Tiffany Owens Reed 0:06

Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens Reed. 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 Makers Collective and will also be one of the speakers at this year's event, which I'm really excited about. Will, welcome to the Bottom Up Revolution podcast.

Will McCollum 1:37

Thank you, Tiffany. I'm so excited to be here, and I love the work you guys do at Strong Towns. It's a great honor.

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 when you realized that this was your vocational path, or this was the path you wanted to explore. Can you tell us about that?

Will McCollum 2:07

Absolutely. So I have always been a tinkerer. I 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 those are some of my first memories of being in some of these walkable cities, really the colonial cities we have in the US, pre-car.

But the big moment for me was in high school. My Spanish class took a trip to Spain for a week for Spanish immersion. The first day we spent on that trip was in Toledo. Toledo is a medieval city in Spain. It's on a hill, completely the winding streets, the really charming alleys of a medieval town is what characterizes Toledo. 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 have asked that first, but I'm just curious to give some context to those experiences.

Will McCollum 3:38

Sure. I grew up, I kind of had two parts of my childhood. The first part, first 10 years, I lived in Vero Beach in Florida, which is about halfway down the Floridian coast on the Eastern Seaboard, just a small to mid-sized town, pretty standard of rural America. Then after I was 10, we moved up to the suburbs of Atlanta, so in the Piedmont of Georgia. 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 what you were seeing and 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. Everything's 10 feet, 15 feet from face to face, and just really kind of like a maze that you're walking through this city. There was just a small sign up that was an entrance fee, five euros or something. It just indicated that this unassuming door, you could go in and see something. So me being curious, I just opened it.

It was the central Cathedral in Toledo, and you had no idea because everything's so narrow. The way that it was on this hill, you're just in this alley, you open this door, and then it opens up into this most magnificent building. Just getting just that one door between, you have this intense urbanism. You open up, you have this intense 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 everything is so separate and so far apart. 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, what architects would call the push and pull, the squeeze and then open up kind of feeling where you walk straight from this narrow street up into this cathedral. 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. I was there during Thanksgiving, and I knew of this woman who was from Canada and she lived in Rome. I followed her on Instagram and thought she was a great photographer, so I reached out to her and we ended up getting pizza and wine or something, and just sitting in this really popular plaza by a fountain and having our little evening Thanksgiving Italian picnic.

I was staying in that area, and it was just the neighborhood I was in was an artistic neighborhood. So there was always people playing music or always people out. There was just, it was just full of life. So one day, I just went for this walk one evening. I think I was looking for something to eat, and I just kind of meandered around the way you can do in Rome. I was heading back, and all of a sudden I just hear the most beautiful singing that I had ever heard probably, and followed it and realized that it was just 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 this plaza, smack in the middle of basically a residential neighborhood. You could walk in for free.

I'm pretty sure I was tearing up just because the doors were open and you just walk in. I just stood in the back and listened to the last 10 minutes of the performance. The lady finished. Everyone clapped, and it was, okay, everyone back to life, back to normal. Everyone just pours out. So what you're talking about with that continuity between the spaces and the connection, and then how you can move from, I'm just looking for something to eat, to, 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, because I've read an article that you've written and we've had lots of conversations in the course of as you've been putting together the program for this summer. I mean, I feel like what I've heard you talk, it's for you, it's not just architecture. Can you talk a little bit about, 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, I feel you almost think more about people. So maybe you can weave this 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 how amazing the buildings were. You're getting to something else.

Will McCollum 9:30

Yeah, that's a great way to put it, and 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. 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 those experiences that really makes it something magic.

You asked a little bit about my journey through education. I point to that Toledo experience as this time 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. I'll add in, I studied abroad at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. So I kind of got this, I had three different university experiences where I was taking studio classes. I was learning about architecture.

Remarkably, they all were very different in several ways, but they all had the same core philosophy of how you teach architecture, and it was weirdly separate from the human experience. Everything was abstracted, an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction when we're talking about things. When you abstract things to that degree, it's really easy to miss that human experience. 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.

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. Because I think, not to get on a tangent, but I think one of the difficult things about architecture education is there's so much to learn. I mean, we're designing buildings and everything from a shed that stores a golf cart to a skyscraper that houses 10,000 people that are going there for work every day. 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? How do you do that in a green and sustainable, resilient way? 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 I'm frustrated with, I would say, in the current ecosystem of architecture is that we aren't grounding everything in the human experience. We're trying to do too much. Instead of letting us specialize as we develop our careers, we're trying to specialize too early and we're missing that first foundation.

Tiffany Owens Reed 13:23

Can you talk a little bit more 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 that out a little bit more? What is that gap? Why does it matter?

Will McCollum 13:59

Absolutely. 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 legislators that create the rules of what you can do places. With everything so separate, we start to lose the big picture. In the US in particular, our pattern of development since the invention of cars and since the invention of zoning has really just dissipated any kind of civic space. Civic space meaning just a place where you can stand and you are surrounded by buildings and you are in an outdoor, a phrase commonly used, as you're in an outdoor room. We just don't experience that here.

Tiffany Owens Reed 15:00

Like a plaza.

Will McCollum 15:07

Exactly, a plaza. In the US, you probably would feel this in a town square. That's 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. The past 100 years, we've just let that go for a 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. 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 aren't connected. So that's the gap we've identified and we're trying to fill currently.

Tiffany Owens Reed 16:11

It's partly that fabric of the buildings and the fabric of the place, but it's also the human experience. 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? 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.

I think you're really onto something with that, the necessity of thinking about architecture from the perspective of the end user almost, which I don't hear you saying that's totally absent. I hear you saying there is a side of that conversation that's absent because I'm sure architects spend plenty of time thinking about the end user. But I think what you're saying is 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, this is probably the most tangent-friendly podcast in the Strong Towns network. 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.

Will McCollum 17:34

I love tangents. So yeah.

Tiffany Owens Reed 17:36

Especially in there about cities and people. Okay, so you talk about, you have this trip to Spain, you come back, you figure out, you go to these different educational experiences. You have this phrase of you have this opportunity to learn under a master. So let's talk about, 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 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 some of the contradictions you were seeing and wrestling with?

Will McCollum 18:17

Well yeah, 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. I ended up being humbled to just take anything.

I got connected with Lou and he was needing a draftsman, and I was just, I will work for three months as I try to find the next job. Within two weeks, I realized that the work that he was doing was so interesting to me and that it was almost like he flicked on a light in my brain that was taking me back to that Toledo experience. It was centered on people and their own experience. It was a very different approach than everything I'd been given in school. In school, it's all about creativity. It's about the space you can create and what does this shape, and it's all about shapes and forms and these kinds of things. But 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 in physical space.

Lou's work very much is centered in all of that. So within two weeks of me working there, I said, okay, I'm going to stay for a minute and learn here. Here I am. It's been over 10 years since when I first started. But yeah, Lou, at the time we were doing a lot of small residential projects and then little pocket communities 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. Since then, Lou has really grown and expanded to touching some very large projects really around the country. So it's been a great time with him.

Tiffany Owens Reed 20:50

How did that experience kind of dovetail with your introduction to New Urbanism?

Will McCollum 20:57

Well, 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 in 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 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 kind of framing like that. But 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 he started taking me to some of the work that had been built here, that's when it really clicked for me. This isn't just some movement of fringe people. This is something for all people.

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. What's the relationship between these two? Why are they different? How are they the same? How do they work together? Because just what you were saying of, it was my only class in urbanism. So can you just flush that out a little bit? How do you, and I've never heard it used that way, which, so it's making the wheels in my head start spinning in a positive way. 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

we'll grade you at the end of this podcast.

Will McCollum 23:17

The way I think about it is it is the physical manifestation of community. So it is how people live together physically. Because urbanism has all sorts of scales from a cluster of three homes out in a rural village somewhere all the way up to Manhattan. So I look at it as just, what does it look like when people live together physically in that built environment?

Tiffany Owens Reed 23:52

That's helpful. I think it's interesting that you apply the word urbanism to a small scale like a few houses in a rural setting. So most people would be like, that's not urbanism. Urbanism means crowds and lots of buildings and lots of noise. But I almost feel like you're saying urbanism is the combination of the built environment and people and the patterns of life that emerge in response to the built environment.

Will McCollum 24:19

Yes, you always take what I say and frame it much more intelligently. I love it. I think really it's also the creation of urban space, which is space contained by buildings, outdoor space contained by buildings. I think that's really what I'm getting at, is that kind of pattern.

Tiffany Owens Reed 24:41

Interesting. 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'm tempted to say some places don't have any urbanism at all because of the breakdown in the built environment. But thinking about it this way kind of makes me realize there can be different types of urbanism. 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. Then you can kind of wrestle with, well, what's good urbanism? I think that's a big part of what you're trying to do 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 do a lot of small projects. The two big ones that we're working on, the two I've been managing have been Trilith, which is a residential town south of Atlanta associated with a movie studio. It's a pretty major movie studio. They film most of the Marvel movies there. So this was a town they wanted in association with that. It's about 350 acres, and about half of that is buildable. So we did the master plan, and currently our company is doing 90% of the homes in there. So that's a pretty major project right now, and 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.

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. Going back to that definition of urbanism, that project is more rural. 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? I think we're executing pretty well in that. 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 you're getting that mountain life, that lake life of more nature and more fresh air, but still getting that sense of community as well.

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, it just makes 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 privacy of the 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 unfortunately we do have to deal with cars and just the site conditions. I mean, it is truly mountain, and then you have 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 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.

The main inspiration for the way we're designing that in landscape architecture specifically is Nantucket, because Nantucket does a really good job, specifically Sconset 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 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

Yeah, that's so interesting. I feel like especially in American context, because there is this desire for the private home and the space and the fences and the, I guess, distance from other people. I don't know. It's almost like there's different types of American urbanism, and maybe it's on a spectrum of distance to other people. Some of us are more comfortable with, ooh, courtyards. I like courtyards. Let's turn our entire neighborhood into one big courtyard. Some people are like, um, not so fast. So it's just interesting to think about what that teaches us about what it means to be human. I think it's okay to have different built environments that speak to different preferences and needs.

Will McCollum 31:06

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. So 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. They give back that courtyard that is something that enough people want that there are no other options for. 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 it.

Tiffany Owens Reed 32:20

Not just that, but it's financially smarter for cities and the whole Strong Towns perspective on how financially sustainable is constant sprawl and suburbia. It's not paying for itself. So at some point, you have to face the reality that it's not a viable option forever. 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.

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. We took nine acres of Trilith, compared it to nine acres of two other projects that were currently constructing homes. One of them was a more dense development, but it was still, we called it densified suburbia. It was kind of suburban principles, but just big house on a small lot. Then just kind of a traditional suburban development, cul-de-sac, just two acre lots and crazy development pattern. We found there was 16 times the value per acre at Trilith than there was at that typical suburban site, and we are getting about 50% green space at Trilith. So it really adds up. When you have a municipality that needs to pay for this infrastructure, we really need some of these solutions in our communities.

Tiffany Owens Reed 34:18

Yeah, and it's not about forcing everyone to live in a dense, walkable community, but I do think there's opportunities to just at least help people understand the variety of different built forms that can exist and understand the implications of each of them in terms of both the financial and also just the social. I'm a fan of options. I think people should be able to choose, but I think it has to be, 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 and how that just opened your eyes, just reminds me of how important, how powerful 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. I also feel like there's this whole issue of latent demand. 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. But I also wonder just how much part of the conversation has to do with just helping people even have opportunities to experience alternatives and then say, okay, what'd you think about that, and how did you feel in that space? Do you think it'd be interesting to live in a space like that? But the experiences we have play such a huge role in shaping what we think we want. So yeah, just wonder how much it's shaped.

Will McCollum 35:54

I have to tell you, it's really huge. 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 a variety of different conditions, everything from extreme urban infill to, he worked on Serenbe. So you have rural kind of rural urbanism. It's really helped because 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 densify, you are heightening every experience in that space. That means you have to give back in certain ways. So the architecture has to be more beautiful if you are densifying because to make that experience a nice one, the landscape has to have a little bit more to it when you densify. If you have a street without trees in an urban environment, we know what that does to people. We know the difference that a single tree on a street can make in a very dense environment. So part of what we're trying to do is teach how to densify.

Because that's another missing link is that if we 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? I think that's where a lot of the pushback comes from in the Strong Towns message that you're putting out, the resistance 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. Even urban development, even 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 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 that pattern where yes, it was dense, but then you stumbled upon a park. 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.

So living in New York City was incredibly stressful. I'm always, why was it, I know why it was stressful, but it's, part of me is like, I still would have stayed. I stayed for a long time. I'm realizing now part of it is because of the way certain pockets of the city or certain elements of the built design, yes, it drained you, but then you turn a corner and it fills you up again with this beautiful piece of architecture or some really nice 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. You just get this boost of irrational optimism. 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 would be balanced out almost immediately or spontaneously with just randomly delightful things.

So 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 have density, you have to balance it out with these other pressure valves basically that really help people cope.

Let's talk about City Makers Collective. So tell us about it. What is this program? Maybe you can share a bit of the origin story.

Will McCollum 41:03

Sure. So I formed this with a group of colleagues just over a year ago, about a year and a half ago. 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.

We talked a little bit earlier about the gap that we see in the architecture education, and so we're trying to fill that gap and teach this foundation for a way of thinking that will lead to better design. Really, it's not just about design. We specifically chose the name City Makers because everybody touches the city. So this is everyone from 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 kind of 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 who we are.

I would say the beginning of the idea was born there. So there's a group called INTBAU, which is the International Network of Traditional Buildings, Architecture and Urbanism. It is, they have chapters in 160 countries in the world. It's a really incredible organization, and it's focused on traditional ways of building, traditional ways of building cities and architecture. They have a series of summer schools that they've set up around the world. I attended one in the Netherlands. It was called Let's Build a Beautiful City. 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.

It was very interesting because in the US we think about the Netherlands 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. 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 actually ugly. It is detracting from that experience. It is creating spaces people don't want to be in.

It's really acute in Europe actually because Europe has all of these gorgeous city centers, and all of their development is happening in the fringes. 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 very similar to what we have, except it's just dense, and 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 was really interesting to see it from that context and to just experience their movement of we want to learn from what we've done really well in terms of the historic centers of our cities, and what lessons can we take from that and then apply it to the new places that we build? 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 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. 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 a couple that were in the film industry, 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. So 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. 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. Then we have Lou Oliver, who I've talked about, and Christine Frank, who is the president of INTBAU USA and 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 pulled together.

We also have a group of lecturers coming in every day at the end of the day, symposium lectures, which you are one of those. We're just so excited about this program and really have high hopes for what the students will be getting out of it and what they'll be doing. 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 and cities and how we actually get this stuff done.

This year, the site is 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. How are we designing everything from architecture to urbanism? To go back to a question you said before, what's the relationship between architecture and urbanism? 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. So that is the missing link. We are focusing on all of that with the students in two weeks. It'll be kind of a whirlwind, but it'll be really great. We're very excited.

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 the end point. There's something else in the buildings. I think that's where it gets really interesting because you have to ask yourself, the decisions that were made about these buildings, how do they, what type of urbanism do they create? I think 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 good.

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 the reasons we located in Charleston is that it is a beautiful space that people keep coming back to. So that is what's at the core 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. They had no mechanisms of 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 pieces that really connect with us being human and that are in the built environment? Then also not only just what they are, but how we can have more of it and get back to building that in our communities.

Tiffany Owens Reed 52:07

I also feel 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. Maybe they won't become an architect, but maybe they'll understand how to articulate or how to properly interpret the built environment. Maybe that will translate into some other kind of meaningful action or creative expression or creative project for them, or just being a better citizen and being able to say, hey, here's why the businesses on the street keep struggling. Let me explain these principles to you that can help our downtown or something like that.

Will McCollum 52:48

No, absolutely. I mean, I think architects and urbanists love to kind of protect that knowledge behind the profession because it is very specialized. But the reality is everybody lives in a place, 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, 1,000 years ago, everybody did. 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 more.

Tiffany Owens Reed 53:46

In a way too, I feel like what you're saying is not so much, 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 what it means to be a human being in a place because, you're right, we all have to live in a place. 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 certain activities and we don't understand how to even interpret our own behavior or our own emotions or our own desires.

I think so much about what urbanism offers and architecture offers is an opportunity to translate humans and to even understand humans, which at the end of the day is really what this should all be about, is understanding what does it mean that humans are fundamentally social beings that live in particular places at a time that do life in places? What's the relationship between place and being human and humans and other humans? 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 joke in the industry is that being an architect for custom homes is being a marriage counselor. You really have to understand people to be a good designer. So if you extrapolate that out to a city, being a good urban designer, you have to understand people, exactly what you're saying. Yeah, 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, this has been a great conversation full of many great tangents, as I knew it would be, giving 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'd like to recommend people visit or 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 visit 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

It's a reflective time. Now you're 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. It's connected to the BeltLine, which 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. I think they've been working on it for almost two decades, but construction, it's been under construction for a decade. So it's connected to that, which has been a real boon to the city. It's a huge amount of development along that BeltLine. 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 central part of the city, those areas, Virginia Highlands, are just really, they're my favorite. 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, Georgia being an original colony, has a lot of older towns rather than the Midwest or the West. A lot of our suburbs were actually small towns before Atlanta gobbled them up. 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 suburbs. So there's been investment in creating little pockets of nice urban spaces for people to experience.

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 suburban growth. So 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.

Tiffany Owens Reed 59:25

That's really interesting. What about do you have a favorite coffee shop or favorite third space, pub or restaurant or anything like that to take people to?

Will McCollum 59:34

You 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. 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. There's The Works, is one of them. Ponce City Market, there's Krog Street Market that are all just nice places to go and hang out. You don't have to buy anything. It's just, you're in the space. There's a lot of food, so you can get some food. 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, we do what we can.

Will McCollum 1:00:33

We do what we can.

Tiffany Owens Reed 1:00:34

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. 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.