“Build it and they will come” sounds confident until the project is finished and nobody comes. The Neighborhood Playbook, a placemaking guide built around testing what people actually respond to before making larger investments, turns 10 this year. Carlee Alm-LaBar revisits it with coauthor Joe Nickol of Yard & Company and Max Musicant of The Musicant Group, asking what a decade of use says about planning places through action instead of prediction. The tension between planning and doing remains: how much should a place decide up front, and how much should it discover through action?
A lot of plans are very good at telling us what a neighborhood should look like in 20 years or 30 years from now, but they're not always as helpful when somebody asks a much simpler question: "What can we do next weekend? Today we are going back into the Strong Towns vault. In 2020, we published an article by John Pattison called "Activating Spaces and Developing Places with the Neighborhood Playbook." It looked at a guide Joe Nickol and Kevin Wright had created to help people learn about a neighborhood by actually getting out into it and trying things. The playbook is built around five plays.
Developers work through it from one side, residents work through it from the other, and the two sides literally meet in the middle. The idea is to test demand, learn from what people actually do, and let that shape the investments that come next. This month, that Neighborhood Playbook is turning 10 years old, so we wanted to revisit that article with a decade of experience behind it and see how those ideas look today. Welcome to Upzoned, a podcast from Strong Towns, where we look beyond the headline at the systems, tradeoffs, and assumptions shaping our cities and towns.
I'm Carlee Alm-LaBar, chief of staff here at Strong Towns, and I've got two great guests with me today. First, of course, joining us from Cincinnati is Joe Nickol, co-founder and principal at Yard and Company, an urban design studio that works with cities, neighborhoods, and developers on planning, activation, and development. As we mentioned, Joe co-authored the Neighborhood Playbook with Kevin Wright, and now leads Yard's development team. Welcome, Joe.
Hey, thanks for having me.
And we have the perfect person with us to join in this discussion today. Joining us from Minneapolis, or usually from Minneapolis, we have Max Musicant, founder and principal of the Musicant Group. Max's work focuses on the design, programming, operation, and long-term care of public and shared spaces. In February, he also wrote a piece for Strong Towns with Sheena Schiesta, titled "Placemaking Is Dead: Long Live Placemaking," about what gets lost when placemaking becomes a one-time project instead of an ongoing process of caring for a place. So excited to have you here!
Thank you for joining us, Max.
Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
So I feel like we should start at the beginning, Joe. Because not all of our listeners will have a copy of the Neighborhood Playbook. Why don't you describe it in your own words? What is it? How do people use it?
What can people experience when they have the Neighborhood Playbook?
Yeah, sure. I do have a copy here. I know we're not necessarily on video, but I am holding it. The reason I'm describing it is because its actual physical design is part of the story. But before I get into that, maybe I should just kind of walk back to what led to the playbook, and then talk about how that guided and shaped what it became.
I can't believe it's been 10 years since we wrote it. It's a good way to feel old, but around that time, 10 years ago, I had just moved to Cincinnati, where my wife is from. We had moved from Pittsburgh. We were new to town. I knew a few people.
One of the people I reached out to was a guy by the name of Kevin Wright. He had just taken over at a community development corporation called the Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation. Walnut Hills is Cincinnati's second downtown. He had taken over an organization that had been focused on a lot of community development, economic development, redevelopment, things of that nature. He and I started talking.
I asked him for a coffee, and we got together and talked for about five seconds about the lay of the land in Cincinnati, and what we started talking about very quickly was what we were seeing in our professional lives.
For 25 years, I've been an architect and urban designer, really focused on revitalizing old towns and then using those lessons to build new places, and through that experience, kind of seeing what was working, what was not working, what was getting implemented, what was not, where plans were sitting on shelves versus actually impacting and shaping change, and comparing that with what he was seeing, kind of on the front lines of development and growth, or lack thereof, in some cases, and it very quickly occurred to us that the industry was shifting or needing to shift, and maybe begrudgingly so, and that there was an opportunity to think about that gap and to maybe reinterpret what planning is, or what community development could be, and so we saw that there was this gap between, kind of broadly speaking, planning and doing.
That kind of planners planned and then handed over the product to folks that they hoped could interpret what the plan said, and do something with it, and this was starting to create a problem for the building industry. It was leading to a sense that there are two teams.
There's the community over here, and then there's developers on the other end, and both are starting to kind of become afraid of one another. when we, took the perspective of each of those camps and really tried to understand what both were trying to accomplish, we started to really articulate to ourselves that they both wanted a lot of the same things and were subject to some of the same forces that, if you took a certain methodology or approach to dealing with those forces, you could actually take a situation and turn it into a force for good and kind of an energy for implementation and changing what might have previously been thought of as impossible for a place, and it really kind of fell under this camp of like, how do we manage change in a way that is not as scary, that is more participatory, more inclusive, more uplifting and elevating of the unique culture and people that are already in a place, and then using that as a way to kind of attract growth, investment in an incremental way that then raises the bar for what is seen as possible from a market and investment standpoint, which is inherently risk-averse.
So we had that coffee that went from 10 minutes to three hours to a second coffee, and around that time, there was a foundation in Cincinnati that was focused on civic projects. when we met with them and kind of talked about what was in our heads, and shared with them an article we had just written at that time called "Five Ways to Activate Your Neighborhood This Weekend." They said that could be an excellent project, and at that time we weren't even thinking about a book. We didn't even know what we were thinking about really.
But long story short, we applied and got funding through that program to really kind of stress test these ideas and that formula, and that's where the genesis of the book and the design of the book was so key.
Where we took what became the five plays that you mentioned, and wrote a book that can be read from two different sides: one from the side of the community, and one from the side of a developer. they're both the same five plays, but written for each of those audiences. what is interesting about it, or at least I think is interesting, is that they meet in the middle with a mutual understanding of what the other is trying to accomplish, and almost as an invitation to start reading the book from the other side. so, in the last 10 years, this book has guided and shaped not only our work and kind of become the underpinning of our methodology, but thousands of people have purchased the book, organizations across the world, and have used it as a way to kind of rethink how they do business, how they do economic development, how they do community development with the communities and places that they're working.
That's great. Well, congratulations on 10 years, and I know Max, you've known Joe and you've known their work for 10 years. Maybe you can talk about how you how you first became familiar with the playbook with Joe and how it how you see it overlapping with your work in placemaking.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, a little over 10 years ago, probably about 12 years ago, the foundation that Joe mentioned, People's Liberty, was convening a group of practitioners from around the country to inform their efforts in Cincinnati, and I had just published a short workbook on Friendly Front Yards: How to Transform Your Front Yard to build community one yard at a time, That translated the placemaking and activation work I was doing for much larger spaces and districts into a very DIY process that anyone could follow to meet more of their neighbors. after trying it out, people that used it met on average of five new neighbors, so it was pretty successful.
So, we were down in Cincinnati presenting about that, along with other great practitioners from around the country, and were able to hear from Joe and Kevin. I think at that point, the article had probably been written, but the book was not, and so came to hear about it, and over the course of a couple days, being able to discuss it, workshop it, etc. I think, like all really useful things, it's based off of practice. It's theory based on practice rather than like practice coming from some abstract theory. so, I think that's why it works really well. in revisiting it, it reminded me of a number of things.
One is I think it speaks to trying to break out of this the idea of like a finite game versus an infinite game. I think in this world it can be really easy to get trapped into an idea of constrained projects. It's like everything is a start and an end. The project is kind of the purpose, rather than a part of a continual process of hopeful improvement and adaptation and attunement. I think that the playbook really speaks to that.
The importance of framing our efforts in an infinite game, rather than gearing up for one big start and one big end, when we're mission where we can hang the banner of mission accomplished, and that this is a repeatable process that we should apply. the other thing that reminded me of a lot was the importance of integrating all these different factors to really bring a place to life.
It's certainly a process that I use, my firm uses, and that the playbook directly speaks to of like the importance of the physical environment, the care of that environment, events and activities there, the involvement of everyone, financial flows, etc. that I think, and that the presence of the playbook speaks to the fact that those things are the default is that they're usually not that integrated, especially at the scale of place where we want to make the transformation, and that it takes real work and intention to try to bring all these things together in a place that we care about from the bottom up, because that's not the norm.
Yeah, there were a couple of things in the article that I referenced when we kicked off the show that I thought were really interesting. That stuck with me. One of one of them was something that Kevin, I think your partner said, which was, "Come out and they will build it." and I think so often in the in the planning, kind of aspirational communities will hear, "Build it and they will come,", and I thought that phrase was such an interesting take, and I think both of you can speak to that.
But maybe if you don't mind, Joe, just talk a little bit about kind of that flipping of the philosophy, maybe, and how that informs your work.
Yeah, for sure. One of the first projects that came out of the Neighborhood Playbook was kind of the beta. We gave the working draft to five kind of unsuspecting citizens of our town, which is just outside of Cincinnati, across the river, called Bellevue, Kentucky. we gave them the plays and set them kind of set them loose. It was interesting to watch them because they had never been invited or given agency to change the world around them. Certainly, we're all used to thinking about how we're going to paint our fence, or clean up our front porch, or mow our yard, or anything to where we live.
But we've kind of resorted as a culture to building the city around us is somebody else's job, and that invitation to participate and to help shape it isn't often extended. We do the dots in the church basement as part of a planning process, and then we go home and kind of forget about it. So watching these folks with the playbook was really illuminating. Where they first found a space, which is the first play, it was a problem in our community that had been talked about time and time again that there wasn't enough things to do in the evenings or on weekends.
There was a growing kind of set of couples that were starting to form households that were starting to have kids, and there just wasn't enough that they could easily kind of stroll down the street and do. So this group of five said, "We're going to change that. We're not going to, repeat ourselves in a planning process or a council meeting.
We're going to take over a space on a prominent corner and next to an empty building that was for sale, but nobody was buying it. we're going to transform it. what they ended up doing using the playbook methodology was creating something called the Old Kentucky Maker's Market, which ended up being tinkered on, iterated, and improved over a course of a two-year period, and at each stage, not only did the sophistication and experience of the market get better, they were starting to monthly get hundreds of people to show up, but the people themselves, the five, the group of five, changed as well, and became more confident in what they were doing, more capable, more organized, and organizing others so much that the people that were part of the core group, the five plus kind of the people that were with it for this duration, started to run for council seats.
Started joining boards. Started helping to actually change the trajectory-not of just that corner, but of important decisions that would impact the whole city. so that actually became one of our metrics for evaluating success-not only just the playbook, but of our work-is how are we really not just getting input from people, which is a transaction, but creating this level of sustained engagement that can really start to have a ripple effect beyond a single project. it's kind of like what Max was saying, where it becomes this thing that doesn't end.
It's not just a project; it has a kind of a life to it that never really ends.
Yeah, well, I agree, and I think Max preparing for this episode was what made me read your article that you wrote with Sheena and talking about, placemaking kind of starting to lose its meaning because it's become such an omnipresent word. But I think a lot of the principles in the Neighborhood Playbook are principles that I see you bringing to your placemaking work. So I'm wondering if you can kind of talk about that iterative process from the work that you do and how you see that aligning with the playbook.
Well, I think this work, whether it's called placemaking or planning, or we're working on the real estate side or public space side, is really about creating the sorts of experiences that we want to have in space, whether it's privately owned or publicly owned, community space, etc. that is shaped by the ecosystem of the built environment, the care of that environment, and then things going on within that environment. if we think about how we do that, let's say in our own home, we're always tinkering with it. We're always attuning it.
Our families and our personal lives change, our spatial needs change, our desires. Our the resources we have available at any given time change, which allows us to do more or less with given resources. We're always attuning our space that we have control over to make it better, There are a lot of systems and processes involved that make that sort of like tinkering very difficult in our public realm or bigger projects.
But that's ultimately the thing that really creates spaces we like being in, that bring us together, that facilitate the things that we want to be able to do, and so I'm reminded of like what's called like the three body problem, which is like in physics where we can perfectly model to how two things are going to interact with each other forever, but once you add a third element, we lose the ability to predict what's going to happen, and I think that's a trap we fall into in like our built environment is that we fool ourselves in thinking that like we know exactly what the future will hold and we can plan out far in advance, but obviously going back to the Strong Towns approach and the playbook approach is like the more we can respond to what is actually what our current realities are and attune, see what happens, test, adapt, and make larger investments based on that repeatable iteration of practice.
It doesn't mean we don't do big things, but it means the path we do to do big things and make big changes is responsive and iterative to make those things happen. there are a variety of like our standard municipal public planning processes, capital flows, how we've set up a standard design process. processes and approvals, all those things sort of conspire for us to make big one big shot moves that make it difficult to then do the attunement and iteration to make that possible.
So my approach is to try to in when doing a project to try to build in as much of that iteration as possible within a within a defined project and across projects to try to increase the likelihood of a project being able to adapt more over time, but also what the playbook speaks to is to do that, and I think that speaks to I think one thing I love about Yard and the playbook is about demand building.
It's like we're not passive consumers of demand, where we're just like, well, there's this is what we need, and we can only fill that gap, and then we better passively hope that someone else comes in and fills that need. But you can build and demonstrate demand for something, and that we're active, as Joe said, active participants in shaping our spaces, rather than passive consumers just waiting for someone to save us.
Yeah, I was going to ask Joe to talk a little bit about the demand discovery and how you guys think about demand in your in your places in a way that's maybe untraditional to the average person not familiar with your work.
Yeah, it's interesting because we're doing that right now. I'm looking out a window at a plaza that we're building in a kind of dormant office park. Something Max, I know you've done a lot in your work with. we were talking as a team with the client, the owner of the park. What if this fails? failure is an interesting concept, right? In our work, and the way that we talked about it with the owner is that you.
This is going to run for 10 days, and it's going to go one of two directions. One is it's going to be so successful that you're going to build off of it. You're going to tinker with some of the things that maybe could be made more permanent. You're going to adjust some things based on what you're observing in it, or it could be a total non-starter. Nobody shows up.
It's not successful, but you'll either way you'll have learned something. in the budget for doing this is cheaper than the going rate for a market study, and has a much higher ceiling for what it can deliver and what it can tell you about the real dynamics of a place that would never show up on a on a bound report, and so that's how we think about demand building. That I mentioned our experiences equally weighted. I would say between developing and existing places, usually in kind of emerging or not quite yet emerging districts, and then new places.
So either first ring suburbs, greenfield sites, or places that haven't yet really been discovered. Just because even things like infrastructure haven't found its way there, and both kind of need the same level of thinking when it relates to demand building, that when you think about how places have historically developed before, call it the last 100 years, there was always kind of that first that first effort, that was very resourceful, kind of lightweight, testing an idea or exploring an idea, and if it worked, it got discarded as, or if it didn't work, it got discarded as part of kind of history.
But if it did work, that things would then want to be around it or to grow with it. so, when we think about the playbooks methodology, and certainly the methodology that we embody at Yard, and I know Max does the same in his work, is what we do is not just throwing a party, or not just creating an event for the event's sake.
Events are great, but if you're trying to create a buzz or something that is actually going to attract and sustain growth, it takes a different approach to thinking about those events and doing so in such a way that sustainably attracts people to be part of it to have a sense that it's being kind of handmade, that it's not just kind of coming off a 3D printing press, and that it's kinetic, that it's kind of always changing, evolving, and learning along with the people coming to experience it, And when that happens, it becomes reliable enough where people start saying, "what?
I can't believe those 300 people to the corner of that Main Street in Bellevue, Kentucky. I can't believe they're showing up. I'm gonna I want to I want to know more about that storefront over there that has a lease sign on it, or that building that's for sale, and that's what we mean when we talk about building demand by creating enough of sustained, repeatable kind of forming new rituals and patterns. That's that becomes the flywheel to create more interest and more investment activity in a place.
That's amazing. I want to ask you both a question because you both have been in this work now for a little while, and I'm curious the places that you've worked now, maybe 10 years ago, that continue to iterate and build and build more demand and create a stronger sense of place versus maybe ones that haven't thrived as much. what if you see commonalities, kind of after a generation or a half a generation of building places and building demand for places? Just any kind of lessons learned, I guess.
I think there's one. There's one thing that I see as the driver of sustained momentum and success in the projects I've worked in or observed, and that's the the capacity, the reliable and consistency of capacity at the at the level of that place.
I think, like year in and year out, to take care of it, to sheppard it, to lead it, to harness and direct larger capital projects, whether public or private, that are happening there, and to sustain that habit building and patronage and interest in both like public and private activities there, and the places I've seen that have good energy to them, but then don't sustain it usually are lacking that place-based capacity to keep things going, and that can be whether let's say it's like a voluntary business association versus something like a business improvement district, which is a business association that has like reliable tax revenue coming into it to sustain a variety of activities they decide to do, or sometimes like a parks department could have a successful project, but if they're still running their operations in a way that is doesn't have a lot of ability to adapt or build relationships at a park at a park by park level, then individual efforts at those parks can wither unless there's like a really dedicated community group that kind of fill that gap there, and so having the governance and organizational structure paired with like sustainable resources grounded in a place-that's what I've seen to be the secret sauce to maintain that momentum over time.
Yeah, we use the metaphor of hardware and software a lot. Hardware is the supply side. It's the streets, the buildings, the public spaces, the bricks and mortar. Software are the applications that events and brands and different experiences. But what often gets forgotten is the operating system that binds those two together, and I think that's Max.
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think that's kind of what you're talking about.
Where if we don't invest with the same care in our operators, then the software doesn't run right, the hardware starts to break down, or isn't well maintained, or just isn't fully utilized to its potential, and so what we have found in the evolution of our company is that it wasn't sufficient to be just another urban design company or just a and I'll say this kind of flippingly, but just a placemaking company, but really thinking comprehensively about what it takes to grow a place and develop an intertwined, cross-disciplinary approach to supporting all facets of a growing place, and that the place management is the work that we do there is all about growing and supporting and updating that operating system so that it's current, current to the current needs of that place's starting point or wherever it's at in its evolution.
That whether it's a volunteer organization or a 40 year old community development corporation or some. That doesn't even exist yet. That needs to be created, from scratch. That it is built in such a way that is aligned to the vision of what that place can or should become.
That's great. I'm definitely gonna use that metaphor of an operating system because I think that's really helpful to think about the ongoing nurturing, and I sometimes just say the lazy phrase of like the work's never finished. There's there's it's never the place is never done, and the great places are the ones that continue to evolve. So before we do these recordings, we put the article in our member platform, the Commons, and so we did get a question from the Commons that I'd love to ask you guys. Maybe start with you, Joe.
Should the developers go into a neighborhood with a plan to build a certain type of building, or should they remain completely open? What's your What's your reaction to that?
Well, we use developer as a kind of monolithic term. There's obviously a lot of different kinds of developers who have different skills and services that they provide. Most development companies have a range or a singular specialty in what they build. I think sometimes, particularly places that are desperate for growth and don't have the confidence or swagger to shape who shows up, think that when a developer comes, they just have to accept whatever it is that they're going to build, and maybe like nibble around the edges to get it to look a little more like they would want it to, or function in a particular way.
Developers have a lot riding on their projects. The economics of running a development company-we have a development arm. It's high risk. There's usually multiple layers of investment with different tolerances for that risk, but also different expectations of on return on investment, and it would be precarious to show up and ask a community kind of blank sheet of paper, "What do you want to do? What do you want to do here? as planners running a kind of even before a developer is maybe at the table, that really shouldn't be the starting question.
Either we should be really thinking about what makes our place special. What do we care about? What needs to change? What can't change? But then, when we close our eyes and imagine the future of a place, we shouldn't be thinking about that one restaurant that we might go to twice a year that needs to show up right next to our main street.
What we should be asking ourselves is, what is what do we want at the end? When we close our eyes and we think about the sensory data that we're receiving about a place, what do we want the personality of that place to become? that gives a lot of, I think, guidance to the vision, but then also to the players that are going to help bring that to life with enough flexibility, where a developer comes, maybe and knows what they need to do, gives them the agency to be a responsible investor in your community. I'd say one other layer to this is that I think we ask developers to focus on way too many things.
On one hand, and on the other hand, we don't give them any good guidance at all. We have found it's kind of going back to Max's article from years ago that if you ask them to focus on what we've been calling the first 16 feet really where their project meets what is shared that kind of seam between private and public that's where you should really have the conversation. What happens outside of that is really not the community's core competency, and it's really where the developer brings a lot of the capacity and sophistication.
Yeah, Max, what do you think?
Yeah, those are all excellent points, and I think only a couple add-ons would be, the to the degree that communities can help developers do the right thing easily. I think a lot of times they there are processes and rules in place that make the type of building that we oftentimes want to see hard to do, and so the developer has a most I would say most developers are open to negotiation. I mean, it's a it is a highly negotiated business. In a lot of ways, and so they're open to it, but there's a finite amount of capacity and risk for that negotiation that they're willing to take on.
So, the more you can make the thing you want easy to do in the process and otherwise, the more you can spend that time on the things that Joe mentioned about that first 16 feet, the place that where the community is going to be impacted on its in its senses and its experience, and I think most people are going to be willing to like work in good faith for that.
But community members don't really; it's not their place, as Joe said, to talk about demand for what there is, what there is demand for, but what you can do prior to that is, use the playbook to demonstrate what demand is there, and the more you, and as the playbook I think also mentions, the more you can attract developers on because they want to be where the action is, the much stronger the community position is in terms of like collaborating, get better projects out of who's there because you've created the attraction that they want to attune themselves to, rather than them plopping a project down in relative isolation of their surroundings.
We are celebrating with this episode, the 10-year anniversary of this playbook, and I'm curious if we can kind of pivot now to look at think about what the next 10 years look like. Max, I'm curious, the article that we referenced of yours, you talked about how placemaking as a term has kind of lost some of its meaning. Where do you where do you see placemaking and this type of work going in the future? Especially because I think one of the one of your thoughts is that term has become so ubiquitous. So many people are using it.
How do how do we use that? I guess to our advantage to get more people thinking about the kind of placemaking that we would all like to see headed into the future.
Sure, yeah, and unfortunately, placemaking has befallen this fate like many other terms when it becomes something that's very important, like sustainability, Equity, many others, and it becomes there's an authentic good. It becomes a fundable priority.
People contort sort of what they're what they're doing to meet the needs of funding or approvals, et cetera, and then it, yeah, it stops as a word where, with a common understanding of what that word is, start to disintegrate, and so that's kind of where we are with placemaking. it doesn't mean that the earlier iteration, the original use of that word, wasn't great. Doesn't mean that work isn't still great and important now. It's just that the term the descriptive term may not be useful anymore, so I don't like to predict what will happen.
But what I hope what I hope would happen I think would be useful would be whether it's placemaking or other terms like activation, which I think might more accurately describe what people are oftentimes trying to get to, which is that we see all this work as a continuous process, and that it's not an object coming in that like, or that there is some place. This is something I referenced in the article. Oh, this is where we're going to put the placemaking element, which connotes that like the other parts are lacking in are not a place, and we have a fixed amount of place that we can allocate.
So we're going to put it here. That's going to be our strategic move: is to like put the place there and not over here. every one of my every place can and should be a great place, no matter what the use type is. so yeah, what I hope is that we for all this work, and I think it is happening. You can just see it because people are engaging with it. What they understand is that to bring a place to life, it's an ongoing process that has to integrate all these different activities, and the activities are already happening. the biggest gap that I usually see is that they're not connected to each other. They're not.
There's no synergy. There's just there's too many things happening disconnected from each other. But there's, I think the proper approach and why I think like the operating system, as Joe said, is so important is that a good operating system allows for one plus one to equal three, and if it's not there, yes, you're still going to have hardware, you're still going to have software, but it's not going to lead to that momentum building.
Yeah, Joe. What about you? After 10 years of the Neighborhood Playbook, what does it? How does it look different? maybe what have you learned in the last 10 years to make it even better?
Yeah. I share Max's belief that it's like I don't fancy myself as a predictor of the future. I'm more interested about how places learn and kind of that kind of thing. But I think one thing that's clear to me, and whatever shape it takes, is yet to be fully written. But the industry is going to have to change, and when I say industry, I'm I'm talking about the all of us who are involved in one way or another, professionally shaping places, shaping the built environment.
I think clearly the pandemic rocked that world pretty hard, but maybe more to the point, we've got so many things that we just do as common practice that are just part of the inertia of well, we did that 20 years ago, so we're going to continue to do it, even though it has no relevance to what we do now. For instance, comprehensive planning, We spend 80% of our time thinking about what's going to happen 30 years from now, or what the built product will be in 30 years, and we spend 18 months doing it at great expense.
By the time we are done writing them, it is time to do the update, which is another, investment in time and resources, and I think what we have to do is get better at flipping the proportionality of that, where we get to a vision within the first 20% of any commission that we get, and that we spend 80% of our time actually executing on that vision, and I think that's going, as we become, more surprised by the future, that we're going to have to start working better in practice with what we have before us, with a north star certainly in mind, but not being so afraid to do anything because that might impact our 30-year plan, and in which case we just sit around and do nothing and wait for the next plan update.
I think, to give places confidence and to give them strength. Strong Towns need to constantly and visibly be doing, and so I think that's one of the fundamental ways I think the industry will necessarily have to respond. Focusing, we have found a great deal of success in focusing on 36 months at a time, where that's a long enough time to get meaningful progress, but short enough to not kind of collapse under the weight of the length of time, and to be pretty nimble and adaptive and responsive to what changes kind of inevitably happen.
Yeah, it's funny both of you both of you talked about predicting the future, and I think it's it's clear in listening to both of you, talk about your work, and it's you've had a hand in kind of shaping the future. So maybe predicting is the wrong word, but thinking about how you guys are going to bring these concepts into the next generation of planning is what I've loved learning about, and I think has been really interesting. one thing I'll add, Joe, to what you said is I think that the that time horizon of planning, as we feel, as the pace of change generally is has continued to increase.
It just that 30 year time horizon just feels less and less, less and less manageable. I guess so. I think that framing to 36 months feels much more accessible to community members. I think that's really interesting. Before we go to the down zone, I'd love to just see if either of you have any closing comments or thoughts of things that you were hoping to add to the conversation that you didn't get a chance to yet,
Max? We had a conversation not too long ago about kind of changes you've seen in the industry, and I kind of put a few thoughts out there. I'd be curious just to spend a little more time on that from your perspective as you've evolved your practice and what you're focused on, and working with a lot of organizations and places, what you're what you're seeing from a practitioner standpoint.
Well, I mean, you alluded to before. I mean, COVID changed our industry, the land use industry, quite a bit, and there were already headwinds starting with like the rise of e-commerce and mobile work that were removing the monopoly of physical places that they had on our lives, and obviously that has caused a lot of isolation and some negative consequences. But one of the positives is that it's forced physical places to really up their game. If they're going to, they actually have to attract people. They can't rely on sort of a captive audience.
That like, well, I have to be in the office. I have to be in this office. I have to stay at this job. I have to go to the shopping mall. so, I think that is on one hand, that's driving a lot of positive investment in thinking about the quality of the experience of place.
The second thing that I've experienced after operating as my firm has been a third-party operator of public and common area and commercial districts for a dozen years, what I was finding was that the success of our work as a service provider was really determined by the culture and incentive structure of our clients, and so that's that's caused a transition in my own work of now working directly with organizations to not only help them set that place activation and enhancement strategy, but with that seeing that they need to examine their own internal operations, budgeting structures, employee incentives, roles and responsibilities, that is the, our places are a function of how we all work together within our own organizations and across organizations, and so we need to change our culture and our the way we collaborate if we're going to also change our places. that was something I was finding I was doing as like a shadow scope as part of like our operating other people's spaces. now I'm bringing that shadow out into the sunshine and just intentionally being able to work with organizations to help them retool to create the vision of what they want to manifest, but that doesn't materialize on its own because of the way things are.
I think that's such a great point that you raise around the culture of building places, and in a service organization, you're kind of beholden to whatever inherited culture exists, and what that raises in my mind is, understanding a place's starting point is so critical, and when a scope of work is generated, sometimes we misdiagnose our place's starting point.
It's easy to provide a scope for a master plan, or for a brand, or for a staffing plan, whatever the case may be, and not enough time is given to what Max is saying, which is like, okay, what are what is our community building culture really functioning like, and then kind of that introspection or that self-diagnosing of okay, not all places are at the same starting point.
A downtown may be totally different than a well-functioning suburb, than a kind of middling main street or an office park, and they all have different needs that need to be invested in some kind of order that isn't always sequential to how we think about a development project, and I think that's part of the way the industry has to evolve is kind of understanding that variety and diversity of starting points is a critical thing to get right.
And I think for people doing the work, especially community members, to appreciate your wins based on your starting point and not on end point comparisons with other communities. Like to your point, it's like I've had I've had a huge win about getting an operator to allow us to put out movable seating for an hour, and that sort of progress would not have been a great win for a highly functioning commercial district where we were trying to drive thousands of new people to the area. That's a totally different, goalpost.
But both involve work, there's a contextual goal, and you should pat yourselves on the back from wherever your starting point is, rather than feeling down on yourself by looking at like what a place has maybe been doing intentionally for 20 years.
And the key there is both are visible, tangible things, but at different scales. There's a great cheugy sign out there that is don't confuse your beginning with somebody else's middle, and as much as I shiver at cheuginess, I think that is a pretty good sign. It's much better than "Don't talk to me till I have had my second coffee" or something like that, or it's or it's wine o'clock.
Right. Oh goodness! Well, thank you both so much. I learned so much, and excited to excited to actually just listen to this episode again and get to kind of seep in those lessons a little deeper. So, thank you both for being here.
We always end every episode with the Downzone. So think about if there's anything you're reading or watching or engaging with that you like to share with the broader Strong Towns community. Since you guys are new to Upzoned, I'll go first to set the tone. It can be something you're working on or not. In my particular case, while this is still Strong Towns-related, We were able to recently announce our dates for the national gathering in 2027, which will be June 2nd through 4th in Sacramento next year.
We're going out to visit one of our strong local conversations, Strong Sac Town, and we're just really thrilled to have that out in the universe and get to start planning the fun content so I want folks to mark that down and it's just such an important part of building this work and our movement so excited to share it Joe or Max, do either of you want to take it next?
Go ahead, Max. I need one more second to think.
I'm working. I've got two books I'm working through right now. One is a small book of like five translations of fairy tales by Robert Bly and his interpretations of those. I love them. I've gotten really into fairy tales and sort of like the deep wisdom that they have over the last several years. then the second book is a very long one, which I'm slowly working through.
David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years. I'm a big David Graeber fan, and he's got a really unique, I think, insightful view of the world. so it's sort of a biography of debt and how it was invented, and the very sort of like perverse consequences of it playing out through 5000 years of culture.
Wow, I'm gonna definitely have to look that one up. That sounds really interesting. How about you, Joe?
That's a tough act to follow.
I know. Yes.
You go first.
Mine's gonna seem very poppy by comparison. No, so I'll I'll break it into three parts. So one being very literal about downzoning. One thing that I am a big proponent of is one-story buildings, and we've kind of zoned them out of existence in many places, trying to avoid the drive-through. We need we need more one-story buildings.
Most of our favorite main streets are one-story buildings. So that's a literal downzoning conversation. But jokes aside, I live a very boring life right now. But I love it. I mean, it's just very binary.
I have work and I have young kids and family life, but one thing I've been really passionate about and insecure about really is parenting, and you kind of grasp at everything you can learn about how to be a better parent. So I really love The Daily Dad. I read it every day. I'm on my second tour of reading it every day. I think it's just a really great way to start the day.
But I've also just been fascinated watching my kids inhabit this world as they kind of grow their bicycling radius in the community and their sense of agency and freedom and independence. I just find that to be, well, not a story or a book or a movie, really, just fun to watch how they're occupying the world in which they live. They're three boys. They hang tight, and it's been fun. then last one is more of a media reference. It's a show that actually we I was watching a lot.
It was popular around when we were writing the playbook, just to bring it full circle. But I thought did a really good job of visualizing how places have historically grown, and it's a series, a mini series about the building of the transcontinental railroad. It was called Hell on Wheels.
I don't know if either of you have seen it, but what was really interesting is through the episodes they would be marching from the east to the west and vice versa, and you got to see what a first settlement looked like and what layers of settlement look like as time and investment and participation and the growth kind of evolved, and so that you would see these shanty towns and tent villages at the at the edge of the project, but then they would go back a few stations or cities, and these shanty towns had become real cities. It wasn't always pretty.
There was a lot of violence and conflict, and obviously, all the things associated with the expansion across the country. But was a really kind of fascinating historical interpretation of what I think we're trying to do with the playbook, or we were trying to do with the playbook at the time, depicted in a kind of pop historical fiction.
That's great! What a great way to end our episode on the Neighborhood Playbook. congratulations again, Joe, on 10 years. Max, thanks for being the perfect co-guest with Joe. We're so glad to have you both here. So thank you.
Yeah, thank you for the invitation. Great to be here.
And to our listeners, if you've got a question or thought we didn't get to, we do have a thread open on the Strong Towns Commons. You can find that at commons.strongtowns.org to continue the conversation. we'll be back next week with a new topic and a new group. As always, take care of yourselves and take care of your places.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.