Show Notes:
Aaron’s Substack: On Housing
Aaron’s architecture & development practice (with Jenn Truman): Rocket Shop
Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Matt Crawford
YIMBYtown 2026 in Raleigh NC
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. Joining me today is Aaron Lubeck, my first returning guest. Aaron is an incremental developer and designer in Durham, North Carolina. He’s taught historic rehabilitation and sustainable design, and with the Incremental Development Alliance he’s taught small builders. He also co-founded the National Town Builders Association podcast. Today we’ll be talking about his ideas for building a new school — ideas that are somewhat different from mine, which makes for an interesting opportunity to compare visions. Aaron, welcome to The New School for City Builders.
Aaron Lubeck: It’s good to be here. Feels like I was just here.
Seth: Yeah, absolutely — great to have you back. You and I have both been talking about building new schools and new educational strategies for teaching city and town builders and developers for a long time now. So let’s start with a basic question: what is a city builder?
Aaron: Great question. My design partner actually started a local pro-housing organization here in North Carolina called City Builder, which was founded on that same question. I’ll be hosting YIMBYtown in Raleigh this November.
I think a city builder is a risk-taker. There are people who are city-builder-adjacent — city-builder supporters — but the ones who obviously qualify are what I jokingly call “the bad guys”: the acronym — builder, architect, developer. But it’s also the shopkeepers, the storefront retailers. Those are all risk-takers. It’s the artists too — artists are entrepreneurs. They’re putting out art, making statements, trying to show their interpretation of the world, and people either buy into it or they don’t. That’s all entrepreneurial, small-business-like behavior.
This might be one of the things we disagree on slightly: I think risk-taking is integral to the definition. That’s not to discount the important work public servants do, but they’re not risk-bearing the way small-business people are, and I think that’s a core differentiator.
Seth: Absolutely. So if you were advising a young person who wants to become a city builder, what would you tell them to go learn? What do they need to be learning when they’re starting out?
Aaron: This isn’t a theoretical question for me — I have a 17-year-old and a 20-year-old exactly in this space, so it’s been fun watching them explore what they want to do and where. I share your core frustration: there’s really no great place to send a 17- or 20-year-old who wants to build cities.
Building a city is messy work. It requires Renaissance men and women who can see the whole picture, even though it also demands specialist skills. Schools tend to teach one facet of it while missing three or four others, which contributes to the siloization you’ve written about so well.
In my own practice — we redesign small neighborhoods and do stock plans for small builders — I had to teach myself to draw. I’m not great at it, but I can communicate ideas and solve problems with it, and that seems like a core skill I want both my kids to have. I was well into my thirties before I was comfortable doing it at all, but there’s no reason a 20-year-old can’t draw a basic site plan. It’s teachable — not even that difficult.
There’s a whole set of tactical skills like that. I think our generation was the first or second generation of American men who didn’t have technical skills and didn’t need them to get by. That pendulum is swinging back — for self-worth, for job opportunities, and honestly for happiness. People want to build things, want to do physical work again, whether as a hobby or for work. I hope universities start teaching that. The more elite the university, the less likely you are to get dirt under your fingernails — and there are a lot of kids craving that now.
Seth: A long time ago I was a high school science teacher at a boarding school right out of college. One thing that stuck with me: we had a shop teacher — husband of one of the English teachers — who ran five sections of wood shop, and the kids were thrilled to be using real tools and making things. It really highlighted the disconnect between how theoretical our learning usually is — we just talk about ideas — and the fact that when you go to work, a lot of that theory isn’t very useful, or you simply haven’t learned other things: hard skills, or soft skills about working with people.
You mentioned drawing. I sometimes describe it this way: you use words to understand ideas and people, you use numbers to understand the physical nature of the world, but if you want to understand space, you need to draw. Words, numbers, and pictures are the three systems we use to understand the world — and if you can’t manipulate shapes on paper, you don’t really understand space. You can’t think about it.
Aaron: That’s totally right — and if you can’t, you’re stuck. We see a lot of frustration around this, especially in bike planning, because so many of the advocates come from policy backgrounds. They don’t know how to draw a street section. So you’ll see a lot of sincere, dedicated activity — but then it hits the point where funding and commitment exist, and the plan has to be handed off to a traditional street engineer, and the whole thing falls apart. I’d argue that’s because the advocate couldn’t draw it out and carry it further themselves. Without those skills, you’re reliant on people who don’t care about your issue as much as you do, or who are fundamentally opposed to it — usually because of some dogmatic, siloed rule that conflicts with your vision.
So people get handcuffed, professionally impotent, because they can’t draw. I see it every day in incremental development — there’s no way to do urban development without drawing. I think every developer should draw. Not every developer I know does. But the ability to look at a lot and sketch out whether something could work — a napkin sketch — every developer should be able to do that.
Seth: It’s a huge part of my own practice. Our architects actually make fun of me because I do a lot of it in PowerPoint — at the end of the day I just need to know how big the rectangle is, and then I can draw other rectangles.
Aaron: Right — it’s rectangles all the way down. I teach a site-plan class for Duke students, many of them upper-level civil engineering majors, and it always amazes me: in two hours I can teach them to draw a single-family home on a 50-by-150 lot. If there’s time, they’ll add a garage, an ADU, and some parking. Mostly it’s hand drawing, tracing paper, coloring, scales — tools like a scale rule they’ve never touched before. But site planning is teachable in an hour and a half. It’s really not that hard. It’s a bunch of rectangles.
Seth: Right — just rectangles and measuring. I came up doing trace, and it was always funny showing up to a meeting with the architect holding my own trace — they’d get a little worried. But it’s given me a lot of power, because I can show what I want instead of describing it loosely — “the bathroom needs to be like this.” It also lets me do a lot of early conceptual design without paying anyone.
Aaron: Exactly right. And the more incremental you are, the less you can afford to walk into an architect’s office and spend one, two, five thousand dollars just to learn that you can’t do what you wanted to do. You need to be able to filter out nine of every ten projects yourself before you go to another professional. If you can’t do that, you probably don’t have the skills you need. It’s just not that hard to draw rectangles on rectangles, and everybody should be able to.
Seth: So why aren’t colleges teaching this? Why isn’t this happening today?
Aaron: Same reasons you’ve talked about. Both my parents have PhDs, I grew up in an academic household, and I’ve lived in seven college towns, so I could talk at length about why college towns don’t work. I think it’s gotten worse over time — universities are filled with genuinely brilliant people, but as the world and its data and technology have accelerated, people have become narrower and narrower in their expertise. That’s a huge challenge for development, which requires Renaissance men and women who can see both macro and micro, but certainly the whole picture. The deeper you dig into elite universities, the less of that you find. People are very narrow, publishing papers in a tight band, and detached from practical application — that’s just not what drives an academic day to day, especially at a place like UNC or Duke, which I’m right next to here in North Carolina.
Drawing is very practical, and in some ways it seems almost juvenile to elite academia — the more elite the university, the more practical stuff gets dismissed. I remember working on an environmental entrepreneurship program at Duke’s Nicholas School — a fun exercise. My thinking was: if people are going to start businesses to make the world more sustainable, entrepreneurship by definition involves sales, and sales is teachable. You’d find a class on sales at a place like Texas A&M. But there is no faster way to get laughed out of a room at Duke than proposing a sales class. Funny, but telling — brilliant people, but so research-oriented and detached from practice. That’s a real problem when you’re trying to teach basic, practice-based skills like drawing a site plan.
Seth: You said something interesting earlier — that we have an overabundance of theory that crowds out practice. Is that a sign we’ve gotten the order backwards?
Aaron: We’ve totally gotten it backwards. We didn’t discuss this much beforehand, but I don’t think theory and practice are equal-weight companions — one without the other gets lost, sure, and the elite schools (especially architecture schools) have a long reputation for teaching almost only theory. But I think the relationship is linear: until you know how a two-by-four goes together, you can’t really talk about the theory of how houses go together, or what houses mean. Practice precedes theory, and we see this reversed constantly.
Not to pick on Duke, but I remember students leaving undergrad who’ve never worked a day in their life, and then going straight to a consulting firm to coach other businesses. Maybe that works out for Boston Consulting Group or wherever, but it seems crazy. The idea of people writing zoning codes who’ve never read one, let alone written one —
Seth: Or never built a building under one.
Aaron: Right. If I were writing the rules from scratch, the people writing your comp plan and zoning code would be the ones who’ve practiced in your community for twenty or thirty years — ideally post-career people who’ve retired but understand the ecosystem better than anyone because they lived it. Practice precedes the theory; it’s the precursor to the ability to talk at a high level and understand the context and the history. The idea that 20-year-olds come out of current pedagogy with the ability to practice, built only on theory — I think that’s overwhelming nonsense, and it hurts our cities.
Seth: I went to a liberal arts college for undergrad, and afterward I felt this education had prepared me well for my last job — meaning, this would’ve been a great education if I were at the end of my career, in a leadership role, making complex trade-offs. That’s good, I don’t deny it. But it hadn’t prepared me at all for my first couple of jobs.
I see this a lot in the urbanism world too — some of the most interesting ideas come from people in or near professional practice, because they’ve actually seen things on the ground. For me, a big entry point into urbanism was Jane Jacobs. That was striking because I came up as a geologist — geology is a field-observation science. You can do some experiments, but mostly you’re out looking at rock faces, trying to understand how they got that way. Jane Jacobs was doing the same kind of observational work as ecology or geology: going out, observing the city, and piecing it together from what she saw, rather than starting from theory. If you get people out there drawing the city, holding a two-by-four, they can step back afterward and understand the concepts in a much deeper, more useful way.
Aaron: That’s right — you learn things. I remember teaching that site-planning class at Duke, and there was an undergrad working on a roughly 7,500-square-foot lot with rectangles and setbacks — we made him include a 25-foot setback — and he got kind of annoyed: “That’s a waste of land.” I said, “Got it — now you’re getting it.” Then we got into a whole conversation about the history behind rules like that. Once students are actually doing the work, they catch the bug.
What Jane Jacobs did was unusual — she was almost an anti-intellectual intellectual, and I say that with respect for people doing difficult academic work. She worked bottom-up, whereas so much of planning and academia goes wrong by staying top-down — avoiding the street-level question of what’s actually happening, what the human interactions look like. She was a journalist, not a practitioner, and her ability to understand the city as well as she did is remarkably rare, even today.
Seth: That points to another way to think about a better school for city builders: not being in the classroom all the time, but out on the street, practicing observation.
Aaron: Yes, exactly. That’s one of the things I sketched out when thinking about what this school could look like — and I think we overlap on almost everything here. Being out in the field, in the city, in the lab, on a habitat build site — you have to do things poorly before you can do them well. That’s what learning is. Go design a building your first week of architecture school and be terrible at it; there’s no better way to learn. I’m bad at clarinet because I don’t play clarinet — that’s how the world works.
Have you heard of the “inverted classroom”? A lot has changed with COVID and technology that’s now sort of blowing up traditional education, especially in the liberal arts. If you’re a history major, you can hit a button and get a 200-page book summarized, hit another button and get a unique-sounding analysis of it. It’s genuinely hard for professors to operate in that environment, because it’s so easy for smart kids to present work without learning anything — which feels disrespectful of good faculty and good minds.
There are a couple of fixes. One is bringing back blue-book essays, so students can’t use AI and are forced to actually write — whether by hand or on a disconnected typewriter, doesn’t matter. The other is the inverted classroom: you might have the best lecture on framing recorded by someone in Sweden. Watch it on YouTube at home. The classroom becomes homework, and class time becomes the actual lab — construction drawings in studio, framing a wall, working with plaster molds, whatever applies to city-building. The professor isn’t lecturing anymore; they’re helping with your project. The physical, in-person lecture might mostly go away — and that could be great, solving both the AI problem and the need for tactile, physical work.
Seth: Without necessarily giving up the parts that work. One thing we’ve seen is that big open online courses have low completion rates. What we’ve had to relearn is that part of how we learn is in groups — we appreciate classmates working alongside us, a mentor, a relationship with a teacher adjusting things in real time and holding us to a standard. So we’re not giving up on having a personal relationship, a teacher, a classroom — just the trappings left over from a different way of operating.
Aaron: Right. I have a son who’s ADHD and started high school right as COVID hit — a disaster, putting a kid on a computer for eight hours a day. He’s thriving now, but I still hate it when he takes online classes; it gives me flashbacks. There’s something to the camaraderie you lose — college is partly about creating a fraternity or guild, people sharing tough common experiences. Ideally that’s being in the field building things, but it might also be shared struggle through tough, technical lectures.
So I could see this evolving into rooms of ten or twenty people watching the great Swedish framer’s lecture together on YouTube, rather than alone. In the version of a city-builder institute I sketched out — two-year, four-year, and five-year tracks, roughly associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s for the sake of tradition — as people move up, there’s a real need for leadership training, which is unusual for most professions. This field is messy and hard; there are days you don’t want to get out of bed. You need strong people, and most colleges aren’t really in the business of building that kind of personal strength.
One way to address that: as students get older, they give back to younger students — juniors, seniors, and grad students serving as TAs. If the lecture’s online, maybe a senior is in the room guiding the discussion before students go back to the professor to work in the lab. I think that ecosystem of giving back is critical to teach, and it mirrors real-world practice — most people in this industry do civic work of some kind.
Seth: One idea I’ve worked on is a rigorous work-study component, for two reasons. First, higher education is far too expensive, partly because labor costs have risen quickly. So a work-study component would have students contribute to the school’s own administrative and operating functions — grounds crew, building maintenance, painting, processing applications, managing mail, hosting events. Event management could be run largely by students, with one adult coordinator, and students could skill up over time — giving tours as a freshman, and by senior year emceeing the speaker series, making sure the food’s out and the chairs are set up. That’s not just a cost-saving mechanism — it’s a way of giving people real responsibility and building leadership.
Aaron: I love it. There’s a humility function there too — worth bringing in Matthew Crawford’s writing on trades work. It’s like: “Welcome to the City Builder Institute. We’re going to train you to be an elite, special-forces-level city builder. The mop is over there.”
Seth: Right — like The Karate Kid. You start out painting the wall, fixing the fence. You’ve got to do some unglamorous things first.
Aaron: It’s a bit like Deep Springs College — I don’t know the full details of how they operate, but they take incredibly smart students, keep a very low faculty-to-student ratio, and put them out in Death Valley milking cows, reroofing barns, whatever needs doing. There’s something to that model, and what you’re describing has a real Deep Springs quality to it.
Seth: So you’ve actually sketched out a model for a school like this. Walk me through the origin story of your version.
Aaron: I started working on this after we talked about it in Cincinnati a few years ago — I’ve had the same frustrations with general pedagogy that you have, with some overlaps and some differences from your model. I liked the idea of two-, four-, and five-year programs that borrow the shape of accredited models without necessarily needing accreditation — students, even ones who don’t care about accreditation, are already thinking in terms of “community college,” “bachelor’s,” “architecture master’s is five years,” so that framework is a helpful starting point.
Like you, I had a core and then some community-oriented add-ons we can get into. My core training was more technical than yours — I really like your classics-and-context approach, the “why does this matter” purpose-based framing. That’s attractive, and missing from most education now unless you’re doing a humanities degree — you’re not reading the Federalist Papers otherwise. With America’s 250th anniversary coming up, there might be a window to get some buy-in on that kind of thing.
My original core was more like: home building 101, financing, project management, principles of architecture, engineering utilities. If I redid it now, I’d make it more liberal-artsy, like yours. Half the classes would be core, and electives would be things like drawing, building science, license prep, schematic drawing, case studies, leadership, architectural history.
When my daughter was looking at architecture schools, she gravitated toward ones with more architectural history — which happened to be the schools associated with traditional architecture and training. I was a history and poli-sci major myself, and I was talking with someone last year who put it well: history alone can bore you to tears, but history through the eyes of an artist is interesting. There’s something to understanding the world through human interpretation — through art history and architectural history — that’s both more compelling and closer to the actual field of practice we’re talking about.
Seth: Right — and if part of what we’re teaching is observation, you need architectural and urbanism history to interpret what you’re seeing. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of buildings — you don’t recognize that a style implies a certain time period, or understand how a street might have changed over time, or read what the utilities are from the manhole covers. You need a knowledge base to be an effective interpreter of the city.
Aaron: Exactly. Not everyone has the stamina for pure technical grinding, and purpose-driven content moves people. We see this in engineering all the time — “here are the rules, go do the thing.” A close friend’s son basically gave up on Virginia Tech’s engineering program, which is hard and, for him, boring, and switched to psychology. That’s fine, but there might be great engineers who’d have stuck it out with more context and purpose built in.
Seth: It’s interesting you say that. I once talked with the founding president of Olin College, a new engineering school started in Massachusetts about 25 years ago — probably the youngest engineering program in the U.S. by decades. Part of its origin story was a big study into why American engineering schools weren’t producing what industry needed. In the late ‘90s, researchers noticed engineering programs were losing a lot of students — and not necessarily their weakest ones. Often it was their best students, and the reason was that the work felt pointless. Students were put through years of basic physics and calculus they’d rarely use in practice — unless they became structural engineers — and lost sight of the purpose.
So Olin tried to get students into the workshop in their first semester, streamlining some of that foundational coursework. You still need foundational physics and math, but if you never connect it to purpose, you lose the most creative, interesting people — and that weakens the profession overall.
Aaron: What’s easy to lose sight of is that we’re all builders — you build a family, a business, a garden, a house. Whether in private or public practice, we all want to build something better. It’s no surprise great students drop out if the only thing they’re “building” is a test. That doesn’t feel like an accomplishment the way building something tangible in a lab does.
Matthew Crawford writes about this in Shop Class as Soulcraft — how trades work is good for the human soul, because you’re fixing things, humbling yourself before the materials, the history, the tools, what you know and don’t know, and figuring out what you don’t know so you can solve the problem. That humbling process is a real antidote to narcissism. I’ve never met a narcissist plumber — it kind of solves itself. Some of the most personality-disordered people I know have zero technical skill; they’re frustrated because they can’t execute, can’t see a problem and fix it, whether it’s policy or a leaky pipe. I think Olin got that right: giving students the chance to build and fix things is soul-satisfying, builds strong people, and helps them stick with otherwise grueling training. If you’re just doing calculus every day, some kids get through, most won’t. If they’re doing calculus and building things, more will.
Seth: This touches on a distinction I wrestle with — what’s your internal conception of what a city or a building actually is? For a lot of designers, the city is art: novelty, creation, personal expression. For a lot of policy people, it’s ideas and big theory. For me, I’ve come to understand it as craft — like carpentry, blacksmithing, gardening, farming. In a craft you’re still creating, still engaging with current problems, not just looking backward. But it always exists within a lineage — you’re carrying forward ideas, lessons, and techniques from the past, updating them, not making a hard break from them. Craft, I think, almost necessarily implies utility — there’s a customer, someone who’ll use what you make. Ideally it’s also beautiful, but the disciplining factor is that it’s not merely meant to be looked at — it has to be useful to people.
Aaron: That’s utility, exactly. I’ve always put it more simply: the difference between art and architecture is utility. You can build a beautiful sculpture that makes a point — that’s art. You can build a building that does something and is beautiful — that’s architecture. And architecture is arguably more challenging, because the rules governing utility are unforgiving.
Seth: They really are — real, fundamental limitations. Sometimes that can feel constraining.
Aaron: For most people it’s actually empowering — partly because I’m self-taught, but I think this is broadly true. I work much better with guardrails. Give me a blank sheet of paper and tell me to design a sixplex, and I’m lost. Give me an actual sixplex with real problems, and I can solve that all day. A lot of us work better with constraints, and in city-building the constraints are basically inherent to everything you build. Kids often work better with that too, even when it’s frustrating.
Something else that doesn’t get taught: my design partner, Jen Truman, just taught a studio at NC State rooted in the practical — a single-stair studio, where nine upper-level students explored what single-stair reform might look like in North Carolina, tied to an actual legislative discussion happening in Raleigh right now. That town-and-gown connection was great to see. It’s amazing how little students generally know about building code — a wonky thing to teach, but rarely taught. Eric Kronberg is the best I’ve seen at this: he can scan a zoning code and tell you that 80% of your problem is going to come down to five things — identify those, and you can have a real discussion. Elite architecture programs generally aren’t teaching those constraints: how to find them, what they mean, why they exist, who changes them, how you get relief from them.
Seth: That seems like a golden opportunity for theory to follow practice. If someone like Eric is deeply enmeshed in the real challenges of zoning and building at the practical level, over time he starts to see patterns — it actually simplifies. My own financial models used to be more complex; now they’re getting simpler as I gain experience, because I’ve learned there’s really a small set of variables that matter. If those look okay, I can build out a more complicated model — if they don’t, it’s probably not worth pursuing. Kronberg has developed that same pattern-recognition with zoning, and you can imagine that expertise turning into a genuinely useful theory of how the city works and where the real opportunities and constraints are. I agree that building code is this unfortunate black box that colleges and universities don’t take seriously — and it’s turning out to be an incredible limiting factor on all our otherwise happy ideas. If we spent real time engaging with it, we’d learn more about city-building than we would from top-down conceptual approaches.
Aaron: Totally agree. And here’s an unpopular opinion I’ll die on: Eric Kronberg knows more about how to fix his city’s zoning code than any planning professor at Georgia Tech — even though Georgia Tech has great planning professors — because he’s the one living it day in, day out. Practitioners just know more about the problem than the theoreticians.
The other piece I had in my schematic, which we haven’t touched on: students should do a Habitat build every two years. In a five-year program, by the time you’re 22 you’ve built three homes. Forget everything else you learned in the classroom — if you’ve built three homes by 22, you’re going to be far ahead of your peers. Another idea: code workshops. Hand students a code book — “It sucks. Here are three real problems in our town: parking requirements are causing this, single-stair rules are blocking that, the fire code is making streets unsafe for pedestrians and cyclists. Find the problem, propose a solution, build a strategic plan to get it fixed. See you in two weeks.”
Seth: That would be fantastic — again, learning how to actually effect change. We’re not working with wood or plumbing here, but with laws — not talking about them conceptually, but handed an actual code book: learn to read it, interpret it, craft changes to it, then think through how those changes move through the real public-policy process. What board has to sign off? Who’s on it? How often do they meet? Who do those people listen to?
Aaron: Exactly right. So much of the actual practice — I look back on my 25-year career and realize 75% of my time has gone to things that have nothing to do with my core competency of designing and building homes. But when you’re doing reform work, you have to think about who the decision-makers are and what motivates them. It’s really a policy job — so much of this work is policy.
Seth: Politics, really — treating politics as a serious craft, not just an academic subject. You were a poli-sci major; I think there’s a limit to treating politics as a purely intellectual exercise. It’s a practical enterprise. Some of the oldest books about living in cities are about politics — the word itself comes from the Greek polis, city-state. Living together with other people is a complicated, difficult challenge, and we should treat it seriously — not just as an intellectual exercise, but as a practice you can learn and get better at.
Aaron: Right — and you know this from being a planner, and you’ve seen it with architects: this isn’t taught in architecture school. You will run into a code issue that threatens your project, and a lot of the job is code interpretation and fighting to get your project through — arguably more of the job than drawing beautiful buildings or detailing stairwells. That’s barely taught at all. It could make a great architecture studio: here’s your building, already designed — now here are your real problems, and we’re going to run a mock hearing where the “planning professor” tries to shoot you down, followed by a critique of how you held up under pressure. That’s probably more valuable than the traditional design-then-critique format.
Seth: That’s a much more realistic experience. Thinking back — you’ve got young people in your own life considering this path — what from your own education played the biggest role in your growth later?
Aaron: I was a history and poli-sci major, following my parents, who are both liberal arts academics — such a strange path, because I really hadn’t thought about architecture in twenty years until I found an old note my mom saved: apparently I said I wanted to be an architect at age eight. Funny how I ended up here anyway.
The liberal arts education did teach me a few things: how to think, and how to write — I came out of high school not being great at writing, and doing fifty ten-page papers for demanding professors made me much better. That’s paid off — I write quite a bit now, wrote a book about our work, which opened doors to teach at Duke and to get involved in the new urbanist world, advocacy and design work. All of that traces back to the ability to communicate — a constant thread through podcasting, writing, blogging.
College was also a time to collaborate. My son, who’s at App State, got heavily into music, and playing with a variety of musicians mirrors grassroots city-building and Jane-Jacobs-style city observation in a real way. Good musicians listen first: what’s happening here, what’s the tradition, how are they doing that — those are triplets, interesting, how can I add to this, how can I make it better? That same spirit plays out in urbanism and design. It wasn’t anything formal, but I got a lot out of music in undergrad.
Seth: So if you could give advice to a young person pursuing this today, what should they do?
Aaron: Get somebody to underwrite your school, then go to it. Kidding — but until then, the more you can get your hands dirty, the more you’ll learn compared to anything in a classroom, and that’s become even truer over time. Get out, put your eyes on as much as you can when you travel to cities. Take a notebook. Draw, draw, draw — you’ll be terrible at first, then you’ll get better. It’s fun, and the ability to translate what your brain sees to your fingers is a genuinely joyful, empowering skill, not unlike music.
I’ve learned so much from conferences — anything CNU-adjacent. If you haven’t been to a Congress for the New Urbanism event, go. It’s full of people fighting the good fight, building walkable places that mean something, working against the grain. The offshoot groups from CNU are where some of the most fascinating conferences happen now: the National Town Builders Association for big new-town developers, the Incremental Development Alliance (now led by Ali Quinlan) for small-scale developers, and the Guild, which has really taken off among the best new-urbanist architects. You meet the best people, see a different city, put your eyes on something new — the pace of learning at those events is so much faster than any classroom.
The one thing they can’t give a young person is tactile work. I wish I’d been building homes at 22 — I’d be so much further ahead now. There’s no reason a 22-year-old can’t build. I met a kid at NC State after a lecture — a stoic, fit, monotone farm-kid type, looked like a future general contractor. He said he liked what I’d said about incremental development, was thinking about that path, was a sophomore in engineering, and was already building two duplexes — wanted my advice on career path. I told him: you’re a sophomore building two duplexes, you don’t need advice from me, you’re going to be fine. Those opportunities exist — anybody in undergrad can join a Habitat crew and learn how a footing goes in, a beam goes up, windows go in. Where else are you going to learn that?
Seth: Getting your hands dirty in the field — fantastic. Let’s do a few quick hits to close out. One place people should visit to learn about building and running cities — and what’s the lesson they’ll take away?
Aaron: My favorite, which I cite a lot and have been lucky to visit a couple of times, is Barcelona’s Eixample. It’s a perfectly gridded set of roughly 400-by-400-foot blocks — a magical place that captured mixed-use, human-scaled development while also being one of the densest places in the world, around 100,000 people per square mile. Mostly six- or seven-story buildings, incredible ground-floor storefronts wrapping the block, internal courtyards, some private and some public, plenty of Gaudí buildings scattered throughout. It’s remarkable that this was planned around 1857 — fifty years before electricity — with the foresight to anticipate the modern world. Maybe partly luck, but brilliant regardless.
There’s a woman, Alicia Peterson, who goes by “the courtyard urbanist” on social media, pitching these ideas in her hometown of Chicago and around the country, because courtyard housing delivers green space, density, meaningful architecture, mixed use, and small-business opportunity — affordably, which is the key. There’s a lot to learn there. Barcelona also has great people, great food, great weather — just a good place to go.
Seth: On my bucket list — I’ve never been. What’s one book you’d recommend for someone learning to be a good city builder?
Aaron: So many good ones, but I keep coming back to Matthew Crawford. I got to meet him briefly at a Front Porch Republic conference at Baylor last year — all his writing is excellent. His most influential book is Shop Class as Soulcraft, especially valuable for parents whose kids probably aren’t headed for a PhD-academic track, which is most of us. There’s a real calling — not necessarily to go get a plumbing license, but to understand craft, the value of working with your hands, how that builds stronger people, gives pride in your work, your city, your family. He writes so clearly about why that matters, and why it matters even more now, as AI comes for a lot of jobs that don’t require tactical skill.
Seth: What’s one thing giving you hope for the future of city-building?
Aaron: Tough one — I’ve got a reputation as an eternal pessimist, so every once in a while I need to force some hope through. I keep meeting more and more talented young people doing amazing work. Having just turned 50, I’ve got two generations behind me now in this field, and you can see millennials stepping into leadership. Sophia Dara just took over Emerging New Urbanists, and I’m sure she’ll be celebrated in Northwest Arkansas — really talented. Passing the baton at CNU has always been a challenge, so building that momentum with younger people matters. Somewhere between millennials and Gen X, the YIMBY movement got founded and has done incredible work fixing zoning codes at the local and state level. I think the younger generation is about to take some real swings at building code, to make cities better and more urban. That’s not our fight anymore — it’s theirs to fix — and I have faith they will.
Seth: Pass it down. Thanks again, Aaron — really appreciate all the hard work you’re doing, and all the conversations we’ve had over the years about how to build better schools for city builders.
Aaron: Thank you for having me. I couldn’t be more excited about this podcast, and I hope to be the recurring champion, the repeat guest. Seriously — as you keep workshopping this, it’s great to bring people back on, keep it open-book, do some whiteboarding. I want to support this in every way I can.
Seth: Absolutely — thanks again, Aaron. This has been 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 the school to fruition, please support us by becoming a paid subscriber at buildthenextrightthing.substack.com.
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