Density is often pictured as a huge apartment building surrounded by pavement, while a yard is treated as something only suburbia can provide. Dr. Alicia Pederson, founder of Courtyard Urbanist, wants cities to look at the block differently. Courtyard blocks arrange many small multifamily buildings around shared green space, giving families larger homes, nearby neighbors, and somewhere for children to play. The form can provide more housing and more usable outdoor space at the same time, while creating enough density to support local shops and transit. American cities haven’t run out of ways to build good family housing; they’ve written many of those possibilities out of their zoning codes.
Hi, everybody! Welcome to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens Reed. If you've been part of the conversation about the American city, whether at Strong Towns or another organization, then you probably know that we put a lot of attention into explaining how we got here. We explain the history behind certain design decisions or policies. We spend a lot of time talking about the problems we face now and the obstacles to making things better.
There's another side to this conversation that is more creative. What can we create? What can we do with what we have and with the situation in which we find ourselves? What could the future look like if we built something better or built differently? I think about this a lot, and I mean that very literally. I drive through my city with its stroads, suburbs, and strip malls, and at the end of the day, it boils down to this: Can we do anything better than this? What do we do with it?
There are conversations happening in that spirit, including the suburban retrofit conversation. Today's guest is bringing us the hopeful news that an alternative exists. We can build something better and different. She's going to talk about one such alternative: the courtyard block.
Today I'm joined by Dr. Alicia Pederson. She's a mother of three living in Chicago's Lincoln Square. She's the founder of Courtyard Urbanist, a fantastic Substack that we will link to. She's a researcher and developer focused on courtyard-block housing for North American cities. If you've never heard of that approach to development, don't worry. You're going to learn all about it in today's conversation. Alicia, welcome to the Bottom Up Revolution podcast.
Thank you so much. It is fantastic to be here, Tiffany, and thank you for that introduction. The story is such an important part of this topic, and I'm excited to talk about how I got here and to share courtyard blocks and courtyard urbanism with your audience.
I'm so excited. This is a fascinating topic, and you have a really interesting story, so let's dive in. Let's start with a little context and your backstory. Your journey to rethinking the American suburb started in the American suburb. Can you tell us a bit about your upbringing?
I grew up in suburban West Michigan, outside Grand Rapids. I was one of four daughters, and I watched my mom and dad spend their 30s and 40s driving us everywhere. It was 15 minutes to school or the grocery store. As a teenager, you don't question it because everything feels normal, but it was a pain. You depended on your parents to see your friends. The moment you turned 16, you got a car, but then you spent your weekends working a job so you could pay for gas. Even though it was normal, it wasn't great.
I went to college and majored in English. I've always loved literature and the humanities. After college, I wanted to learn Italian and see the world, so I found a job in Florence, Italy, working as an au pair for a Florentine family. They had a home in a courtyard block in the center of Florence. That was the context: I grew up in suburban Michigan and made my way to Florence in my early 20s.
First of all, I love that phrase: normal is not great. I feel as though that summarizes the strange cognitive dissonance around suburban culture. It has a grip on us because it's normal, but it is legitimately not great. I'm putting that on my list of phrases I want on a coffee mug one day, or on the back of my car, which I do have to drive.
When you arrived in Florence and were getting used to this new built environment, were you already thinking about differences in the built environment? Or was this one of those experiences that planted a seed that didn't bloom until later? What was it like for you?
It was shocking. I had traveled during high school and college and had been to Europe as a tourist, but this was the first time I lived there. I was living with this family and working as an au pair, basically a nanny for their baby. In an au pair situation, you're a member of the family, so you really get to know them. I lived with them for two years.
I also tutored English for other families in Florence, and I went to their homes. I saw the interiors of many homes throughout Florence and across the income scale. There were very few single-family homes and very few detached buildings. Almost everything was an apartment. Some were rented and some were owned, but they were generally part of a perimeter-block plan.
Growing up in suburban Michigan, I associated apartments with something that wasn't aspirational. The apartments in Michigan were not nice, and the aspiration was a single-family home with a yard. In Florence, I saw apartments that were better than any single-family home I had ever seen. In addition to being amazing homes, they were steps from shopping, culture, the bakery, the pharmacy, museums, and community.
People also had access to their families. It wasn't a situation where the grandparents lived in Florida, the aunts and uncles lived in Indiana, and the parents lived in Michigan. It was a multigenerational city where the whole family could live in the same place. That was shocking, and it changed my attitude toward cities and what family housing could be. It made me think that if I ever had a family, I definitely didn't want to live in the suburbs. I wanted to live in a proper city.
I would love to talk about how this connects with your professional work. What was happening in your life, and what clicked for you as the spark behind Courtyard Urbanist? I know the work exists in many forms now, and we're going to talk about that, but can you share the origin story, starting with the Substack and how it grew from there?
It is a strange story. After living in Italy and learning Italian, I wanted an academic career. I ended up in Chicago while getting my doctorate at Northwestern. I earned a Ph.D. in English with a specialization in Renaissance English and Italian literature. I planned to become a Shakespeare professor and teach Italian and English literature.
Halfway through my dissertation, I met my husband. Then I had three kids in four years, with the third arriving just as COVID began. I finished my Ph.D., but the world was falling apart and I had all these kids, so I paused my academic career and became a stay-at-home mom for a while.
I also got involved in local YIMBY-NIMBY development issues because, as my kids reached preschool and elementary-school age, I watched many of our family friends move away. They didn't dislike Chicago. We lived in a great Chicago neighborhood, and they wanted to stay, but they couldn't afford a large home with access to a yard. They wanted a house with a yard, not necessarily a detached single-family home, but that was nearly the only housing type in the city that came with a yard.
I thought back to the courtyard blocks and the Italian home where I had lived. It was a large home with access to a courtyard in the back. I had also traveled throughout Europe and seen different versions of this form. They're not large in every country; in Scandinavia, they tend to be larger. The basic idea is that you arrange multifamily buildings around the perimeter of a yard.
That uses land differently from the way we tend to use it in U.S. cities. We tend to have narrower lots, and buildings consume more of each lot. If you look at an aerial view of even prewar American cities, the lots are narrow and the buildings are lower and cover more of the parcel, leaving little room for a yard. I lived in a 1911 building with very little yard space, and because the buildings were shorter, there wasn't as much density.
I became obsessed with the differences between how American and European cities use land and how those differences affect family life. Why did European cities have greater density and more yard space? Because they had more density, they also had more commercial space, more shops, and more walkability. By almost every metric you care about in walkable urbanism, they had more floor area, more density, and more affordability.
I kept asking why we couldn't build these here. That led to the question of why we can't, and the answer involved rules and regulations about front and side setbacks, parking minimums, and egress. I started writing about it, and the work took off. I gained a significant following, first on Twitter and then on Substack, and wrote articles for different media outlets.
In January, some investors approached me and said, 'This is a business.' They provided seed money, and I used it to hire architects to design American versions of the building and block prototypes. We now have those templates and building prototypes, and we're beginning to work with developers around the country to build them. That's how it became what it is today.
Fascinating. When you're talking about the design and the architects, I know this might be challenging because this is an audio-only podcast and we don't have a lot of time. But could you describe what this looks like for our listeners? I've seen some examples, and we'll put links in the show notes so people can see what's available on your website. To the best of your ability, can you paint a picture of what this would look like?
Sure. The form is very important because people often say, 'Alicia, we have courtyard blocks in Texas,' and then show me what is called a Texas doughnut. That is usually one massive building with hundreds of units accessed from double-loaded corridors. If you've been in a hotel, dormitory, or one of these apartment buildings, you know the form: you enter a lobby, go up an elevator or stairs, then walk down long corridors to reach a unit. Your unit faces either the street or the back, and if it faces the back, it often overlooks a parking lot. Courtyard blocks are completely different.
A courtyard block consists of many small multifamily buildings built wall to wall around a block. If you've been to Copenhagen, Berlin, or another European city and seen a continuous street wall, that street wall is not one building. It is fine-grained and made of many small buildings connected by party walls.
Those buildings can share party walls because they are shallow. They usually extend about 40 feet deep. That depth matters because daylight generally reaches about 20 feet into a building. You get 20 feet of light from the front and 20 feet from the back. If you go much deeper, you have a deep-floor-plate problem.
The buildings also don't have corridors running through them. Instead, you enter through a stair core. You open the front door into a small vestibule or lobby with stairs and sometimes an elevator. You go up to a landing, where there might be one, two, three, or sometimes four doors. Two doors per landing is common, which allows each unit to have a front and a back.
That front-and-back condition is important. A house has a front facing the street and a quieter back facing the yard. You can send your kids into the courtyard, look out the back window, and call them in. Kitchens are often in the back, so you can make dinner or wash dishes while keeping an eye on the children outside.
You can repeat that arrangement up six stories and get 12 to 20 units, depending on the unit mix. One floor might hold a large five-bedroom home for an upper-middle-class family, while another might include several one-bedroom units. That creates real income diversity. Everyone shares the same piece of land, the roof costs, and the courtyard, which brings costs down.
That density then supports the cafe, bakery, pharmacy, and other amenities that make city living so appealing. A typical building might have about 60 feet of street frontage. These are not townhouses, which are often 20 to 25 feet wide. Townhouses have a place, but they're narrow, support fewer units, and have to extend farther back to gain floor area.
Courtyard buildings are roughly 60 feet wide and 40 feet deep, and they can go taller to create floor area while leaving room for a yard. In a townhouse, the short ends of the box hold the windows because the building is long and narrow. In courtyard buildings, the wide sides have windows, so the units get much better light and ventilation.
If anyone has seen a Haussmannian building in Paris, this is the typical 19th-century form. Those apartments are spectacular and drenched in light. They're among the best real estate on the planet. They're apartments, but the building form makes them extraordinary.
Thank you for walking me through that. It's interesting to think about the differences and all those design features, which might be difficult to keep track of in audio. If you're listening, I recommend looking up pictures or visiting the website we'll link to so you can fill in the gaps visually.
What's fascinating is the relationship between design choices and how people perceive their own space. Even something as basic as the way light enters a home, or how a parent feels while working in the kitchen and dealing with the kids, affects whether a place feels like home. Those design decisions really matter.
Let's talk about the work you're doing now. You're adapting this form and bringing it to the United States. From our earlier conversation, it sounded as though this could address several problems, including the challenge of urban downtown infill, the density needed to support better public transportation and local businesses, and the problem of families leaving cities.
The family-flight issue might make sense on its own, so perhaps we can focus on urban downtown infill and how this can help families who want to stay. Do you see this mainly as a solution for urban contexts, rather than suburban ones?
I see it as a way to make any municipality more valuable because it creates a neighborhood that is more efficient, convenient, and sustainable over time. More households share the land and maintenance costs.
I think this will be even more valuable now than it was 60 years ago because we have more dual-income households and more working mothers. In the past, you might have had a commuter dad and a stay-at-home mom, which meant someone was home to maintain the house. Now I want a yard because I have kids and want to tell them to go play outside, but I don't want a private yard that I'm solely responsible for maintaining. I also don't want a detached home where I have to worry about the roof and everything else. I would rather share those costs and share a courtyard with other households.
We have a small backyard in the city. It was nice when the kids were little and could use a kiddie pool, but now they want to play with friends, and the yard is too small. They would love a shared courtyard where they could play with other children. There isn't really a place on our block that provides that.
One example of the infill work is a collaboration with Strong Towns BloNo, which is short for Bloomington-Normal. Bloomington-Normal is a twin-city area in central Illinois. It's home to State Farm Insurance and Rivian, the electric-vehicle manufacturer. The area has more than 135,000 people, is growing, and has a strong regional workforce and employment base, so it has significant housing demand. But its downtown has been gutted.
About two decades ago, the area had a conventional multifamily urban-revival project with large buildings containing hundreds of small units over parking podiums. Strong Towns BloNo wanted something incremental and fine-grained. They had read a lot of my work and were interested in courtyard blocks, so they invited me to give a keynote and lead a charrette, which is a design workshop.
The charrette kicked off work on a downtown transitional district. A planning commission is writing a report that will influence how the city rezones and plans redevelopment for a downtown that desperately needs infill over time. I gave the keynote, explained the form, and showed participants how to design courtyard blocks: the width, depth, corners, height, and other details. We walked around the city, mapped it, and placed courtyard blocks on those maps.
It was fantastic. The form resonated with the audience, especially the idea of family-friendly density. Many Americans still hear the word density and associate it with high-rises, pavement, and no green space.
I think anonymity is part of that, too. People hear density and think strangers, right?
Yes. In my talk, I explain that courtyard blocks can achieve very high density across an entire block while dividing that density among many small buildings. You might share a building with 10 other households instead of hundreds.
Because the floor area is concentrated high and thin around the perimeter, you get a great deal of green space. I encourage people to look at aerial images of Copenhagen, Hanover, or Berlin. It is striking how green those cities are. I often compare the densest neighborhood in Chicago with the densest neighborhood in Copenhagen. The Copenhagen neighborhood is significantly denser and also much greener. The Chicago neighborhood has almost no green space.
Then you can look at the demographics. The Copenhagen neighborhood has many families, with preschools and daycares on the ground floor. It retains families because the form works across the life cycle, not only when you're in your 20s and starting your career.
My message to cities is that they're losing families and students for their schools. They need family-friendly density, and it isn't going to come from high-rises over parking podiums because few people want to raise children that way. They need a form of density that works for families, and this is what it is.
What you're proposing is also a product. You have a specific thing to build, along with a code that guides it. If I remember correctly, you're also helping cities understand how they need to change their zoning codes so these buildings can be constructed.
But it is also a rhythm of life. You're offering a multigenerational and adaptable answer to the human need to exist in space. It fits multiple life stages and allows people to stay connected to neighbors and shop owners without feeling overwhelmed by strangers.
What are you hearing back? I know you're working in other cities. Are you seeing this click? Are cities reforming their zoning codes to allow these buildings? What's your sense of the appetite for this vision and for rethinking the way family life intersects with the built environment? It has been normal, but it hasn't been great. Are cities ready to rethink that?
It is definitely clicking with a lot of people, including individuals at every level of government who are trying to bring it to cities. I incorporated the company in January, and we finished the designs in May, so it is still very early. But we're making tremendous progress, and I've been writing about this for a while, so I've already had conversations with municipalities that are studying how to do it.
Unfortunately, there usually isn't a situation where a city can take decisive action immediately. The smaller the municipality, the more flexibility it tends to have. There is one small town in the Boston area that I can't talk about publicly yet. It is small enough to say, 'This is the zoning code you need. Go for it.' We're hoping to break ground there in April because the town gave us the green light.
In cities such as Chicago, where I originally imagined this work, the red tape goes on and on. One example is the affordable-housing requirement. If you're building 10 units or more, 20% of the units must be affordable. It costs more to build three- and four-bedroom units, and the affordable units are supposed to be comparable. If you're building family-sized units, you must also build affordable family-sized units and sell them at a loss to households earning 60% to 80% of the area median income.
For a small developer, that is difficult. Another part of this work is the development model. A large developer could serve as the master developer, assemble the land, and then build out the small buildings one at a time. But traditionally, and potentially in a way that could transform the industry, a city or master developer could assemble the land, handle the parcel entitlements, and sell the parcels to small developers.
Those small developers could build the block incrementally because each individual building is a manageable size. You don't need to be a huge institutional developer to build a 60-by-40-foot building.
I want to clarify that. When you look at an aerial image of a courtyard block, you see a ring or rectangle of buildings around the green space. Are those actually individual buildings? Do the zoning codes allow or require the buildings to touch through the party walls you described?
Yes. The code you need begins with a zero front setback, which allows a building to come right up to the front property line. You also need to be able to build to the side property lines and have windowless party walls on the sides.
Historically, this is the kind of building code that created courtyard blocks across Europe. There wasn't a special design code. The rules said you could build to the front and side property lines and go up five or six stories, but you could cover only 50% or 60% of the lot. That pushed the building mass high and thin around the perimeter because developers wanted to maximize floor area but couldn't use the entire lot.
In many cases, those building codes came after cities had burned down several times. I didn't ask about fire.
Fire. Yes.
Exactly. These cities had burned down several times, and eventually the response was that buildings had to use masonry and provide air, light, and ventilation. Courtyards also served as firebreaks. The goal was to create more space inside the block for fire safety, air, ventilation, and a higher quality of life. They required a courtyard in the back, whereas in the United States, we tend to require open space in the front and side setbacks.
They solved the problem.
We just solved it completely the wrong way.
I'm glad you brought up fire because I was going to ask about it. A huge part of the history of the American form has to do with fire, along with the response to tenements and the loss of light and air. It makes sense that if you're building with masonry and better materials, you can be more comfortable with buildings touching. The concern was always that if one building caught fire, they would all catch fire, but you address that by building with better materials.
I want to ask you a personal question. How did you connect all these dots? You had three kids, you were coming out of COVID, you were watching your friends leave, and you were connecting your experiences in Italy with what you observed in Chicago. How did you see all that and decide we could fix it, instead of thinking, 'Gosh darn it, I guess we're really in a pickle now'?
You have an article on your Substack about the 10 challenges. Anyone could read one of those and dust off their hands and say, 'Well, we tried. I guess we're never going to have nice things.' You didn't. You said, 'No, we can have nice things. We can build these here, too.'
It came from living in this neighborhood, which is, to be clear, one of the best neighborhoods in the United States to raise a family. I love Lincoln Square in Chicago. It's very walkable. We walk to everything, and my husband takes the train to work. We're very happy here. But it is still nothing compared with the walkability of Italian and other European neighborhoods, and I became fascinated by that difference.
I walked around the neighborhood with my three kids and my dog, paying attention to the gaps between buildings, the way the alleys worked, the mixed-use pattern, and the lack of density. I kept asking why it was so much less walkable and cataloged those differences over the years.
There were many catalytic moments, but one stands out, and I haven't talked about it much. We had our priest over for dinner. After dinner, I was sitting at the table with our priest and my husband and complaining that we had to drive to the pharmacy. It was a Walgreens where everything was locked up—the typical horrible American pharmacy experience.
In Italy, there is a pharmacy on nearly every block. They laughed at me a little because the pharmacies close during the middle of the day, but they were dismissing my point that the built form supports a better commercial experience in a way that is especially helpful for mothers.
If you're a mother with little kids and one of them gets strep throat, you get the prescription call while you're home with the children. Then you have to get everyone into the car and drive to the pharmacy. It is such a pain. In Italy, the child could be napping while you went downstairs to the pharmacy on the street. It is a completely different experience.
I was in the thick of raising small children at the time, and I kept asking why we couldn't have more mixed-use buildings and more density to support them. Then I realized that we could. There was no reason we couldn't have nicer things. That night, I was especially frustrated by the dismissal of the built environment and the way it shapes daily life.
That dismissal, right? 'Oh, that's so cute.' Excuse me. We are raising the future generation here. The least we can have is a pharmacy we can get to quickly.
Right. Yes, thank you.
Anyone listening to this will know that I'm secretly chuckling because we just did an episode with Lauren Penn, and they know I have a soft spot for talking about the intersection of motherhood and urban design. It blows my mind when I think about the cost of suburbia and car-oriented design for mothers.
We won't go further into it because we're out of time, but there is nothing to dismiss in that. Absolutely nothing. We can even escalate our opening phrase. It is normal but not great, and on many levels it can be cataclysmic when you understand the effect it has on motherhood, parenting, and child-rearing. There is enough to say for an entire podcast.
I'm going to ask my closing question, which makes me a little sad because I feel as though we could talk for another hour about your work and the conversations you're having. You've mentioned your neighborhood several times. Could you recommend a couple of small businesses for listeners to visit if they come to Lincoln Square?
If you get off the Brown Line at the Western stop in Lincoln Square, there is Gene's Sausage Shop. It's a grocery store with everything, and it's very cute. There is also Merz Apothecary. It isn't a full-service pharmacy, which drives me crazy, but it has all sorts of nonprescription items, including soaps and fragrances. It's an adorable shop.
There are also many great restaurants and cafes throughout Lincoln Square. Come to Lincoln Square and walk up and down Lincoln Avenue. In the 1990s, a civic group closed one of the through streets and turned it into a plaza. It feels like a plaza you might find in Italy, and it is one of the most enchanting neighborhood spaces in the city. It's fantastic.
Well, I'm sold. I definitely want to come see it. Thank you so much, Alicia, for taking the time to talk with me and share your story and work. We'll share the link to your Substack so listeners can learn more about what you're doing.
You have an enormous amount of content on your Substack that explores this work in depth from a researcher's perspective, and now you're branching into development. It will be exciting to follow your work. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us. I appreciate it.
Thank you so much, Tiffany, and please come visit me soon in Lincoln Square.
To our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in for another conversation. I'll be back soon with another episode. If there's someone you think we should have on the show, please let us know through the suggested-guest form in the show notes. That's how we learn about many fantastic people around the country doing great work in a bottom-up fashion.
Please nominate someone you'd like to hear interviewed. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
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.