Sheinya Joseph on Rebuilding City-Builder Education

In this episode, Seth talks with Sheinya Joseph — architectural designer at Dover, Little Diversified Architectural Consulting and president of the Emerging New Urbanists (ENU) — about her path into architecture and urbanism, what her education did (and didn't) prepare her for, the programs ENU runs for young professionals, and what a truly interdisciplinary school for city builders might look like.

• Emerging New Urbanists (ENU) — website · The ENU Exchange on Substack

• Dover, Kohl & Partners — Miami-based town planning firm where Sheinya did her first internship

• Little Diversified Architectural Consulting — where Sheinya now works

• Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) — the broader New Urbanist movement and conference community ENU grew out of

• Incremental Development Alliance (IncDev) — website, trains small-scale developers

• Citymakers Collective — website, runs an in-person Summer Studio program for aspiring architects and urbanists

• Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America — the book both Seth and Sheinya point to for understanding how housing policy, zoning, and lending shaped today’s cities

• Chuck Marohn & Daniel Herriges, Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis — discussed in ENU’s book club

• M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It — also an ENU book club pick

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Seth: Hello and welcome to the New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zaran, 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 — a new generation of architects, engineers, planners, developers, city managers, and civic leaders. We need a new school for city builders.

Today I’m joined by Sheinya Joseph. Sheinya is a recent graduate of the University of Miami architecture program and an architectural designer with Little Diversified Architectural Consulting. She’s also the president of the Emerging New Urbanists, a nonprofit that supports young professionals in city building and those new to New Urbanism. Welcome to the New School for City Builders, Sheinya.

Sheinya: Thank you so much for having me, Seth. I’m excited to be here and to talk about my journey and experiences as an emerging professional.

Seth: You were on my short list of people I wanted to interview when I was putting this together, because I think it’s important to get perspectives from people at different stages of their career. The Emerging New Urbanists is a great group of people who’ve recently left school, so you can tell us the most about what school is like today — the good and the bad — and how it’s shaping careers going forward. You’re also doing a lot of tremendous educational work through ENU, so it’s great to have you on.

Sheinya: Thank you.

Seth: Sheinya, how did you come to be an architect?

Sheinya: I became interested in architecture because I think a home is one of the most fundamental parts of our lives — shelter is one of our basic needs. But beyond that, our homes are often where we feel most comfortable and where we build memories, and for many people it’s also the largest investment they’ll ever make. So I was really drawn to the opportunity to design those kinds of spaces for people, and I saw architecture as a way to create spaces that are not just functional but also meaningful. As I continued through architecture school, that interest expanded beyond individual buildings — I started thinking more about the neighborhoods and communities those buildings exist within. That’s where I really began to discover urbanism.

Seth: Did you know in high school, or before, that you wanted to do architecture?

Sheinya: I did. I knew in high school.

Seth: Do you have some note from when you were ten years old saying “I’m going to be an architect”?

Sheinya: I actually have a screenshot of a job posting from 2013 for an “architectural manager.” I saved it to research further — though I don’t think I ever did — but I still have that screenshot today and look back on it.

Seth: That’s your gateway moment. So when did you attend school, and how did that shape your career today?

Sheinya: I studied architecture at the University of Miami, and one of the things that really shaped my education there was how much the program integrated urban design into architecture. We weren’t just thinking about the building as an isolated object — we were always prompted to think about the context, the public space, the streets, and how buildings contribute to the larger environment around them. That really influences the way I approach design today: I think about architecture through a broader lens, especially around questions of equity and how the spaces we create can better serve the people who use them.

Miami gave me the best of both worlds — urban design and city building, alongside architecture. That experience also led me to my first internship at Dover, Kohl & Partners, which happened to be right down the street from the university. It was a great opportunity because I got to see that urban design and community-focused planning happening in practice, which further reinforced my interest beyond just individual buildings.

Seth: How did you find Miami? Are you from Florida, or did you seek it out?

Sheinya: I definitely sought it out. I grew up just outside of Boston, so I decided to find the farthest south I could get so it would feel like a five-year vacation — Miami was the answer.

Seth: So you didn’t really know what you were getting into, other than that you wanted to go to architecture school.

Sheinya: Yeah, I had no idea what I was getting into.

Seth: When did you graduate from Miami?

Sheinya: 2022.

Seth: Looking back four years later, what was the best experience you had in school? Was there a lesson or assignment that really reshaped how you thought?

Sheinya: I think the most impactful experience was studying abroad in Rome. Being immersed in a city with such a long history really changed the way I look at architecture and the relationship between buildings and the public realm — it changed the way I’ll forever look at cities. I grew up in a suburban town outside Boston, so living in Rome for those few months was a complete 180 from what I was used to. Being there let me see how plazas and neighborhoods work together over time, and how people today still interact with spaces that have existed for hundreds of years. It reinforced that it’s not just about creating a building — it’s about creating a place, or contributing to a larger place, and understanding how design impacts the way people experience their surroundings.

Seth: It’s interesting — my own journey was also shaped by time I spent abroad, including visiting Rome in grad school. It was mind-opening, because American cities, even our oldest ones, are pretty young — they’re like toddlers. Then you’re in an old city that’s been continuously inhabited for two thousand-plus years, whether in Asia, Africa, or Europe, and you can see the buildup of different periods — the evolution of design, architecture, the economy, how people work in that place. It’s really eye-opening. So that was the highlight for you. If you could go back, what would you change about your program, knowing what you know now, four years into practice?

Sheinya: I think architecture programs do a great job teaching design thinking and technical skills, but there’s an opportunity to expose students to more of the broader process of the built environment. Architecture is just one piece of a much larger ecosystem — understanding how projects actually work, things like development, policy, how financing can be a barrier, and how different professionals collaborate, would help students see how their work fits into the bigger picture. I think about that a lot, since I mentor students still in architecture school. A really valuable experience would have been a semester-long project that brought together students from different majors involved in city building — it would give you a taste of what it’s actually like in the real world, across all the different professions and disciplines, and how collaboration actually happens. When I left school, I didn’t know any of that — I just thought, “I’m an architectural designer, I’m going to make all the design decisions.”

Seth: Right — sometimes you don’t even know what you don’t know. In my first planning job, working with the city engineer, we technically worked for the same city, but it wasn’t clear we were doing anything related to each other — we were often butting heads. It would have helped both of us if the civil engineer, the architect, the developer, and the planning student had all had to collaborate on a project together and recognize each other’s strengths, blind spots, and personality differences — and learn how to manage across that. Because once you’re out in the field, you’re not empowered to just make decisions by yourself. That’s not even true if you’re the owner — you’re still in an ecosystem with lots of different parties to navigate and balance.

It’s an interesting challenge, because academic silos — even at Miami or Notre Dame, which are, I’d say, some of the better programs — are still architecture schools. You’re still doing mostly architecture. So the idea that you’d sacrifice any architecture time to bring in planning, economics, development, or engineering seems, on its face, like it would weaken the program — like you’d become a less capable architect. But is that really true?

Sheinya: That’s interesting, because when I left school, I found I was doing less architecture and more coordination — talking with city officials and community members. So I don’t think it would weaken the program; I think it would make it stronger, because now you’re taught to collaborate across the groups you’ll actually work with in the real world.

Seth: And part of what you’re describing — especially working with community members or politicians — is that so much of this work ultimately comes down to persuasion, conversation, and relationships. That’s not entirely teachable, but it’s not entirely un-teachable either. You could practice those things — improv, negotiation, whatever — and get better at interacting with people and navigating relationships. That would be tremendously valuable once you’re out in the world. It’s just harder to measure on a test, maybe that’s part of the problem.

You advise a lot of students today through ENU who are currently in these programs. Why do they come to ENU? What are they looking for from you?

Sheinya: I’d say most architecture students who come to ENU are looking for a community that broadens beyond architecture itself into city building and urban design. Emerging New Urbanists is a group of emerging professionals passionate about shaping better places and creating more people-centered communities. Our membership comes from a lot of different backgrounds — architecture, planning, development, advocacy, design, or just people who like urban design and urbanist communities — but we’re all connected by shared interests in placemaking, walkability, and environmental justice.

We bring people together from across the country, both online and in person, to collaborate, learn from each other, grow as professionals, and use their voice to explore projects and topics they might not otherwise get exposure to — whether through their current school, education, or practice. I think a lot of people come here for that diversification of community within a professional space focused on building better cities.

Seth: That’s beautiful — it reminds me I really ought to be doing more mentoring work with you all. You’ve asked me to come in before, and I should do it more, because the way you describe it is genuinely inspiring. People need support they may not be able to get inside their current program. What advice do you give to people considering going to school, or choosing between schools — someone who says, “I’d like to be like Sheinya someday”?

Sheinya: I don’t often advise people who haven’t started school yet — I haven’t come across that group much. But if I were to advise on picking a school: I went through a five-year B.Arch program, and I’d say that structure tends to be more rigorous and goes directly into design. Beyond that, I can’t say I have much unbiased advice — I’d just say go to the University of Miami.

Seth: Great insight — you should ask them to sponsor the show; we take advertisements now. Not everything happens in the classroom, though. What’s the best non-academic experience you’ve had that’s helped your career?

Sheinya: Emerging New Urbanists. I think that’s been the most meaningful experience. Early in your career — whether in school or after graduating — it’s very challenging to find a community of people who share your interests and are also trying to figure out where they fit in the field, especially after graduation, when you move to a new city and start a new job. You’re starting over. Being part of ENU gave me the chance to connect with other emerging professionals, and now, being part of the leadership team, I’ve grown not just as a designer but as an advocate, teacher, mentor, and community leader. I’d encourage anyone to find a professional organization that interests them.

Seth: That’s a really good point. I remember first encountering the ENU folks about three years ago at CNU. I’d been away from the CNU conference world for a while because of young kids and COVID, and when I showed up again — in Charlotte, I think — I realized I was no longer a young professional; I was mid-career, and I’d been away a while. It was great to see the energy and creativity coming up behind us. Sometimes in the CNU world — and this is true across a lot of professional worlds — there’s a cadre of senior people who’ve been around a long time, written everything, been to every conference, and everyone wants to talk to them. It can be hard to break in, because they all know each other and have for twenty or thirty years. But no movement or community can put all its hopes on the old guard — you need people coming up, and it can be hard to invest enough in bringing them in. So I was excited to see ENU on the scene, leading that with real intention and energy toward building structures that would last, not just a flash in the pan. How did you first get involved with ENU?

Sheinya: During my undergrad in Miami, working at Dover Kohl, I got introduced to CNU and started understanding what it was about. When I moved to DC for my first full-time job, I was volunteering for the CNU Mid-Atlantic chapter and looking for more growth — more emerging professionals to be around. The president of CNU Mid-Atlantic recommended ENU, saying there was an existing professional group I should reach out to. So I did, and it turned out they were actually looking for a new leader — they encouraged me to interview for the role.

Seth: So you show up and they’re like, “Congratulations, you’re the president.”

Sheinya: Pretty much — it was exciting, but also a little scary. You know how they say to be wary if you get a job too quickly? ENU at the time might have only been two or three years old, so it was very much still at the beginning. I saw an opportunity to grow something — not necessarily change the mission, but add to its trajectory — so I said, “I’m in.” Now I’m three years into a four-year term, and it’s been incredible.

Seth: That’s awesome. Do you have a membership roster? How many members does ENU have?

Sheinya: Just north of six hundred, spanning the country as well as Canada. We’ve been expanding rapidly.

Seth: So there’s real hunger for this. Do you have an age cutoff, where people get “promoted out”?

Sheinya: Sort of — we typically encourage members to have ten years or less of professional experience. It’s less an age cutoff than an experience cutoff, because past that point it can start to feel redundant; you already know a lot of what we’re covering.

Seth: Right, you want to keep it focused on people coming up. Walk us through some of the activities ENU provides for its members, and for the urbanism community generally.

Sheinya: We offer quite a few things. One of our more successful programs is mentorship. We’ve been running it for two years and are entering our third, following the academic calendar — starting in fall, ending in early spring. Mentors and mentees fill out an intake form about their interests and what they’re hoping to get out of the program, and we pair them for a year. Every quarter the whole group meets around a specific theme, prompt, or guest speaker, and we also encourage each pair to meet monthly on their own. It lets the torch pass down — emerging professionals learn from seasoned folks, and seasoned folks give back and learn from the newer generation too.

We also run a program called Urban Decode, where you essentially decode the urbanism of an area. It can happen in any city — we currently have one coming up in the DMV area on September 12th, and another in Boston the weekend of October 3rd. Emerging professionals in that region get together, or people fly in if they want to. We pick neighborhoods and projects that reflect what we want to learn about and push forward, and we bring in the designers, speakers, or developers involved to give tours and talk about the issues they ran into and what they’d do differently. It’s typically a two-day event, and we host a workshop where everyone is assigned a role and a set of limitations. You get a site and its zoning constraints, and you essentially run a mini charrette on the spot, negotiating with your group to make the project work. That’s actually close to the semester-long university project idea I mentioned earlier — I think it’s very helpful.

We also have book clubs, if anyone’s interested in leading one or discussing a book.

Seth: What books have you covered recently?

Sheinya: Escaping the Housing Trap, The Color of Law, and Arbitrary Lines — that’s what I can think of off the top of my head.

Seth: Those are great books, and really fun to discuss. When I was coming up — I’m a “seasoned professional” now, I suppose; that’s a nice way of putting the gray hair — a lot of growth came from connecting with people, learning from them, often people around your own age dealing with similar problems, meeting them at conferences, and reading books together. In school you have that built in — classmates, a whole world around you — but once you’re out in your apprenticeship, working for a firm or a city, you’re learning a lot but you may not have anyone to talk about The Color of Law with. Having a peer group to read a book with and talk through what they see, what they don’t, and how it might shape their own practice — that’s fantastic.

Sheinya: Absolutely. We also have the ENU Exchange, a newsletter written for emerging professionals by emerging professionals — check us out on Substack at Emerging New Urbanists. We let people write about anything they’re passionate about. It gives emerging professionals a place to find their voice, practice their writing, and talk about things that maybe aren’t being discussed elsewhere.

Seth: That’s great — a forum where people can experiment, share their experiences, and practice writing for a public audience. So here’s one of my questions: how does the experience of younger professionals today differ from previous generations?

Sheinya: I think younger professionals are approaching city building in a more interdisciplinary way. Many of us don’t want to be limited to one discipline — that’s kind of what ENU is all about. We’ve decided we can’t confine ourselves to one bucket when we have many skills and interests, but there isn’t always a space that exists for that. I also think we’re seeing more people interested in doing small, one-off projects, and that incrementalism is part of how the movement keeps getting stronger. I think that’s what differs.

Seth: I’ve been involved in Incremental Development Alliance and other developer-training programs myself, and it’s gratifying to share those “dark arts” with people from different corners of city building, because once you understand how development actually works — the challenges, constraints, and opportunities — you have real power to interface with the system directly. You’re not designing something or writing a policy and hoping someone else implements it — you’re going to do it yourself. You’re not waiting for someone else to fix it. So that interdisciplinary character is one difference. How does the ENU crowd differ from the CNU crowd more broadly, when you’re at a conference or event?

Sheinya: That’s a great question — I’m not sure I have a clean answer for that.

Seth: Some of it’s generational, but I think people also carry different sets of concerns. You mentioned environmental justice, and community empowerment is a big objective for a lot of people. Housing affordability has become the crisis everywhere now, and when you’re young you don’t already own a home, so you’re not insulated from it — which makes it harder. Among the people I talk to, that puts a sharp edge on a lot of what we’re doing. There’s urbanism because it would be nice, and there’s urbanism because otherwise we won’t have a home — if I can’t build housing here, my kids won’t be able to live in the town I grew up in, versus, well, my Main Street’s a little ugly. That matters too, but if the housing situation were more under control, we could spend more time on those other things. Same with city budgets — in the Strong Towns world, if a city doesn’t generate enough tax revenue to fund its liabilities, that’s a bigger problem to deal with first. A lot of this isn’t something one discipline can solve on its own — it’s a team effort involving relationships, communication, and persuasion.

It sounds like you’ve got one more year as president. What does the future look like for ENU? What are you hoping to accomplish, and is there a longer-term vision for where the organization goes?

Sheinya: I hope ENU continues to grow as a place where emerging professionals find community, develop leadership skills, and have meaningful conversations about the future of our cities. We’re always looking for people to join our leadership team — I know that sounds like a plug, but it’s not really where I was going. Serving in that volunteer capacity builds a lot of skills you wouldn’t build in a traditional architecture-firm setting. I hope ENU stays the place where people come to build networks and skills, so that when they move into the seasoned-professional part of their careers, they can look back on those networks and keep working together to implement what they’ve learned.

Seth: You’re building a thick network for people to draw on. I’m struck by your point about developing leadership skills — I think that’s something our technical degree programs largely don’t pay attention to. Part of that’s fair, since you’re young and they’re focused on training you for your first job. But we also want people who grow up to be effective leaders in their organizations, and it sometimes feels like we just don’t treat that as an educational goal we could actually work on. How has ENU helped you personally grow your leadership and people-management skills — and how has it helped the rest of the leadership team?

Sheinya: For me, it’s been huge — I’m not just managing people now, I’m managing an entire organization: budgets, taxes, the business-development side that you don’t necessarily learn about in design school, even though it’s arguably one of the most important things. There’s public speaking — in a leadership role you have to learn to speak publicly, communicate with people you’re forming partnerships with, and handle members asking questions or considering sponsorship. You have to learn persuasion — why should someone join, why should someone sponsor the organization. Beyond that: organizational skills, writing skills — it’s been an endless opportunity to learn.

Seth: A lot of that’s because you were sort of thrown into the fire — you walked in the door to say hi and they handed you a hat that said “president” on it, and you’re like, “What happened to me?” Do you have any practices, particularly among the leadership team, that help share that kind of learning across the people leading the organization?

Sheinya: A lot of it is peer feedback. We have regular leadership meetings, check-ins, and one-on-ones where our executive director and I ask the leadership team what gaps they feel they need help with. If it’s something we’re knowledgeable about, we do peer mentoring; if not, we find the resources to help. It’s a “figuring it out as we go” kind of thing — we don’t have a formal leadership curriculum.

Seth: You’re doing a lot of that checking in, communicating, and — evaluating is a hard word for it, but — working through things and really practicing managing and supporting people, and keeping people going. That’s super helpful.

Sheinya: Yeah — and for most of us, actually all of us, ENU isn’t our full-time gig; we all have full-time jobs too. So in our day jobs, we’re watching project managers and people senior to us talk, act, and make deals. You see how those things happen, and you may not get the chance to practice it in that moment, but you can bring those skills to ENU and try them out — negotiate what a partnership between two organizations might look like, or negotiate a space we’re trying to rent. And if it doesn’t work out, it’s not the end of the world.

Seth: So you get a lot of practice, fundamentally, doing something that really matters — and it’s not unrelated to urbanism, since it’s a lot about managing people, accessing space, running programming, persuasion, and education, all central to the day job too. For anyone listening with less than ten years of experience, you should be reaching out to Sheinya and crew — I’ll make the shameless plug if you don’t want to.

Part of the ethos of this show is that — and there are schools I hold up as examples, Miami certainly among them — there’s a general sense among people who’ve been practicing a while that we haven’t done enough to reform the structures of undergraduate and graduate education, so students come out really prepared to be effective, interdisciplinary city builders. Whether that’s Incremental Development Alliance doing online and in-person programming, or the City Makers Collective — which has been on this podcast and now runs a summer school — there are weekend programs, conferences, all these different pieces outside of school. ENU is one of them. I think there’s real opportunity both to reform existing institutions and to build new ones — whether fully accredited competitors or wraparound pieces that support and develop people.

If you could wave a magic wand, walk in the door, and they crowned you queen — what would a new school for city builders teach? What would it look like? What excites you about the future of city-builder education?

Sheinya: I think, for starters, expanding the definition of “city building” itself. When people think of city building today, they might just think of engineers, planners, or architects, but as we know, it’s so much more than that — so expanding what students even see as city-building careers would be an important start. Bridging the gap between real-world practice and academia matters too — we don’t learn about business development, or how the economy matters, or what an interest rate does to a project. Those are all things that would help shape the foundation of how a designer thinks.

Seth: And we’ll keep the trip to Rome, or some other fun city.

Sheinya: Somewhere in Europe.

Seth: I had the chance to live in Asia for a while, and I think there are interesting lessons in the experience of living in a city with a different kind of urbanism. It does two things. First, it shows you possibilities you might not have imagined otherwise — that people can, in fact, live this way. Their kids can still go to school whether they’re taking the train, walking, or biking; whether they live in a high-rise or a row house, it’s okay. You get a lot of ideas from those other lineages, other histories of city-making. But living abroad also gives you a lot of reflection on your own context — because it’s not like everyone else has it all figured out either. When you’re forced to step outside yourself and look back at your assumptions about what’s normal, you come back with a sense that things are more open-ended than you thought, and a better sense of what you’re really attached to, and why. Then you can start to balance the two. So part of it is that stepping outside, and seeing a city with a long history, well built up in layers, that you can really engage with — that’s all really valuable. We’ve got to keep the trips.

Sheinya: Absolutely.

Seth: One thing I muse about a lot is this tension: on one hand, it’s important for people to be generalists who understand how to work with other humans — that’s true. At the same time, we’re not going to get rid of technical specialists. The structural engineer still needs to know structural engineering, the transportation engineer still needs to do transportation, the architectural designer still needs to do architecture. My hope has always been that if they shared more in common with each other, there’d be less miscommunication and friction in the process — but we’re not getting rid of those specializations. So there’s always that tension: we need generalists, and we need skilled technical professionals, meshing together to do city building.

Here’s another idea I sometimes have: what if a school, if it’s in an urban environment, owned a strip of storefronts, and student clubs could run a small business out of one? It would give you that experience of running a budget, managing payroll, thinking about taxes — all the stuff that doesn’t exist in an academic curriculum but turns out to matter enormously once you’re out working. They could run a bookstore, a cafe, a record store, a gym — whatever. Part of the logic is that being a city builder is also about being a risk-taker. If you’re a small business owner in a city, I think you’re part of the city-builder team — you’re building up your business, contributing to the public realm, providing goods and services to your neighbors. We don’t tend to think of those people as part of the team, but they are. As a developer, I can’t do my work without business owners who want to open in my storefronts — it’s a symbiotic relationship. I think you’d learn a lot from having people excited about entrepreneurship as part of the mix, instead of scattering everyone across different schools.

Sheinya: Yeah — and I think that goes back to cross-collaboration. I really think that’s the most impactful and well-rounded way to gain that kind of experience, because most people who haven’t practiced yet probably wouldn’t even think about what a business owner has to do with any of this.

I also think doing community workshops, and actually going into communities, is a very valuable experience. Often, when you’re practicing design at a firm, you don’t get out on a charrette or meet the community members you’re designing for — you’re supposed to design for them without gathering their input.

Seth: Right — you’re not even on site. You’re at a desk somewhere across town.

Sheinya: Exactly. A lot of design decisions end up being shaped by the stories of community members — their history there, what they’re hoping for — because at the end of the day, I’m not the one who’s going to live there. I should be designing for the people who are living there and want to live there. In my undergraduate program, probably third year — which is actually how I met Victor Dover and the team — we went into a community in South Miami that was considering redevelopment of the last affordable-housing block they had. We talked with officials there, and that was a good experience. But had we taken it a step further and spoken with community members directly, asking what was going on and gathering more insight, that would have shaped how we ended up proposing a design for the project.

Seth: That’s a really good point. Sometimes when we talk about relationships, communication, and persuasion, we’re thinking about it at an elite level — persuading other professionals, or the city council. But I think the on-the-ground, observational and relational work — walking around a neighborhood and just talking to people, watching how they use a space, since they don’t always tell you what they do but you can watch and see — is a whole other skill set that’s extremely valuable for designing well for people and neighborhoods. It’s different from presenting at a city council meeting; it’s different from walking down the street and talking to people. Not the same job. But it’s that community-based work — it sounds like you were talking mostly to the movers and shakers, not out walking the neighborhood for a whole day, chatting with people, seeing how they were using it, getting that context. Jane Jacobs has a complicated legacy, but the core of her work was basically watching, walking around, looking, and talking to people.

There’s a lot of value in learning to communicate with people who don’t necessarily understand your architectural terms — and again, I think it’s totally teachable; you could run it as a studio course.

Sheinya: Absolutely.

Seth: Even something as basic as this: most people can’t read plans very well. If you’re an architect, you’re good at looking at a sheet of paper and imagining the building. But most people don’t look at a floor plan and picture the building the way you do. So you show someone a site plan on-site and they say, “What’s this?” and you think, “Isn’t this obvious?” — and they say, “No, not at all.” That’s a good lesson to remember: you’ve got some work to do to translate your ideas into a form of communication that works for the people you’re designing for.

Sheinya: Right — and that’s an important skill, because it teaches you to translate your ideas into a better form of communication for the people you’re designing for.

Seth: Well, this has been fantastic — thank you, Sheinya, so much for coming on. I love getting your whole story. I’ve got a few quick-hit questions to close. What’s one place people should visit to learn more about building and running cities, and what lesson should they take away?

Sheinya: Other than Europe — I’d say there isn’t a single large city I’d point to. I’d encourage people to visit neighborhoods experiencing change through incremental development, not just cities with major transformations. Places like Detroit, Cleveland, even parts of Northern Virginia and DC itself show that city building isn’t always about one big project that changes the scale of everything — it’s often about residents, small developers, and community organizations making improvements over time. I’d encourage people to look up what’s happening in cities near them, go walk it themselves, and take in the street design, the buildings, the people, and what they’re doing.

Seth: What’s one book you’d recommend to our audience?

Sheinya: The Color of Law.

Seth: It’s a good book.

Sheinya: One of the biggest lessons in that book is understanding that the places we live in today aren’t the result of accidental patterns. Many of our communities were shaped by deliberate decisions made through housing policy — zoning, lending, infrastructure. It’s an important reminder that, as city builders, we have a responsibility to understand history. If we want to create better, more equitable spaces going forward, we have to understand how we got here in the first place.

Seth: I have a confession — I don’t know how well you remember the book, but the first chapter or introduction is about a neighborhood in California: La Dera, where I grew up. I was reading it at my parents’ house, maybe ten years ago when it came out, and I got to that first chapter and thought, “Holy shit.” I’d known a little of the history — that the neighborhood had originally been founded as a racially integrated community by a group of Stanford professors, and they couldn’t get mortgage insurance, so the whole thing fell apart and got redeveloped in a more conventional way later. The racial covenants were eventually removed, which I was actually a little bummed about — I wanted to go see them, but they’re not in the deeds anymore. It was a wild experience. But your broader point about the importance of history is really valuable. I’m in a city with a lot of legacy from urban renewal, and we’re getting to the point where it’s far enough back that people are forgetting it was a conscious decision made by real people, with real plans and policies — not some force of nature or inevitable economic process that just unfolded. It wasn’t “too bad, but it was going to go this way regardless” — they decided to do it, and then they did it. Now it’s far enough away that we’re forgetting it was carried out by existing institutions — the Providence Redevelopment Authority still exists and operates, but it’s starting to get disconnected from its own history. Part of why that history matters so much to me is that you can’t really understand a modern American city today without understanding The Color of Law, urban renewal, and all these other factors. If you don’t understand it, you can’t treat the problem or find solutions, because you don’t know why the neighborhood looks the way it does, why the streets are the way they are — you’re missing that context. It’s hard to treat the illness without the right diagnosis.

Sheinya: Exactly. For anyone who wants a shorter overview before diving into The Color of Law, I wrote an article called “Urban Planning Has Never Been Neutral,” which explores the idea that decisions about our built environment always reflect values and priorities — and asks whether we’re being intentional about understanding those impacts and using our roles to create better outcomes. It also gives a quick history of some of what happened. It’s on the Emerging New Urbanists Substack — feel free to leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

Seth: I’ll make sure it’s in the show notes — you’ve got a bunch of great links here. And last question: what’s one thing giving you hope for the future of city building?

Sheinya: Incremental development. As you mentioned, organizations like Incremental Development Alliance are helping provide the knowledge, resources, and support people need to take action. It gives me hope because I don’t think the future of city building is going to come only from large-scale developments or institutions — it’s also going to come from citizen builders, local leaders, and people who care deeply about their own neighborhoods. More resources are being made available for community members to learn these processes, and for people like me — trained in architecture but wanting to be part of the development process — to have the resources to learn and the opportunity to engage. It’s exciting that more people are coming in and joining.

Seth: That’s awesome. Sheinya, thank you so much for coming on the New School for City Builders — it’s been a real pleasure having you.

Sheinya: Thank you for having me.

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