The Strong Towns Podcast
Chuck and Kevin Klinkenberg explore why progress comes from people who stop waiting for permission and start doing things locally. They look at incremental developers, neighborhood groups, and the limits of top-down systems in cities like Kansas City. Along the way, they wrestle with incentives, housing, and how much order a city actually needs.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hey everybody. This is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. My friend Kevin Klinkenberg is my guest today. Before we get started, let me say a couple of things about Kevin first.
Kevin is an urban designer, a planner, and an architect. He is the executive director of an organization called Midtown KC in Kansas City. He is also — and I think this is the important thing — the host of the Messy City Podcast. If I have one goal on this show today, it is to get you to listen to the Messy City Podcast.
Kevin, I've been listening to your podcast since the early days, and I'm going to say this hoping it comes across as flattering. In the early days, you were interviewing old friends, and it was fun for me because it was nostalgic. But your podcast — I don't want to say it has turned a corner, because I don't think there was a corner to turn — has really reached what I'd call cruising altitude. It has gotten really profoundly good. I have felt guilty for a while not having you on, and now I'm like, there's no excuse. People need to listen to the Messy City Podcast. Let's have Kevin on, let's chat about some stuff, and let's send some people your way.
So with all of that — the second Klinkenberg to ever be on the podcast — I don't think you've been on before, have you? Well, it's been a while. Several years, maybe once, yeah. Okay, I was going to say I can't recall exactly. Your brother was on when he wrote his book about the Mississippi River, right? Let me just say, Kevin, welcome to the Strong Towns Podcast. So nice to have you.
Thank you — and high praise! I appreciate that. That's very kind of you. I feel like so many people helped me get started, especially in the early years. They would share my stuff and point people my way. I try to do that. But I'm also inundated with people asking me to signal-boost them, and I try, but I also deeply respect the people who listen and I don't want to just throw things their way.
To be honest, you've never asked me to do that, but on the other hand, I felt like I needed to point people in your direction because it really is good. You've done some episodes in the last few months that have been really phenomenal.
Is Dean older than you?
He is. He's six years older than me, and I remind him of that all the time. There's definitely an older-younger brother dynamic at play.
I feel like — for me it was writing, but I think podcasting too — when you do this, particularly when you do solo episodes, it becomes an intentional exploration of ideas. You and I can sit around and just talk, and those talks are really fun, I get a lot of energy out of them. But there's something that forces you into an intellectual exploratory zone when you're writing something or chatting with someone and asking questions to help them tell a story.
I feel like what you've done — and I don't want this to sound like a backhanded compliment, because I didn't think your early episodes were bad — is that you've reached a next stage of exploration, where you're tying things together and asking really deep questions. So let me use that as a way to start. Why don't you talk about the Messy City Podcast: what do you mean by "messy city," how did you get here, and what are you trying to accomplish? Then I've got a thousand directions we can go.
"Messy city" owes a lot to Strong Towns. It's a very complementary term in a lot of ways. It was really born out of my evolving understanding of cities and towns — what did I like, what did I not like, and what are the real forces behind cities that make them the way they are? As we try to recreate cities, what is really working or not working?
I'm a designer by background, and so for most of the early part of my career I focused a lot on design issues, and I still care tremendously about them. But even within the New Urbanism world that you and I have been a part of, we often don't understand the systems behind the screen that create things — or don't. As consultants or designers, you take clients, you work within the system, and you don't often have a chance to step back and think about how these things actually manifest themselves.
I've been trying to make sense of that for a long time. I still have my pet issues. I love architecture and design, and I love talking to architects who do beautiful work and sharing that with others. But as time has gone on, what you've identified is hopefully where I've tried to go: asking bigger questions and starting to find answers about how to really improve our communities.
You did a podcast recently about the agency that people have, and I want to start there. You and I both have initials behind our names — degrees you can hang on the wall — and there's a certain comfort or empowerment that comes from being an architect, an engineer, a planner, whether it's how you're introduced at a council meeting or how you're perceived as having special technical knowledge. It took me a while to recognize the problems that creates.
I don't even acquiesce to the idea that in the 1950s and '60s we had different problems and maybe that's what we needed then. In the year 2026, it's not the answer. Can you talk a little bit about credentials and policy — the things that create the lines we color in — and how you perceive those as part of the problem? Why do you think it's critical to remind people that they have agency?
That's a big question. I think a lot of it comes from — well, you and I are both men of a certain age now, although you have younger kids, so I have more faith in your ability to think young. They keep you younger in spirit, for sure.
Because of that, I think we both get a lot of younger people reaching out who want advice, suggestions, direction — and that's actually pretty gratifying. One thing I've consistently seen is a lot of people not understanding that they can just do things, that you don't always need permission to accomplish whatever it is you're trying to accomplish.
The credentialism and professionalism mindset certainly has its upsides — it raises standards and quality in a lot of respects — but it also tends to put people in a box. "I'm not an expert, therefore I must defer to others" or "I just can't take this on because I don't know enough about that world." It almost doesn't matter what world you're talking about. I obviously spend a lot of time in planning and development, and I see it all the time: people who have an interest in building or developing things but think, "I don't know anything about finance or zoning, so I have to go hire all these experts."
One of the common lessons I've seen over the years is that about 80% of success is really just hustle and initiative. People who have a desire to overcome obstacles are going to figure it out. I love having people tell their stories — how often people we know who are really successful never started out going in that direction.
For example, I recently had Ross Chapin on the podcast. One of the great fun aspects of having a podcast is getting to interview people you really admire. Ross and his work creating the cottage court movement is someone I've admired for many years. When you hear him tell his story, it's just like: he had an idea, there was a site, he had an interest, and they just did something and figured it out. Lo and behold, they did it so well that it became a phenomenon. He's built a whole career around it.
What I try to encourage is this notion that we all have agency to do whatever we're interested in. You may succeed, you may fail, but you can try. You don't have to be a credentialed expert in everything. It used to be that you could become a registered architect without a college degree — there was an apprenticeship path within the profession. Unfortunately the profession largely wiped that away, though they've eased it back a little in recent years. I thought the original method was correct: one path is school and a degree, another path is apprenticing with an architect at 18. Both are great. In general, I want folks — especially younger people, and a lot of my audience is younger — to understand that they can just do things.
Let's apply this to Kansas City. I feel like Kansas City is a nice Midwestern city — I'm going to say this and you can push back — but it feels competently run but not well run. They're able to do things that a city does, but I see them building big subdivisions on the edge with decorative lights out on the greenfield, and struggling to make real good investments in a neighborhood like the one you work in.
What's the tension between a formal city — one that tries to do the right thing and be competent — and a messy city, a place where you do have agency? And if I'm a government that knows it lives in an orderly but dumb kind of world, how do I inject more of that chaotic-but-smart energy into my neighborhoods?
A couple of things come to mind. We kind of joke that there's an upside to living in a poorly run city. It frustrates us frequently, but something I've observed throughout my lifetime is that when you live in a poorly run city, you can kind of do whatever you want to do, and unless you really anger your neighbors, you can probably get away with it. I'm not saying that's a virtue necessarily — it's not the way to do things — but it certainly happens.
Kevin, for me, being in Memphis around 2012 and watching what was going on there — I'm from Minnesota, we're very orderly. It was chaos. But I recognized that the people there would say, "We're fixing this place, and by the time anybody shows up we'll be gone anyway, so who cares?" I was like — wow, okay. That's empowering.
Well, I remember how Andrés used to talk about New Orleans — like a Caribbean city. You have to think about New Orleans like a Caribbean city, not like Minneapolis. He actually used Minneapolis as his whipping boy.
There's always a tension between order and chaos. I think that's just part of the human condition. We need order, but we also need some chaos from time to time. The word tends to evoke a negative sentiment, but it doesn't have to.
What a lot of local governments can do is figure out where they can just let go and let individual action happen. Are we really so worried that somebody is going to build a duplex or convert a room into a suite on the back of their house? What's the worst that's really going to happen? Are we so worried that an entrepreneur starting a business in a rundown part of town won't live up to the letter of every commercial building code? We tend to think way too much about the downsides of bad things that could happen, instead of focusing on the upsides of good things.
In my city, our public debates tend to fetishize problems that could happen 20 years from now, instead of thinking about the big problem today. My feeling is the problem we need to solve is that we have a city in fiscal crisis that is not sustainable in its basic responsibilities. We have to focus on how to reverse population loss in the declining parts of town, ease up on some of the other things people obsess about that might happen 10, 20, 30 years from now, and solve those problems when we get to them.
I feel like there's an element of scale here. You've become an expert on a neighborhood and on hacking things in place. When you're doing small, incremental things, you don't often have to wrestle with long-term ramifications. When the city's doing a multimillion-dollar project or a big TIF thing, it kind of forces you to think about 30 years from now. Is giving people agency a matter of scale, or is there more to it?
Working in a big city — a large municipality — is definitely different. Kansas City, Missouri, where I live and work, has half a million people spread over 300 square miles. Working within that framework, you tend to focus just on your locality. In our little slice of the city, I feel like we often have agency to do the things we would like to do.
Our organization is called a place management organization. We are the experts on our part of town — we know the residents, the businesses, what's coming, the public spaces, the issues good and bad. Because we manage some community improvement districts, we have some modest ability to make positive change happen. Other parts of town don't have that, but we do.
We're able to accomplish a lot of the really small-scale stuff that the city government itself is just not set up well to handle, because it's so large and its responsibilities are vast. You have 12 council members and a mayor overseeing this huge geography, consumed with both citywide and localized problems. We don't have to think about citywide problems. We can think about how to fix this one block in our area. In a really large governmental unit like that, we're probably more empowered to work in our small area than we would otherwise be.
Let me ask you this — let's talk about not Kansas City specifically, because I want you to speak as freely as you can. Let's pretend there's another Kevin doing this in Omaha or St. Louis or Minneapolis, running a neighborhood organization that's focused on doing the things that cities struggle to do. If I'm the city government, how do I make the person in that role's job easier? How do I support them?
That's our struggle, and I think it's the struggle of larger cities. It's been an interesting career trajectory for me. I started as an architect working solely in design, did a lot of policy work, and in the last seven or eight years I've really been exposed to the management side of things. That has really impacted my thinking about this question.
I have evolved to think that a lot of our large cities and their governments really need to be decentralized in some fashion. About 80% of the issues we run across and obsess about are very localized — either neighborhood or district-based — but we have governments that operate at a larger scale. I don't have great answers. I feel like I've just had a deep education in this over the last several years.
What I do know is that there are place management organizations like ours in cities all over the country that do a tremendous job because they're boots on the ground and they know the people and the place. It would be great if we could figure out how to better empower them — financially, through some better form of revenue sharing or revenue incentives, and maybe some better direct staff coordination.
In our case, a lot of what we have to do is know who the staff are at city hall that we need to call, and in a big system that can be a real challenge. If the system could be broken down into smaller, more localized units, then a lot of the things we struggle with would just be more effective. It would also give people a better feeling about their local government. In a large city like ours, people don't have a good feeling about local government — in survey after survey they say they think it does a lousy job. A lot of that comes back to how the system is structured: everything runs vertically through city hall, decisions are made there, management happens from there. It just doesn't work at the scale of the problems we're dealing with.
I want to run something I've said many times by you and get your reaction. I've argued that city hall should reduce the number of technical people on staff by half to two thirds — fewer planners, fewer engineers, fewer finance people, fewer management types — but augment the staff, maybe doubling it in size, with people who do social work and conflict resolution and human interaction. I'm trying to define a city that's less vertically oriented and more horizontally thick. Does that make sense?
I understand where you're headed. I might put it a little differently. I think there's definitely a need for technical expertise. If I drew a picture of what I wish could happen in my city, it would be many city halls spread throughout the city, with really competent people who understand each of the relevant departments. A codes person, a public works person, a planning person — but yes, the outreach and engagement piece really gets lost in a large city, and it's so much more effective in a smaller unit.
We have a strong engagement piece with our little nonprofit, and we feel pretty effective at it. So yes, I think there's a complement there. If you reduce the scale and think about your job as local government being to really stay in touch with people and what they're thinking and wanting, but also downscale the technical expertise to match — you really need the public works person to help you figure out the utilities situation in the street and the sidewalk — I think that model could work.
What we tend to have too much of when things get vertical is administrative overhead and layers of middle management that seem to make sense when an organization grows, but aren't terribly impactful on the ground. Corporate America realized this a long time ago. There's an opportunity to think about how a lot of those jobs in local government may still exist but just be different jobs.
You lose a lot of innovation when you stratify like that. Now that we're here, I think the commonality is that we both see that local government needs to change and become something different. There's a big push, particularly in the housing arena, for state preemption — for states to come in and say, "We're going to change the conditions and direct cities to do something different." In my mind that's always been going in the opposite direction. If the problem is that cities aren't locally responsive enough, making them even more state-responsive seems wrong. How do you think about the state's role in helping cities transform and modernize?
Boy, that's a complicated question.
I'm not here for the easy questions, Kevin.
The simple observation is that states are preempting because they see failure at the local level, and there's pressure on them to solve problems that aren't getting solved locally. Especially in the housing world, there's a lot of push for state governments to clear the decks, because local governments just won't do it — they won't clear out restrictive policy to allow housing to get built.
There's an argument to be made for that. The state has a legitimate interest in the economy growing and in basic property rights being protected. But there's a slippery slope. When you start asking the state to get involved in everything, at a certain point you have to ask: do you have local government or not?
I'm in a state where there's a lot of tension between local and state government. They're not on the same side of the aisle, they fight and snipe at each other a lot, and they seem to get off on it. That's common in blue cities and red states. The political dynamics are always changing, and when you empower states to take a lot of control, be careful what you wish for 10 or 20 years down the road. That might work out really well for certain issues today, but it opens the door to things you may not support down the line, things that could completely usurp local government.
So it all exists in tension, and there's no one-size-fits-all answer. I like the notion of states pushing cities to clear away restrictions that have really held them back. A lot of local governments dramatically underperform — especially big cities. There are books written about this from all sides of the political spectrum. But it would be better if, at the local level, we could figure out how to solve those problems ourselves.
I'm going to lump some things together. I know you've really championed the incremental developer and the idea that they're an important part of the revolution that needs to happen in cities. I want to add to that the entrepreneur — but I feel like there's a distinct class of what I just call crazy people who don't know they can fail, who are willing to go out and try things and make things work. What's the role of those people in this reform movement? How do they create — or interact with — the messy part to make the city a better place?
In my opinion, they're foundational. You've got to have this entrepreneurial class that takes real ownership of their place and wants to improve it. I think back to when the Incremental Development Alliance was formed and I was goading John Anderson and others to do it. We brainstormed this idea of 10,000 new developers. The reason we talked about that was to say: if every large metro in the country had a couple hundred new incremental developers who were really passionate about this, they can change their community.
Those people working in communities they know and care about, and who are becoming successful developers — and that's really important, the fact that they're actually building something and succeeding — will have the attention of others in their community. They'll have the ability to make the kind of change that needs to happen at the local level.
I have long been a proponent of development as a noble career path, and I relentlessly push people toward it — probably too much. You will learn. You will be invested in your community. If you have success, you will be looked at very differently by others in your community, because you have a direct stake in it, and policymakers will pay attention. Those sorts of people are absolutely foundational.
Unfortunately, we've lost a lot of that as development — like a lot of industries — has corporatized. So much of it is increasingly dependent on Wall Street money and everything else. That's not always a bad thing, but the fact that it's becoming a larger and larger share is a problem. We need those folks at the local level to take risks and be successful.
I have watched in Kansas City — and I think Urban3 has done a really good job of documenting this — the extreme passion the city has had for giving tax subsidies to large corporations and large entities. What's the view from the small developer angle? How does the city treat its incremental development community there?
It's definitely getting better. There's a lot more attention being paid to incremental developers, and that is in large part a response to people like Abby Newsham and her organizing a group here that meets regularly and gets out into the world and talks to people. There's a presence now, which has manifested itself in better policy over the last four or five years — some real wins that make a huge difference.
The whole tax incentive topic is fraught with problems. I wish we lived in a world where we didn't need any of it. It shows how you can create a tool to solve a problem, and then that tool gets turned around and used for other things. We have tax abatements because starting in the 1980s, the city was in such a desperate economic situation. It's more expensive to develop in the city, and we thought we'd throw anything at it, including very substantial tax abatements to encourage investment. I think that was a good idea at the time. But over time, smart people figure out how to use those same tools for things they were not intended for, and then you get abuse. It's the One Ring phenomenon: created for good, and then through misuse it wields evil. That's what I've seen over and over.
Unfortunately, that poisons the waters for everybody when it gets to that point.
You've talked a lot about starter homes. I feel like there's a whole ecosystem here — incremental development, starter homes, entrepreneurs, neighborhood revitalization. What you're talking about and trying to bring about in the Midtown neighborhood is essentially what people would historically just call neighborhood development. Why are starter homes important to this? How do they fit in? And what does a starter home actually look like to you?
The term means a lot of things to a lot of people. I think the majority of people not in our world think of a starter home the way my parents did: a little three-bedroom, one-bath ranch house of about 1,000 square feet that a young family can live in. That's the mentality for most people, and there's nothing wrong with it. In fact, we're not really building many of those anymore, which is kind of a problem.
What I've encouraged a lot of people to think about — especially now when new housing has become so expensive — is the house hacking model as the new starter home. That's a way, especially for young people, to get into ownership and help offset costs by renting rooms, having an accessory dwelling unit, having a duplex, whatever it is. The starter home is exactly what it's meant to be: the first rung on the economic ladder toward ownership and wealth building.
For previous generations, it was much easier to find a starter home and buy it inexpensively. It's become much harder, especially in desirable places. So I think we have to get more creative. The house hacking model is one way.
I recently had Bobby Feen on the show. He and his partners have this American Housing Corporation, and they're looking at the row house model — trying to essentially standardize a row house model they can build in urban communities all over the country. They believe firmly it's a great starter home model, and I agree. It's a wonderful model in the right context. So there are a lot of ways to look at it, but given where construction costs and financing are, we just have to think about it a little differently.
How much of what's possible is constrained by the way Manhattan and San Francisco and Austin dominate the dialog? Even when we get together with new urbanists who are working in places that would be recognizable to most Americans, the conversation always seems to flow in a river of thought that comes out of literally three superstar cities. This is a frustration I know you've had too. How is the debate being shaped in an unhelpful way by that?
That's like catnip for me, Chuck. You and I are Midwest people by nature, and we have a little bit of a chip on our shoulder about this conversation. We both hate the Yankees.
I've told you this story, but when my daughter Chloe was young, we used to have this saying in our house: we don't hate anybody — our family doesn't hate anybody — except for the Yankees. That was the one exception. Much to my pleasure, they haven't won a World Series in quite a while.
That's right. It really is a huge problem. So much of what you might call "urbanist media" gets filtered through the issues of a very small number of cities. All jokes aside, I love those cities — I love New York, I love San Francisco, I love Seattle. These are wonderful places and there's nothing generally wrong with that.
The problem is that we filter issues through them that then get applied to other cities all over the country — Tulsa, Omaha, Rochester, Minnesota — where they just don't apply. I think about this a lot. There are things that happen in New York that are really, really cool. One incredible phenomenon in recent years has been the High Line — an amazing public space in Manhattan. But then every city in the country, like Kansas City, wants to have a High Line. It's not going to work here. Let's build Manhattan first.
That phenomenon gets carried over into a hundred different issues — things that work in a certain context just aren't going to work anywhere else. There is no city in North America like New York City, so what happens there is not necessarily transferable to all the places I'm familiar with.
At the same time, between the Appalachians and the Rockies there are 100 million people. If that were its own country, it would be a very large country. These are real cities with real things to deal with, but they're going to be different. Kansas City, Minneapolis, Omaha, Tulsa, Oklahoma City — a lot of these cities that most people on the coast have never been to are actually more typical of American life than the coastal markets.
If you were to look at Kansas City and say, "The biggest housing problem we have today is blank" — would blank be a lack of housing, or something more nuanced than just "we need more units"?
The biggest issue we have relative to housing in my city is that we have a large chunk of our community that has been in decline for 50 years. Those neighborhoods are seeing houses torn down and properties with very little value. It's a large geography, so the infrastructure is hard to maintain — and these are not remote neighborhoods. These are core neighborhoods, and the same dynamic has spread to the inner suburbs.
That is, by far and away, the biggest housing problem we have. There's no question we've also made it too hard to build housing in some ways, and we need to address that. But if anybody were to come to Kansas City from New York or San Francisco, they would think it's a joke how easy it is to build compared to those places. You can still build stuff here. The bigger trajectory is these declining places — how to stop that decline and improve them, because they're actually well located and the architecture that remains is high quality for the most part. This is something we've struggled with for decades.
I've long argued to the boosters of big cities, who are obsessed about their problems, that a lot of pressure would come off them if Kansas City were a nicer place, and Cincinnati, and Memphis, and Buffalo, and Omaha, and Oklahoma City, and Minneapolis. What would be the message you'd give to the vocal advocates emanating from those other places about second-tier America — from their perspective?
When I graduated from college in 1994, most of my peers wanted to go to three or four really sexy cities. In that period, those were Chicago, Seattle, New York, San Francisco. The truth is, a lot of my class gravitated to the Kansas City area, but they weren't necessarily excited about it. They weren't going to live downtown. That has changed over time — our downtown has improved, our central city is much more livable and enjoyable.
But really, the thought process is that if those cities had enough attraction to keep people in those markets, that would be a relief valve on the coastal markets. I wrote something about this years ago after a trip with my wife to Bangor, Maine — where she's from, just outside Bangor. We were hanging out in the downtown, and Bangor doesn't lack for charming bones. It's a really beautiful little place. You can't help but be there and think: if this place were more successful, there would be a whole lot less economic and housing pressure in some of the cultural markets.
Young people in particular want to go to places that have a vibe, that are exciting, where other young people are and there's economic activity. If more places had what attracts young people, it would help across the board.
I've watched our mutual friend Steve Mouzon get beat up kind of mercilessly for saying what I think is obvious: aesthetics matter. If the idea is we just need to build a lot of housing urgently, building it so it looks like East German cell blocks is not as helpful as taking whatever extra time it would take to make it aesthetic. Why should we care about beauty when there are so many other important things to think about?
This is kind of at the heart of my one really substantial beef with the YIMBY movement, which I've talked about a bit before. At a Strong Towns gathering — I think it was in Charlotte — I got thrown into a debate about YIMBYs with Sonia Hirt from UMB. We started off thinking, "Well, what are we going to have to debate? We pretty much agree on things." Then the more we got into it, we did have things to debate. A lot of it revolved around this issue: her and a lot of the more hardcore YIMBY folks in the room were like, "Bring on the ugly buildings — we don't care, we just need housing, period."
My response is: we've seen this movie before. We had a period of explosive housing development following World War Two all the way through the early 1970s — not just suburban expansion, but also urban renewal, where we aggressively built a lot of housing. How's that worked out? A lot of that urban renewal has already been torn down. It didn't even last a generation or two.
Beauty is innate to something we crave as part of our human nature. We all admire beauty — in people, in natural spaces, in buildings, in the built environment. When we don't exist in a beautiful place, we don't value it. When we don't value it, chances are we're not going to invest in it or stick around. There are a lot of ways to accomplish a beautiful environment. But beauty is inherent to our nature as humans. It's something we need and crave.
That's just the warning I would give to folks who are really adamant about the "any housing at all cost" approach: you may accomplish a short-term objective, but it's not going to last.
If we're going to do "any housing at all cost" without worrying about aesthetics, we need to lower the standards a lot — because why put a bunch of energy into building something that's going to get torn down in a generation? We know how this story ends.
I actually had that discussion with folks about big box design standards. Years ago in the neighboring suburb of Brainerd, you had to do decorative rock on the outside of your big box store in your strip mall. I'm like — if that turns your crank, but you've just made a building that's $50 a square foot into one that's $50.05 a square foot. It still doesn't have any real value.
Right. To Steve's point — and Steve talks a lot about lovability — the real question is: are we building things that are lovable? Because those are the places that will endure, that people want to stay in and continue to invest in over time.
You and I met, I think, at CNU. I know we've gotten to know each other through CNU. I've been on a couple of podcasts recently where they asked me about CNU, and I have a strange and evolving relationship with it. Our two organizations have tried to work together on gatherings annually, and that's become less and less successful as time goes on. I know you have some ongoing critique. It feels like the Congress for the New Urbanism is not quite at an inflection point, but there certainly is a generational transition going on, and what I've lamented is a need for renewed purpose and focus.
As kind of a last question — and if listeners are still with us, they're being very gracious and generous with us talking inside shop — I want to give you a chance to diagnose and prescribe an approach for where you think CNU is now and where it needs to be to fulfill its highest and best purpose.
Well, it's interesting. First off, CNU, for me personally, has meant an enormous amount. The people I've met along the way, that I've learned from and worked with — it's been central to my career trajectory. In the time period I was most active, I had the time of my life participating in CNU and going to the congresses.
It has absolutely changed. The interesting thing is, I'm not sure it was meant to last forever. Andrés and the others patterned CNU after CIAM from the modern movement, which lasted about 30 years before it died or transitioned into a different organization called Team 10. So with Andrés, you never really know: did he mean for it to last, or did he mean for it to burn out?
What always interested me most — and what I loved about CNU — were two things. One was the robust debate about everything. If you wanted groupthink, it was not the place to go. People were happy to argue with each other and still be friends. That was a wonderful thing. The second was that people were eminently practical, really trying to figure out how to get things done. We measure old cities. We didn't come up with a seven-foot-wide parking stall because we read it in a book; we measured it and drew it. I loved that practical aspect.
What's been lost is both of those things. First, there's just a ton of groupthink within CNU that has evolved over the last decade. It's become like a lot of other professional organizations where there's a certain orthodoxy you have to adhere to. Second, it's gotten more focused on cultural and societal issues — which we all care about and which are important — but they're not necessarily relevant to how we build a good street or a beautiful neighborhood. Where can we really make a difference as practitioners? CNU was built on practitioners. It wasn't built on theorists. It was created by actual practitioners doing work.
So I think if there's going to be a future for CNU, I would love to see it really get back to a ruthless focus on the actual implementation of building great communities — and not just allowing but encouraging that back-and-forth discussion where we don't always have to agree on things. And that's fine. That's good.
I don't think I could say it any better than that. Kevin Klinkenberg, the podcast is the Messy City Podcast. I know you have a Substack to that regard. What's the best place for people to find you and follow the podcast?
The podcast is available on all the usual platforms. The Substack is a great place to subscribe. I don't write very much anymore — I have great intentions and a hopelessly long list of things I'd like to write about — but when I do, it will be on the Substack and probably nowhere else.
The Messy City Podcast. Thanks, Kevin — so nice to chat with you. Maybe I'll see you in Northwest Arkansas, or I'm sure I'll see you in Kansas City at some point soon.
Terrific. I hope so.
Thanks everybody for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care, everybody.
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