Show Notes:
Edited Transcript
Seth Zeren: Hello and welcome to The New School for City Builders. I’m your host, Seth Zeren, a recovering city planner turned neighborhood developer in Providence, Rhode Island. This is a podcast about how we transform the education of city builders. If we want to change how our cities and towns work, we need to change the people who run them. We need a new generation of city builders — architects, engineers, planners, developers, city managers, and civic leaders. We need a new school for city builders.
Joining me today is civil engineer Jacob Hyman, PE. I met Jacob at the Congress for the New Urbanism in 2024 in Cincinnati — one of those great, fortuitous lobby connections that conferences are best for. Jacob trained as a civil engineer before going to work for Paul Crabtree, one of the best civil engineers building places people love in the entire country. In our conversation today, Jacob and I explore his background, his path through civil engineering education, his connection to New Urbanism and Strong Towns, and his insights about the importance of human formation in education.
Jacob, welcome to The New School for City Builders.
Jacob Hyman: Thank you, Seth. Very glad to be here.
Seth Zeren: It was great meeting you in that hotel lobby — that’s the best part of going to conferences, those fortuitous connections. You never quite know what you’re going to find, and it’s a lot of fun.
Jacob Hyman: That’s great. I remember our hallway conversation well, and I remember you talking about education back in ‘24. I thought, I want to chat with this guy — this is critical, being able to talk about the education question. So I’m really glad you reached out a couple of weeks ago about doing this podcast. You’ve kept the spark alive and kept fanning the flame of this important discussion.
Seth Zeren: Thanks, Jacob. We’re going to keep this fire growing and get some good stuff going. So — how did you become a civil engineer? What led you down this path?
Jacob Hyman: Sure. I’ll keep my answer focused on the civil engineering side for now, though as I’ve reflected on my own education, I’ve realized how incidentally I found my way into urban planning and urbanism.
I went to college from 2014 to 2019, at Florida State University — go Seminoles — and studied engineering at the joint FAMU–FSU College of Engineering. I went into civil engineering, and into engineering generally, because I was good at math, or so my dad told me. As a 17-year-old with a STEM inclination, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but my father encouraged me toward engineering.
I started at Florida State in 2014 in the general engineering track, taking math and physics, and didn’t declare civil engineering until my sophomore year. By the end of my first semester I already knew I wanted to do civil — which, as it happens, gets you closer to the urban planning side of things. From there I did a fairly typical civil engineering curriculum: concrete and steel, hydraulics and hydrology, soils, construction management, engineering ethics.
I graduated in 2019 with my ABET-accredited degree, which requires at least four years of professional experience before you can sit for your PE license. I got that experience through a master’s degree in engineering management while I was in the Air Force, through a year and a half working for a conventional engineering firm here in the Pittsburgh area, and then through the rest of my time working with Paul Crabtree. I got my license this past December — about six months ago now. That’s the big-picture journey.
Seth Zeren: Congratulations — passing the PE exams is a big accomplishment, a lot of work. What was the best part of your civil engineering education?
Jacob Hyman: Honestly, the engineering itself is fascinating, and I think I got a very good education in the fundamentals. There’s no “urbanist civil engineering” concentration — that doesn’t exist, unless you pursue some kind of independent, self-directed study. So I’m grateful for a rock-solid grounding in the fundamentals: understanding the concepts and equations behind the engineering, doing the math by hand rather than just running software.
It wasn’t heavy on the software side — all the CAD work I now do daily was learned on the job. But the fundamentals — the stuff running quietly in the background of every Excel spreadsheet, every Civil 3D design, every automated grading calculation — that’s what I got, and that’s what I’m most grateful for.
Seth Zeren: That’s great — not just “here’s how to use the application” without understanding what’s underneath.
Jacob Hyman: Right. I actually felt pretty inadequate going into my first engineering job, because I had very little CAD experience — I didn’t have many internships in college since my summers were taken up by Air Force ROTC. So my first job was largely learning the software for the first time. But I’d think back — oh, I learned the TR-55 method, I learned the Rational Method in school — and it was rewarding to see that knowledge translate into real-world work.
Seth Zeren: Looking back, what would you change about the program, knowing what you know now?
Jacob Hyman: That’s why we’re here on this podcast, isn’t it? My civil engineering program didn’t have tracks — no architectural engineering focus, no structural focus. It was one catch-all civil engineering degree. Some of my fellow alumni now do site engineering like me, others do dam engineering, bridge and structural engineering, and so on.
Seth Zeren: That’s a really interesting point. If you’re not in civil engineering, you don’t fully appreciate the breadth of what people with a civil engineering degree end up doing — from the steel in a skyscraper, to a dam or a runway, to site grading, to transportation and traffic engineering. In a lot of other contexts these would be entirely separate degrees, but here they’re all mashed into one.
Jacob Hyman: You’re right. When I was an undergrad — seven years ago now — I was drawn to structural engineering. I liked building with Legos and Minecraft, which is actually where my urban-planning interest began, and I’d also heard that structural engineers tend to be near the top of the pay scale in civil engineering. So I took every optional structural class I could. But seven years later, I’m doing site work exclusively.
Your PE license technically allows you to practice anything you’re competent in, but I’m not going to stamp a set of structural drawings — I don’t do that kind of work regularly, and I’m not going to take on that liability. So even though there was a point where I thought I’d go into structures, that’s just not how things turned out. And I’m glad — I’m doing the New Urbanist work now, which for civil engineers is mostly site-related. Even in developments where we admire the structural or masonry work — say, missing-middle housing — when people think about the engineering behind a New Urbanist development, they’re usually thinking about the streets, the roads, and the stormwater. That’s the site work we principally think about.
Seth Zeren: Let’s dig into that. What is it that you and Paul Crabtree’s firm do differently from typical civil engineering practice?
Jacob Hyman: I joined the Crabtree team in September of ‘23 — so this September will be three years. When I first joined, I told my engineering friends doing more conventional site work, “How is this New Urbanist work different from what you’re doing?” I thought that was a great question, and I’m still figuring out the answer, though almost three years in I have a better sense of it now.
Water flows at the same rate through a 48-inch concrete pipe at a 2% slope with a Manning’s n of 0.015, whether that pipe sits under a suburban McMansion subdivision or under a walkable, historic town like Seaside or New Urbanist community we’re trying to build today. The physics — the actual engineering — is the same. What’s different is that you’re building an actual place. The form of the street in a well-designed neighborhood is fundamentally different from the form of a suburban stroad, and that distinction is never made in engineering education.
Nothing in my required coursework touched on it — I only encountered urban planning because I chose those electives voluntarily to fill a humanities requirement. That’s what opened my eyes to the fact that we need to think about the places we’re making. What’s unique about New Urbanist engineering, philosophically, is that the places we build are meant to serve a person, not just a financial transaction. The calculations don’t change, but what we build does.
And the work pulls you beyond pure engineering into zoning and fire code — you start being asked to have opinions on those things, which engineering school never asks of you. Normally the only “opinion” you have is whatever code book the municipality has adopted. You don’t develop a critical eye for how those codes implicitly dictate street widths or the single-use nature of stormwater facilities. New Urbanist engineers have to cultivate that eye on their own, because it isn’t taught. So the difference isn’t really the engineering — it’s a broader understanding of how what you’re doing affects the end user, who is, after all, a person.
Seth Zeren: That’s really interesting — your point about getting beyond the book. My father is a mechanical engineer, and growing up around his work, then later encountering civil engineering myself, I felt a real contrast. The engineering I knew growing up was about technical problem-solving, building systems and machines — entrepreneurial, pushing the frontier of what we knew how to do. Civil engineering, by contrast, often felt like: here’s a table, I consult the table, and that tells me the width of the street. But we’re not just consulting a table — we have a real place in the world with complex inputs and outputs: rainwater flow, but also how people will interact with the place, its ability to generate tax revenue, and so on. But a lot of the civil engineers I worked with just said, “this doesn’t meet my table, I don’t have the warrant in the book to do it.” And I’d think — what happened to your brain?
Jacob Hyman: Right. With mechanical engineering — building a fast car, say — you’re thinking through the physics of what’s actually happening and how to make it happen. Civil engineering does have that same technical rigor in places — setting the orifices in a stormwater basin at just the right elevation so post-development flow matches pre-development flow, for instance. But it’s driven far more by what the municipal code says. In a lot of places we work, we don’t even get to do full modeling, because the code just specifies a minimum basin size for a given amount of disturbed land — even when our own modeling shows a smaller basin would work.
Civil engineers can lose the ability to really engineer within an overly regimented code structure, because it takes less brainpower — or a different kind. Reading and interpreting code requires its own skill, but it’s different from actually making good judgment calls about street widths and stormwater design.
Seth Zeren: So how did you end up taking urban planning electives alongside your engineering coursework?
Jacob Hyman: I think I fell into it. I was a Lego kid from about age five — my mother bought me sets meant for kids three or four years older, which probably had pieces I could have choked on, but she got them for me anyway, and I took to it immediately. That continued through my childhood, and then I got very into Minecraft. In high school — and I’ll admit I probably spent more time on this than I should have, looking back — I spent hours on a Minecraft server with strangers online, building a city. The server had plugins that let you claim and protect land, and you could actually become a “mayor” based on how many people lived in your city.
I built streets, sold plots of land, built a town hall, an arena, murals made of dyed wool — over fifty residences at one point, the largest city on the server. It was a real point of pride in high school. So I had cities on my mind heading into college, and one of the electives I gravitated toward, almost instinctively, was a freshman course called World Cities, through Florida State’s Urban Planning Department. I thought, I like cities, I’ve been building one in Minecraft for three years, let me learn about real ones.
I credit that course as a pivotal moment. I knew almost nothing about engineering going in, but I came to understand that civil engineers are the ones who build cities, and something clicked — spiritually, almost — about the good that a city represents. I decided: I want to build cities, I’ll do that through engineering, I’ll be a civil engineer. That was the first semester of freshman year.
That course was also the first class in Florida State’s four-class urban planning minor — there was no undergraduate major in urban planning there at the time. I took the second class the following summer, and it was while doing homework for that class, back in 2015, that I started researching questions online, read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and came across a website called Strong Towns. I never finished the minor — I got too busy with the civil engineering degree and my ROTC commission — but those were the seeds that blossomed six or seven years later.
Seth Zeren: You mentioned that firms like Paul Crabtree’s, doing New Urbanist civil engineering, have to do a lot of additional coaching and mentorship for people coming out of a typical civil engineering program. So what would need to change in undergraduate civil engineering education to make people more ready for this kind of work? Maybe it’s as simple as everyone needing an urban planning minor — though I doubt they’d all want that.
Jacob Hyman: Even within how civil engineering is practiced today, I could see several different specialties each needing their own version of a New Urbanist education. Civil site engineers like me design local roads and local stormwater infrastructure, but we’re not designing highways — that’s the transportation engineers’ domain, though we sometimes indirectly influence where highways go. Then you have regional-scale civil work — bridge engineering, dam engineering — which also intersects with land use planning.
There’s no formal education for any of these New Urbanist-oriented roles right now. I’d leave structural and geotechnical engineering a bit more to the side — geotech in particular is probably the specialty least connected to New Urbanism, no offense to geotechs. It’s a thankless task in some ways — I need to know what soil is under my road base, but it’s hard to leave your own mark there.
But broadly: right now, civil engineering students share a common core curriculum and then choose whichever humanities electives suit their taste — I did mostly music, since I like it personally, even though I don’t use it professionally. What if we flipped that? Instead of “choose your own adventure” humanities on top of a broad shared engineering core, what if the humanities requirement had a consistent urban-planning orientation, and the engineering side let students specialize earlier and more deeply?
Seth Zeren: So once you became a transportation engineer, say, you’d be less likely to shift into site civil work — whereas right now, right out of undergrad, you could in principle go in almost any direction. But then, as you said, people specialize anyway once they start practicing, because most firms are specialized.
Jacob Hyman: Right — I’m actually a good example, since I had no internships in undergrad, my summers were all Air Force ROTC, and I went straight into the Air Force after graduating. There’s a window right after undergrad when you’re green enough that you could plausibly go into any civil engineering track. But once you’re in a role for four years, moving up from staff consultant into project management and eventually your PE, you’re unlikely to switch — partly because of the specialized expertise you’ve built, and partly because switching, say from transportation to structures, would mean starting over and probably taking a significant pay cut.
There’s maybe something valuable about having that early freedom to explore, but I don’t know many people who make a dramatic specialty switch after a couple years in practice — especially if you did internships in different areas during undergrad, since by graduation a firm has probably already offered you a role based on what you’re good at and enjoy.
So the question becomes: how do we build more focused engineering tracks within the undergraduate degree, paired with a broader, more unified humanities and urban-planning education that actually teaches you what kind of world you’re building?
Seth Zeren: Right — what’s the point of the road? You’ll be the best person at designing that road, but it connects to and interfaces with the rest of the city.
I want to ask about something else I’ve noticed in this education conversation — in the architecture world, at least, it seems like religiously affiliated schools are the ones doing the most interesting, heterodox work: Notre Dame especially, but also Benedictine College, Andrews University. And I know you’ve had some experience with the new College of St. Joseph the Worker. Why do you think religiously affiliated institutions seem more willing to engage with city-building questions differently than most mainstream institutions?
Jacob Hyman: Great question — we’d need many more episodes to really dig into it. For listeners who don’t know me: I’m a Roman Catholic. I actually converted during undergrad, and it’s a bit of a journey — I was raised Jewish, spent time as an atheist, briefly as a Protestant, and I’ve been Catholic for about ten years now. I live in Steubenville, Ohio, about 45–50 minutes west of Pittsburgh.
You mentioned the College of St. Joseph the Worker — a small, fairly new liberal-arts trade school just wrapping up its second full school year. Students study the Catholic philosophical and liberal-arts tradition alongside training in one of four trades — HVAC, electrical, plumbing, or carpentry — graduating with enough hands-on experience to be readily hireable, and with paid summer work so they finish without student debt.
It’s interesting — some people in that college are quite drawn to New Urbanism, even working alongside plumbers, electricians, and HVAC techs. They’re reading Christopher Alexander and Léon Krier — literally, plumbers and HVAC techs reading Léon Krier — tied specifically to that Catholic ethos.
I can speak most directly to the Catholic tradition here. There’s a strong current of Catholic social teaching going back to 1891 and Pope Leo XIII — whose name our current pope, Leo XIV, took — that has wrestled with what industrial modernity means for the human person: what is the actual, lived reality of the places we’ve built, and does that correspond to the understanding of a person made in the image and likeness of God? In many ways the Church has argued that our places and social systems often don’t correspond to the human person.
Seth Zeren: I had a question in my notes: is there a Catholic way to design a street? The physics of water is the same in Rome as it is anywhere else.
Jacob Hyman: I think there is — and there’s also a beautiful multiplicity within it. There’s no single Catholic way to design a street, just as Christopher Alexander recognized many beautiful patterns for designing everything from a region down to a bedroom. But these are real patterns.
The Catholic philosophical tradition draws heavily on Thomas Aquinas’s reading of Aristotle — the idea that things have a nature, a form, an end. Not everyone agrees with that framework, but it’s why someone like Chuck Marohn identifying the real, distinct nature of a “stroad” is such a useful insight: it names something as having a genuine nature and purpose, distinct from a street or a road, even without using that philosophical language explicitly. Modernity has tended to flatten all of that — form and nature don’t matter, only whether something is efficient or usable. That flattening traces back to Enlightenment philosophical foundations.
Seth Zeren: We’ve talked a lot about the idea of “human formation” — a term I mostly hear in Catholic classical education circles. What does that mean, and why does it matter?
Jacob Hyman: It’s the idea that becoming a full human being is itself something you have to be formed into — you don’t simply arrive as a fully formed person. That’s not a uniquely Catholic idea; many traditions and cultures have their own account of human flourishing and what human excellence looks like. Catholic human formation in particular draws on both natural and supernatural formation, and on the idea that a person has a particular end — that we’re more than just our desires.
If all you care about is getting sushi delivered to your door — and I’m not immune to that desire myself — as a private individual in your own socially contracted little bubble, then you don’t have much reason to care what the world outside you looks like.
Seth Zeren: The way I’d put it: if we imagine an engineering school with more of a liberal-arts foundation — human formation is often tied to the liberal arts because studying philosophy, history, literature, theology, music, architecture, math, and science gives you a broader sense of what it means to be human, how humans have shaped the world, and how we understand each other and our society. Going through that kind of formation gives you a range of perspective on yourself, on other people, and on the society you’re part of — so that when you apply your technical skill, whether you’re building bridges or designing streets, it’s connected to a broader sense of human purpose, rather than just being an automaton building the biggest bridge you can and ignoring the consequences.
Jacob Hyman: Exactly. One thought that comes to me for the city builder is this: once you build the world, you have to live in it — and as you live in the world, you have to build it. Part of this is just economic reality — I’m a minority within a minority. New Urbanists are still a minority in the development world, and civil engineers are a minority within New Urbanism. There was a day recently where, across an eight-hour workday, I was working on projects in five different states.
Especially with New Urbanist work, we’re often trying to shape the surrounding culture — pushing back on codes, arguing for changes rather than simply developing to what the book already allows. For larger master-planned developments, there can be years of design work before anything actually gets built, so you may not see the fruits of your labor for years, which is frustrating.
Seth Zeren: I feel this too, as a developer — the same long arc. I have an idea, work through countless steps, maybe with a civil engineer, and hopefully in five years I get to walk in and welcome someone to their new apartment, or open the restaurant. It’s slow. But part of how we think about our own work is that you’re both building and living in it — you have to craft and create, but you also have to steward. The city was here long before I was — I’m sitting in a building older than I am, which will likely outlast me — so I have a temporary stewardship over this place, this building, this street, and I hope to pass it on better than I found it. That cycle of stewardship, craft, and creation is central to this idea. It’s not like getting your DoorDash order and being done — “I built the bridge, I’m finished, I don’t have to think about what happens next.”
Jacob Hyman: Right. Maybe that is the Catholic way of designing a street — Catholicism has been around for over two thousand years, so it has a long time horizon built in.
Seth Zeren: You’ve lived in Steubenville for a few years now and have been a leader in the local Strong Towns conversation there. What has being part of Strong Towns meant to you, and what has leading a local conversation taught you?
Jacob Hyman: For context — I’m not originally from Steubenville, I’m from Florida, but I’ve lived there for just over five years now. About two and a half years ago I went to my first Congress for the New Urbanism and my first Strong Towns National Gathering — we were both among the inaugural Pecha Kucha speakers at that kickoff event, actually.
It was there I first heard about Strong Towns “local conversations.” I’d wanted to do something more locally focused with these urbanist ideas, to help this small post-industrial Rust Belt town of about 18,000 people, and Strong Towns was exactly the model I was looking for. Over the past two and a half years we’ve done a lot of good work — I was part of a Bottom-Up Revolution podcast episode about a year and a half ago covering what we’ve built here, which I’d point listeners toward if they want more detail on Strong Towns Steubenville.
Broadly, I describe it this way: New Urbanists are the design professionals, and Strong Towns is more the lay citizen-activist side. It’s a good example of that same idea of building and living in the world — many passionate people involved in a local conversation couldn’t make a living doing urbanism if they tried. We’re fortunate to get paid to do this and go on podcasts about it. But being involved in Strong Towns gets at a deeper question: what does it mean to actually live in a city — to care about and engage with the place you live not because you’re paid to, but as a way of being?
It’s also meant getting to know others in town who don’t have professional expertise in this but are just trying to live well in the place, the same as anyone. As a design professional, you have a particular role to play in helping pull back the curtain on why places are the way they are, and in helping build a culture where people understand how their town got the way it did through decades of suburban-style development — and how they might build something different.
Practically, I now know my city councilors, and they know me. I know the city engineer, and he knows me by name. Steubenville is small enough that I run into these people at the grocery store, and I get to shake hands with city councilors and their kids and grandkids at the First Friday street festival where we table for Strong Towns.
I wonder if this is part of the education question too — but I think committing to the place you live, even if it means making less money than you could elsewhere, matters. Building the place you live might mean living there a long time before you actually get to build anything. It’s only now, five years into living in Steubenville, that I’m getting my first small contracts to do real engineering work here — to help make downtown more pedestrian-friendly. It took five years of living here, without earning a dime from local engineering work, before I could really come to know this place well enough to start building it. I had to live in it first before I could help build it.
Seth Zeren: That’s beautiful. I usually ask what’s giving people hope for the future of city building — but honestly, you’re giving me hope. I think one of the strange things about modernity is that we’ve professionalized city building — put it behind licensure and accreditation in rarefied institutions — so that most people simply consume a city or town built for them by a small group of city builders. That’s actually quite unusual in human history. There have always been expert builders, but there used to be a continuous spectrum of involvement — everyone participated in city building to some degree. And along with consuming the physical place, we’ve also started consuming its culture and community: we expect someone else to put on the festival, someone else to take care of the park. It takes a real cultural shift to realize that the “someone else” is you — that you have to do it, and no one is coming to save you.
Jacob Hyman: Yes.
Seth Zeren: And that, to me, is a big part of what Strong Towns has done — made that case constructively, in a way that brings people in to make that change.
Jacob Hyman: I agree. What gives me hope is that I’m trying to do it, and I see others doing it — young people especially. I’m 30, still young myself. If you realize that no one’s coming to save you, that you’re the one who has to fix your place — and if you don’t feel any real connection to where you live, then go find a place you can care about and start building there. If New Urbanists — the people who get paid to do this work — commit to living in a real community, a place with real life in it, that will help you see not just how to build the places people live in, but how to live in the places you help build.
Seth Zeren: That’s fantastic. Thank you again, Jacob, for coming on the podcast.
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