This week on The New School for City Builders, I’m joined by my good friend Nathan Norris to talk about our work together designing a new degree program for Lake Sumter State College in Florida. I hope you enjoy it!
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 can 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 my good friend Nathan Norris. In 2003, he co-founded the urban design firm Placemakers and continues to advise new town builders through the City Building Partnership. He is the past CEO of the Downtown Development Authority of Lafayette, Louisiana, and today serves as the Economic Development Director for the City of Claremont, Florida. He’s a Fellow of the Congress for the New Urbanism and a co-founder of the Urban Guild. Nathan, welcome to the New School for City Builders.
Nathan Norris: Thanks so much, Seth. Great to be here.
Seth Zeren: Great to have you. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. Nathan, I want to start in a funny place — you were a JAG officer. How did you become a city builder?
Nathan Norris: Because I was a JAG officer, actually. The story’s a fairly short one. I was on active duty in the Army, then got out and practiced law as a litigator — and I was having a great time. After a couple of years, I figured I could go back into the military part-time, so I joined the Air National Guard. I knew I wouldn’t be sent to some swamp in Louisiana for annual training; I’d probably just be sent to Europe. And sure enough, my first two-week assignment was in England.
When I arrived, they said, “Sorry, we can’t use you — we’re physically moving our office this week, and next week we get a new boss. Just enjoy yourself.” So I nerded out, walked across the parking lot to the library, and started researching how to build a city, town, or village.
The reason was that my father had suggested I invest in a company claiming they were going to build new towns. Having grown up around Washington, D.C., I was familiar with Reston, Virginia, and Columbia, Maryland. But everything I read was saying those were old news — the new thing was called New Urbanism, or traditional town planning. They talked about these traditional neighborhood developments I’d never heard of, and I became completely fascinated. I could not stop reading.
I had lived in military housing that reflected every decade since the 1890s, and when I started reading about planning, I thought: this conforms with my experiences. I just didn’t know what was going on behind the scenes.
I went to high school for a while in Omaha, Nebraska, and my best friend was stationed in Paris at the time, so I got a three-day pass to visit. I was blown away. But what I had just learned before going was that it was illegal to build Paris in the United States. That sent my brain into a strange place, because I was in the military thinking I was defending freedoms we had more than anywhere else on earth — and here I was finding out we can’t build these places.
As an attorney, I asked a basic question: if we’ve been the richest country the world has ever seen since World War II, what great city, town, or village had we actually built in that time? And that’s when I knew I had to get on this. That’s what I needed to do with my life.
I dove in with intense focus — following everything I could read, visiting every place I could. About seven months in, my wife said, “Nathan, you’re getting a job in this business within three months, or you need to take it down a notch.” Fortunately, about six weeks after that ultimatum, I was offered the opportunity to go work on a traditional neighborhood development. That’s how I got involved.
Seth Zeren: That’s great. So when you show up at this traditional neighborhood development for the first time, you’re an attorney — but you’re working alongside architects, engineers, planners, and developers. I think one of the important things in this conversation is to define our terms. How would you define what a city builder is?
Nathan Norris: A city builder is someone involved in building a city in some capacity — but you can’t do it well if you don’t understand how to design, develop, and maintain a city, town, or village. Cities, towns, and villages are all made up of neighborhoods, so it’s really just a question of what character a neighborhood has.
The core problem is that nobody involved in typical development in the United States understands how everything fits together. We’ve created a system where everyone is a specialist. A city builder, by contrast, is a generalist — someone who knows a little about every piece of the equation.
Those pieces include design (architects, landscape architects, engineers all design things, whether they think of it that way or not), development, utilities, construction, finance, sales, maintenance, and government approval. If you don’t have people at every step who understand the bigger picture, they’ll be making mistakes they don’t even know they’re making — because they never received an education in how you build a city, town, or village.
Seth Zeren: That corresponds with my experience. I’m a better developer for having worked as a planner and spent time with designers and architects. I still hire an architect for my projects, but I have insights that help shape that work. I know how to push back with an engineer — though it’s hard to win those fights.
I sometimes use the analogy of saving the world as a team sport. On a football or soccer team, people play different roles — some specialized, some generalist — but the team works when everyone understands the goal and what the other positions are doing. When people don’t share a common goal and don’t understand each other’s roles, they’re constantly in conflict even as they try to move the ball down the field. Does that make sense?
Nathan Norris: Yes — it’s very much a team sport. So many people have their hands in the process that one pair of hands can mess it up for everyone else.
When I first became an urbanist, the biggest impediment most people saw was that zoning codes wouldn’t allow you to build anything urban. You could only build suburban or rural. We’ve largely overcome that hurdle in most places, but now even when the zoning allows it, you run into staff who don’t understand how infrastructure relates to what’s being built or redeveloped. So it’s another battle you have to fight — because someone simply doesn’t know.
We’ve seen codes get the rules right, then languish or even get repealed — because they didn’t have developers or administrators experienced in urban development to implement them well.
That’s what gave me such motivation early on. My very first job in this field was Director of Marketing and Sales. The most rewarding experience was an hour when the developer brought his entire team out to a street to decide: do we keep this as one street, or split it into two?
He asked everyone for their perspective — me worrying about sales, the architect about how it affected buildings, the landscape architect about the landscape, the accountant about the money, the development director about the spreadsheet, the engineer about safety and liability, and the developer holding the long-term vision. Everyone had a completely different angle. And at the end, the right decision was made because he wanted all those perspectives.
Now imagine if you had all those perspectives in a single person — how powerful that would be. That’s ultimately where we need to get: people who are sensitive to what everyone else is thinking, so they can do their own job better as a result.
Seth Zeren: When you understand the ecosystem of other professions and share a common goal with the people around you, you can really make a great place. Your example of going to Paris as a young person — being blown away, then learning it was essentially illegal to build that in the United States — really drives home how we convinced ourselves we couldn’t do it. Our professionals taught themselves: we don’t know how, it’s not safe. All in opposition to what we see in the world around us.
Nathan Norris: It was crazy.
Seth Zeren: So if you were advising a young person who wants to become a great city builder, what are the key things they need to learn?
Nathan Norris: You need to understand the different steps involved in going from a blank piece of land — or a place you’re going to redevelop — to a finished city, town, or village.
The piece that’s weakest right now, the one that needs the most widespread adoption in any curriculum, is design. It’s actually been difficult to figure out how to teach design comprehensively.
I never thought growing up that a street was anything more than a road. I didn’t think: this is public property, like a city park, and we get to decide what happens in this right-of-way. We could turn it into a park if we wanted — it’s community property.
Understanding how you design a street is genuinely complex. How wide is the travel lane? What do you do with parking? With transit? With cyclists? With pedestrians? Every time you adjust one element, it affects something else. Transportation designers often aren’t taught how to build a city in school, so they don’t know that a small tweak to a road can undermine how the whole community functions.
Take a historic main street — if you run a high-speed arterial through it, you’ve killed it. A main street is where people walk to shop. If cars are moving fast enough to kill you, it doesn’t work.
So: first, understand design.
Second, you need to understand development — which is a broad term covering finance (how do you pay to be in the game?), construction (you can’t propose ridiculous things to build), and markets (how do you sell?).
Third, you need to understand government. Like it or not, in the United States, real estate development is a political act. It’s controlled by laws. A city council or equivalent body makes decisions about your project. Whether you like it or not, the government is your partner. You have to get permissions to develop, and if you don’t understand how government works or how the people running it think, you’re going to struggle.
Fourth, I’d argue you need to be a good observer of how people act, behave, and live. You have to understand humans.
I didn’t understand how to design a downtown until someone explained that you only need to understand two key characteristics of humans. First: we can adapt better than any other species — that’s why we have so much control over our environment. Second: we bore easily.
I had never thought of it that way, but we bore easily. And when you think about successful urban environments like downtowns, one of their great advantages is that if they’re set up well, they maximize your potential interactions with other humans — the one thing that never bores us. Blank walls make a lousy downtown. Clear windows where you might see other people, see things to buy or do — that’s what makes a great downtown.
So understanding human behavior isn’t just a soft addition to this education. It’s foundational to knowing what to build and how to build it.
Seth Zeren: There’s almost a psychology and behavioral economics to living in cities. And you won’t find a psychology class in an engineering degree or an economics class in architecture school, so those perspectives on how people think, choose, and interact are being lost.
Nathan Norris: Shakespeare said, “What is the city but its people?” I always compare designing cities to performing open heart surgery. It takes years to learn to do that. I’ll argue every day that designing cities is more complex than open heart surgery — because of the number of people involved and the intersecting engineering, financial, and social forces at play.
And you might look at a charming downtown and think, “That looks easy to replicate.” But how many great examples do we actually have of people building a downtown from scratch these days, compared to a hundred years ago? They were doing it then with far fewer resources.
Seth Zeren: Every little town had a great downtown a hundred years ago. Today accomplishing that feels remarkable.
And I’d add: cities require constant care. It’s not like finishing surgery and watching someone recover. Buildings fall apart, businesses move, streets need repair, needs change, markets evolve — there’s always more work to be done. You have to think long-term, because short-term decisions have long-term consequences.
Nathan Norris: The easiest example in our lifetimes is retail — how radically it’s changed. If you go back to 1957, the new tax laws and road-building patterns opened up strip shopping centers. Then every decade or so, something shifts. Now I watch TV shows that glamorize 1980s malls. I remember when those malls were brand new and exciting. Our society changed, our technology changed, and our cities have to change too.
The challenge over the last thirty to forty years is that we’ve frozen development in amber, codifying rules that prevent natural evolution. That’s what our generation and future generations will pay the price for — legal agreements and physical layouts that prevent us from doing what actually makes sense today.
Seth Zeren: So if you were talking to a young person today who wanted to become a city builder, what advice would you give them about making the most of their education?
Nathan Norris: It depends on the person, because different people learn differently and have different abilities.
I recently advised someone who had just gotten into a phenomenal master’s degree program, and I told him I thought it was a mistake. He was taken aback, and I explained: when you’re in your 20s, most people aren’t being paid so well that they can’t afford to do something else. That’s your opportunity to learn.
My general advice is: if you already have a clear idea of where you want to end up, go work for the people you respect the most — even if they pay you nothing. That’s far better than paying a school tens of thousands of dollars for a degree.
That said, if you’re someone who doesn’t have access to that kind of opportunity, you need a foundation first. And unfortunately, there aren’t many places — if any — that teach the generalist knowledge we’ve been describing: a little about everything, across design, development, finance, government, and human behavior.
My strong advice: get that generalist foundation first, then do a deep dive into a specialty if you want. And when you’re looking for who to work with, find people who are doing the best work and who genuinely enjoy teaching.
My most recent business partner is an architect I started out mentoring. I realized how talented he was and we started collaborating on projects, then became business partners. It’s been the most rewarding professional experience of my career — because he was teaching me as much as I was teaching him. We were having genuine breakthroughs together in understanding how to do things in the development world.
Seth Zeren: That’s interesting, because while formal education can be useful and give a good foundation, a lot of the real innovation and hard thinking happens in an apprenticeship or mentorship context — working inside firms with people who are both in practice and intellectually engaged. The interplay of practice and thinking can be incredibly effective.
So if you have a solid base, you can build from there — work in the field, figure things out, pursue further specialization if needed. Rather than hyper-specializing in undergrad, before you’ve built that generalist foundation.
Nathan Norris: The person I advised recently had two paths. One: he was talented enough to write a book filling a niche in the sociology-of-urbanism space that doesn’t yet exist. I offered to guide him on that. He came back shaken — I had thrown him off his original plan. Then a week later he called back excited: he’d been offered the opportunity to work for two years alongside someone at the top of the field, toward the end of their career.
I said: do it without hesitation. Because older professionals are often the most eager to share what they know — they’re thinking about their legacy, what they want to pass on, what they wish someone had told them when they were young. My generation had to figure most of this out on our own. There was no textbook anyone could hand us.
Seth Zeren: There still isn’t.
Nathan Norris: We’re working on that. Education has always been my passion. I always believed it should be easier to learn this material, apply it, and then teach it to others.
Seth Zeren: So Nathan, you and I are building a new degree program together. What are we doing? Why can’t existing schools achieve this vision?
Nathan Norris: We’re doing what can’t be done elsewhere — which is unfortunate.
I was brought into conversations about educating people in New Urbanism and traditional town planning about twenty years ago. I was the oddball in the room because everyone else was an academic. About ten years after those early conversations, I reached back out to those people and asked: why haven’t you been able to get your institution to truly change course?
They all said the same thing: “Nathan, I had no idea how difficult this would be. The inertia is so great that I couldn’t do it, and I don’t see how anyone can.” And these were people at top-tier universities.
There are a couple of places today — Notre Dame being the most well-known in our circles, with Stephanos Polyzoides and others who’ve built something remarkable there — but that’s rare.
The institutional obstacles are real. First: you can’t expect an institution to teach new content through faculty who don’t understand it. How is an existing professor supposed to enthusiastically learn and then teach a topic they never studied?
Second: turf battles between programs. If a real estate development master’s degree starts teaching design, the architecture school gets defensive — “that’s our territory.” The structure of universities, organized by specialty school, creates built-in interest groups that resist pulling disciplines together.
Third: accreditation. Everyone wants an accredited program that leads to a real degree. But the entire accreditation system is built on one premise: making specialists. The idea of a program that blends everything together breaks outside the entire trajectory of education over the last fifty to seventy years.
The only students at top universities who successfully get a generalist education are those allowed to design their own degree — and the faculty tolerates that because it’s just one student doing something interesting. If it became a whole program, there would be resistance.
Seth Zeren: A hundred years ago, at least in undergraduate education, you might study physics, sociology, philosophy, and Greek — depending on your interests and who was on the faculty. We’ve professionalized ourselves into these boxes.
So you believe we can’t fix it from within — too much inertia, too many entrenched interests.
Nathan Norris: Too much inertia, too many special interests. The good news is that the substance of what we’re talking about has become part of planning curricula in more places over the last thirty years. But most planning schools still aren’t teaching design the way they did before the 1950s. And without design, even a well-trained planner has limited power.
Seth Zeren: So walk us through how we got to where we are now and what we’re trying to accomplish.
Nathan Norris: Both of us have spent years trying to create educational institutions that could provide this kind of education.
In 2016, I started an initiative called the City Building Institute. The idea was to bypass the university system and go private, funded by people who understood the mission. I went down that path, it got sidetracked, and it never came to be. But the desire to create a place where we could teach people to be generalists never left me.
Then — about five years ago — Andrés Duany introduced us at Seaside. He came over and said, “Nathan, you need to meet this guy.” And there you were, sitting on the steps outside the Seaside Institute. We shook hands and started talking. That began our ongoing discussions.
Separately, I connected with someone actively involved in a state college here in Florida — and he happened to be on the board. He said that at the state college level, there’s far more flexibility than people think. The one constraint is demonstrating a nexus between what you’re teaching and local economic needs.
In our case, we’re in a region where real estate development is the number one economic engine. So the question was: what could help that engine run at a higher level? And the answer is people — people going into local government as planners, economic developers, city managers, and engineers; and people going into the private development sector.
Here in Florida, property rights mean you often can’t mandate what developers do. If developers don’t understand how to build well, and have no staff who do, they’ll default to what’s easiest. So we need to fill the ranks of both the public and private sides with people who understand this. And right now, there’s no school that will teach them what they need to know.
Seth Zeren: And the other piece is the incremental developer — the small-scale builder.
Nathan Norris: Yes. If you have this generalist understanding and you’re young, you have a wonderful opportunity to become what I call an incremental developer. If you understand a little about everything and you start small — one building a year, leasing it out — and you have thirty years ahead of you, what does your position look like at age 52?
If you go from 22 to 52 and build or acquire one property every two years, you have fifteen buildings — all generating revenue. Look at Dan Camp in Starkville, Mississippi, who slowly acquired buildings one at a time in the Cotton District near Mississippi State University. After thirty years, he owned an entire neighborhood. He made it so desirable that living there actually improved people’s social standing as students. And it’s also a great business. It works on every front.
Seth Zeren: So we’re creating a two-year associate’s degree. When you first approached me last fall, you and I sketched it out over a couple of hours on the phone. What are the main components of the curriculum?
Nathan Norris: First, I have to say — I had no idea we’d be able to figure out the big picture in about two hours. But both of us had been independently thinking about this for a decade or more, so we weren’t coming to the table empty-handed.
We figured out that it takes about 45 credit hours to produce a solid generalist understanding — not deep expertise in everything, but enough to understand how the big picture operates. Combined with general education requirements, that makes it a two-year, 60-credit-hour program, with 45 hours specialized for this curriculum.
We divided the content into four areas:
Design. You have to understand how the built environment is shaped.
Development. You need to understand how things actually get built — and that includes finance, because the form of what we build almost always follows what can be financed.
History. If you don’t understand how we got to where we are, it’s harder to fix it and harder to know what to avoid. There’s also a practical dimension: being able to look at a building and understand roughly when it was built, why it was built that way, and how forces like defense, water transport, railroads, and the automobile shaped cities over time. That helps you read the landscape in a way you simply can’t without that background.
Government, law, and codes. We also cover infrastructure, so you understand utilities and streets. And we weave in sociology — crime, public order, the social dynamics of neighborhoods.
But what’s distinct about this program isn’t just the content — it’s how it’s taught. A lot of the learning happens outside the classroom. You can give a PowerPoint on urban design, or you can walk outside and learn more in an hour on the street. This is not a virtual program. Students will be together in person, making observations in real places, because so much of what we’re teaching requires being there.
At the same time, everyone who comes into this program already has lived in a city, town, or village their whole life. They already know a lot about place — they just don’t know why it works or doesn’t. So when the aha moments hit, they’re powerful.
Seth Zeren: And the assignments are designed to be concrete and applied. When I teach real estate development, I come as a practitioner — I can tell stories from what happened that day or last week. Students are incredibly receptive to that. And it shapes the assignments: I’ll tell students to call a real estate broker and schedule an actual tour of a property on the market. Go do it.
Nathan Norris: That’s the other key element of this program: a heavy dose of visiting lecturers. Our networks across the country are strong, and we’ll bring in practitioners — remotely and in person — who are doing the real work. Students won’t just hear from a couple of people; they’ll hear from dozens of contributors across the two years. That combination — how pragmatic it is, and the breadth of voices — is what makes this genuinely different.
Seth Zeren: When do you think we’re going to have this thing up and running?
Nathan Norris: Potentially August. We expect formal program approval in about seventeen days, with no reason to think it won’t come through. Accreditation follows over the summer.
The unknown is enrollment. We want a cohort of twenty students. This is not a program you do on your computer at home — students need to be here in person. The cohort model matters: these people will build bonds and learn together that will serve them socially and professionally for the rest of their careers.
If you’re in your twenties and would have dropped what you were doing to be part of something like this — that’s who we’re looking for. And we already know local people who are eager to be part of it. We just need to find the right twenty people.
Seth Zeren: Is there a way for folks to find out more?
Nathan Norris: The easiest way right now is to reach out directly. You can email me at placemaker@gmail.com. A month from now we’ll have a website up with more details. But it is a big decision for anyone to make, and I’m happy to walk people through the specifics.
One thing we didn’t mention: because this is going through a state college, it’s incredibly affordable. Compared to most programs of this quality, there’s at least one missing zero in the price.
Seth Zeren: An incredible opportunity. Let’s do a few closing questions for fun. What’s one place you’d recommend people visit to learn more about building cities?
Nathan Norris: I can’t give you just one, because the honest answer changes constantly and depends on where you’re coming from. When I got involved in this field nearly thirty years ago, everyone said you had to go to Indianapolis. Then it was Chattanooga. Then Carmel, Indiana. Now it’s Northwest Arkansas. The right answer depends on your city, your stage, and the current moment. I’m not going to be pinned down on that one.
Seth Zeren: Excellent attorney answer. The lawyer is still in there. What about for me — I think about my own formative experience backpacking in Europe with a friend when we were young and broke. We were sitting in a street café in the Grand Place in Brussels, drinking beer and eating fries — as you do — looking at the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall. It looks symmetrical at first: a big tower, two wings, ornate detailing all over. But you sit there long enough, and you realize it’s not actually symmetrical. The windows are different on each side, the dormers are different. You start seeing layers of symmetry and asymmetry that reward attention.
You could spend hours looking at one building. It taught me a lot — before I knew anything about urbanism — about the value of design and craftsmanship, and about the balance of opposing forces. Symmetry is comforting, but pure symmetry becomes boring. The layering of order and surprise is what makes a place hold your interest. There’s a lot to be said for sitting in a place and really observing it closely. You get things out of that you can’t get any other way.
Nathan Norris: Absolutely. And what you’re describing about humans — we bore easily, but great design gives us layers to discover. That’s what Andrés Duany captures when he talks about maximizing the chance of encountering other humans or discovering something new. It’s not just aesthetics; it’s how humans actually work.
Seth Zeren: Last question: what’s one book you’d recommend?
Nathan Norris: The first thing I require of anyone I mentor isn’t actually a book — it’s a resource. I have them go read the DPZ Lexicon, which you can find free online by searching “DPZ Lexicon.” It’s essentially the vocabulary of place — about 75 pages, dense, and not easy to get through. If you can’t get through it, you may not have the drive for this work.
Beyond that, the book I return to most is The Architecture of Community by Léon Krier. It has so much in it that you won’t absorb it all on the first read. Every time you come back to it, you get something you missed before. That’s the best kind of book to learn from.
If you have a shorter attention span, I’d recommend the book about Seaside put together by Dhiru Thadani. It’s enormous — six or eight hundred pages — but it’s composed of short two-page articles. You can read one or two a day and gradually build up your understanding of all the different elements that go into making a great place. Visitors to Seaside feel that it’s special but often don’t know why. A book like this reveals how much love and thought went into every decision — and that’s the reason it feels special.
Seth Zeren: Great. Nathan, thank you so much. I look forward to talking again soon. We’re working on this curriculum right now, and it’s going to be great.
Nathan Norris: School starts in August, my friend. School starts in August.
Seth Zeren: If you’re interested in learning more about what Nathan and I are building, reach out to us. I’ll include contact information in the show notes. Thanks very much for listening.
