A New Way of Educating City Builders
The current ways of teaching and learning urbanism are outdated. It's time for something new. Here's how we get there.
Editorial Note: This is a guest post in the “Summer School at College Towns” series.
The guest post comes from Seth Zeren of Build the Next Right Thing. He is a recovering city planner turned neighborhood real estate developer, advocate, and educator based in Providence, RI. Seth has been a high school science teacher, an adjunct lecturer in real estate and planning, and co-founded Neighbors Welcome! RI, Rhode Island’s state-wide pro-homes advocacy organization.
Frustration with the trajectory of our cities and towns has led Seth to focus on the “education problem” — that educational institutions haven’t kept pace with changing demands from professional practice. Seth has a new podcast building on these themes called The New School for City Builders. Seth has also written on the intersection of Strong Towns, CNU, and YIMBYism here and here.
Enjoy. -Ryan
I wrote this piece a couple of years ago—a bit cri de cour and a bit Martin Luther’s 95 Theses—in an attempt to crystalize my critique of the state of “professional” education for the City Builders: the architects, engineers, planners, developers, city managers, and civic leaders who together (though rarely in collaboration) build and manage our cities and towns. It has also formed the foundation of my efforts to imagine and build new educational institutions that would approach the training of City Builders in a different way. That enterprise is best seen in my new podcast: The New School for City Builders. Thanks to Ryan for letting me republish this for his audience.
The Manual Says…
About fifteen years ago, fresh from graduate school, I got my first job as a planner in a city outside Boston. I arrived at my basement desk excited to help my new city to meet the challenges of housing affordability and climate change.
A few weeks later, a group of us planners was in our windowless conference room working on ideas to improve the economic vitality and walkability of one of our village centers. Joining the planning staff was also a young city engineer, also in his late 20’s. And then the “no’s” started.
“No, we can’t put a crosswalk there.”
“No, we can’t add a stop sign there. We don’t have the MUTCD warrants.”
“The who with the what there?” I found myself replying.
“The manual says we can’t put a crosswalk or stop sign there,” he replied as if that was the end of the conversation.
“But you get what we’re trying to do here? What would you suggest?”
“Don’t change anything,” he replied, “and by the way if you do, it all has to meet ADA and have 100% stormwater capture.”
“But it doesn’t do that now…” I said, “Let me guess:”
“The manual says…” he filled in.
We were barely able to communicate, so different was the language of our specialties. A slow realization dawned on me that we didn’t even share a coherent idea of what the city is and what we’re trying to do. No wonder we found ourselves at cross-purposes again and again.
I would go on to have many conversations like this, not just with our city engineer, but also with the fire marshal, the conservation planner, the police traffic lieutenant, the public works director.
I also worked closely with many of the architects and developers working in our city. Part of my job was to review projects for zoning compliance and identify what relief they might require. And I realized these architects also spoke a specialist jargon and designed buildings like private sculptures.
Similarly, the developers could be myopically focused on their piece of land, their project, their profit, seemingly unaware or uncaring of the long-term collaborative goal of building a good place.1
City-Builders in Silos
My experience inside city government (and since on the outside as a developer) is that our city-building professions–architects, planners, engineers, developers, etc.–lack shared purpose, goals, vocabulary, or even a common understanding of just what a city or town is.
And perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising:
Architects are trained in the school of arts and architecture; the engineers are over in the engineering college; the planners are at the school of public affairs and government; the developers are in the business school; and the budding activists are over in the sociology department.
Separated in silos, you can get an engineering degree without learning anything about what a city is. You can get an architecture degree knowing nothing about development and a business degree in real estate development without learning anything about construction.
A Generation After the New Urbanism
Over thirty years ago, a nascent movement calling itself the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) challenged the then ascendant way of building cities and towns. Over the generation that followed, many ideas that were incubated within the movement—mixed-use districts and form-based zoning, the missing middle and accessory dwelling units, transit-oriented and traditional neighborhood development, complete streets and tactical urbanism, highway removal and parking reform—have become mainstream ideas in the city-building professions.
But over that same time-frame, there has been little progress in reforming the academic institutions that train our city-builders. Other than a select few schools (Notre Dame, Andrews University, and the University of Miami architecture programs in particular), it’s fair to say that most schools and faculties are indifferent to or hostile to the New Urbanist movement.
This hostility, I think, comes from a clash of very different cultures and institutions. New Urbanists are practice-oriented and focused on building better places right now, with all the messiness and compromise that entails. Many new urbanists focus on architectural styles that some might deride as historicist or pastiche. Promotion in academia, in contrast, depends on specialist research output and the goodwill of your peers. Many full-time academics have never worked outside the academy and are skeptical of New Urbanists’ close ties to for-profit developers and willingness to work in suburban contexts.
As a result of this divide, the New Urbanist movement has grown, built, thought, and written largely outside the academy. New Urbanist-friendly academics are few and far between. A student is more likely to be introduced to “urbanism,” whether new or traditional, through a part-time lecturer coming from professional practice, than a full-time faculty member.
It is also apparent to me now that this is a real problem. Our city builder professionals no doubt want to build thriving places people love. And our persistent failures to do so are deeply frustrating to many of us. The way we teach our city builders is not only failing our cities and towns, it’s also failing our students. What we teach them matters. How we teach them matters.
There are some 120,000 licensed architects in the US and 28,000 students enrolled in accredited architecture schools. There are around 40,000 city planners and 6,000 students enrolled in accredited planning schools. And there are around 300,000 practicing civil engineers with 20,000 degrees in civil engineering awarded each year. There are at least 3,000 counties and 20,000 municipalities across the US.
By way of comparison, CNU has just 2,600 members. Strong Towns has a little over 5,000.
A self-selected elite cadre of professionals—the “navy seals of city-building” as some New Urbanists self-identify—may forge brilliant new ideas and build a few excellent projects. But that isn’t going to scale (on its own) to implementing reform across the other 98% of America.
Saving the World is a Team Sport
Humans have built cities, towns, and villages for many thousands of years. They are “human habitat”—places, like the beaver’s dam, that we shape to support our safety, productivity, sociability, and flourishing. Given the centrality of cities to human life (they are where most of us live today anyway), it should be little surprise that many of the hardest and most impactful challenges we face today are also “urban.” From housing affordability to mitigating and adapting to climate change, from economic prosperity and innovation, to public health and civic cohesion, the challenges that our cities face today require responses that cross disciplines, span government, civil society, and business, and defy easy solutions.
When I work with students trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up, I like to remind them that “saving the world is a team sport.” In hockey, football, soccer, etc., people play different positions (defense, offense, special teams, causing trouble, coach, etc.) but share a common goal. When those different positions work together, you can move a ball down the field. Indeed, a team is likely to be better with a bunch of different personalities and skills.
Responding to our urban problems is also a team sport. The need for technical specialists isn’t going away, because cities are truly complex and have many specialized systems to allow them to function. But, we need many more generalists who are adept problem solvers, managers, and leaders. And both generalists and specialists will need a shared understanding of the project of city building and management—the game they are playing together—so that they can advance the ball down the field.
Toward a New Way of Educating City Builders
What would it take to make it easier to learn, practice, and teach the knowledge and skills for building lovable places? I think that reform must include at least these foundational principles:
Integration of the city-building professions–We must re-gather the specialist disciplines around city-building as a shared enterprise. No longer can we put the education of civil engineers, architects, developers, planners, etc. in separate silos across the university.
Shared core curricula–To create humane stewards for our cities, we must bring students into the long conversation about how and why we build, the nature of cities and their predicaments, the relationship between ourselves and society, the balance of liberties and responsibilities, and so on through a common body of texts and experiences.
Practice orientation–To teach city-building as a craft, the curriculum must be practical, rigorous, hands-on, and mindful of its history, present needs, and future evolution. Practice experience must be valued among the faculty.
Having read this far, you may be excited by the prospect of taking this reform program to our existing academic institutions. There would be great power in repurposing their faculty, students, buildings, and prestige. So how do we do it?
We don’t.
The truth is that legacy academic institutions are too hard to change. Colleges are defined by being a collegium of academic researchers. Universities center the creation of new knowledge. Tenure protections, disciplinary turf protection, promotion based on research output, and the critical culture of academia all push against the essential reforms above. Colleges are further constrained by their bureaucratic structure, where action dies in an ever-expanding process, while keeping up with elite fads prevents long-term strategic transformation.
So instead of waging a multi-decade campaign on the hostile soil of the academy… let’s recognize that it’s time to build something new.
A New School, a New Type of School
When I have shared the above ideas with people, I am often asked, “Why is building a new school the right idea? Why not a new series of online trainings? Or summer programs? Or weekend workshops? Or apprenticeships? Why not a loose confederacy of all those things cobbled together into something like a degree program?”
I like all those ideas. They are worth doing. And doing at least a few of them will help us get off the ground. But they cannot be a replacement for building durable, physical institutions.
City building is not a tech startup. Cities and towns are one of the oldest activities of human craft, art, and politics. We need durable institutions that can carry this lineage forward with fidelity, confidence, and adaptability. A physical school builds a community of learning and practice. Students and faculty are strengthened, tested, and supported by their cohorts. It will be a place of pride, a symbol, and a gathering place for city builders in practice across the country.
The second reason for a physical school is that we’re not going to stop licensing and certifying architects, engineers, and planners. Credentials can matter even to developers and public sector managers. Having a license or a stamp provides substantial power. And right now, nearly all these stamps are coming from graduates of schools teaching the old siloed way of city-building.
The path to licensure comes through obtaining a degree in an accredited program. To reform the city building professions, we need to build schools that can (eventually) obtain accreditation and produce young professionals on the path to licensure.
And the third reason is that the way to spur change in our legacy institutions is through competition.
Olin College of Engineering, founded in 2001, is an instructive example. The school’s founders observed that in most electrical and mechanical engineering programs, students spent three years in math and science lecture courses before getting into a lab or workshop. American engineering graduates were getting a degree in applied science. But they struggled when they went out into the workplace because they had little knowledge of product development, entrepreneurship, or the factory floor.
At Olin, they redesigned the curriculum so students are getting their hands dirty in project-based learning from the first semester. They still get all the same knowledge as a traditional program with much more experience in design, manufacturing, and entrepreneurship. Olin now exerts a competitive force on other schools to keep up with their curricular and pedagogical innovations and hosts summer programs for the faculty of other schools to learn their techniques.
Our new schools will likewise be able to innovate in curriculum and pedagogy, and then share those lessons broadly so that many institutions and their students can benefit.
How We Can Do Things Differently
Experiential, not just classes—Education shouldn’t just consist of classroom work. Students will work on construction sites, spend a day studying a single building, or walk across a whole city. Short courses will allow intense focus on a topic and study-abroad terms in cities around the world will allow students to see and feel how other people live and bring those lessons back to their future work.
Rigorous, practical, project-based—The curriculum and pedagogy will emphasize practical skills equally with theory. Students will work extensively on real world projects and learn from active practitioners. Expectations will be rigorous and grading hard–not everyone will make it. We want graduates to be known and know themselves to be excellent, hard-working, and resilient.
Cross-disciplinary—We will bring together disciplines that often operate in silos to learn together so that engineers, architects, activists, planners, public administrators, and developers understand each other and can collaborate effectively.
No tenure, teaching focus, institutional neutrality—The tenure system has laudable goals but creates perverse incentives for faculty to check boxes, rack up publications, minimize teaching, and not rock the boat. We will follow in the path of other schools, including Olin College, in awarding 5-year, renewable contracts to faculty based on student development, research, practice, and institutional service. Student learning, development, and achievement are the principal goal and metric of the institution and the faculty. Faculty and student speech and independence will be protected through rigorous principles of institutional neutrality.
City-building as a craft—City building and management involve technical crafts with deep lineage: architecture, engineering, accounting, construction, etc. In each case, reform is needed within the specialization as well as a recovery of lost ways of doing things. Our curriculum will build on the past, rather than seeking novelty for its own sake.
A common humanities core—a core curriculum integrating history and philosophy, literature and drawing, rhetoric and reasoning, economics and finance will prepare students to be humane stewards and not simple technicians or profiteers. Common courses taken by all students build shared understanding of our collaborative enterprise. Learning how to learn is essential to preparing students to be generalists, able to learn and manage between narrow specializations.
Together, these guiding principles help create a different institutional DNA from legacy academic programs, ensuring that as the school(s) grow and evolve, they stay true to this different way of teaching city builders.
How We Start?
The prospect of launching a brand new college is daunting. Substantial time and resources will be required to obtain facilities, recruit faculty, and develop the curriculum before the first student comes through the doors, let alone see the first class through to graduation and obtain any needed accreditation.
Fortunately, there are ways that we can start short of building a full college from day one. We don’t need to know all the steps along the way. We just have to start.
The following ideas benefit from the fact that they require much less time and fewer resources to launch. There is an existing market of people who will pay for these programs. And no accreditation is required.
Weekend intensives—Perhaps the easiest step. A weekend is a condensed period of time easier for working adults or full-time students. It can serve as a teaser introduction or to impart a specific idea, skill, or open a door to future programming. Examples of this are already being run by the Incremental Development Alliance (IncDev), Neighborhood Evolution, Small Scale Developer Forum, and formerly by the City Building Exchange. The new Citymakers Collective is planning a course for the fall of 2024 on cognitive architecture.
Summer schools—Significantly more intensive (especially logistically to secure housing and classroom space). College students and recent graduates already pay for summer programs that offer unique learning experiences (no course credit necessarily required). A three, four, or five week summer program offers much more space for an extensive curriculum and lasting skill development. The Citymakers Collective is working on such a course for the summer of 2025, modeled on the Intbau summer programs. I have a summer course of my own in development, the City Summer Intensive.
Professional certifications—Another option is to create a series of (online) courses that would lead to a professional certification. Examples include CNU-Accreditation and a new initiative by IncDev to certify consultants for working with incremental developers.
Online courses—Online courses are attractive for their lower overhead, ability to scale enrollment, and ability to reach students anywhere. Examples run the gamut from short programs like the many commercial real estate development training programs such as Thesis Driven or Bright Build to multi-year courses like the Classic Planning Institute’s Academy.
In developing these programs, we will begin creating the curriculum materials, pedagogical tools, network of instructors, professional staff, and market knowledge we need to build lasting institutions. It’s proof of concept–for ourselves and for others (especially funders).
Looking Backward in the Future
If we can project forward to 2050 and imagine looking backward, what do we hope to see?
I imagine a rich ecosystem of educational programs–from short courses to graduate certificates and undergraduate programs. I see a network of City & Town Builder Colleges spread across the country, offering graduate and undergraduate degrees, sharing similar DNA and core curricula, and also specializing to meet the needs of their region. I imagine a constellation of satellite campuses in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, shared by the colleges in the network for international learning experiences.
All together, these institutions are training thousands of new professionals each year, as well as pulling legacy institutions along to keep up.
Ten thousand or more alumni of our various programs will spread out across the country, taking important roles building and managing cities and towns across every state. New leaders within the professions and their trade organizations will reorient their professions around the common enterprise of “building places people love.”
Instead of disposable places and people, we will build and administer cities and towns to last 1,000 years–sustainable, resilient, prosperous, adaptive, inclusive, beloved communities.
PS–If you or someone you know is in a position to donate substantial resources to this effort, please reach out!
 | A guest post by
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another program doing work in this area is the DIS program at RPI -https://hass.rpi.edu/science-and-technology-studies/design-innovation-and-society. It's geared more toward product design, but it gets Engineering, Business, and Arts students all in the same studio coursework over the duration of their undergraduate degree.
The types of engineers and designers it produces was best reflected when I was a student there in the fact that some companies (namely Hasbro, Burton, Apple) go to RPI only to recruit students from that program.