what they expected. So there’s a real need for a forum where young people can learn how to make the most of their education and what to look for in a program.Aaron: Wholeheartedly agree. And to reiterate — I’m so glad you started this podcast, because it’s narrow and specific. The ones that make a difference are usually on a narrow topic, and there’s nobody in this space. There are plenty of podcasts on urbanism, walkability, design, affordability — but nothing like this. This could evolve into a space people come to when they’re frustrated with the pedagogy — professors, students, families with kids interested in this stuff.So much has happened since Cincinnati, going on two or three years ago now. Brett Jones’s work in Florida, Nathan Norris’s community college program — which hits some of the gold standard we’ll discuss today — Will McCollum’s summer program in Charleston, which sounds incredible, and Ruben Hanson, who has a great podcast and is getting into teaching in Europe. I see all of these as green shoots.Before you answer — I know we’re doing a bit of an experiment here. Given my background hosting the Town Builders Podcast for the National Town Builders Association, a good way to plant the flag for this podcast and your website is for me to interview you, so you can lay out your thesis: what’s the point of dissatisfaction, and what do we do about it? So — Seth, why do you think we need a new school for city builders?Seth: Thanks, Aaron. A lot of this comes from my own experience. Like I said, we all have our breakthrough moment. For me — I’d studied climate science, was a geology major in undergrad, was thinking about grad school and PhDs. I’d also picked up a bug for sustainable design and green building. So I took an early online course — this was around 2006 or 2007 — through the Harvard Extension Program, on the history of the American city. Great course. I read Jane Jacobs for the first time, studied the history of American cities.Aaron: It’s her birthday today, incidentally.Seth: It is her birthday today. Happy birthday, Jane Jacobs — or as we like to call it, Urban Renewal Remembrance Day, when we remind ourselves of the dangers of hubris. Go put a wreath on a highway overpass somewhere. Say sorry.So that course got me excited about city building, but I was intimidated — I didn’t know how to draw, had no portfolio, didn’t think I could go to architecture or planning school. I was a scientist. So I went to a graduate program at Yale where I was technically enrolled in the environmental school but spent half my time secretly taking classes in architecture, law, and business. I got really interested in zoning and land use regulation, and ended up taking a job as a city planner for the City of Newton, Massachusetts — writing zoning amendments, reviewing projects.While on city staff, I started to see the whole city-builder ecosystem: on the city side, planners, engineers, police and fire, DPW; on the private side, civil engineers, architects, developers. Watching all these pieces interact, I was struck by the fact that we don’t understand each other. We don’t even speak the same language — different jargon, different goals.Aaron: There’s a stunning lack of curiosity sometimes. The silo-ization keeps it that way — “I don’t understand them, but it’s not my job to.”Seth: Right. Some people think their job is regulatory compliance — just follow the rules, whatever they are. Some developers just want to make as much money as possible and don’t care about long-term implications. Not everyone’s like that, but I’ll tell a story — we were working on improving a neighborhood village center, trying to improve walkability and pedestrian safety, and we kept hitting a wall with the city engineer. Every time we tried to change something, it was “this doesn’t comply with the regs” or “we don’t have the warrants for a stop sign here.” And we’d say, well, we’re trying to improve safety — what would you suggest? “Nothing, because none of these things meet my book.” And we’re left thinking, what are we all doing here?Aaron: Right — “the rule book says this.” There’s a reputation in every city for which profession is the most rigid and unbending about doing reasonable things, and engineers often get that label. There’s an understanding of the broader vision, but “that’s not my job, and the rule book says something different.” There are interesting proposals to fix this — calls for some kind of benevolent overseer who could cut through it — but really, it’s the silo issue you write about so eloquently in the piece we’re discussing today.Seth: Part of the problem is that cities are genuinely complex and do require specialized expertise. I don’t know how to make sure sewers drain correctly — someone needs that skill, and it’s a specialized job. There are a lot of these specialized roles. But look at how we train specialists: architects are in the school of arts and architecture, planners are in the government school, civil engineers are in the engineering college, developers are in the business school, activists are in sociology. Nobody talks to anybody, nobody shares the same goals.You can get an engineering degree without learning anything about urbanism. You can get an architecture degree without learning anything about development. You can get a development degree knowing nothing about design. These silos start early in people’s technical training, and they persist — you get your first job, and on some paths you pursue licensure, which requires apprenticing at an existing firm or having an accredited degree.Part of the reason the civil engineering curriculum has nothing about how a city works is that it’s not in the accreditation standards — there’s no room for it. You take four semesters of calculus but zero semesters on the purpose of a city. That’s driven by accreditation, so it’s very hard to change at the ground level. People arrive in specialized jobs with no sense of the whole team. It’s like a football team where everyone does their own thing with no shared playbook, language, or goals. Some specialization is fine and necessary, but without a shared framework, you get chaos — which is exactly what we have. Our cities aren’t functioning in a coordinated fashion.Aaron: This is getting a bit ahead of the horse, but two of your proposed solutions are a common core curriculum — giving people a shared liberal-arts foundation in what a city is and why it matters — and leadership training. At the end of the day, teamwork requires leadership. On a football team that’s obvious, but I don’t know that city departments are doing leadership development internally. When you’re dealing with problems that take millions of dollars and years to fix, leadership matters — and we’ve all seen how non-functional things get without it. Talk about how the school you’ve envisioned addresses those needs.Seth: Let’s pull back and talk conceptually — if we were starting over, what would we build, and how? Then we can come back to how you’d actually get there, and why it’s so hard to change existing institutions.Aaron: Agreed. You’ve established the problem — now, what’s your vision, and why is now the time?Seth: Let’s set the course. I think there are three big agendas central to building — or reforming — an institution like this.The first is initial integration of the city-building professions. Engineers, architects, developers, planners, and so on should at least sit in some classes together and work on some projects together. That doesn’t preclude additional specialized training later — but they need a good chunk of time working together, getting to know each other’s personalities, seeing how different skill sets fit together, and developing a shared basis.One way to think about this: we’ve started specialization too quickly. We need some shared cross-training and shared vision first, then build into specialization. Take civil engineering — I don’t think any civil engineers are using that calculus once they’re in practice. It’s mostly weeding people out for being good at math and following directions.Aaron: I think that’s right. Architecture has a similar reputation, though there’s less math now that computers do it for you.Seth: Architecture has a reputation for ridiculous studio projects, harshly reviewed, designed to make you cry and see if you can stomach it. Everyone has their own version of social-control weeding functions. My view is you could do most of the basic specialization training — what amounts to an undergraduate-equivalent period — faster than existing programs do. Part of the reason is that, at the end of the day, all these jobs are really apprenticeships. I need to give you a basic foundation, enough useful skills to be productive in an entry-level job, and get you into the industry to start practicing. You might take more classes later to skill up, but the goal is to get you started.Aaron: Sure. Is there a strong critique of college pedagogy here — the idea that some of this just can’t be learned in the classroom? There’s an easy counter: maybe we’re just not teaching it in the classroom, so we don’t really know. Architecture is more of an applicable technical skill than, say, a history course — though certainly less so than medicine, where you have to get out and apprentice. But there’s more ability for a freshman architecture student to do construction drawings and elevations than there is in some other fields. Is part of your vision to accelerate that — to start doing, in the classroom, whatever can be done there?Seth: Yes. The second of the three agendas is a practice orientation — practice has to start at the beginning and continue throughout, increasing in complexity as you go. Not four years of theory before you ever set foot in the shop. I think of Olin College, here in Massachusetts, which was started in the early 2000s — first graduating class around 2005.Aaron: Oh, that recent? The way you wrote about it, I assumed it was old-guard, Ivy League engineering. I didn’t realize it was that young.Seth: Right around the turn of the century. Part of their approach was: we’re not waiting four years before students hold a soldering iron. They’re in a workshop the first semester — mechanical and electrical engineering students using tools from day one — to understand the physics and mechanics of what they’re doing and connect with the realities of industry and making things, rather than four years of fundamental science and math followed by, at the end, an applied scientist rather than an engineer in the old sense.The third piece — and this is maybe a personal feeling — is a shared core curriculum. In most of these programs, nobody sits in the same classroom, nobody studies the same things. You need to bring people together to work on hard stuff. And at the end of the day, a city is a humanistic project. A city without people is a ruin — that’s literally what a ruin is. The city is about people. And we’ve lost that in a lot of technical training — engineers take four years of applied science but never a psychology class; architects never take economics. The behavioral sciences and humanistic arts — why people make decisions, questions of truth, goodness, and beauty — have no home in these curricula.Aaron: Or sociology, or history.Seth: Right.Aaron: Which schools out there currently have a common core? Obviously not architecture programs generally, but —Seth: There are a few examples, and this is something I hope to dig into more on the podcast — the liberal arts are facing real challenges right now, from multiple directions. AI and the changing nature of student bodies and faculty are affecting the ability to do traditional humanities, and we have to address that, it’s not going away. But at the same time, humans really like learning about other humans. That’s the fundamental purpose — understanding ourselves, understanding others, understanding our relationship to society and where we came from. It’s not about producing better essays faster. The point is for you to understand yourself and others — a large language model can’t do that for you.There are places still doing this. Columbia has a common core — everyone reads Homer and works up through the moderns in literature, political theory, and philosophy. Yale has a Directed Studies program. And then there’s St. John’s College, a true great-books curriculum — one of my real inspirations, because they’re just going to read classic texts and aren’t self-conscious about not doing what Harvard or Stanford does. It’s strange how few schools differentiate their model by doing something genuinely different, rather than trying to copy Harvard with less money and less prestige.Aaron: I think that’s totally right. It’s remarkable group-think. I have the same reaction to planning departments — there are thousands of them across the country, and they nearly all have the same parking standards. You’d think somewhere in Wyoming, some city would just try something different. It’s groupthink, and I think the modern world — accelerating data and computing — promised incredible diversity and choice, and in so many ways the opposite happened. In buildings and in education both.Seth: It’s accelerated sameness, in a sense. Other examples: Deep Springs — another inspiration — a two-year program on a cattle ranch in the American Southwest, after which students transfer to a four-year college. Half your time is spent maintaining the ranch — cooking, fixing fences — and half reading and working together as a group. And Olin again — “we’re just going to do it differently and not play the same game.”Aaron: To put a pin in that — the best carpenter I ever worked with was a Deep Springs graduate. He went on to study divinity at Oxford, then ended up working in crawl spaces for me before we realized the guy was a brilliant carpenter and moved him into millwork.Seth: A carpenter with a divinity degree seems like a fitting path.Aaron: It is. We’re publishing a piece today at Southern Urbanism by Nick Larkins — a carpenter-philosopher, which is sort of the model of person these programs should be producing.Seth: If you’re in professional practice, public or private, working in a complex city dealing with history and an economy and other people, you need a broad toolbox for thinking, communicating, and understanding — because it’s not a purely technical problem. Getting things done in a city is relational. It’s about working with people and managing yourself. The best training for that might genuinely be literature, philosophy, and theology — because we have thousands of years of writing about living together in large groups without killing each other. That’s half of all philosophy, from the Greek polis to the present: how do you live together and get things done without it going sideways?Aaron: And the benefits aren’t hard to articulate. Mike Rowe has written about this — functionally, we’re producing an intellectual overclass with liberal arts degrees who can’t plunge a toilet or caulk a window. We need people who can read philosophy and fix things, and plumbers who understand context and the humanities. Right now there’s a hard wall between those two worlds.Seth: A hard barrier, but not a permanent one. There have been plenty of times historically when working-class people were reading and engaging with ideas. We need to get back to some of that — it’s another version of breaking down the silo.Aaron: And it goes both ways. Many of the problems we see in practice come from the other direction too — the planner or government official who has no idea how the trades or construction actually work. In some ways that need is even more acute than the plumber-reads-philosophy direction.Seth: True. As I’ve worked through these ideas, I keep coming back to an undergraduate-equivalent program that gives people a strong foundation — knowledge, perspective, and skills — so they can go apprentice and work. For some, that might be all the formal education they ever get. Others might layer something on top — an engineering degree to become a PE, a PhD to teach. But everyone gets that thick foundation that lets them keep reading, learning, and practicing on their own.If I had to name the ideal career outcome — the highest aspiration for our graduates — on the private side, it’s the real estate developer, because a good developer shapes and orchestrates the private realm, hires good consultants, builds a good team, and you get amazing work. A bad developer who doesn’t care can do real damage.On the public side, it’s the city or town manager — the deputy mayor, the executive-branch roles that actually operate the city and direct the other departments. One problem with how we’ve stylized professional training is that most ambitious young people who want to fix cities from the public side end up in the planning department — and get stuck there. That was my experience; I was a planner and switched to the private sector because I wanted agency and effectiveness. The planning department doesn’t have shovels, trucks, guns, or much discretionary money. Its power is persuasion — and to a lesser extent, writing ordinances, though even then the law department often has the final say. So if you’re a planner, especially a junior one, your core skills need to be politics and persuasion — but you’re not empowered to use them. You’re not going to have coffee with city councilors and whip votes for your ordinance; that would be deeply inappropriate. Maybe the planning director can do some of that. But ultimately it’s the mayor and elected officials who decide. I wrote a bunch of zoning ordinances, but I didn’t get a vote.So a lot of planners get stuck in that department. The ambitious, rebellious ones leave. The ones who learn to work within the bureaucracy’s constraints stay — but they’re not rotating through DPW, finance, the assessor’s office. The energetic young people interested in public service end up concentrated in maybe one-fifteenth of city government and are essentially invisible to the rest. What I really want is for them to get into that executive office where they can direct resources and priorities across departments. And to do that, planning education — which is maybe 5-10% focused on persuasion and politics, the actual core skill — doesn’t equip them.Aaron: Really interesting — we bantered about how this school could look and had slightly different visions, which will be fun to reconcile. It’s interesting that you want to train public-service professionals too, where the need is clearly there. You could even argue for fewer planners but higher-level ones — town planning directors and managers with something like five years of intensive training across law, design, architecture, politics, and leadership.The critique, though: starting a school is an enormous lift — this is “pulling the sword from the stone.” It’s the same critique we ran into at the Incremental Development Alliance, which succeeded because it focused narrowly on training small-scale developers and did that one thing well. Eric Kronberg always took your approach — you can train all the developers you want, but if they’re walking into the buzzsaw of American zoning and politics, which punishes small developers at every turn, you’re sending them on kamikaze missions. So we have to deal with the cities too. Given that, are training city builders and training public servants actually the same training? Compatible? Does combining them dilute the core mission — or do you genuinely see public servants as city builders too?Seth: Absolutely, public servants are city builders — and one problem is we don’t treat them that way in practice. Because planners aren’t competitive for that upper tier, city and town managers are usually drawn from the law department or the finance department — people seen as understanding the rules and the money. But finance and law are fundamentally compliance orientations, not entrepreneurial ones.Aaron: It’s a glass ceiling.Seth: Right — and it’s risk-averse. The CFO’s job is to make sure the budget balances and the rainy-day fund is full; that’s a defensive posture. The law department is trying to avoid getting sued. Part of why the public sector is bad at city-building is that we don’t have city builders in those positions.I wrote an essay on this — we’ll link it in the show notes — and got a lot of positive response, plus some pushback, including from Chuck at Strong Towns. His argument was that it’s more about restructuring how things work, and that the people are already there, just not empowered correctly. I hear that, but I don’t think we currently have the right people for those jobs. We do need to restructure city government to allow more risk-taking, more small bets, more iteration — good Strong Towns principles. But I’m not convinced we have anywhere near enough people prepared to work in city government and be entrepreneurial risk-takers.Aaron: I agree. I was hoping to reread that piece before this conversation — I remember it being a great exchange, and I generally agreed with your take. We all love Chuck — he’s probably been the most successful media voice in New Urbanism for a while, and his basic thesis on sprawl being unsustainable is essentially unimpeachable. But he’s not on the front lines of permit applications the way you and I are, and hasn’t been for years. So on what the front-line experience is actually like, I think he can just be wrong.I see a handful of people in those planning and zoning roles trying to fight the good fight every year — and they’re always the most exhausted people at CNU. “I’m so stuck, I’m trying to do the right thing.” When you look at how many planners and public officials there are nationally — tens of thousands — the fact that there’s only a handful really validates your point. There’s no bench anywhere in the USA you could point to and say, “these people know how to fix the streets, get the parks right, run the utilities, work with developers, and pursue a vision.” We’re not training that in any professional school — not just planning, but architecture, development, and engineering too.Seth: Right. My own program was a nominally professional environmental management degree. When they surveyed alumni about which skills mattered most — for people going on to work for the EPA, manage forests, or run sustainability offices — the answers were communication, financial management, project management. When they surveyed faculty, the priorities were the opposite: statistical analysis, scientific research. Which makes sense — the faculty were career ecologists doing interesting forest-ecology research, but they’d never worked in industry, government, or an NGO. They were completely disconnected from the practice of, say, actually improving how the U.S. manages forest land. It might help if you’d worked for a logging company or a state forestry department at some point — some connection to how an agency or company actually runs.Aaron: And there’s resistance to that. I taught for four years at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment — also elite, also environmental management — and had the exact same experience. I was in a room where they tried to design an environmental entrepreneurship program, similarly out of left field for them. I have no idea what became of it, but the faculty’s conclusion was essentially, “this isn’t what we do” — nobody on the faculty spoke entrepreneurship; they were all researchers. It’s oil and water, and that’s a real challenge for doing something like this at any legacy institution. Which gets to my next question: why might — or might not — this work within existing universities?Seth: Good question, and I get asked it constantly. Starting a new school from scratch is incredibly hard — it just doesn’t happen much. Very few new schools have been founded in the U.S. in the last fifty years. So much else has changed, but the list of colleges and universities looks largely the same. A few major reasons it’s so hard to change existing institutions:You mentioned one — these institutions are organized around a research-first model. Faculty are hired and promoted based on research output, going back to the PhD itself, and that’s not inherently bad. But when that research is disconnected from professional practice — and I’ve felt for a long time that very little coming out of academia in the city-making fields is interesting or useful — most of the real intellectual work comes from practitioners. People like Chuck, who are out there digging in the weeds. CNU is a very intellectual, creative, conceptual space, but almost everyone there is also a practicing professional with clients and billable hours, trying to get things done.So one big challenge is staffing — you can’t staff a school like this entirely with career-research PhDs; they don’t have the right skills. We need people with practice experience who are also interested in ideas and in teaching well — and those two things don’t always coincide. Great practitioners aren’t always great teachers. To some extent we’ll have to build our own teaching corps — people who come up through our programs, learn the practice and the ideas, and want to come back and teach the next generation. That requires building almost a parallel track to prepare them.Aaron: I was going to say — when we get to my vision for the school, I don’t actually think finding talent to teach would be that hard, based on my experience with IncDev and others at CNU. Within our bubble there’s an incredible wealth of talent; outside it, less so, but it’s out there. The bigger headwind, once you step outside the research-based model that fuels these universities, is accreditation. I know you’re planning to address this in an early episode, but is that a real headwind to what you’re trying to do?Seth: It is. To be clear, we’re not building a four-year college next year — that’s the culmination of a lot of effort. In the meantime: the Incremental Development Alliance is teaching great programming and will keep expanding it. Will McCollum’s City Makers Collective is running fantastic summer studios. There’s online professional education, what Ruben Hanson is doing with The Aesthetic City. We can run weekend courses, summer schools, study-away semesters for college students — a lot of things that don’t require building the full infrastructure of a college and don’t require accreditation. That’s where we start — and where people have already started.Part of the point of this podcast is to bring together the people running and creating these programs, to talk about what they’re doing, share what’s working pedagogically, inspire new programs, identify gaps, and replicate successes in new cities. That builds a critical mass, develops skills and expertise, and forms the foundation that eventually makes a physical school easier to build. And ultimately, I don’t think it’s just one school — I don’t want any of these schools to get gigantic. They should be smaller, more nimble, more innovative, more high-touch. The school doesn’t need to be its own city with all the overhead and administration that implies — keep it lean. That’s the only way to survive the current cost environment in higher education.What would be great is regional iterations with shared DNA: a City Building Institute of New England would differ from one in the Southeast, the Midwest, or Portland — and that’s good, as long as there’s enough shared foundation to collaborate, share case studies, and avoid each one recreating the core curriculum from scratch. Because it’s a network, you could spend a semester or a year at a different campus — study abroad in Portland, if you’re based in the Southeast.Aaron: I love that. It’s a logistical puzzle, but conceptually — a two-year core program, partly online or centrally taught, with several semesters “on the road”: sustainability in Portland, greenfield development in the South, traditional building arts and history in Charleston or New England. That could be amazing, even partnered with existing organizations like the American College of the Building Arts.Seth: We don’t have it all figured out, but part of what’s exciting is approaching this entrepreneurially and with an institution-building mindset — recognizing we need institutions that outlive individuals. What tends to happen is a great dean or a few great faculty make a program excellent for a while, but eventually they retire or leave, new people come in, and it reverts to the mean. That happened with Miami’s architecture program — one of the New Urbanist stars alongside Notre Dame — after Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk stepped down as dean; it reverted toward every other program, because there was no longer a person or group demanding it be different. Institutions have so much inertia, and so much “keeping up with the Joneses,” that you almost have to be willing to say, “we’re not doing what everyone else is doing.” Interestingly, a lot of the most interesting things happening in higher education right now come from religious institutions — I think because they’re willing to say, “we’re a Catholic school, we’re going to teach differently, and we don’t have to pretend to be Harvard.”Aaron: It is bizarre how Catholic schools have become the rebels here, especially in architecture. I was trying to map Notre Dame’s “coaching tree” — its influence on other programs — at NTBA. Utah Valley’s young program is Notre Dame-trained; Benedictine College in Kansas is Notre Dame-oriented; Andrews University, which I’d assumed was just because of proximity to Notre Dame, also fits. And ACBA has Notre Dame talent too. Public institutions seem far less likely to innovate and more likely to conform — though I don’t know if that holds everywhere.Seth: Part of it might be an orientation toward accreditation. My hope is that eventually our own network could self-accredit — create our own accrediting body.Aaron: Are you tracking — given the current disdain for academia and intellectual life in the current administration, there’s apparently movement toward a third accrediting body that some red-state universities are considering for various reasons. Has any of that affected your thinking?Seth: There’s a lot happening that’s hard to parse, but I’m cautiously hopeful that there’s appetite to shake up accreditation. Ostensibly, accreditation exists to protect consumers — families and students — from being fleeced, given how imperfect the information is. It’s also tied to financial aid eligibility, both governmental and institutional, and in many professions it’s an easier path to licensure if you attend an accredited program. So there are reasons it exists — but it also creates a weird centralizing effect that discourages creativity, entrepreneurship, and experimentation. It’s incredibly conformity-oriented, and I have a modest hope that will loosen, both in regulatory practice and in the popular imagination — that people will become less anxious about accreditation, or more open to different kinds of it.Aaron: Walk through the logistics. It’s frustrating — college towns should be centers of innovation, places where you can afford to be wrong, experiment with ideas and designs. In our lifetimes, the opposite has often happened — regulation and constraints on speech and architecture and everything else. Ideally you’d run a two-, three-, or four-year program that’s just genuinely great education, producing 21- or 22-year-olds who are ready to do great work in our world. If you had the content but not the accreditation — no PhD-heavy research faculty — what specific challenge does that create for getting a school off the ground?Seth: A few components. One is laddering up through things that don’t require accreditation: weekend intensives, summer schools, semester-abroad programs, maybe an affiliation with another institution — “come to our city, do a full semester our way, and you’ll learn a lot of useful things.”We can also build other professional certifications — IncDev has talked about online courses. I’ve increasingly been thinking about a one-year executive education certificate, particularly for people who might move into leadership roles in their firm or in city government. If you’ve been a practicing architect or planner for ten or fifteen years, you may have hit the ceiling of what your core skills alone can do — a graduate-level certificate could ladder you up.We’ve talked to New Urbanist-oriented firms that hire new grads and, unless they’re from Notre Dame, basically have to re-educate them for the first couple of years. If we could bring those grads in for a six-week boot camp, it would be hugely valuable to those firms — people coming in at a much higher level, able to engage immediately.Put all that together — a full summer calendar, two semester calendars, a one-year online certificate program — and you’ve basically got the guts of a school. Classroom space, residential space, used at different points in the year. At some point, building out a physical school requires real capital — family foundations, real estate developers in their legacy-building years. One of my inspirations: a local university here in Rhode Island got a $20 million gift to add a real estate program to their architecture school. I taught there for a semester and got familiar with the program, and honestly thought, if this is the competition, we could really outdo them. So — where’s my $20 million gift? Half-joking, but it is possible to raise that kind of money and use it to build out a lean physical plant — keeping overhead much lower than existing institutions carry.Then accreditation is the tricky bridge to cross. Without it, you give up a lot of financial aid eligibility, which you’d hope to offset by being cheaper — leaning up the program.Aaron: Or by finding aid elsewhere — a philanthropist covering it. Is the American College of the Building Arts accredited, do you know?Seth: I believe they are now, or have been working toward it — which gives some credibility and a path to navigate. I think this is an area we’ll have to work on continuously, paying close attention to reform efforts. Accreditation is ostensibly for consumer protection, but in practice nobody really understands it — it functions as an insider club, a guild protecting these schools from competition. If we could create new kinds of accreditation-like signals that are genuinely consumer-facing — “if you come here, you’ll get a job,” “your classes won’t be ridiculous” — that would help.Aaron: We talked about this in Cincinnati too — probably a terrible strategy, but you could brand the school as emphatically not accredited, given all the shenanigans around accreditation. “If you want to actually learn this stuff and become elite at city building, come here. If you want a credentialed institution teaching theory, there are plenty of those.”Seth: I think there’s room for that. We don’t need 100,000 students. Two thousand students would be a tremendous transformation — 500 a year. Even starting with 40 a year would be something.Aaron: There are cracks in the accreditation system worth noting. I just learned Utah Valley University — which has a phenomenal traditional program producing talented students — isn’t actually accredited for their five-year architecture program; they’re going through the process now. So even programs with relatively traditional offerings have to fight for it.Seth: Right — you have to. That’ll be an important part of this ongoing conversation, but I’m intrigued by the scenario where we just don’t play by the same rules.Aaron: I think that could be genuinely attractive to certain people. Planning tends to attract more risk-averse personalities — less likely to sign a personal guarantee or put themselves at risk. But there are 18-year-olds out there who want the fight — who get energized by the hunt, by the challenge. Jane Jacobs talked about “guardian” versus “commerce” culture — fundamentally different temperaments. Right now there’s no real path into that commerce-culture, entrepreneurial side. Even undergraduate business programs — which used to be graduate-only — mostly train people for corporate work. There are nominally entrepreneurial classes, but they’re really corporate-flavored. There are kids who want to fight for this stuff day to day, and there’s just a void of opportunity for them.Seth: A lot of young people get energized by activism partly because it feels like they’re really working on something, pushing against the system. We can offer the same energy through a different channel — real tools, real power, real ability to affect things. And it’s not hard to imagine a career pipeline — we have a big network of people who’d hire into this work.Aaron: Or who’d create jobs. When I was working on the entrepreneurship program at Duke, we used to joke: universities track the percentage of graduates employed six months or a year out — what they should track is the percentage who are employers a year out. Even one or two percent would be remarkable — someone starting a business right out of your program. That distinctiveness might be exactly the appeal — like Deep Springs, where people look at it and think, “that’s different, that’s interesting.”Seth: Really different. Part of my belief is that even though higher education is going through a lot of tumult right now — colleges closing, for various reasons — that instability creates an opportunity. People will respond to things done differently. Taking a harder swing, doing something a little wacky, might actually be a better strategy than trying to look glossy and keep up with everyone else.For example — I’ve had this idea for young people who feel like their brains have been rotted by screens and AI: a program where, for the first year, you’re in the woods with a typewriter and some books, working only on paper. You type your term papers. There’s a single phone at the end of the hall if you need to call home. No cell phones — a full societal detox in the woods of Vermont. People would love that. I don’t need everyone to love it — I need a few hundred people to love it, and that’s enough to run these institutions, especially with a different approach to financing and structure.Aaron: So you’re going to need a college football team to finance, basically.Seth: Or something like it — we’ll need our own big rituals and inspirational traditions.Aaron: We’re at about an hour, so let me close with two questions — one narrow, one big picture. You’ve described wanting to build this incrementally, and as an incremental developer myself, I subscribe to that completely. Starting with weekend classes, online programs, partnerships, summer trips — that all sounds smart and achievable. But do you also have a parallel “full plan” — if someone showed up wanting to fund the whole vision at once? The comparable here is the University of Austin, which I believe raised something like $250 million to start a new college, now in its second year, focused on the classics with not much practical/apprenticeship component. They raised nine figures to start a school. Do you see that as a path — and if someone wanted to write that check, would it actually accelerate things, or are you committed to the incremental approach regardless?Seth: Yes — I’ve worked on several models over the years for two-, three-, and four-year programs in different contexts: urban versions, rural versions, financial models for building it out over time. So if someone wants to write a check with a lot of zeros, we could move quickly.That said, I think incrementalism remains important even with a large check. Even UATX did a lot of iteration — summer programs and so on — to build the story; you’d do that regardless. And even building a physical school, we’d still run these other programs in parallel: the one-year graduate certificate, summer schools for high schoolers like a “Career Discovery” model, “semester in the city” programs. You could have a very full set of offerings quickly, rather than starting with just a freshman class and building up year by year over decades. I think there’d be tremendous interest, and we could recruit excellent faculty and staff quickly to launch something like this. So — if you know someone who’d like to write a check north of $10 million, please reach out after the show.Aaron: Leave your Venmo in the show notes.Seth: Venmo in the show notes.Aaron: I’ll close with this. We’ve covered your dissatisfaction with current pedagogy and how cities get built, and your vision for filling that void. This is clearly a long game — not a quick policy fix, but a culture change, which is slow. Take a breath, and then — if you’re Picasso painting this vision — describe a total home-run success, five or ten years out. What does a thriving city-builder institution look like, both as a university and for the industry?Seth: That’s a good question. I’m an incremental developer by day, and I live in a house built in 1890 — a big part of what we do is build things that outlast us, and act as stewards of places and institutions. This is a long game. I don’t expect to finish it in my lifetime. It’s taken roughly a hundred years to get how we build cities to where it is now; it’ll probably take close to that long to find our way back out. We’re making progress, but it’s a process.The only way to do that is to build new institutions with new cultures — durable, not swayed by the wind, oriented toward a larger purpose. If I’m looking back from 2050, in our glorious imagined future, like Edward Bellamy looking backward: I’d picture an ecosystem of programs — short courses, graduate certificates, undergraduate programs — and a network of city- and town-builder colleges across the country, maybe six or eight in different regions, collaborating the way we’ve discussed. Plus satellite campuses internationally — Europe, Latin America, East Asia, Africa — so students can spend six months or a year, like Notre Dame students do, living in a different kind of urbanism and gaining perspective and confidence.These institutions would be training thousands of new professionals a year. And because we’d be excellent, existing institutions would start copying our methods. We’d be ecumenical about it — running summer programs for faculty from other schools, teaching them how we do it — and we’d pull those programs along simply by attracting their best students and, eventually, their best faculty. That’s the only way I see Harvard’s GSD, MIT’s planning program, or UNC’s planning school getting dragged toward a different model.By 2050, there’d be tens of thousands of our alumni doing important work — mayors, city managers, developers, running cities and towns, leading their professions, helping reform architecture and civil engineering around a shared enterprise: building places people love. Instead of disposable places and disposable people, we’d be building and running towns meant to last a thousand years — sustainable, yes, but also financially viable, resilient, prosperous, and genuinely loved. Because if people don’t love a place — or an institution, or a school — they won’t maintain it, no matter how good it looks on paper. People need a deep, abiding affection for a place to take care of it.Aaron: So what I’m hearing is you’ll eventually need to finance a college football team too.Seth: Something like that — we’ll need our big rituals and inspirational traditions.Aaron: Not to discount anything you just said — I think it’s a great vision, and I wholeheartedly subscribe to it. Next time, you get to interview me on how my vision differs slightly, and we’ll see what it’s worth.Seth: I look forward to it — let’s do that soon. Thanks, Aaron.This is The New School for City Builders, a production of the Educational Collaborative for Building Places People Love, and Build the Next Right Thing. If you appreciate what we’re doing and want to help bring this school to fruition, please support us by becoming a paid subscriber at buildthenextrightthing.substack.com. And if you happen to have the ability to write a very large check — please reach out. 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Thank you for joining me for the second installment of The New School for City Builders as I interview Sara Bega and Jack Duncan on Las Catalinas, studio education, building new architecture schools, and more. Please like and subscribe! Build the Next Right Thing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The following transcript has been edited for clarity:Seth Zeren (00:02) Hello and welcome to the New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zeren, a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer in Providence, Rhode Island. This is a podcast about how we can transform the education of city builders. If we want to change how our cities and towns work, we need to change the people who run them. We need a new generation of city builders — architects, engineers, planners, developers, city managers, and civic leaders. We need a new school for city builders.Joining me today is Sarah Bega, an architect, professor at Notre Dame Architecture School, and former town architect for Las Catalinas, Costa Rica. And for our first dual-guest podcast, Jack Duncan, also a Notre Dame architect, who helped launch an architecture program at the American College of Building Arts and is now at the College of Charleston. Together they are part of the founding team behind CityMakers Collective, a summer studio in Charleston, South Carolina, which is having its second summer starting this Sunday.So it’s very exciting — you’re both about to get right back into the thick of it. In our conversation today, Jack, Sarah, and I are going to talk about building new towns, building new schools, and the ins and outs of the studio education experience. Sarah and Jack, welcome to the New School for City Builders.Sara Bega (01:18) Thanks for having us.Seth Zeren (01:21) Great. Sarah, I saw you about a week or two ago in Northwest Arkansas at CNU, which was a ton of fun. You had just gotten back from teaching a semester in Rome — which sounds like a pretty sweet deal. Now you’re teaching at Notre Dame, the same school where you studied architecture. Can you tell us what the architecture program is like there, and how it differs from other architecture schools?Sara Bega (01:48) Sure. Notre Dame’s pedagogy in architecture and urbanism is founded on a classical philosophy and design process. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s always expressed in the classical language, but it’s a design process based on analysis and the study of precedent — essentially learning from the successes of the past so you can do even better in the future. We treat architecture and urbanism as a living tradition. We should always be working to improve it, bringing it into the next generation, and thinking far beyond the moment so that we’re not pursuing trends that put an inherent expiration date on a project. Instead, we participate in a larger culture — multiple cultures — and understand how context-based design really matters, both as a process and as a character.I studied at Notre Dame and was drawn to it because during my tour, I was told: “We teach you the rules so you can intelligently break them.” For someone who’s incapable of being obedient, that felt great. That philosophy has remained while the program constantly folds in new successes — it’s not stagnant. In Rome this past year, for example, we had even more emphasis on landscape than ever before. I just appreciate working with people who really care about the built environment, about contributing wonderful additions to our societies, and about always learning and doing better.Seth Zeren (03:35) That’s fantastic. What’s the semester like in Rome as a teacher?Sara Bega (03:41) Dreamlike. It’s a big ask for the students — it sounds cushy, but honestly, they have to balance a lot of travel, which is a good problem to have, along with the experience of simply being there. We all know how important it is to actually be in a place to understand it. They’re traveling all around Italy and constantly shifting in and out of their design headspace. It’s challenging — most of them are in an environment very different from where they grew up, learning as human beings to adapt, and simultaneously extracting design lessons. Not all of them are going to be doing work in Europe; it’s the precedent behind the precedent, so to speak. If you’re trying to engage American tradition and American classicism, you’re going to look at what those architects were looking at, which — given the history of the Grand Tour and the development of architectural language — has often been rooted in that region.As a professor, it’s a joy because students are engaging more sophisticated ideas than ever before. They’re not just picking Corinthian because it’s their favorite — they understand when it’s appropriate to articulate a column at all, or simply use the proportional system, and if you are going to use a columnar order, what character is appropriate and where it fits within the broader culture of that expression. I had mostly taught second years before, which is the boot camp and the engine room of Notre Dame’s pedagogy. Getting to teach third years and expand on those conversations in a different context was a real joy. And outside of studio, you’re just kind of floating around in heaven.Seth Zeren (05:48) Just hanging out in Italy. So Jack — you also attended Notre Dame. Sarah, you were an undergrad there, and Jack, you came as a graduate student. What was your arc? How did you end up there?Jack Duncan (06:08) That’s a good question. I actually didn’t go to college right after high school. I ended up working for Procter & Gamble for almost five years. I wasn’t a great high school student, if I’m being honest. So it was definitely a transition.When I was ready, I wanted to stay in-state and had always been interested in architecture, but in South Carolina we really only have Clemson, and the program didn’t quite fit my perspective on the built environment. I knew I wanted to come to Charleston — it’s a beautiful place, and a lot of us from the upstate, near the North Carolina line, would come south to the beaches. So I came here originally to study classics, and somewhat ironically realized after the first year that I didn’t want to teach. I couldn’t see another career path, so I started taking coursework that interested me: studio art, historic preservation, art history. A year later, my advisor Robert Russell said, “It looks like you could double-major in art history and historic preservation, and if you want to triple major or minor in studio art, you can do that.” So I said okay — I was a bit aimless, if I’m being real.I fell in love with architecture through historic preservation, partly because of where I was. I’m sitting right now at 12 Wool Street, and you just walk out the door into a beautiful environment. Come senior year, I interned for two architects here — Christopher Liberatus and Jenny Bedden — for about a year. They asked if I was going to pursue architecture, and I said I honestly didn’t know. I took another year off and went to the ICAA Summer Studio — I think it was one of the first after they revamped it. I met great people there, came back, and thought: yes, I want to be a classical architect. So I applied to the master’s program at Notre Dame — the only program I applied to. I said, if I get in, great; if not, I’ll go join a fishing boat or something. I got in, finished the program, and it was honestly the most life-changing experience of my life.Seth Zeren (09:36) This podcast is basically just an advertisement for Notre Dame — they should really be sponsoring us. So Sarah, after graduating you went back to Italy, and then someone told you to get on a plane?Sara Bega (09:54) Yes. It was actually my last summer before my final year of school. I did a research project — mostly as an excuse to be back in Rome. I finished it too quickly, in two or three weeks, and meanwhile the internship feelers I had out weren’t panning out. I thought, if I’m going to be a waitress in Marietta, Georgia, I might as well try being a waitress in Rome. I was trying to make that work.But it became moot when someone told me to get on a plane. I had a conversation with Charles Brewer, the founder of Las Catalinas — maybe eight minutes long. We said, let’s send you down there for eight weeks as an intern. When I got there, it was less of an internship and more of an interim situation. I had to quickly overcome panic and paralysis and just get the job done. They were kind about it: “You don’t have to be extraordinary, just duct-tape this thing together until we find the long-term person.” Then I went back and finished school — and it turned out I was the long-term person. So I graduated and flew down there two weeks later.Seth Zeren (11:28) So what is Las Catalinas?Sara Bega (11:30) So many things. Las Catalinas is a village with aspirations to become a town, on a hillside above the Pacific Ocean in northwest Guanacaste, Costa Rica. The core is car-free. That design choice stems from the pursuit of a built environment where, as Clay Chapman puts it, free-range children are possible — what we call “kid freedom.” The idea is that children can have a completely independent discovery of both nature and their community, without the need for constant parental supervision. Charles grew up deciding to be home when it got dark, and that was the experience he wanted to recreate.He first tested it at Glenwood Park, learned a lot, and then doubled down at Las Catalinas. The car-free core has been a resounding success.Seth Zeren (12:41) What is it like to be a town architect?Sara Bega (12:44) Fascinating is a good word for it. You learn so much about people and their egos. I had to do a lot of work to separate my identity from the success of the vision. I understood my role as vision keeper and guardian — so anything that felt like a threat to that vision felt like a personal threat. You put a lot of heart into it, and sometimes that’s necessary.I went down there thinking I’d stay three years at most and ended up staying a decade, because it was so satisfying to watch the vision come together and know the world was better for it.The job requires being a jack of all trades. I wore the hat of architect, urbanist, bureaucrat, entitlement manager, marketer, infrastructure overseer, engineer, and construction manager. You do a little of everything — figuring out where you need to apply pressure and when, to herd what I’d call the goat parade of development.Seth Zeren (14:17) I love that expression — the goat parade. I’m going to start using that. Because it is exactly like herding goats: less cuddly than cats, and they will occasionally headbutt you.What you’re highlighting is the gap between what a lot of education does — teaching technical proficiency in a narrow specialty — and what’s actually needed to lead the whole enterprise of city building. We’ve somewhat artificially created silos over the decades, and to lead that work, you need to be a generalist who can deal with humans. A city without humans is a ruin — that’s the fundamental dynamic. And most technical education doesn’t prepare you for that.So Sarah, you’ve left Las Catalinas and are now teaching at Notre Dame. And Jack, you also graduated from Notre Dame and, despite your best intentions, ended up back in teaching — at the American College of Building Arts, helping create an architecture program. Is that right?Jack Duncan (15:51) Yes. I had known about the American College of Building Arts when I was a student at the College of Charleston — it used to be housed in the old jail on Magazine Street. And honestly, given the kind of wonderfully eccentric students who go there, it was aptly fitting.I had a great friend named Patrick Will, the plaster professor there, who heard about a program I had started at the College of Charleston called Students Interested in Traditional Architecture — C² for short. Through mutual connections, he wanted to meet me, and we became fast friends. We started holding symposia on Saturdays, inviting students from historic preservation, ACBA, and across the crafts — timber framers, blacksmiths, stone carvers. We’d be doing sacred geometry one week, working through the orders the next, or Patrick would be running plaster. Word got out, and people started showing up from the Citadel, MUSC, the College of Charleston, and even just neighbors who’d hear the sound of iron and peer over the gate.My thesis became the integration of a traditional architecture program into a school. I chose Cannon Park as the site — it has four Corinthian columns from the old Charleston Museum and a nice relationship to the surrounding residential neighborhood. About three weeks before I graduated, I got a call from the provost, which I was convinced meant I was in trouble. Instead, he said they had heard through William Bates, who was teaching drawing at the college, that I had written a curriculum, drawn the building, and worked out the spatial requirements. He asked if I’d consider teaching. I said absolutely not — I had taken a long time to get to school, and now you want to pull me back in?He offered to fly me down and make his pitch over a drink. I came home and told my wife. She’s from Charleston, and as soon as the words “job in Charleston” left my mouth — well, I do what she says. Long story short, I came on board, and for the next six years worked with my great friend and now business partner Philip Smith to build the program. Last year I moved over to the College of Charleston, but I still love those students at ACBA and see them all the time.Seth Zeren (21:10) What is it like to build an architectural program inside an existing institution — essentially from scratch? There’s a real tension between what a traditional contemporary architecture program looks like and what you were trying to do.Jack Duncan (21:39) To be quite honest, I stole everything great from Notre Dame. Not just the ideas about architecture and urbanism, but what I’d observed about great teaching. The kindness and patience of Richard Economakis. The stern expectation of Samir Younes. The eccentricity and creativity of Lucien Steil. All of those experiences shaped what I became as a teacher, and it took me two or three years before I’d consider myself even mediocre.It was the same thing Sarah described about Las Catalinas — I was terrified. It had been sold to me as “everything’s set up, we just need you to come teach,” and I showed up to find no syllabus, no curriculum, no schedule. But I work well under pressure, which I think any good architectural designer does. And I think teaching comes to me naturally — it’s something I genuinely love.The main thing I wanted to focus on was the integration of architects and craftsmen in education. When I was at Notre Dame, we had brought some craftsmen in for an exhibition. That experience made me realize that in a place like ACBA — and I hope others like it emerge around the country — when you educate architects and urbanists alongside craftsmen and they grow up together, it’ll be fascinating to see what kinds of cities they build.Seth Zeren (23:41) There’s a strange disembodied quality to a lot of contemporary architectural education. You hear stories of architects who come out of school not knowing that the real dimensions of nominal lumber don’t match what’s on the label — because they’ve never held a two-by-four, never thought about how parts actually go together in the real world.It’s like what you get from being in Italy, Sarah — you’re walking around inside your textbook. I had a similar experience in undergraduate geology during field camp. By the end of the week you realize: I’m inside one of these. And you have to figure it out by hand, developing observational skills and the ability to synthesize complex information from being on the ground.So you were both brought in to be part of CityMakers Collective, which is now in its second year. Can you tell us what it is and what you’re doing this summer? Sarah, why don’t you go first?Sara Bega (25:16) I can speak mostly to the studio component, which is where my participation has been. Jack is a better source on the overall program, but briefly: CityMakers Collective is a wonderful partnership between CityMakers Collective and InBAU USA, coming together to create a classic, intensive summer program uniquely focused on urbanism. The intensive that Jack did with the ICAA is incredible from an architectural standpoint; what Michael Mesko does there is completely admirable. CityMakers created a program they wish they’d had when entering the field — after going through educational systems where tradition felt like a bad word and anything grounded in both ideas and reality wasn’t allowed. They had to figure it out on their own, and I think the best programs come from a need, not just a desire.The overall approach is creating and encouraging built environments that are human-scaled and support human flourishing, very much aligned with New Urbanism. In the studio specifically, last year more than half of the sixteen participants had never done design work — they weren’t designers. So the challenge was: how do we teach these principles through a design project, knowing that design is the best training for understanding the built environment, even if you’re going to end up in development, policy, public health, or town council rather than design practice? The participants tackled projects at neighborhood, block, and architectural scales. This year we’ve doubled the number of participants, which is kudos to everyone, and as a result we now need two studios — so Jack is teaming up with me.Seth Zeren (27:53) Are you actually doing the scales in that order, macro to micro?Sara Bega (27:59) Last year, yes. This year we’re going to focus much more on an iterative design process across all scales simultaneously, since we have many more designers in the group. Higher expectations — why not raise the bar every year?Seth Zeren (28:21) Absolutely. You’re going to learn something every year and try to accelerate. It’s fantastic to see that kind of growth. This is a challenge for a lot of these programs — you’re starting something from nothing, and nobody knows what it is. Sometimes people find their way here after getting “radicalized” by a trip to Europe or a YouTube video, and they come back thinking: wait, what is going on? They end up in a traditional architecture school expecting one thing and finding another. CityMakers Collective is valuable for those people.Jack, you’ve taught studios at ACBA and now at CityMakers. For someone who’s never been in a design program — what does a studio class actually mean?Jack Duncan (29:47) Sarah and I have been talking about this recently. Studio is an environment of exploration and creativity — everything’s on the table. It’s an iterative process, and what I see most with early students is frustration. I think we’re conditioned, maybe culturally, to pursue a linear path: here’s the goal, it’s a straight line, let’s go. My freshmen work for three or four weeks on a pavilion — the hardest work of their lives, learning classical grammar, staying up late, putting everything into it. And then I tell them: this doesn’t quite work. The entry is in the wrong place. The proportions are off. You just watch them sink.So the first hurdle is helping them understand it’s an iterative process. That’s true in practice too — you submit to an ARB after two months of work, and they ask why you sited it that way. Getting patience and humility, making them understand the critique isn’t personal — that’s the essential lesson. Because like Sarah with Las Catalinas, or me starting a program, you tie yourself to the work. Detachment is the first thing you have to learn in any arts program, and it can be the hardest thing in studio. But we can teach it.Being in Charleston helps, because the built work is right outside the door. If a student says that detail doesn’t go together that way, we can say: let’s walk down the street and look at it.Sara Bega (32:19) And it’s worth saying — studio is not a lecture course. It’s typically four hours, meeting several times a week, where students are actively working and the professor goes around giving desk critiques. Different professors have different styles. Mine tends to be: I’m here to join you in your design process, call out obstacles, and help you figure out your options for navigating them. I try to put the responsibility for decisions on the student, because that’s what the professional world demands.That’s uncomfortable for students who got where they are by being obedient, by checking boxes. Now we’re saying: you decide what the list should be, let alone the order. That’s an entirely different relationship to your own responsibility. And sometimes the conversation is less about vernacular character or foundation details and more about helping a student who lacks confidence find the tools and resources to feel sure of their decisions.Seth Zeren (34:00) When an architectural studio is really humming, what does that look like?Sara Bega (34:07) It usually smells pretty bad, actually. COVID masks were a blessing in that regard. But in all seriousness — it’s the energy of people in the same space working through problems together. COVID proved how important that creative energy is. The projects are often individual, which runs counter to professional life, but that’s appropriate for developing design thinking. At the same time, everyone is learning from and supporting each other. It’s not quiet. For people who work best in isolation, that can be a real challenge.Jack Duncan (34:51) This connects to something Harbison writes about in The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable — the idea of the atelier. From my very first year of freshmen, I told them: by the time you’re a sophomore, junior, senior, you are the professor. I can’t be there at midnight — I already did my time. But when you’re suffering at midnight and you see a freshman crumpled in the corner, you go help them. And they do the same as they become upperclassmen. It only takes a couple of years for that culture to take hold, and it’s a beautiful thing.I graduated from Notre Dame with eight people. I talk to all of them constantly. You spend more time together than you do with your own family. That creates an incredible bond I’m not sure exists anywhere else outside of an architectural design studio.Seth Zeren (36:03) And at the end of a studio, you typically have a crit — everyone’s work goes up on the wall, outside reviewers come in, and there are lots of comments. Traditionally, the joke is it’s not a successful crit until someone cries. What does that look like when you’re pulling it all together?Sara Bega (36:37) We’re more focused on constructive criticism at Notre Dame. Making someone cry isn’t the goal. That said, it does happen — usually from exhaustion more than anything else. It can absolutely feel like a firing line. I often tell students to have a review buddy who takes notes on what the critics are saying, because you’ll go blank or only absorb the negative. You’re so focused on appearing professional that you don’t actually retain the information.What’s important to recognize is that the review isn’t just about making a beautiful drawing or even a successful design — it’s about being able to verbally communicate your work and be persuasive. That’s how things go from paper to physical reality. You have to persuade people.The outside perspective is also very valuable. As design professors, we’re close to the project — we’ve been in the process with the student and may not catch everything. Outside critics bring fresh eyes that round out the critique.Seth Zeren (38:02) Absolutely. When I teach real estate development, I have outside reviewers for the final project and put some stakes on it — usually a gift card or something symbolic — so students are competing for the best review. And I balance the reviewers: nonprofit, for-profit, large, small, public sector. It’s really helpful for students to encounter the reality that their project will have to exist in a world where people come from very different perspectives and values.Where do you see opportunities to improve studio education — where could it be better?Sara Bega (38:57) The opportunities are infinite — that’s our job. Jack mentioned that Notre Dame has a relationship with the physical reality of how things get built: there’s a focus on structure and how things go together. But it’s not quite the same as the side-by-side experience with craftsmen that ACBA offers. That’s a different and valuable flavor.There are also studios that close the gap with reality in other ways. John Miller runs a Habitat for Humanity studio at Notre Dame — they do full construction documents, budgeting, the whole thing. It’s fantastic. But in the academic context, the fundamental job is to teach you how to think and how to learn, which often keeps things in the world of ideas rather than the world of reality. Getting that balance right is a persistent challenge, especially as students advance and get to choose their own studios.What we don’t do enough — outside of programs like that Habitat studio or Mary Ann Casado’s charrette lab — is prepare students for the messy reality they’re about to enter. I can teach you to defend your work to a room of architects, but not to a NIMBY with very emotional, non-technical arguments. That can be a cold bucket of water a few years out of school.Seth Zeren (41:17) A typical architecture degree requires a lot of studio time, and undergraduate programs often take five years or more. Is that necessary? Could we do it faster?Jack Duncan (41:35) I’ll say something slightly controversial. There was a lot of discussion recently about whether architecture should even be a licensed profession. While teaching at ACBA, I was confronted with craftsmen doing something very practical that doesn’t require a license or an exam — they’re just inhabiting the real world directly. Meanwhile, everything in architecture requires bureaucratic steps, exams, internships. And all of that is relatively new — I believe Illinois enacted the first architectural licensing law around 1897.I say this partly as devil’s advocate, but I wonder if understanding architecture more through a practical lens, and loosening some of those educational constraints, might serve us better. Maybe you keep the exams, where you can test competence in health, safety, and welfare. But a degree at Notre Dame — what does that cost now, a quarter million dollars or more? I think we’re limiting who can enter the profession.Seth Zeren (43:01) That’s exactly where I was heading — these programs become very expensive, very long.Jack Duncan (43:08) Even in law, I think you could argue for keeping the bar exam while reconsidering the education requirement. That would allow traditional architectural designers and urbanists to create something new. I wrote about this — the idea of establishing regional building arts colleges that would combine architecture, urbanism, and the building trades, rooted in each region’s living tradition. Students could be educated together: architects, craftsmen, people who make the city, at a much lower cost. At ACBA, tuition was twenty thousand a year, in an incredible city. We weren’t competing with Notre Dame — we were filling a different need.And from seven years of experience in universities: do not underestimate the glacially paced bureaucratic environment when you want to make a change. If you walk into a well-established institution and say you want to start a traditional architecture program, they will laugh you out of the building. Every decision has to pass through seventeen layers of approval. That’s an argument for building something new rather than trying to reform from within.Sara Bega (44:25) Yes. And in urbanism, the answer is always “yes, and.” Fill the whole ecosystem, don’t create competition within a very niche interest.I’ll add a slight asterisk on Notre Dame: the sticker price is obscene, but the need-based financial aid is excellent — I believe families under around $100,000 annual income pay little to no tuition. The barrier to entry isn’t purely financial; it’s the entire support ecosystem coming up that either gets you there or doesn’t. But the broader point stands.Cities are not made by architects alone. A great city is maybe eighty percent background fabric and twenty percent capital-A Architecture — civic buildings, institutions, landmark houses. So you need the full range of programs. A developer or engineer with knowledge of urbanism and context-based design is as important as a trained architect. We need the fire marshal who understands what makes a great street, and the street designer who understands health and safety. Everyone knowing a little bit about everyone else’s world will make our cities better. Whether that’s a two-week intensive like CityMakers, the ICAA summer studio, or a craftsman learning about architecture and urbanism — it’s all of the above, and the more of it that exists, the better.Seth Zeren (46:31) I like the analogy of a missing middle here too — between the YouTube video that’s inspiring and accessible, and the quarter-million-dollar five-year degree, there’s a lot of missing rungs that have withered because they didn’t fit any accredited box. Reopening that terrain would be really valuable.Sara Bega (47:01) And it should be collaborative, not competitive. What if Notre Dame published its pedagogy so that year-long programs could draw from it? What are the fundamentals of design thinking that a one-year program could build on? What is InkDev teaching developers that could inform the Auburns and Clemsons of the world? The goal should be: let’s work within existing systems to improve them, and identify where new systems are genuinely needed to fill the gaps. When the critique becomes “your program is worthless, we need to start from scratch,” that’s just creating a new silo instead of connecting them.Seth Zeren (48:10) Part of the challenge in reforming city-builder education is creating enough additional competition — even if it’s just drawing students to a summer school — that existing institutions notice and start asking questions. At some point they’ll see someone doing really great work and realize they should learn from it.Sara Bega (49:01) There are examples of crossover already. Andrews University has an incredible program, very rooted in reality. Yale has at least one classical studio. The crossover with sustainability efforts, with affordability focus — schools that are genuinely wrestling with the disposability of the built environment — is more than we realize. Identifying where we have common ground is where a lot of the dial-moving can happen. Saying “your program is not worthy so we’re starting from scratch” isn’t sustainable — it just creates another silo.Seth Zeren (50:35) Right. And the other thing you said I find really interesting: if we understand that eighty to ninety percent of the city is background buildings, then maybe we want some reflection of that in the educational programs. I went to graduate school at Yale — not in architecture, but I took several classes there. The architects I later worked alongside as a city planner were designing kitchen remodels and small apartment buildings. Nothing like what was being taught at Yale — very theoretical, very monumental. Then in practice you meet people who have to make payroll and pick tile. There’s a lot of that kind of work, and it might call for a different kind of person and a different kind of preparation: the design-build-developer type. You don’t have to be the world’s greatest designer to produce good background buildings, but you need to know enough about building and construction and development to manage the process — whether you’re stamping your own plans or hiring someone else. That’s just a different job from designing a beautiful church. But we don’t really have that distinction in our educational system today.Sara Bega (52:20) Absolutely.Jack Duncan (52:28) That was a big part of what I was trying to address in the ACBA curriculum. If you want to build a house, give me five craftsmen — a timber framer, a carpenter, a mason, someone to handle MEP. The way craftsmen work is inherently collaborative. If I’m framing a house as a timber framer, I’m in constant conversation with the mason about how we’re tying in and sheathing, and with mechanical, electrical, and plumbing about how we’re running things through the walls. That’s what I wanted the architecture program to be part of.That’s why I called the sequence “traditional architecture,” not classical architecture — we had a classical studio, but the broader program was vernacular and regional. Third-year students had a vernacular design studio covering traditional architecture from around the world, from earthen construction in Chad to the way Vietnamese buildings are oriented based on climate and social life. That context-based thinking is what I’d want any regional building arts college to be rooted in — picking a city that has a living tradition as its base, whether that’s Natchez, Charleston, or somewhere else.The tuition was twenty thousand a year, in an amazing city. We weren’t competing with Notre Dame. We were filling a completely different need. And from experience: never underestimate the bureaucratic inertia inside universities. If you try to introduce traditional architecture or an integrated real estate program into an established institution, you’ll be laughed out the door — not for any nefarious reason, just because every decision has to pass through seventeen people. That’s a genuine argument for building something new.Seth Zeren (55:51) Right. CityMakers Collective is affiliated with some schools but isn’t credit-bearing — you’re just teaching people useful skills.Sara Bega (56:02) Exactly. I heard someone say recently that the future is local. I think that’s true through every lens — how we design, build, regulate, and finance the built environment should all run through a local context. Yes, you’ll have programs educating people to work anywhere, operating at a more general level. But the more local programs there are, the better. Or programs that train you to recognize what resources and options are available so you can apply them to your particular context — whether that’s the financing structures that work in Indiana versus Florida, or the material supply chains and networks that make sense in a given region.One of the things CityMakers does really well is connect people to the broader ecosystem. The speakers who come in for symposia represent all of these different organizations — CNU for town building, NTBA for new traditional architecture, ICAA for classical design, the Urban Guild for the intersection of architecture and urbanism, InkDev for incremental development, Strong Towns for community-based work. You leave knowing people in those worlds. That handshake is what lets you follow up and go deeper. Making that map broadly available is definitely a need.Seth Zeren (58:26) I think to the extent we can create something like an ecosystem map — because there are a lot of individual people and programs out there doing great work, but it’s hard to find them if you’re new — that would be enormously valuable. There are a lot of pieces, and we loosely know of them, but there isn’t really a guide that a newcomer could use to navigate the network.Sara Bega (58:49) That’s one of the major strengths of what Will and the crew at CityMakers have done — they’ve mapped it, at least in practice. And this is a very human profession. It’s about the comfort of knowing someone who’s doing the thing you’re interested in, having that introduction so you can follow it up. Making it more generally available is a real need.Seth Zeren (59:26) This has been fantastic. I really appreciate both of you coming on — you’re doing such great work, and I come away genuinely inspired. Before we close, I’d like each of you to recommend either a place worth visiting and learning from, or a book. Either of you can go first.Sara Bega (01:00:09) A book that just arrived in the mail for me: the second edition of Street Design by Victor Dover and John Massengale. It’s even better than the first — the photos are more legible, the case studies are stronger. If you’re in the design world, the street is the heart and soul of the urban realm, and this book captures that. I got it yesterday and it felt like Christmas. Highly recommended.Seth Zeren (01:00:41) Nice. Jack?Jack Duncan (01:00:47) There’s a wonderful book by a local author named Wilson — I’m afraid I’m blanking on the full title — but it paints a picture of daily life in Charleston in the mid-twentieth century through her own words and is complemented by beautiful etchings. The way she describes street life, the flower sellers, the sounds, the rhythms of the city — it’s a remarkable window into what Charleston was and, in many ways, still is.Seth Zeren (01:01:40) Wonderful. Thank you both so much.The New School for City Builders is a production of the Educational Collaborative for Building Places People Love and Build the Next Right Thing. If you appreciate what we’re doing and want to support us in bringing this school to fruition, please become a paid subscriber at buildthenextrighthing.com.Build the Next Right Thing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Build the Next Right Thing at buildthenextrightthing.substack.com/subscribe

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

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