#E000: Intro
Welcome to The Reflective Urbanist
November 10, 2024
"Notable talents are not necessarily connected with discretion."
- Junius
The Beginning
I always thought I’d be an architect for the rest of my life. But after working in firms for over ten years after college, I started thinking about playing a bigger role in city-building—and having more fun while doing it. That’s when I started exploring opportunities outside traditional architectural practice. I ended up taking a job with Mayor Ed Rendell’s administration in Philadelphia, where I led a team managing the design and construction of city projects. My architect friends thought I was out of my mind, but those four years were truly life-changing for me. I loved every moment, from the sense of purpose and mission that comes with working in government to the challenges of navigating a complex bureaucratic and political landscape. In fact, I loved it so much that I went back to school for a master’s degree in government administration, juggling full-time work, night classes, weekend classes, and visits to New York to see my fiancée, who’s now my wife.
A lot of college graduates complain that what they learn in school isn’t very useful in the real world. But for me, it was the opposite. Everything we studied from Machiavelli and the Cuban Missile Crisis to public finance and revenue bonds was not only fascinating but surprisingly relevant to the challenges I faced daily. Balancing theory and practice—by studying at night and working during the day—gave me a deeper understanding of how to be effective in my job. It was one of the richest growth periods of my live, both personally and professionally. After a lifetime of being an average student with a short attention span, I found myself loving learning like never before. And for the first time in my life, I consistently earned good grades, so I took great pleasure in sending those report cards back home to my long-suffering parents.
I loved school so much that after four years with the city and the completion of my master’s degree, I went back again—this time for a PhD in city and regional planning. I wanted to learn more about the kinds of things I had been working on at the city: Large-scale urban redevelopment, big projects, special-purpose governments, and public-private partnerships. My dissertation integrated these ideas into a study of waterfront redevelopment in four American cities, that I later published as a book. My wife got a job in Minneapolis so after we arrived, I thought, why not work in real estate development? After all, I had worked with developers as an architect, as a city employee, and I had interviewed many of them for my dissertation. My development career was a whole new education, and I loved that ride for four years, until it ended abruptly with the bursting of the housing bubble and the great financial crisis. Yet between that work and serving on my neighborhood board, I felt like I knew enough to make lemonade from lemons ,and so I wrote a book about how developers think. I have spent the better part of the past two decades serving as an owner’s representative, leading and facilitating a variety of big, complicated, urban public realm projects. And since 1990, I have taught graduate students in design and government majors about urban design, private sector development, and planning and design for the urban public realm.
Edge Dweller
Looking back on my career, a big recurring theme has been moving between worlds—sometimes even inhabiting more than one world at the same time. My first big shift was moving from the private to the public sector, and, at the same time, from being the architect to being the client, hiring and managing the architects. By the time I started work at the city, I had already been teaching as an adjunct professor for a few years, moving back and forth between practice and academia, and learning how to balance full-time work during the day, part-time teaching in the evenings, and writing in the twilight hours. My professional work has taken me from private architectural practice to government, real estate development, and independent consulting, moving easily between public and private sectors. Along the way, I’ve built a broad and deep network of colleagues and friends spread across an array of disciplines, as I have sought to understand urban development from many different perspectives. In my teaching and writing, I draw on my experience from practice—whether working for local governments, nonprofits, or private developers—to bring theory to life and show how big ideas play out in the day-to-day work of city-building.
The Philosopher and The Technician
In 2018, at the Annual Conference of the Minnesota Chapter of the American Planning Association, I was part of a panel called "Fast, Funny, and Passionate," where each of us gave a ten-minute talk on something that personally interested us. My talk was called The Technician and the Philosopher. To set myself apart, I wore a beret and scarf, channeling the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. My title slide featured two side-by-side images: Jacques Louis David’s painting, The Death of Socrates, and a big pile of nuts and bolts. The point was simple: to be an effective city planner, you need to be able to hold big ideas in your head while also skillfully turning a wrench. You should be able to contemplate Aristotle’s concept of "the good life" while leading a community meeting for residents who are nervous about a proposed project in their neighborhood. The talk was well received, and I continued to refine and share versions of it with my students over the coming years.
Five Eggheads
This idea of integrating theory into practice and day-to-day work continued to occupy my mind, so in early 2020, I recruited four colleagues, all PhDs who had also worked as Practitioners, to join me for a panel discussion at the upcoming Upper Midwest American Planning Association Conference. We called it Five Eggheads Talk about Big Ideas: Some Practical Uses of Philosophy in Your Planning Career.
I submitted the proposal in January 2020, but after the Covid pandemic started, the conference organizers let everyone know that the program would be abbreviated, moved to Zoom, and narrowed down to the basics. Which is why me and my colleagues were pleasantly surprised when our nontraditional proposal was accepted. Originally, the session would have been 60 minutes, but with the shift to Zoom, we had just 45 minutes to present and take questions. Since there were five of us, we decided on a simple outline of three slides and three main points: We would each introduce ourselves and summarize our background in practice and academia, share one theory that influenced us during grad school, and give an example of how that theory applied to our daily work.
The session was a hit, and we received a lot of positive feedback. So, we brought it back the next year with The Return of the Eggheads, and again, the year after, with The Eggheads Live, when we celebrated the end of COVID and the return to an in-person conference. Afterwards, we five eggheads went to dinner, where we decided to go out on top and retire the act before it got stale. But the experience confirmed for me again that this idea of more deliberately integrating theory into practice had merit and could be adapted for a broader audience beyond planners.
What's Next?
Throughout this time, I’d been planning to write a book about implementing public realm projects. The onset of the COVID pandemic, however, followed by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, where I live, and civil protests around the country and the world, changed everything. There was a widespread awakening about the experience of public space that reached far beyond projects, my concept seemed to have lost its relevance, my enthusiasm for the book dried up, and I wasn’t sure what to do next. So, in the fall of 2023, I took an online personal essay class just to get myself writing again. In eight weeks, despite being incredibly busy, I wrote six solid essays. I wrote about everything from a Jackson Browne song that takes me back in time, to my love of root beer floats, and a habit people in my family have of slapping our foreheads to make a point. Writing has always been easy for me, but the format of a short weekly “essayette” of under 1,000 words unlocked a flood of creativity.
That’s when the big idea hit me: Why not focus on writing essays instead of a book? Each essay could follow the format of the Eggheads panel—applying one theory to a real-world experience. I imagined a two-pronged program: podcasts with essays as companion pieces. Then, after months of brainstorming names, I had a eureka moment and landed on The Reflective Urbanist. [1] It perfectly captures the idea of reflecting back and forth between theory and practice, continually improving both.
The Reflective Urbanist
And that’s how The Reflective Urbanist came to be. My goal is simple: To add a new layer of theoretical insight to your day-to-day work, making the task of city-building more interesting, engaging, productive, and fun.
I’ll address a wide audience—architects, landscape architects, planners, engineers, developers, elected officials, bureaucrats, special interest groups, and community members alike. We’ll explore a wide range of theories—from policy windows, urban growth machines, and exchange vs. use value, to post-modernity, strange bedfellows, graft, corruption, and the dangers of name-dropping in important meetings.
I’ll be asking key questions like: Who, what, why, where, when, and how? Which theory best explains what’s really going on here? How do things actually get done in cities? And in each case, we’ll rely on a simple structure: a story, a theory, and a lesson.
I hope you enjoy The Reflective Urbanist!
“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.”
- Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
[1] The name, The Reflective Urbanist, might cause some students of planning and design to hear an echo. In 1983, MIT philosopher and urban planning professor Donald Schön published an influential book called The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Schön challenged the idea that trained professionals in a variety of fields, ranging from design to medicine to education, work within fixed fields of knowledge. In studying these practitioners, Schön found instead that professionals who must constantly adapt to uncertainty, complexity, and dynamic situations, continuously improve their performance during and after the problem-solving process, through “reflection-in-action” and “reflection-on-action.” While I use the word “reflective” in a similar context, I didn’t pick the name to recognize Schön, as my own objectives, while related, are more modest. I simply hope to offer a range of theories to an audience of city-builders, ranging from professionals to community members, with the aim of helping everyone make a little more sense out of what can, at times, feel like a bewildering process.