Courtyard Urbanism: Mixing the Best Parts of the City and the Suburb
Dr. Alicia Pederson is a writer and advocate who encourages cities to adopt courtyard urbanism, a style of development where mixed-use buildings surround a shared courtyard. Today, she joins Norm to explain the benefits of this development style and how to advocate for it.
-
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 0:00
Thanks for tuning in to this Bottom-Up Short, I'm Norm with Strong Towns. After meeting 1000s of Strong Towns members, I often find myself saying "I've got to tell you about so and so." That's what this series is all about, quick introductions to regular people doing remarkable things today. My guest is Dr Alicia Peterson, a Chicago based writer, urban policy advocate and a mom of three. She's a leading voice for courtyard urbanism, designing cities with green, family friendly density that supports schools, transit, small business and strong communities. Alicia is also vice president of the Greater Rockwell Organization, and active in the Strong Towns Chicago Local Conversation group and Abundance Illinois. You'll hear how her advocacy, especially on Instagram, makes complex ideas feel approachable and urgent, helping people see what's possible in their own neighborhoods. I'm so glad that Alicia has agreed to share her story with us, and I'm sure you're going to enjoy this. Welcome Alicia.
Dr. Alicia Pederson 1:02
Hi Norm. Thank you so much for having me. It's so fun to be here.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 1:06
I would love to hear how it is that you are using Instagram and other tools like this to help shape people's understanding of what they see when they pass through their community and why that matters.
Dr. Alicia Pederson 1:18
All right. Well, a really quick but important correction, I'm not on Instagram at all. I'm on X, formerly Twitter. But, you know, social media. Similar, although some big differences. People ask me to get on Instagram all the time. I'm on X because it's a lot of where industry people are, as well as politicians and a lot of lurkers who come in, and they might have burner accounts, but there's a lot of people there. I get a lot of engagement, and I get a lot of people reaching out about my content through this website. So I post on X a lot. I'm @Urbancourtyard. I post about courtyard urbanism, which is an urban planning typology that is commonly found throughout Europe. It is almost non existent in the European form in North America. Just to define it, it is where a city block might have 10 to 15 discrete apartment buildings, and they are mixed use, maybe four to six stories tall. The ground floor is commercial. Floors one and two might have larger apartments, and then three through 4, 5, 6 have smaller. These are built wall to wall so that they frame a block, and the inside of the block is a courtyard. And they come in all shapes and sizes in Europe, but one thing that is common is that they allow a range of households, like in size and income, to live in a city with a backyard. It unlocks family friendly living for residents, both because they have access to the protected, semi private yard where they can send their kids out when the kids are going crazy or whatever, but it also gives them access to all the amenities of the city. And in my content on on X, I talk a lot about how to identify the form, because it's very unfamiliar to Americans. How to build it, what its history is, what it looks like in different cities, the unique amenities that it brings to cities in Europe. A lot of the things that we recognize as beautiful and attractive about Europe are downstream of this block form. And I'm trying to make the connection that people have this kind of neighborhood in Europe because of the way they do these blocks. And then I post a lot about how to bring this form incrementally to American cities.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 4:08
I love that. And actually, I love that we started with a correction, because using a platform like X is, I think, part of a strategy of saying, "I need to bring these ideas into different spaces." You know, my LinkedIn, for example, is full of people posting really nice things, and Instagram has sort of an aesthetic element to it, but I think you've touched on the fact that, on X, there's an opportunity to reach slightly different audiences, to sort of cross pollinate across that. And one of the elements that I think you're picking up on is that we have struggled to really define areas that are semi private or semi public, Describe how your work is trying to help people understand the importance of a courtyard in that context.
Dr. Alicia Pederson 4:49
Yeah. Well, so these courtyards can come in lots of different flavors. In the one that I think is going to be the most useful to American cities in reurbanizing the suburban population -- namely these middle class families who want a big house with a yard -- the courtyard can be completely enclosed so that is only available for the residents of the block. And if you are a mom with three little kids, as I am, having a space where you can send your 4, 5, 6 year old kid, or even three, to go and play in a sandbox while you make dinner. Or where, if you're getting some work done inside, you can send them to play outside with other neighbor kids in a place where cars can't come, Stranger Danger can't come, and they can't get out is such incredible value. And in many ways, it's better than the private suburban backyard, because you can have other kids. I know we're going to go back into the biography later, but in my 20s, I after college, I went to au pair for a family in Florence, Italy. That's where I first saw this in action. This is a family, they lived in a beautiful, big apartment in a Florence courtyard block. On the backside of the apartment was this yard where they could send their kids to play. They didn't have to take them to a park. They didn't have to take them somewhere and do some special play date, because they could just send their kids out to play in the courtyard with the other kids on the backside. But then out the front door they had this amazing city with all the shops and the commerce and everything that we love about being in cities, and they had both. I thought, being in America, that you can't have both. You can either have the big house with the yard or you can have the city. But this amazing urban planning technology lets us have our cake and eat it too. But using that building frontage, the building mass itself, to create privacy is key to this. I will just add one more thing. In different communities, you can have different levels of privacy. So if you go to Berlin, a lot of these courtyards are open, or gated but they're open at some times. So there might be concerts or things that take place. And in some places, the interior courtyard might be walled off and private to the families that just have the ground floor. Or in other places, more in northern Europe, they have the entire courtyard open in common. But it can look different for different communities. And it's part of the flexibility of this form that makes it so resilient and valuable whenever it is implemented.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 7:58
And my observation is that the larger the keep out signs or the private property signs, the more sterile the space tends to be. Can you touch a little bit on how we make sure that these are not just empty places that we've created, but actually places for thriving in the fullest sense?
Dr. Alicia Pederson 8:16
That's a good question. I think that having some kind of gates that can be open where people can come in, and have play structures. It can be semi private or semi public, where people can come in at certain times. I think just in general, like the more density and the diversity of uses on a block, the less sterile it's going to be. I've seen some of these where they're all residential and they have that sterile feel. I mean, the way that you create a flourishing, interesting, dynamic place is mixed use. The more residential uses and the more commercial uses or institutional uses, the more lively it's going to be. And by different residential uses, I mean a real range of unit types. You don't want all one bedroom and studio apartments for small households. You want some four bedroom plus units for large families. You want some studios. You want some in between. You want the whole range of society represented on a block, because that's how you get resilience. You get all the benefits of having social cohesion and integration by having a whole broad social network living near each other.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 9:46
And so I would imagine many people that are listening live in areas where these types of development patterns are not allowed yet or are uncomfortable or unknown. What would you suggest in terms of advocating for these types of things to pop up in more places?
Dr. Alicia Pederson 10:02
You know, that's a good question. There are some areas where they're very, very far from anything like this. That will take education and getting involved in your local neighborhood organization, getting involved in Strong Towns, and just making people aware that this even exists. A lot of people have gone to Europe and they've seen that, but they have no idea how to recreate that. So showing people that it's really simple, actually, what they did. It's not rocket science. The block size matters, the street size matters, and the buildings. But you can have that kind of neighborhood in a North American city. There are some obstacles, but they are political, mainly, and easily overcome, or at least it's simple. I'm working on it currently in Chicago. I think that, for cities where there is already mixed use and a block structure and density, the challenge is zoning and building templates. So I have worked with our local neighborhood organization and the alderman and the congressman to try to bring some of this kind of building typology to Chicago. And the big obstacle in Chicago is the cost of construction. Building the missing middle is harder to do. It's harder to make it pencil. Developers make more money if they go really high and if they have double loaded corridors. And so it's finding the right site. It's finding the right developer. What I'm working on now is I've partnered with an architectural firm, and we are going to the city and trying to persuade them to adopt what's called a form based code and building templates. So, a form based code differs from typical zoning codes, that regulate uses. In a form based code, they don't care what the use is, whether it's commercial, residential, they care how the building relates to the street, how tall it is, what the setbacks are. We are trying to create a courtyard block or perimeter block based code and pre-approved building templates. So you could go to any developer and say, "Hey, here's a pre-approved building template, building design. We've got the zoning all approved. Everything's ready to go. You just need to build it out." And that will really reduce the cost, because a lot of the costs of building come from permitting delays and getting all these approvals. That's what we're pursuing now. But yeah, I think the education and also looking at the zoning aspects and the building plans. Those are the big pieces of bringing courtyard blocks to your North American city.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 13:31
Yeah. And I think a specific instance that we could devote a whole podcast to is the reform around single stair reforms and allowing single stair buildings. We'll have to do a whole other session, and certainly Strong Towns has covered that as covered that as well. But I'm so impressed by the work that you're currently doing, and I'm also interested, what are the steps in your journey that have brought you to this type of work, in this type of advocacy?
Dr. Alicia Pederson 13:52
Sure. It's a little bit odd, and I want the story to inspire people who aren't in the urbanist space, or don't have a building background. I'm not an architect, I'm not an urban planner. I moved to Chicago to get my doctorate in English, and I have a PhD from Northwestern and my specialization is Renaissance Italian and English literature. And I was going to be a Shakespeare professor and do academia. And then halfway through my dissertation, I met my husband and started having kids. I completed the PhD, but I had three kids in four years, and there was no way I was going to be doing academia. So I stay-at-home-momed it for 10 years and just got really involved in my neighborhood organization. It's been wonderful. I strongly recommend everyone to go and find your neighborhood organization and get involved. Try to connect them with Strong Towns. I'm working now with Strong Towns and our neighborhood organization. We're going to do a neighborhood walk. We're going to walk around our Chicago neighborhood and talk about strengths and weaknesses of urbanism and goals for how we can make it better. But I got involved in the Urban Planning and Development Committee on my neighborhood organization, and started working with developers. In Chicago, the developers are kind of on the defense because they get a lot of flak. The aldermen want them to have more affordable housing, residents don't like buildings that they perceive as ugly or too dense, and there's parking. And I started working a lot with local developers ahead of time saying, "Hey, here's what I think would work really well. And if you make these tweaks, I think it's going to be more successful with the community and the alders." In the process of working with developers, I learned a lot about it. I also had this experience of living in Europe and understanding this different courtyard urbanism type, and trying to push developers in the direction of this kind of wide but shallow, mixed use building. Yeah.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 16:07
Well, and it's apparent too that the bar to entry might at first feel like, whoa. There's acronyms and jargon and other elements like this. But being a parent is one pathway in to say, "Hey, I observed that this is not the way that it could be." I mean, studying in Italy back in the day, I always think of Romeo and Juliet balconies. Well, that's only a part of the fuller function of those buildingsthat would have been commonplace. There would have been courtyards, there would have been all of these other features, spaces for people to be able to be together. And so I love that labor of love that you're doing on X and continuing to contribute to the discussions in your community. I think crucially too, not being alone in this, but finding allies, finding the neighborhood organizations and Strong Towns Chicago and other groups like that. And I love that encouragement for each of the folks that are listening just to go out and find similar groups. They are in your community, and they're a great way to begin to really feel wind in your sails. This gives me hope. Alicia, do you want to share what gives you hope?
Dr. Alicia Pederson 16:08
Oh, I am so hopeful and optimistic. I think that social media has allowed so many to learn about the principles of urbanism and what makes cities better. I've learned so much from like podcasts and YouTube content and content on different social media, and I think that social media will allow people to get the information and knowledge they need to make their cities better. And I think there's a real desire for people to live in walkable, nice neighborhoods. Having grown up in a very suburban, car centered area of West Michigan and not loving it, I'm so excited, because I think that the trend is toward better urbanism, and I'm very optimistic and excited about it.
Norm Van Eeden Petersman 18:08
Alicia, this is fantastic. Really enjoyed learning about this with you. And if anyone is interested, definitely go check out on X, @Urbancourtyard is Alicia's handle there. Or there are various pieces that she's had published in the Chicago Tribune, would definitely recommend that you check those out. And we also, just before we started recording, were talking about a illustration by the late Leon Krier, a great architect that has a really profound illustration. So maybe one little nugget is to head into the show notes and go take a look at that. And Alicia said that she had just put up a post about this as well. And so definitely check that out. And if you are also inspired to begin to look for ways in which the built form of our communities can really begin to be informed and shaped by the insights that come from what it takes to be a human, what it takes to really thrive in a community environment, definitely take note of what Alicia is doing. I hope that you also are feeling encouraged to go and do something similar in your community. And so with that, take care and take care of your places.
ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES
6 housing reforms that could help make courtyard blocks possible.
Read more from Alicia:
Urban Courtyard (X/Twitter)
“Chicago’s affordable housing plan demands a courtyard block blueprint” Chicago Tribune
“The courtyard block solution to Chicago’s family flight problem” Chicago Tribune
“A better way to approach the challenge of Lincoln Yards” Crain’s Chicago Business
Norm Van Eeden Petersman (LinkedIn)
Do you know someone who would make for a great The Bottom-Up Revolution guest? Let us know here!
Subscribe to The Bottom-Up Revolution on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Podbean or via RSS.
This podcast is made possible by Strong Towns members. Click here to learn more about membership.
