The Bottom-Up Revolution Is...Designing Prosperous Places
Will McCollum is a registered architect and the president and co-founder of Citymakers Collective, a nonprofit that teaches aspiring architects and planners how to design resilient, beautiful and prosperous places.
He joins Tiffany on this episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution to talk about what it takes to design environments for human flourishing, as well as the importance of educating the next generation of architects and planners.
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Tiffany Owens Reed 0:06
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the bottom up Revolution podcast. I'm your host. Tiffany Owens Reid, one of the most interesting challenges about the movement to improve our cities and make them more resilient is figuring out how to bring younger generations into the conversation. After all, they will be the ones building our towns, governing them, and, most importantly, living in the consequences of the decisions we make today. I think this is a real and under discussed aspect of the movement, so I'm excited to bring you a conversation today with someone who is working in that space, creating programs to educate young architects and builders about the importance of design and how it affects our flourishing as human beings. Will McCollum is a registered architect and project manager at Lou Oliver, where he brings his knowledge of both design and urbanism to bear on various projects. He is also the president and co founder of city makers collective, where he helps design programs to educate aspiring architects and planners in the classical and holistic design principles of resilient, beautiful and prosperous places. This summer, he and his team are launching their first summer school where 24 students will learn from some of the best minds in the architectural and city building spaces about what it takes to build environments for human flourishing. Full disclosure, I your host, am honored to serve on the Board of city major city makers collective, and will also be one of the speakers at this year's event, which I'm really excited about. Well, welcome to the bottom up Revolution podcast. Thank
Will McCollum 1:37
you, Tiffany. I'm so excited to be here, and I love the work you guys do at strong towns, and it's a great honor. Well,
Tiffany Owens Reed 1:43
I'm looking forward to this conversation. Let's kick things off. I would love to give you a chance to share more of your story. Can you share with me and with our listeners a bit of your journey to becoming a professional architect? Perhaps you can answer that question by telling us a story about kind of like when you realize that this was like your vocational path, or this was the path you wanted to explore. Can you tell us about
Will McCollum 2:07
that? Absolutely, so I have always been, you know, a tinkerer. I, you know, played with the Lincoln Logs. I played with the Legos. I created things since I was walking. But I think I really got my love of architecture and urbanism from traveling. I remember very early on, I was lucky enough, my grandparents took us on a road trip across the US, and we got to see Philadelphia, Boston. We kind of did an American history tour, and that those are some of my first memories of being in some of these walkable cities, is really the colonial cities we have in the US, pre car and but the big moment for me was in high school, my Spanish class took a trip to Spain for a week for Spanish immersion. And the first day we spent on that trip was in Toledo. And Toledo is a medieval city in in Spain. It's on his Hill. And completely, you know, the winding streets, the the really charming alleys of a medieval town is, is what characterizes Toledo, and that was the moment where I was walking around, and it really solidified for me, I want to be a part of building places like this.
Tiffany Owens Reed 3:29
So where did you grow up? I should maybe I should have asked that first, but I'm just curious to give some context to those experiences. Sure,
Will McCollum 3:38
I grew up, I kind of had a two parts of my childhood, the first part, first 10 years, I lived in Vera beach and in Florida, which is about halfway down the Floridian coast on the Eastern Seaboard, and just, you know, small, small to mid side town, Pretty, pretty standard of rural America. And then after I was 10, we moved up to the suburbs of Atlanta, so in the Piedmont of of Georgia, so that both both of those experiences, neither one was really walkable, very car centric, very, I would say, typical of the American experience.
Tiffany Owens Reed 4:23
So until on this trip to Spain, can you tell us a little bit more about like what you were seeing that and like how it was affecting you, and kind of how that shaped your decisions when you came home?
Will McCollum 4:37
Absolutely. So there's one memory I have in particular that really sticks out. I was with a couple of my classmates, and we were just wandering the streets and alleys. And, you know, everything's like 10 feet, 15 feet, from face to face, and just really kind of like a maze that you're walking through this, you know. And. City. And there was just a small sign up that was, you know, like entrance fee, five euros or something. And it just indicated that, you know, this unassuming door, you could go in and see something. So me, being curious, I just opened it. And it was the the central Cathedral in in in Toledo, and you had no idea, because everything's so narrow, and the way that it was on this hill, it was, you know, you're just in this alley, you open this door, and then, and then it opens up into the this most magnificent building, and just getting just that one door between. You have this intense urbanism. You open up, you have this intense like experience with architecture and the giant heights and the detail that, to me, was so impactful that you could never get in the US, because you have everything is so separate and so so far apart that if you want a big experience like that, you're getting in your car, you're driving, you're parking in a parking lot, you're walking in, and you don't ever have that, you know, what architects would call the push and pull, the squeeze and then open up, kind of a feeling where you walk straight from this straight narrow street up into this cathedral. And I think knowing that these kinds of things are possible, and that we used to live this way, and that it felt good to be in these spaces, that's what invigorated me very early on
Tiffany Owens Reed 6:38
that story reminds me of one of my favorite memories of Rome. I was there seven years ago, and I was there during Thanksgiving, and I knew of this woman who was from Canada, and she lived in Rome, and I followed her on Instagram, and thought she was a great photographer, so I reached out to her, and we ended up getting, like pizza and like wine or something, and just sitting in this really popular Plaza by a fountain and having our little evening Thanksgiving Italian picnic. And I was staying in that area, and it was just the neighborhood I was in was like a artistic neighborhood. So there was always people playing music, or always people out there was just, it was just full of life. And so one day, I just went for this walk, one evening, I just went for this walk. I think I was looking for something to eat, and I just kind of meandered around the way you can do in Rome, and I was heading back, and all of a sudden I just hear the most beautiful singing that I had ever heard, probably, and like, followed it and realized that it was just like this, free, I want to say opera, operatic, but maybe not quite opera, but it was some type of beautiful, maybe sacred music or something like that, in a church smack in the middle of, like this plaza, smack in the middle of basically a residential neighborhood. You could walk in for free. And I'm pretty sure I, like, was tearing up just because you could the doors were open, and you just walk in, and I just stood in the back and listened to the last like 10 minutes of the performance. The lady finished. Everyone clapped, and it was like, Okay, everyone back to life, back to normal, you know. Everyone just like, pours out, you know. And so what you're talking about with that continuity between the spaces and the connection, and then how you can move from like, I'm just looking for something to eat, to like, oh, now I'm stumbling upon this amazing, beautiful, sacred performance, and it's just all woven into the fabric of life around other people. I feel like part of because I've read an article that you've written and we've had lots of conversations in the course of like, putting, as you've been putting together the program for this summer. I mean, I feel like what I've heard you talk that, you know, it's for you, it's not just architecture. Can you talk a little bit about like, because I feel like sometimes when people talk about architecture, they're really interested in buildings. But it seems like everything I've read and everything I've heard about I feel you almost think more about people, and so maybe you can weave this into your into telling us a little bit more about kind of college and the journey you went on when you went back to the states and had to figure out what kind of decisions you were going to make about your career. But can you talk a little bit about what you were experiencing, about how those places affected you as a person, and how architecture played into that, but it almost wasn't, because I feel like you're not really saying I just couldn't get over it how amazing the buildings were getting to something else.
Will McCollum 9:30
Yeah, that. That's a great way to put it, and I I really appreciate your point about continuity, because the continuity of experience of a well designed urban space. I think that's what I was reacting to, and it wasn't the architecture. I mean, I do think architecture can be beautiful and should be beautiful, and it all comes together as a part of that experience, but it's the continuity of. Of of those experiences that really makes it something magic. And you you asked it a little bit about my, my journey through education, I point to that Toledo experience as as this time when, when it was really impactful, and sent me on this journey. But I will say I got lost in between, because I studied at two great universities. I studied at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and I studied at Tulane University in New Orleans. And I'll add into I studied abroad at the Chinese University of Hong Kong In Hong Kong. So I kind of got this, you know, I had three different university experiences where I was taking studio classes, I was I was learning about architecture. And remarkably, they all had, they were all very different in several ways, but they all had the same core philosophy of how you teach architecture, and it, it was weirdly separate from the human experience. Everything was abstracted, like an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction when we're talking about things. And it, when you abstract things to that degree, it's really easy to miss that human experience. And I think this is the thing that's causing, at least from in the design world. This is causing that disconnect between the buildings and the spaces we're creating and the experiences we want people to have that they're not having in the spaces. And it really took me years after graduating and working under a master to really piece back together a philosophy for myself that made sense and that was rooted in people. And because I think one of the not to get on a tangent, but I think one of the difficult things about things about architecture education is there's so much to learn. Yeah, I mean, we're designing buildings and everything from a shed that stores, you know, a golf cart, to a skyscraper that houses 10,000 people that are going there for work every day. We have you have to teach so much at all of these different scales, and you have everything from structure to worry about to wind loads to how are you keeping the inside, the temperature and air regulated in a way that's healthy for humans. And how do you do that in a green and sustainable, resilient way? You know, there's so many things about architecture that you have to learn. It's really hard to learn that in school, and so most of the learning actually happens after school. But what what I'm frustrated with, I would say, in the current ecosystem of architecture, is that we aren't grounding everything in the human experience. It's, it's we're trying to do too much. And instead of letting us specialize as we develop our careers, we're trying to specialize too early, and we're missing that that first foundation.
Tiffany Owens Reed 13:23
Can you talk a little bit more about about what you call and what many strong towns fans probably might understand, but this idea of human centered urban design, the article I found that you wrote for southern urbanism, and you're touching on this already, so I'm just kind of giving you a chance to go into a little bit more. But we've talked about this gap in architecture education and in training students to understand human centered urban design. Can you flush out, flush that out a little bit more? What is that gap? Why does it matter? Absolutely,
Will McCollum 13:59
so one of the big problems too, is we have siloed everything. So we have urban planners, we have urban designers, we have architects, we have civil engineers, we have, you know, legislators that that create the rules of what you can do places. It's with everything so separate, we start to lose the big picture. And in the US, in particular, our pattern of development, you know, since the invention of cars and since the invention of zoning, has really just dissipated any kind of civic space. And civic space meaning just a place where you can stand and you are surrounded by buildings and you you are, you know, you're an outdoor you know, a phrase commonly used as you're in an outdoor room. We just don't experience that here. And you. Like a plaza, a plaza,
Tiffany Owens Reed 15:00
exactly a plaza. And the US, you probably would feel this in a town square, like that's
Will McCollum 15:07
the closest place you can feel it here. But I mean, if you go to any of the towns built before 1900 every space in that town was that way, whether it was a street or a big plaza or a square or a park, you were surrounded by urbanism. And the past 100 years, we've just let that go for a variety variety of reasons, but what we've identified as the big gap is that we're not teaching architects about cities. We're teaching architects about buildings, and ultimately, the architect's job is to take a piece of land and build something on it, or design something to be built. But if you don't understand how that little piece fits into the greater city, then what you end up with is a bunch of little individual pieces all around that that aren't connected, so that that's the gap we've identified and and we're trying to fill currently.
Tiffany Owens Reed 16:11
And also it's partly that fabric of the buildings and the fabric of the place, but it's also like the human experience, like, how is this gonna how is this going to affect the people who are going into this building or standing outside of this building, or looking at the building or passing in front of it, right? And how is this going to affect not just their relationship to the building, but their relationship to the whole area and to other people? Because architecture can really have an effect on how you experience other people around you, right? And so I think you're really onto something with that, the necessity of of thinking about architecture from the perspective of the end user, almost, which I don't hear you saying that's totally absent. I'd hear you saying there is a side of that conversation that's absent, because I'm sure y'all, you know, I'm sure architects spend plenty of time thinking about the end user, but I think what you're saying is there, there's a way of thinking about people that needs more conversation. You apologized earlier for a tangent, and I was kind of laughing, so I'm like, this is probably the most tangenti, tangent friendly podcast and the strong tensor, we've made it through two questions in 20 minutes. This is going to be great. I probably need to do more apologizing for tangents. If anyone has listened to this show long enough, they probably would have. I
Will McCollum 17:34
love tangent. So, so yeah,
Tiffany Owens Reed 17:36
especially in there about cities and people. Okay, so you talk about, you know, you have this trip to Spain, you come back, you know, you figure out, you go to these, these different educational experiences, and you have this phrase of like, you have this opportunity to learn under a master. So let's talk about your I'm assuming by that you're referring to your internship with Lou Oliver. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but yeah, I'm just curious, just to kind of continue your story a little bit. How did that experience that internship and just what's happened since then? How did that help answer some of the questions, or, like, some of the contradictions you were seeing and wrestling with?
Will McCollum 18:17
Well, yeah, I was. I graduated undergraduate in 2014 right at the end of the recession, it was about six months before architecture firms felt comfortable with the market to start hiring again. So I was really struggling to find any work, and I was not really interested in residential architecture design. When I graduated, I thought that I wanted to do big projects and make a big impact and do these massive designs. And I ended up being humbled to just take anything, and I got connected with Lou and he was needing a draftsman, and I was just like, I will work it for three months as I try to find the next job. And within two weeks, I realized that the work that he was doing was so interesting to me and that it was almost like he, he flicked on a light in my brain that said that it was taking me back to that Toledo experience. And it was, it was centered on people and their own experience. And it was a very different approach than everything I'd been given in school. Of you know, it's about, you know, in school, it's all about creativity. It's about the space you can create and and what is, what does this shape? And it's all about shapes and forms and these kinds of things. But it's not, it wasn't really rooted in, how do you feel when you're in that space, and how do you build community with other people? And if there. Physical space, and Lou's work very much is centered in all of that. And so within, within like, two weeks of me working there, I said, Okay, I'm going to give this. I'm going to stay for a minute and learn here. And here I am. It's been over 10 years since when I first started. But yeah, Lou is at the time, we were doing a lot of small residential projects, and then, you know, little pocket communities that of these homes that were clustered and just creating little pockets of urbanism wherever we could, usually in and around Atlanta, where we're based. And since then, Lou has really grown and expanded to touching some very large projects, really around the country. So it's been a great, great time with him. How did
Tiffany Owens Reed 20:50
that experience kind of dovetail with your introduction to new urbanism?
Will McCollum 20:57
Well, Lou, Lou was my real introduction to new urbanism. I had one class at Georgia Tech, and there's a great class on the history of urban form, which was the one class I had the entire six years of my education that even talked about urbanism. But it was a history class. So it was kind of framed as, if you find yourself in Paris, you can talk about why Paris is this way, but they didn't really draw that connection between designing new places that with these principles. But in that class, we were introduced to new urbanism, and it was kind of this quirky thing that people tried to do because they were rebelling against cars or some, some kind of framing like that. But Lou, Lou really introduced me to New Urbanism and just the principles of it and why it matters, and really seeing his projects around Atlanta once, once we started, he started taking me to some of the work that had been built here. That's when it really clicked for me, is this isn't just some some movement of fringe people. This is, this is something for all people. So
Tiffany Owens Reed 22:14
you've used the word urbanism in an interesting way in this conversation, and I just want to give you a chance to flush it out a little bit, because some people might be scratching their head going, architecture, urbanism, architecture, urbanism. Like, what? What's the relationship between these two? Like, why are they different? How are they the same? How do they work together? Because, like, just what you were saying, of, like, it was my only class in urbanism, so I don't know. Can you just flush that out a little bit like, how do you, and I've never heard of it used that way, which so it's making my the wheels in my head start, start spinning and like a positive push. But yeah, how do you distinguish between, how do you define urbanism, and then how do you kind of see the way that architecture plays into that?
Will McCollum 23:01
So, the way I personally define urbanism, and I don't know how this relates to CNU or strong towns or other different definitions, but the way
Tiffany Owens Reed 23:11
the grade at the end of this podcast, well,
Will McCollum 23:17
the way I think about it is, it is the physical manifestation of community. So it is how different how people live together physically and because urbanism has all sorts of scales, from, you know, a cluster of three homes out in a rural village somewhere, all the way up to Manhattan. And so I look at it as just, you know, how what does it look like when people live together physically in that built environment, right?
Tiffany Owens Reed 23:52
That's helpful. And I think it's interesting that you apply the word urbanism to a small scale, like a few houses in a rural setting. So like most people be like, That's not urbanism. Urbanism means crowds and lots of buildings and lots of noise. But think I almost feel like you're saying like urbanism is the combination of the built environment and people and like the patterns of life that emerge in response to the built environment.
Will McCollum 24:19
Yes, that's a you. You always take what I say and frame it much, much more intelligently. I love it. I think, I think really, it's also the creation of urban space, which is, you know, like we were saying before, space contained by buildings, outdoor space contained by buildings. I think that that's really what I'm getting at, is, is that kind of pattern.
Tiffany Owens Reed 24:41
Interesting. That's because this is, this is going to give me something to think about for a little while. Because, yeah, I don't think I've ever thought about, I guess sometimes I think I'm tempted to say, like, some places are not, don't have any urbanism at all because of such of the breakdown in the built environment. But. But thinking about it this way kind of makes you kind of makes me realize, like, there can be different types of urbanism, and I think it's good to consider by looking at the patterns of life that emerge in each place and the pattern of the built environment, you know, then you can kind of rustle with like, well, what's good urbanism? And I think that's a big part of what you're trying to do with with city makers collective, and, yeah, all these different programs that you're designing. Before we talk about that, though, can you share a little bit about what you've been working on at Lou Oliver lately?
Will McCollum 25:36
Sure, so we are currently. Yeah, we do a lot of small projects. The two big ones that we're working on, my main the two I've been managing have been trilla, which is a residential town south of Atlanta, associated with a movie studio. And it's a pretty, pretty major movie studio. They film most the Marvel movies there. And so this was a town they wanted in association with that. It's about 200 and I think 350 acres, and about half of that is buildable. So we've, we're designing, we did the master plan, and currently our company is doing 90% of the homes in there. So that's, that's a pretty major project right now, and it's a pretty it's almost, it's almost halfway complete now. So it's a really great project. We're really proud of it, and they've executed really well down there on the buildings. And then another project we're working on is up in the mountains of North Georgia. It's next to Lake Burton, which is one of the kind of quieter premier lakes, is how they would describe it. And going back to that definition of urbanism, that project is more rural, but and you know, some of the acre, some of the some of the lots we have to have as full acre lots with septic, because there isn't a sewer out there currently. So that one's been really challenging us to reconsider our idea of what urbanism is, because the challenge there is, how do you build a walkable community in a space where you have to have that certain size of lots and and I think we're executing pretty well in that, you know, there are certain tricks that we have that can achieve all of the goals and still create a good urban space for people and urban experience, but it still feels rural, and still feels like it's you're getting that, you know, that mountain life, that lake life, of of more nature and more fresh air, but but still getting that sense of community as well. So
Tiffany Owens Reed 28:03
I'm just curious. I don't know if this came up in the course of that project, but did you all I would just make me think about the walking paths in England, about how all the different private properties are connected by a public walking path. I don't know if that came up at all, but I'm just curious, because I feel like to me, that's an example of how you can have both the, I guess, privacy of the like rural setting, but still have an element of the built environment that kind of draws you towards the community life aspect as well.
Will McCollum 28:37
It was definitely a part of the conversations. I think we settled on the road itself being the walking path, which is less magical, but, but unfortunately, we do have to deal with cars and just the site conditions. I mean, it is, it is truly mountain, and then you're and then you have, like the valley and the mountain, and it's surrounded on three sides by National Forest, so the buildable area is very tight. So we were pretty constrained on what we can do, but we they are doing a trail system up there, but getting at what you're saying, I think it's less connected to walking by every house and getting that experience, but it is. It's the main inspiration for that, the way we're designing that in landscape architecture specifically, is Nantucket, because Nantucket does a really good job of specifically sconce it in Nantucket, which is kind of on the eastern side of the island, they do a really good job of keeping it rural while still having homes pretty close to each other, and giving everybody their garden, but not making it feel car centric, but having the alleys and so. A lot of hedges, a lot of fences and walls, but really, that's more of the inspiration for that project. But there's a lot of different ways you can achieve that,
Tiffany Owens Reed 30:10
right? Yeah, that's so interesting, I feel like, especially in American context, because there is this desire for, you know, the private home and, like, the space and the fences and the, I guess, distance from other people. I don't, I don't know that. It's almost like there's like, different types of American urbanism, and maybe it's on a spectrum of like, distance to other people, like some of us are more comfortable with, like, ooh, courtyards. I like courtyards, you know, let's turn our entire neighborhood into one bit courtyard. And some people are like, um, not so fast, right? And so it's just, it's just interesting to think about what that teaches us about what it means to be human. And I think it's okay to have different built environments that speak to different preferences and needs. Well,
Will McCollum 31:06
you know, just jumping off of that point, something we really try to talk about with our developers that we work with is new urbanism and density as much as we like them, they really aren't for everybody. But the problem is right now, in the US, 90% of our spaces are built in the suburban model, and we definitely do not have 90% of people who want that privacy and space and way of living. And so what we've over built in a way of life that is not the way of life that people want. So there is a huge not only are we not building for people, but there's a huge market opportunity for building good spaces and building spaces that are maybe a little bit more dense, and they, like you said, they give back that courtyard that is something that enough people want that there are no other options for that. You can make a lot of money doing something that is both making their life better, giving them something they want, and you're able to make money off of
Tiffany Owens Reed 32:20
it, not just that, but it's financially smarter for cities, and not like, you know, the whole strong counts, you know, perspective on how financially sustainable is constant sprawl and suburbia, right? Like it's not paying for itself. So we just at some point, you have to face the reality that it's not a viable option forever. You know there, there's, there are serious costs associated with that. So I think you're right. There's more market demand for variety and different types of urbanism, but I think there's also just sheer absolute economic necessity to consider other options and other patterns of arranging our lives as it pertains to how we're building neighborhoods and towns. Yeah,
Will McCollum 33:05
urban three could speak more to this than I can but we did internally. We did a small study on trilith Early on, comparing it to two other sites that we took nine acres of trillionth compared it to nine acres of two other projects that were currently constructing homes, and one of them was a more dense development, but it was still not we called it densified suburbia. It was kind of suburban principles, but just like big house on a small lot and then just kind of a traditional suburban development. You know, cul de sac, just two acre lots and crazy, crazy development pattern. We found there was 16 times the value per acre at trilla than there was at that typical suburban site, and we are getting about 50% green space at trilla. So it really, it really adds up. And like you're saying, when you have a municipality that needs to pay for this infrastructure, you we really need some of these solutions in our communities. Yeah, and you're right. It's not
Tiffany Owens Reed 34:18
about forcing everyone to live in, like a dense, walkable community, but I do think there's opportunities to just at least help people understand Understand the variety of different built forms that can exist, and understand the implications of each of them, and terms of both the financial and also the, you know, just the social. You know, I'm a fan of options. I think people should be able to choose, but I think it has to be like I think there definitely needs to be more conversation about the costs associated with each option and also the opportunities too. Because I think maybe your story of going to Spain, I think, is and how that just opened your eyes, just reminds me of how. Important, like how powerful like, exposure bias is in a lot of our decision making, and how, if you haven't been exposed to pleasantly walkable communities and towns and villages, it might be really hard to envision it as being something you even want to also feel like there's this whole issue of latent demand, like people don't know what they want, or they might just resist something because it's associated with something else that they don't like, you know. But I also wonder just how much part of how much of the conversation has to do with just helping people, even, like, have opportunities to experience alternatives and then say, like, Okay, what'd you think about that, and how did you feel in that space like do you think it'd be interesting to live in a space like that, you know, but the experiences we have play such a huge role in shaping what we think we want. And so, yeah, just wonder how much it's shaped.
Will McCollum 35:54
I have to tell you, it's really huge. We one of the things that has made our sales job as a firm a lot easier lately is that Lou has 10 to 20 projects around the city of Atlanta that we can take people to to show them, you know, a little bit of a variety of different conditions, everything from extreme urban infill to, you know, he worked on searedby. So you have rural, kind of rural urbanism, and it's really helped because, like you said, it's just people need to see it, and then once they see it, they get it. But we just don't have many examples in the US, so learning to know what examples to take people to and to reference really goes a long way in convincing people, because this is another thing that I was thinking about when you were just talking, but density is not always the solution, and especially if density is bad density, because when you when you densify, you are heightening every experience in that space. And that means you have to give back in certain ways. So the architecture has to be more beautiful if you are identifying, because to make that experience a nice one, the landscape has to have a little bit more to it when you identify, like if you have a street without trees in an urban environment, we know what that does to people. We know. We know the difference that a single tree on a street can make in a very dense environment. And so part of what we're trying to do is teach how to densify. Because that's, that's one of the myth that's another missing link is that if we, you know, want to teach architects how to build in cities, and we're just building a bunch of affordable housing, because that's the thing to do right now, because we're in an affordable housing crisis. How do you do that in a way that makes people enjoy that urban space more, rather than takes away from what they used to have? And I think that's where a lot of the pushback comes from in, you know, the strong towns message that you're putting out the resistance that that we're all getting in building the kinds of cities that we know makes financially more sense, that is more beautiful, that gives people a better feeling and better experience. People are just afraid because they've seen so much bad development over the past 80 years, and even even urban development, even good, good urbanism with bad design makes people want to resist the next project that goes in.
Tiffany Owens Reed 38:54
What you're saying about how density has to be balanced with like more you have to balance it out through other decisions, makes me understand a little bit more about why I enjoy living in New York City so much because, and also what you said earlier about the push and pull, because I think New York City had, like it had that pattern where, yes, it was dense, but then you stumbled upon, like a park, and yes, it was dense, but then you saw a really beautiful building. Or, Yes, it was dense, but then you saw a little bit of really entertaining street life. And so, you know, living in New York City was incredibly stressful, and I'm always like, why was it, you know, it's, I know why it was stressful, but I would have, it's like, part of me is like, I still would have stayed right, like, I stayed for a long time, and I'm realizing now, like part of it is because of the way certain pockets of the city or certain elements of the built design, kind of, yes, it drained you, but then you turn a corner and it fill you up again with this, like, beautiful piece of architecture, or some just really. Cafe. Just stumble into a beautiful cafe, and you're like, everything is fine. I can do this. I have no money, but everything will be okay. And you just get this boost of irrational optimism. Or you or you just Walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and go get dumplings or something, or you go see a free movie in Bryant Park. So there are just all these moments that could be very, very draining, but then can just would be balanced out almost immediately as spontaneously with just randomly delightful things. So that's a really helpful that's really helpful to understand that, because I think I just intuited it for so long and tried explaining it, but it kind of helps me see how, yeah, if you're when you have density, you have to balance it out with these, these other pressure valves, basically, you know, really help people cope. Let's talk about city makers collective. So Tell, tell us about it. What is this program? And maybe you can share a bit of the origin story,
Will McCollum 41:03
sure. So we, for I formed this with a group of colleagues just over a year ago, about a year and a half ago, and really our mission is to teach aspiring city makers how to build resilient, prosperous and beautiful cities. So because all of those three things, resiliency, prosperity, both for the developer and for the municipality, and beauty, they all go together, and the same solution fits all of them. And we talked a little bit earlier about the gap that we see in the architecture education, and so we, we're trying to fill that gap and teach, teach this foundation for a way of thinking that will lead to better design. And really, it's not just about design. We specifically chose the name city makers, because everybody touches the city. So this is everyone from, you know, engineers to advocates for their own neighborhood. We think that teaching the principles of good urbanism, of good design, even if you aren't going to go out and do those designs yourself, if you know what the what the kind of the rules are of what makes a place feel good to people, and what historically has worked, and then how to kind of think about it, then we can all go and be better advocates for the places that we live In. So that's kind of the who we are. The I would say the beginning of of the idea was born there. So there's a group called into which is the international network of traditional buildings, architecture and urbanism. And it is, they have, you know, chapters in 160 countries in the world. It's, it's a really incredible organization, and it's focused on traditional ways of building, traditional ways of building cities and architecture. And they have a series of summer schools that they've set up around the world. And I attended one in the Netherlands. It was called, let's build a beautiful city. And the whole premise of that was, we aren't building places that are beautiful. Can we build places that are beautiful? That was their entire question. And it was very interesting, because in, you know, in the US, we think about the Netherlands, you know, in terms of urbanism, and we're like, that is the dream. You could get on your bike and you can go anywhere. Their train network is on time, and it runs frequently. And, you know, from an urbanism level, they really have it down over there, from what we can tell. But it was interesting because they're having very similar conversations in Europe and all over the world, because the architecture that is being built is, at best, benign, and at worst, it's, it's actually ugly. It is detracting from that experience. It is creating spaces people don't want to be in. And it's, it's really acute in Europe, actually, because Europe has all of these gorgeous, you know, city centers, and all of their development is happening in the fringes, and we don't, you know, as when we tour and we're tourists, and we go over there, we don't see the new development that's happening. It's, it's very similar to what we have, except it's just dense, and that, in a lot of ways, that makes it worse, because. At least in suburbs, in the US, you have your privacy and you have your little space. So it's it was really interesting to see it from that context and to just experience their movement of we want to, you know, learn from what we've done really well in terms of the historic centers of our cities, and how what lessons can we take from that and then apply it to the new places that we build? And we took that idea of those summer schools, and we identified the opportunity in the US, because we currently have nothing like it that supplements our design education. So that's kind of where the idea came from.
Tiffany Owens Reed 45:38
So how to just talk a little bit about the logistics of the program. It's three weeks, I think
Will McCollum 45:44
absolutely so. It's two weeks in Charleston, South Carolina. This year is our inaugural year. We have, unfortunately for the listeners, we have already closed our applications, but we have a really great diverse group of people who've applied. We have everybody from Australia to Pakistan applying to this program, also from all over the US, and really, a really good group of professions as well. We have everything, everybody from carpenters to architects, to city planners to aspiring developers. We have, we have a couple that were in the film industry, you know, set design and storytelling. And just really, a really good group that we're excited about, because it's all of us that touch the city and make this a place. And so it's we can all learn from each other and figure out how to build better cities together. But anyways, the program itself is two weeks in Charleston, South Carolina. We have a really amazing cohort of teachers that are coming in. We have a core team for this first year is Sarah Bega will be leading the studio. She was the town architect at Las Catalinas in Costa Rica, and currently also teaches at Notre Dame University in their architecture program. We have Jack Duncan, who is the director of the architecture program at the American College of the building Arts, which is in Charleston, and they're doing some really amazing work in that city, teaching traditional crafts, specifically about historic preservation and how to keep that heritage in Charleston and preserve those buildings. And then we have Lou Oliver, who I've talked about, and Christine Frank, who is the president of intball USA, and was one of the she was the first executive director of the ICAA Institute of classical art and architecture when it was first founded. So we were really excited about the team. We've We've pulled together. We also have a group of of lecturers coming in every day, at the end of the day, symposium lectures, which, which you are one of those. And we're just so excited about about this program, and really have high hopes for what the students will be getting out of it, and what, what they'll be doing. And then one more thing to say is it's going to be a design studio class, so students will have an active design project throughout the two weeks, in addition to getting lectures and learning about urbanism in cities and how we actually get this stuff done. And so this year, the site is a an urban district, and we'll be doing everything from looking at the layout of the streets and the street sections to getting down to the door knobs. And you know, how are we designing everything from architecture to urbanism. And to go back to a question you said before, what's the relationship between architecture and urbanism when you're standing in an urban when you're standing in an urban space, what you see is the architecture. So that is the relationship that the outside of that building defines that urbanism. And so that is the missing link. And so we are focusing on all of all of that with the students. In two weeks. It'll be kind of a whirlwind, but it'll be, it'll be really great. We're very excited. Yeah,
Tiffany Owens Reed 49:34
you're gonna have me thinking about this urbanism, architecture relationship for a while, because I think it is the buildings. But I think the buildings themselves are not like the end point. There's something else in the buildings, right, like, and I think that's where it gets really interesting, because you have to ask yourself, like, the decisions that were made about these buildings, how do they what type of urbanism do they create? Right? I think you know. A strip mall versus a town square. Both of them are buildings. Both of them are technically a type of urbanism. But now you can begin to articulate, well, what kind of urbanism did we get based on the way the buildings look and the way they're arranged? So just so many layers there to think about. This is a good and
Will McCollum 50:19
not every type is good, right?
Tiffany Owens Reed 50:23
Well, so when you think about city makers collective and think about, okay, you get to the end of those two weeks and everyone's packing up to go home, what are you hoping the students are taking away from this experience?
Will McCollum 50:34
We want students to walk away with the knowledge of what it takes to basically create that urban space. One of, one of the reasons we located in Charleston is that it is a beautiful space that people keep coming back to, and so that is what that's at the core of of what we want to teach is, how do you create those spaces that connect with people in such a deep way that 400 years after that city was founded, or 300 in Charleston's case, how do you create a place that people keep coming back to and keep connecting with because I mean, the reality is, when Charleston was founded, those people lived a wildly different life than we live today. They had a different political structure. They had a king right. They had a they had no mechanisms of like, like, no industry in terms of cars, machines, everything was human or animal powered wildly different lives, and yet, somehow, here we are, and we still connect with it. So what are those? What are those pieces that that really connect with us being human and and that are in the built environment, and then also, not only just what they are, but how we can have more of it and get back to to building that in our communities. I also feel
Tiffany Owens Reed 52:07
like there's going to be many people who walk away. Maybe they're not going to necessarily become community builders or city builders, but they'll also walk away with an interpretive framework for looking at the built environment that they're in. And maybe they won't become an architect, but maybe they'll understand how to articulate or how to properly interpret the built environment, and maybe that will translate into some other kind of meaningful action, or creative, creative expression or creative project for them, or just being a better citizen, you know, and being able to say, like, Hey, here's why the businesses on the street keep struggling. You know, let me explain these principles to you that can help our downtown or something like that. You know.
Will McCollum 52:48
No, absolutely. I mean, I think architects and urbanists love to kind of protect that knowledge behind the profession and because it is very specialized. But the reality is, everybody lives in a place, right? And, and, and everybody should know what makes places better, because architects only do so much. City planners only do so much. Everybody only has their little piece of the puzzle, and everybody should know what it takes to build a nice place, because, I mean, to be honest with you, 1000 years ago, everybody did, and we're just so specialized now that that knowledge is kind of just hidden In a couple professions, and our goal is to democratize it a little bit
Tiffany Owens Reed 53:46
more in a way too. I feel like what you're saying is not so much like, oh, we want to make sure everyone is an urban nerd and an architect wonk like us. I almost feel like it's an invitation for people to understand, like, what it means to be a human being in a place, because, you're right, we all have to live in a place. And sometimes, I think we find ourselves frustrated or angry or really happy in particular places. We can't articulate why, or we're drawn to places, or we're drawn to sorts of certain activities, and we don't understand how to even interpret our own behavior or our own emotions our own desires. And I think so much about what urbanism offers and architecture offers is an opportunity to like, translate humans and like to even understand like humans, which, at the end of the day, is really what this should all be about, is it's like understanding, what does it mean that humans are fundamentally social beings that live in particular places at a time, right, that do life in places. And what's the relationship between place and being human, and humans and other humans. And how does this all how does this all come together? I find it endlessly fascinating. I plan to spend the rest of my life thinking about this, but I think that could. Also be a great service to people, to the students who are coming here, to hopefully they walk away fascinated by people and the way that we relate to each other, and the way that really and the role that place plays in that, I guess, is what's coming.
Will McCollum 55:17
I mean, the the joke in the industry is that being an architect for custom homes as being a marriage counselor and you, you really have to, you really have understand people to be a good designer. And so if you, if you extrapolate that out to a city, you know, being a good urban designer is being a good you have to understand people exactly what you're saying, and it's yeah, it this is, this is a skill that everybody benefits from having, is understanding cities. So that's what we're trying to do, is just help people understand cities and what makes us like a place.
Tiffany Owens Reed 55:56
Well, well, this has been a great conversation full of many great tangents, as I knew it would be, given me a lot to think about and to feel inspired by. In closing, can you tell us a little bit about the city where you live? What do you enjoy about it, and what are a couple of places around town you like to recommend people visit? People check out if they come to visit. My standard closing question, and I'm using it to secretly plot the world's most epic road trip one day to talk about all these places people have told me about.
Will McCollum 56:27
Well, you're catching me at a weird time, because I'm moving in about two months
Tiffany Owens Reed 56:33
after being here reflective time now you're like looking back and thinking about all the places you'll miss.
Will McCollum 56:38
Yes, absolutely. So I currently live, I'm in Atlanta near Grant Park, which is a really lovely park a little south of the Capitol. I mean, kind of the stereotypical places in Atlanta are Piedmont Park, which is a huge park. It was designed by Olmsted and has great views of midtown, with these towering skyscrapers, and is just a really lovely place to walk around. And it's connected to the BeltLine, which is, I'm sure the listeners of strong towns know about the BeltLine, but it is a Rails to Trails project in Atlanta. It's been going on for about over a decade. They, I think they've been working on it for almost two decades, but construction, it's been under construction for a decade, and so it's connected to that, which has been a real boon to the city. It's a huge amount of development along that belt line. It's really cool. There's a lot of food halls and nice places to go hang out, and it ties into Piedmont Park, so that that's like central part of the city. Those areas Virginia Highlands, are just really they're my favorite. They're they're very walkable, very just worth seeing, very green. Atlanta is known as the city in a forest, so our canopy is something to behold, especially on the northern end of the city, I would say, to throw something in there that's not typically talked about. I actually think there's some really interesting and specifically for your listeners, there's some really interesting activity happening in the suburbs of Atlanta right now, we have a lot of you know, Georgia, being a original colony, has a lot of older towns, rather than, like, the Midwest or the West, and a lot of our suburbs were actually small towns before Atlanta gobbled them up. And so obviously suburbia kind of spread out and took over those towns. But what's been happening over the past 20 years is we've been building centers again for those for those suburbs. So there's been investment in creating little pockets of nice urban spaces for people to experience. And I wouldn't say they're the most perfect example of a place to build, but it's interesting that it's happening, and they are pretty nice, especially for, you know, suburban growth. So as seeing, seeing that return to community and to building these little pockets of walkability in the suburbs, I think is really, I don't know if it's unique to Atlanta, but it's exciting that's happening here that's
Tiffany Owens Reed 59:25
really interesting. Um, what about do you have, like, a favorite coffee shop or favorite third space, like pub or restaurant or anything like that, like to take people to, you
Will McCollum 59:34
know what? There's a brewery called Bold monk brewing. That's really nice. They have great food and drinks, and it's also a good space. And they have a they have a really cool space upstairs that's like a small book shop and lounge area. So I quite like going in there. We also have several food halls in Atlanta, a. We there's the works, is one of them, pond City Market. There's Krog street market. That are all just nice places to go and hang out. And you don't have to buy anything. It's just, you know, you're in the space. There's a lot of food, so you can get some free. It's not required. So I would say those are my favorite spaces. Atlanta doesn't have too many third spaces, like most cities, but,
Tiffany Owens Reed 1:00:31
yeah, great. Do What We Can well. Thank you so much for joining me on this podcast. It's been a fantastic conversation. I'm looking forward to the city makers collective this summer. If you're listening to this, we'll definitely put links to everything in the show notes. And if you're listening to this and you know someone in your community who you think would make a great fit for the show, please nominate them using the suggested guest form in our show notes. We've had the pleasure of speaking to many interesting people who are doing interesting projects in their towns, because you all have told us about them. I'll be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES
Local Recommendations:
Citymakers Collective (Website)
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Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.