My time at the Citymakers Collective 2026.

This summer I visited the beautiful city of Charleston, South Carolina. Not as a tourist this time, but as an urbanist. For two weeks in June, a nonprofit organization called the Citymakers Collective hosted over 20 students for an intensive urban design program. Headed by my friend Will McCollum, an excellent architect and urbanist in his own right, the program intends to fill the gaps in traditional urban design education that is missing in most universities across the United States: hand rendering, sketching, becoming intimately aware of the design language that makes places lovely to visit and live in. The students in this program hailed from all over, including far flung places such as Hawai’i and Central America. Many were in school for architecture or urban planning and their programs left them in want for something more hands-on and experiential. Several were folks who wanted to switch careers and learn how to design beautiful places.

The summer school was split into two studio design teams, led by New Urbanist practitioners Sara Bega and Jack Duncan, each tasked with coming up with a cohesive urban design proposal for infill lots near the Charleston Hospital and a public housing complex. The first week of the program was spent on teaching the basics of sketching, site planning, and core concepts of traditional urban design through walking tours and classroom time. By the end of the second week of collaboration, design, and iteration, the teams presented their work to local stakeholders. Below is a gallery of that wonderful program:

Learning experiences like the Citymakers Collective is where our urban planning, architecture, and development education need to head in this country in order to truly repair our built environment. Will McCollum created the following Venn Diagram to explain the reason for the existence of the Citymakers Collective:

McCollum explained that the way we think about, design, build, and interact with the built environment has become increasingly siloed off since at least World War II. No longer do architects get much training on the construction site or take a deep look into the full-life cycle financials of a project; professionals align their design preferences with unpopular elite styles; and a layperson almost never is involved in the development or design process in any meaningful way.

The ivory towers of urban planning and architectural academia seem more concerned with producing ambitious schematics that will never get built instead of training students with valuable skills to enter the profession with. Studio classes are often graded through the aesthetic lens of the specific teaching architect, and not industry best practices or public preferences. Here, built traditions are shunted for new and untested technologies that often make structures more expensive and less resilient over time. 

If the building industry is left alone, it will create products that are profitable, but vapid. These professionals are grounded: they know the costs of various projects, how to navigate labyrinthine building and zoning codes, and can market developments to the masses. Unfortunately, many of these developers have no design background and what is created is purely “spreadsheet architecture” that continues to unravel our sense of place. Buildings that look like that can be plopped in Boston or Mesa end up making the country less unique and more bland. In the end, it makes our places less loveable. 

The general public has a strong sense of what it wants when it comes to building design, but often lacks the language to describe what is missing from proposed developments. They just know that “something is off.” Grounded movements to propose alternatives try to strive for maintaining the looks of what made a community unique and loved in the first place, but these plans almost never make it to reality. Saying that “a grocery store should go here” or “I want to see walkable neighborhoods” does not will it into existence. 

Why the Citymakers Collective Matters & What Next?

Summer programs like the Citymakers Collective in Charleston, and across the world like Let’s Build a Beautiful City in Utrecht, the Netherlands are filling a much needed gap in the official education of the next generation of urban designers, planners, developers, and architects. I wish the team much luck in the future, but to truly move the needle we need to demand changes at all levels: education, in cities, in the industries, and at an individual level.

Schools across the world should start to adopt more of this interdisciplinary curriculum as seen at Notre Dame’s School of Architecture and the American College of the Building Arts. Architects need to be seen as a part of a development team, not as untouchable avant-garde artists beyond criticism. Don’t throw away regional architectural traditions for placeless design, embrace them. Importantly, as architect and our mentor Mieke Bosse says: “Tradition is the sum of all successful innovations.” 

Society can improve our built environment through looking at the most beautiful and loved developments and seeing what regulations have made their form impossible to recreate today. For example, people love the simple shophouses in our downtowns, but realize that with current lot widths and setback requirements, the same structure cannot be rebuilt if it was burned down. Cities can engage with design styles that are broadly popular when pursuing public projects, and residents can participate as feedback members or even designers in community-driven charrettes like the ones our Strong Towns group have hosted in the past. Being in a team with design and development professionals can ensure that a layperson’s lofty ideas are tethered to the reality of financing and zoning.

Industry needs to change by beginning to realize that the current predominant model of forecasting investment returns incentivizes bad development practices. The math behind the Internal Rate of Return (IRR), heavily pushes projects to be sold to others within three to five years. This in turn leads to lazy design, poor quality materials, and bad interfacing with the rest of the urban fabric through rushing single-use and easily-entitled properties through a development pipeline. Instead, developers should work to find a new model of capitalization and investment. Groups such as Neighborhood Evolution believe in the “buy and hold” strategy, where developers “cultivate their farms” by continually improving properties in a given block or neighborhood. Returns might be lower upfront, but costs will be too. Once the value of all the new walkable areas hit a critical mass, this stewardship model certainly pays dividends. Austin Tunnell of the firm Building Culture is using this strategy to build an entirely walkable and durable urban district out of brick: buildings that will last generations instead of falling apart once the building is paid off.

Importantly, it cannot be “business as usual” for the development world. Large builders with high overhead struggle to build small infill projects that feel human-scaled. This is often because of financing issues stated above and here. We need to expand our development sphere with a robust alliance of smaller developers, who all share knowledge, contractors, swap parcels, and can do the smaller projects that don’t make sense to the big guys. Neighborhood Evolution’s group in South Bend, Indiana is a prime example of this working: each smaller developer might do one or two projects a year, but collectively as a group they are one of the largest developers by units produced in the entire community. Check out the tax implications below:

We at Strong Towns Blono hope to catalyze this realignment of disparate constituencies in an effort to improve our built environment: informing the public and changing city codes, grounding academia in reality of development practices, and moving developers toward a model of stewardship and cultivation. It is in our 5 year strategic plan to stand up a Small Developer’s Alliance in Bloomington-Normal, focusing on empowering residents to be the change in their neighborhoods and foster new development ourselves. Please fill out the link below to receive an email once this group is ready to meet!