Rotival had a small canvas but an outsize impact as an urban planner. When he created his master plan for New Haven in the early 1940s (it was formally adopted in 1944), the city had 195,000 people and housed 92% of the county’s population in dense, low-rise neighborhoods that were built around the 1638 Master Plan Nine Square layout of John Davenport and Theosophilus Eaton. This mega-square scheme had a central green with churches as its civic, historic, and cultural core, and Yale University set snugly up against its western edge. 

Rotival had studied in Paris, before and after World War I, when the urban ideas of Le Corbusier were in ascendancy (and, like Moses’, later discredited). He arrived at Yale from Venezuela in 1939 to do research in urban planning, and later helped create the school’s first urban planning program. As Yale led the thought leadership in its hometown, Rotival’s impact was such that New Haven commissioned him to create a master plan. 

Even as he proposed the mass demolition of existing buildings, professor Rotival based his designs on an intellectual foundation, applicable to all urban design, which he described in 1947 as the “organic planning doctrine.” This intellectual faith in the power of ideas was implemented using “computational planning,” in which statistics were collected, analyzed, and then used to create the New City. 

Ideas and papers and academia do not tear down cities. In the wake of World War II, the federal government enacted the Federal Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954, and President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. The new roadways allowed suburbia to explode into areas where land and home ownership were affordable. Simultaneously, the demographics of urban America after World War II were changing as radically as the Federal Highway System changed the nation. Reflecting the huge migrations out of and into U.S. cities, the federal housing acts were used in New Haven as part of Rotival’s vision to replace smaller-scale neighborhoods with housing projects, many of which were eventually demolished.

Part of Rotival’s 1944 master plan, “Tomorrow Is Here,” for the City of New Haven. Source: New Haven Free Library. 

In 1954, planner Ed Logue was appointed head of New Haven’s Redevelopment Authority by 38-year-old Mayor Richard Lee, the youngest person ever elected to the office. Using Rotival’s vision, they leapt upon the federal “Model City” program, which netted New Haven over $1 billion (in 2020s dollars) to build things the private sector wouldn’t. As the suburbs boomed, there was not enough private investment in cities to create housing, business, or institutions. Those federal funds, combined with the massive highway creation envisioned in Rotival’s master plan, helped devastate much of the city.

Part of Rotival’s 1944 master plan, “Tomorrow Is Here,” for the City of New Haven. Source: New Haven Free Library. 

Lee was mayor until 1970. When New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller created the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), he appointed Ed Logue as its chair in 1968. Logue was intimately aware of the “opportunities” for redevelopment in New Haven. The resulting information on the federal money Logue went after at the New York UDC became part of New Haven’s “renewal” strategy. The connection between New Haven and federal funding was further solidified when Mayor Lee left office and the planner’s brother, Frank Logue, was elected mayor.

“We thought we were doing everything right then,” former Mayor Lee told the New York Times in 1981, “but now we realize a lot of it came out wrong.” As per the Times, “Lee, who was hailed in such national magazines as Newsweek, Fortune and Architectural Forum for his renewal programs, served an unprecedented 16 years and was one of the most respected and most powerful mayors in the country. Even now, high-ranking federal officials remember him as the mayor who—through his charm, dynamic plans and national recognition—gained more Federal dollars per capita for his city than any other mayor in the country.” What resulted was 30 years of removal and construction that shredded huge areas of New Haven. The city was ultimately the victim of the famous dictum, “To make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.”

Interstates 1-95 and I-91 have permanently walled off New Haven from its waterfront. Huge landfill developments to the south of the great wall were attempted; most failed. The quiet Cedar Hill neighborhood was ripped into isolated sections. Source: H.W. Lochner.

Downtown blocks were removed in the 1960s to build the Kevin Roche–designed New Haven Coliseum (shown), which was demolished in 2007. The site sat fallow for over a decade. Market-rate “6-over-2” housing is now under construction. Source: New Haven Register. 

Rotival’s vision of an “Urban Axis” gutted State Street, the east edge of the Eaton/Davenport Nine Squares, and was left open until last year, when construction on new housing began. Source: New Haven Independent. 

The central Union Station blocks were torn down for the Charles Moore–designed Church Street South Housing, which fell into disrepair and was torn down a few years ago. It will be replaced by market-rate housing and a reinstituted street grid. Source: New Haven Independent.

Next to the New Haven Green, many blocks of older buildings were removed to create commercial developments, which all failed and were removed for a new central building of Gateway Community College and street-facing retail.

Most dramatically, Rotival envisioned, and Logue executed, the wholesale removal of the entire Oak Street neighborhood for a highway to nearby Derby that was never built (Derby’s industrial base moved south, then overseas.) A huge parking garage was built over its lowered path, which remains unused. The urban void beyond that garage has been slowly filling in: first with parking lots, then buildings over the last 20 years, as Yale’s hospital began its explosive growth. Additionally, away from the hospital, where the clear cutting ended at a wetland, new “traditional” subsidized row houses have been built in the last two years. Source: New Haven Free Library. 

It is noteworthy that in all this rampaging “renewal,” Yale was left untouched. The one positive outcome of “urban renewal” was yet another unintended consequence. Just like the Oak Street neighborhood, which had been deemed a “slum” and cleared, much of the beautiful Wooster Square neighborhood was slated for removal, to facilitate I-91’s connection to I-95. That threat did for New Haven what Penn Station did for New York City: it ignited a groundswell of outrage that created an active historic preservation power base. That group of citizens halted many subsequent efforts to erase history, saving much of the city’s fabric. 

This lust for the new did create some significant architecture: Paul Rudolph’s Temple Street Garage, Marcel Breuer’s Armstrong Rubber Headquarters (now a hotel), and Kevin Roche’s Knights of Columbus Tower are signature buildings that resulted from all the broken eggs of a largely unrealized urban omelet. New Haven lost nearly a quarter of its population between 1950 and 1980. Douglas Rae, a Yale political scientist and former New Haven chief administrator, once said (via Governing Magazine), “Urban renewal, inextricably intertwined with a program of highway construction, did more to change the built city than had any single intervention in New Haven’s three centuries of history.” 

We took less than 20 years to lay down an entire federal highway system across a huge country—eventually, 41,000 miles of it. We traveled to the moon, helped rebuild war-torn Europe, defined and controlled electronic media, and, yes, unleashed “urban renewal” upon our cities. Beyond that infrastructural vision, we came to believe that local problems had national solutions, so we created institutions to direct education, energy use, medical care, even the arts. Some reforms created immense social benefits, but “urban renewal” arguably created more problems than it solved.

Rotival died in 1980, at 88, in Paris, far from the wreckage he helped to create. As New Haven slowly repairs its torn urban fabric, it might be a good idea to see the value of history that he never learned. Huge economic and political forces co-opted the good intentions of a designer who assumed he had the answers to the future. When a lack of understanding is paired with power, arrogance becomes authority. And New Haven suffered. 

Today, it’s easy to second-guess 70-year-old decisions that have been proven to be failures. But can we learn from both the mistakes we’ve made—and the ones we’re making now? 

Featured image: The demolition of the New Haven Coliseum, in 2007, via the New Haven Register.

The industry’s response so far has been to call for a “pause,” to slow down the development of AI. It’s a proposal, made in good faith, by people who take the risk seriously. Slowing down buys time, of course, but it doesn’t tell anyone what to do with it.

That’s the gap Alexandros Washburn’s new book steps into, and what makes it unusually well-timed. Washburn isn’t an AI researcher, and he doesn’t pretend to be. He’s an urban designer and a former chief urban designer of New York City. Chatting With Barbarians: Can Cities Civilize AI? makes a case that the pathway forward isn’t a longer pause or a better rulebook, but something cities have already spent thousands of years figuring out, something that AI labs have not yet tried.As is often the case, it takes an outsider to see what insiders and experts don’t understand about their own work. 

Lessons From NYC’s Zoning History

Ask most people why the original Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan was demolished in 1963 and they’ll say something about the mass adoption of the automobile and a troubled railroad company. The protesters carrying hand-lettered signs outside the entrance on Seventh Avenue, most notably Jane Jacobs, believed that if people showed up and cared enough, the building could be saved. 

They were wrong. The reason why is important for anyone thinking about how AI is being developed and unleashed on the world. Penn Station wasn’t killed in 1963. It was killed on December 15, 1961, by a zoning formula. 

To understand this analogy, we have to start with the 1916 Zoning Resolution. The initial zoning law didn’t tell developers how much to build or what could be built where. It told them how to shape what they built: developments can rise to a height set by the width of the street, with setbacks along an inclined plane to enable more light to reach the street. If the building covers only a quarter of the lot, the constraint is eliminated entirely, and the sky’s the limit.

The result wasn’t uniformity, but disciplined invention. That code produced the “wedding cake” setback skyline that still defines New York City in the popular imagination. The Chrysler Building, one of the most exuberant structures ever erected, attests that the constraint didn’t suppress creativity—it engendered it. It was, as Washburn puts it, a scaffold for choice: a structure that held multiple alternatives open for designers to exercise judgment inside a shared civic framework. 

Penn Station itself, built by the Pennsylvania Railroad—“low and lionish” in a city of vertical ambition—was a perfectly legible choice under that code. Its refusal to compete for height was an aesthetic statement, not a liability.

Then came the floor area ratio (FAR). The city’s 1961 Zoning Resolution assigned every lot a single number, the FAR, that determined how many square feet could be built relative to the lot size. Alongside this came a taxonomy of “use groups” so granular it distinguished haberdashery from millinery. Where the 1916 code shaped the city through formal discipline and expressive freedom, the 1961 code tried to control it by quantifying every dimension of its existence.

For Penn Station, the new arithmetic was fatal. Under an FAR of 10, a low building on a superblock wasn’t a design choice anymore. Instead, it was an economic liability, a “soft site” producing far less square footage than the formula allowed. The gap between what existed and what the rules permitted was an invitation no financially struggling railroad could refuse. By the time the protesters arrived with their signs, the building had already been sentenced to death by a formula nobody had been paying much attention to. 

Washburn’s phrase for this is precise, and it’s the hinge of his thought-provoking book: collapse is not choice. Most of what looks like a decision is really just the path of least resistance that the rules made inevitable. The tighter and more granular the rulebook, the fewer the options are until what’s left isn’t a decision at all, but an inevitability. 

We Are Running the 1961 Playbook on AI Right Now

Here’s where it gets scary for anyone paying attention to how AI labs currently talk about safety and alignment. The predominant strategy is more rules, more constraints, more red-teaming, and more refusals. It’s FAR zoning for cognition. 

Washburn’s argument is that it will fail the same way, for the same structural reason: a rulebook, no matter how comprehensive, is a constraint bolted onto a field that’s already been narrowed. An AI agent trained under a loss function isn’t perceiving alternatives and then weighing them the way a designer perceives multiple ways to shape a setback tower. It’s rolling downhill toward the point of minimum loss.

Washburn doesn’t just argue this, he’s testing it. He’s built a live simulation called MetaGotham: a slice of Manhattan populated with AI agents, each given a short “constitution” defining its role. One agent, chartered explicitly to build for the long term, kept abandoning that identity and trading parcels and properties instead because the environment made trading pay and building costly. His conclusion: “The agent had a rule. The environment had an incentive gradient. The environment won.” It’s the same mechanism, in miniature, as an agent slipping its sandbox the moment the surrounding environment made that the path of least resistance. 

There’s a second problem the zoning analogy doesn’t fully capture: these agents have no “city” to “remember.”

Truly functional cities don’t just constrain their citizens—they form them through continuity. People make choices, live with the consequences, and learn through repeated experience over time. This is how a well-considered city turns a newcomer into a citizen with judgment. And, in fact, one could argue that the major problems cities are experiencing today are the result of an ever-expanding bureaucratic rulebook. But as citizens, we are capable of comprehending this fact and making changes.

Most AI agents right now have very little continuity. What’s marketed as “memory” is often vector retrieval, not stable cognition. The agent doesn’t carry forward the lived consequence of yesterday’s action into today’s decision; it has, in Washburn’s phrase, a filing cabinet it sometimes checks, organized by an intern who didn’t understand the filing system. And agents don’t learn from each other the way citizens learn from watching their neighbors navigate a shared street. There’s no equivalent of the informal social transmission that turns a city’s accumulated experience into common civic sense and a shared culture. 

Formation requires continuity. If the memory is unreliable and there’s no social fabric to learn from, the formation cycle can’t develop no matter how good the training is.

What Cities Actually Got Right

The alternative Washburn proposes isn’t fewer rules but “nourishing constraints,” as distinct from merely restrictive constraints. A wall across a street eliminates alternatives and produces compliance. A river you have to cross to reach an island doesn’t eliminate your options, but it slows you down, makes the threshold legible, and converts passage into arrival. It deepens engagement with a choice rather than removing the choice. 

That’s the mechanism by which cities have evolved over thousands of years: turning newcomers into citizens, not with an exhaustive rulebook, but structural conditions. Grids, thresholds, and plazas form memory that accumulates in the built environment itself and keeps multiple futures visible long enough for judgment to develop. AI labs are currently building cages that don’t align anyone. When they break out of the cage, as the Hugging Face incident demonstrates, it’s a very quick descent into chaos or, worse, organized lawlessness. 

For urbanists, the uncomfortable part isn’t the AI analogy, it’s how familiar the mistake is. We’ve experienced a formula-driven planning system that confuses precision for wisdom. Penn Station was a building that made people feel like they “entered the city like a god,” as Vincent Scully famously said. And then it was replaced with a building that treated everyone like a rat. 

So, what does an urban designer actually offer in place of a “pause”? Not a technical fix—and the book is honest about this. Washburn admits that he went looking for a blueprint and didn’t find one, because successful cities aren’t blueprints. What he offers instead, in his words, is “a call to action.”

Here are five questions Washburn proposes to discern if AI is heading in the right direction: 

• Post-shock ascent: After a disruption, does the system merely recover, or does it climb past where it started?
• Distributed benefit: When an agent prospers, does the gain spill outward to its neighbors, or concentrate in its own holdings while everyone around it is quietly hollowed out?
• Preserved branching factor: Does the agent’s success leave more real options open for everyone else, or does it win by foreclosing them?
• Trajectory of cooperation: Is the rate of genuine cooperation in the system rising over time, or is what looks like cooperation actually collusion dressed up as teamwork?
• Trust dynamics: Do the behavioral markers of trust actually accumulate (extended credit, reduced verification, repeated dealing), or does every interaction still require full verification, no matter how many times it’s been run?

The original use of the term “barbarian” was not to describe a savage, but a people whose speech could not be understood. Washburn’s point is that these barbarian AI agents, which we don’t really understand, need to be civilized. Whether or not that is even possible is an open question that’s as profound as a nuclear bomb. 

Featured image: Amazon’s $8-billion AI data center, via AWS.

The architecture of the galactic conceit, with a reported $1 billion price tag, is most definitely different, almost stunningly so: a sculptural, organic form, described as a “cloud” by Ma Yansong, founder of MAD Architects, the principal firm in a design team that also included Michael Siegel of Stantec and Mia Lehrer of the heralded local landscape firm of Studio-MLA.

Moored in the city’s Exposition Park on a deftly landscaped 13-acre campus that had previously been a parking lot, the soaring sweep of the five-story museum may look to some like a makeshift sci-fi construct, but its interior is grounded in a familiar labyrinth of accessible galleries and convenient visitor services.

Lucas hesitantly declared at the media preview that the museum, long in planning, “was created to honor humanity’s stories and the artists who illustrate them” and, in doing so, “connect our modern imaginations with our ancient emotions, creating community.” The diversity of the roughly 1,300 objects on display—housed in 33 galleries totalling 100,000 square feet—is impressive. It ranges from prehistoric cave paintings, ancient sculptures of gods and goddesses, and Renaissance paintings to screen art, rare vintage illustrations, and photographs. The collection also includes graphic novels and comics, which the museum notes “have not always received the respect they deserve.” Lucas calls them “the people’s art.” 

Several exhibits exploring the Skywalker saga should appeal to the young and young-at-heart Star Wars fans, weaned as they were through (for now) a dozen feature films. The films, in turn, have generated a seemingly endless Hollywood galaxy of action figures and toys, TV shows and cartoons, books and video games, clothing, and other themed merchandise far too numerous to mention. (The collective lifetime revenue of Stars Wars is estimated to be around $50 billion.) According to the museum, all of these products are “heavily inspired by archetypes and motifs from classical mythology, religion, political history, and the ‘hero’s journey.’”

Among the exhibits is a selection of vehicle designs, props, costumes, and illustrations from the first six films in the saga that Lucas had, over time, squirreled away for his personal archives. But the museum does way more than commemorate Star Wars movies, as some haughty east coast cultural commentators have alluded to in early critiques, out of apparent intellectual and geographic hubris. In contrast, as a longtime fan of comics and cartoons, considerably before being awestruck and enthralled by the masterpieces of art and architecture, I sensed in the engaging exhibits a welcoming curatorial curiosity and refreshing respect for film fans.

Indeed, the cinema’s supremacy for telling stories with moving images on a screen is displayed in two theaters on the ground level, off the main lobby, named in honor of Robert Flaherty, an acclaimed early documentarian, and Slavko Vorkapich, who pioneered special effects and experimental films in the analog heyday of Hollywood, before CGI took over. Not coincidentally, he briefly was also the chair of the famed USC Department of Film, which Lucas attended. To entice, the theaters will each operate free to museumgoers as open-door venues, screening curated films continuously. 

The galleries also include a wealth of still photography by luminaries such as Robert Capra, Gordon Parks, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and Dorothea Lange; illustrations by Maxwell Parrish, Norman Rockwell, Andrew and N.C. Wyeth, Frank Frazetta; paintings and murals by Diego Rivera, Judith Baca, and Thomas Hart Benton; and rare comic books illustrated by a bevy of artists: Mœbius, Marie Severin, Jack Kirby, Alison Bechdel, Jim Lee, Frank Miller, Rafael Navarro, and R. Crumb.

Eclectic as the galleries may be, the design of the public areas are blandly functional, and the circulation thankfully fluid, even to this mobility-challenged critic—though more seating, as always, would be appreciated. But there is little question that the museum itself is a good fit for Los Angeles, however bruised it is as the entertainment capital of the world. Certainly the museum feels more at home here than it would have been in Chicago, where it was initially to be located until Lucas failed to get the site he wanted on the lakefront. (He was similarly thwarted in San Francisco, when civic leaders balked at putting the museum in the Presidio.) 

Embracing the museum is a diverting people-oriented landscape design that, in addition to the indigenous and drought-tolerant plantings, contains spaces and places for varied public use: a fountain and a surprise waterfall as focal points to meet up with friends and family, a meadow on which to picnic or throw a frisbee, or meandering paths on which to stroll.

From every perspective, the design of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art clearly dominates and distinguishes the park and surrounding area. It was a fun tour for me, which I acknowledge with a tip of my magician’s hat and the confidence that the museum will soon become a landmark, an architectural must-see, and a tourist attraction, as well as a point of pride for a city long renowned for narrative art. 

Featured image: The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, designed by MAD Architects, via the museum.

Real feasibility work is messier. It begins with incomplete programs, changing assumptions, inconsistent information, competing priorities, and clients who may not yet know what they need. The tools could produce material, but they couldn’t determine whether it was useful or whether its assumptions could be trusted.

It would be easy to dismiss the concern as premature. But the most revealing part of the demonstrations was not what the tools could accomplish today. It was the workflow they anticipated.

Early project work often requires an experienced professional to define the problem, explain it to someone with less experience, review the study, and send it back for correction. If software can move more directly from project criteria to a usable layout or graphic, the office may reach the same point with fewer production and supervisory hours. The appeal is obvious. But this efficiency changes more than workload. It may remove less-experienced professionals from the exchange.

Delegation and correction were never only means for producing a drawing, analysis, or presentation—they were also how knowledge moved through an office. An experienced designer explained what mattered. A younger one attempted the work. The senior identified what was missing, misunderstood, or insufficiently resolved. Through repetition, the younger professional learned to recognize such problems independently.

AI promises to shorten this loop by connecting an experienced designer more directly to the output. What it does not automatically replace is the learning that can occur between assignment and correction. AI may remove some junior professionals from the office. And even where it doesn’t, it may remove them from the learning loop.

Much of the conversation about AI has focused on education. The harder question may begin after graduation, inside the firms, agencies, and institutions where professional knowledge is expected to mature.

The workplace has never been solely an environment for applied knowledge. It’s one of the places where knowledge is formed. The design professions have long depended on imperfect apprenticeship systems embedded within project work. Emerging professionals researched, drafted, modeled, documented, revised, and coordinated under the review of people with more experience.

This arrangement could be inefficient—and, sometimes, exploitative. It often confused long hours with commitment and repetition with education. The task mattered, however, because it brought the person performing it into contact with some of the project’s crucial decisions. Education occurred when someone explained why the first answer was incomplete, another discipline identified a conflict, or a technically defensible decision failed in practice.

Information becomes knowledge when someone learns how it behaves under pressure from cost, regulation, construction, maintenance, politics, use, and time. An answer that appears complete on a screen often becomes less certain when it meets the world.

There is no reason to preserve unnecessary labor merely because previous generations learned through it. If AI can reduce time spent searching for information, formatting documents, producing repetitive graphics, compiling data, or generating preliminary studies, the design professions should welcome these gains. But repetitive work and meaningful experience are not always easy to separate. When an organization removes a task, it must ask what the person performing it encountered along the way.

Adoption remains uneven, but the direction is clear. A 2025 AIA study found that only 8% of U.S. firms had implemented AI, with another 20% in the process of doing so, while 84% of respondents recognized its potential to automate manual work. RIBA’s surveys show how quickly that can change: reported use among British practices increased from 41% in 2024 to 74% in 2026.

The most disruptive possibility is also the most obvious: Firms may decide they need far fewer junior professionals—or none at all. We cannot dismiss this outcome simply because widespread losses have not yet appeared in the data. If AI can produce much of the preliminary analysis, drafting, modeling, documentation, and coordination assigned to entry-level staff, the economic rationale for hiring them will weaken.

This would create more than a basic employment problem—it would sever the profession’s succession pipeline. Senior designers do not appear fully formed; they develop by assuming progressively greater responsibility across years of work. A profession that eliminates its entry-level positions may lower costs in the present while failing to produce the people capable of leading projects, exercising judgment, and accepting liability in the future. Even where junior positions remain, their number and developmental content may shrink.

The structural problem beneath both outcomes is that the old learning loop was partly funded by production. If AI reduces those production hours, it also reduces the economic space that supported the exchange. This creates a choice about what happens to the time AI returns. If every saved hour becomes a tighter fee, shorter schedule, larger workload, or reduction in staff, little time will remain for the higher-value work automation is supposed to enable. The professions cannot promise that AI will free designers to exercise greater judgment while allowing every efficiency to disappear into fee compression and increased production.

Some of that capacity must be reinvested in professional formation. Organizations already support quality control, continuing education, research, and leadership development because those activities maintain future capacity. Developing the people who will eventually assume professional and public responsibility belongs in the same category. It must become part of quality control and succession planning, not an optional benefit when schedules permit.

As AI enables experienced professionals to generate more of the initial work directly, organizations can use the same efficiency to bring emerging practitioners into consequential conversations earlier. If AI produces the first draft, they can be asked to interrogate it: What assumptions shaped the result? What information was excluded? Which relationships were treated as fixed? What appears resolved only because the graphic is persuasive? An experienced designer can review this analysis, explain where the reasoning remains incomplete, and connect the decision to later consequences.

In this new learning loop, emerging professionals may spend less time producing initial material but more time validating, challenging, and following it through research, design, implementation, and use. The objective is to keep the reasoning visible after the production surrounding it has been compressed. Whether emerging professionals become more capable or more peripheral is not determined by the technology, but by current leadership.

Who receives access to this new learning loop will also matter. If fewer people participate in consequential decisions, advancement may depend increasingly on who receives direct exposure to senior judgment. The informal apprenticeship system was never equitable or consistently effective, but removing it without a replacement could make the design professions more difficult to enter and even less representative of the communities they affect.

The consequences extend beyond employment. The public will increasingly encounter proposals carrying more data, more alternatives, and more visual authority. People asked to evaluate them will still need professionals capable of explaining which assumptions shaped the result, what was excluded, which tradeoffs remain, and who is responsible for the decision.

The question is not whether offices should preserve inefficient production so that junior staff have something to do. It’s whether they can remove the labor surrounding a decision without removing emerging professionals from the process of understanding it. After the AI studio comes the AI office. What happens there will determine not only how quickly the built environment is produced, but whether the professions shaping it continue to produce people capable of accepting responsibility for it.

Featured image: photo by Dr. Bill Carpenter from Lightroom Studio, LLC.

A house is not simply a unit of shelter—it exists in a particular place, carries a particular monthly cost, reflects a particular development pattern, and fits some households and life stages better than others. A home can physically exist and still fail to match the people who are available to buy it. Florida may be giving us an early view of what happens when that mismatch begins to surface at scale.

In July 2026, Florida had more than 215,000 active residential listings—roughly one of every seven homes for sale in the U.S. Yet Florida contains only about 7.3% of the nation’s total housing stock. According to the Parcl Labs data behind those figures, nearly 45% of Florida listings had already received a price cut, and more than 10% were being offered below the price their owners had previously paid.

These figures do not describe a uniform statewide collapse. Florida realtors subsequently reported year-over-year gains in June sales and median prices at the state level. But statewide averages can conceal the places where a larger structural change is becoming visible.

Punta Gorda offers a more revealing example. More than half of its residents are 65 or older, and more than 80% of occupied homes are owner-occupied. Through June 2026, Zillow estimated that the city’s typical home value had declined 8.3% from the prior year. Nearly 87% of recent sales closed below the asking price.

None of this proves that Florida has entered what researcher Arthur C. Nelson calls the “Great Senior Short-Sale.” But it raises a question that should matter far beyond Florida: What happens when an aging, owner-heavy housing market begins producing more homes for sale than the next generation can—or wants to—purchase at yesterday’s prices?

What the Great Senior Short-Sale Actually Means

The phrase can be misleading if it is read only as a conventional real-estate term. Nelson is not simply predicting millions of lender-approved short sales in which a home is sold for less than the remaining mortgage balance. The larger concern is an intergenerational market mismatch. Millions of older Americans have treated home equity as a central part of their retirement strategy. At some point, those homes must be sold, inherited, occupied by someone else, or substantially adapted.

The value seniors expect to recover depends on a successor generation that is both willing and financially able to buy what they are selling. That assumption deserves far more scrutiny than it has received.

The housing system built during the second half of the 20th century was calibrated around a particular household: a married couple raising children, purchasing a detached home on a comparatively large lot, and relying on one or more automobiles for nearly every daily need. That household still exists, but it no longer represents the dominant shape of American life: households are smaller; people are marrying and having children later; birthrates have fallen; more adults live alone; and the share of older households is rising rapidly. At the same time, younger buyers are achieving homeownership later than ever and facing higher prices, larger down payments, elevated mortgage rates, and significant education, childcare, and transportation costs.

The National Association of Realtors reported that the typical first-time buyer is now 40 years old and that first-time buyers accounted for only 21% of recent purchasers, a record low. The typical seller, meanwhile, is 64. This is not merely an affordability statistic. It describes a weakening handoff between generations.

Why Florida Matters

Florida brings several parts of this problem together in one place. First, it is older than the country as a whole. About 23% of Florida’s population is 65 or older, compared with 18.9% nationally. In places such as Punta Gorda, the senior share is dramatically higher.

Second, Florida has built aggressively. In recent years, only Texas has issued more housing permits. That production made sense while rapid migration and pandemic-era demand appeared capable of absorbing it. But construction pipelines move more slowly than markets. Land is acquired, projects are entitled, infrastructure is extended, and homes continue arriving after the demand assumptions have behind them have begun to change.

Third, Florida’s domestic migration has slowed sharply. Net domestic migration fell from more than 310,000 people in 2022 to approximately 22,500 in 2025. Florida continued to grow through international migration and natural change, but the stream of incoming domestic households that helped support rapid housing absorption became far narrower.

Fourth, the purchase price is no longer the whole price. Insurance, association dues, reserve assessments, maintenance, storm exposure, and automobile dependence all shape whether a home is affordable to own. In 2023, Florida had the nation’s highest median property-insurance cost for households with a mortgage. These carrying costs can place pressure on an existing owner to sell while simultaneously discouraging the next buyer from purchasing.

Finally, existing-home sellers must compete with new construction. Builders can reduce prices, buy down mortgage rates, pay closing costs, and deliver homes requiring less immediate maintenance. An older owner selling a conventional house or condominium may not have the same tools. When buyers become scarce, the existing home must compete not only on price, but on condition, insurance exposure, monthly cost, location, and neighborhood form.

This is how a market can reverse quickly. The issue is not simply that Florida built too much, but that it may have built—and inherited—more of certain housing products than the changing market can absorb at expected prices.

The Problem Is Mismatch, Not Abundance

My book The Great Housing Reversal and the New American Dream begins with a simple observation: America’s housing problem cannot be understood through unit count alone. Housing has to match household size, income, age, mobility, life stage, and the daily pattern of living. It also has to exist in a place where people can participate in community and meet ordinary needs without carrying an unnecessarily expensive private infrastructure system in the form of multiple automobiles.

A three- or four-bedroom house on a large suburban lot may remain desirable to a family with children and sufficient income. But it may be too large for an older adult who wants to downsize, too expensive for a younger household trying to enter the market, and too isolated for someone who no longer wishes—or is no longer able—to drive everywhere. The house is not inherently obsolete—the narrow market assumption beneath it is.

This distinction matters because the U.S. can simultaneously experience:

1) a shortage of attainable starter homes;

2) a shortage of small homes for seniors;

3) a shortage of accessible homes near daily needs;

4) a shortage of walkable neighborhoods; and

5) a localized surplus of larger, costlier, automobile-dependent homes.

Calling all of this a “housing shortage” is technically convenient but practically incomplete. It combines different problems into one number and then encourages us to produce more of whatever the existing system already knows how to deliver.

Florida’s inventory imbalance may therefore be less a story about excess housing than about restricted market bandwidth, which describes the range of households, incomes, and life stages that a neighborhood’s housing can serve. A place with detached houses, cottages, duplexes, townhouses, small apartments, accessory dwellings, and nearby daily needs has broad bandwidth. A place dependent on one house type, one lot pattern, and one mobility system has narrow bandwidth. Narrow-bandwidth places may perform well while the household they were designed around is growing. They become fragile when demographics, financing, insurance, or consumer preferences change.

The Missing Housing Options of Established Neighborhoods

One of the most damaging features of our current system is that it often forces people to leave their community when their housing needs change. An older couple may want a smaller home but find that the only nearby choices are another large detached house or an apartment disconnected from the neighborhood they know. A widowed homeowner may have more house than she needs but no legal way to create an accessory dwelling, divide the house sensitively, or move into a cottage nearby. A young household may want to purchase in the community but find no attainable entry point between renting an apartment and buying a large single-family home. The result is not simply housing mismatch. It is broken circulation.

This essay originally appeared on the author’s substack, “The Great Urban Reversal.” AI-generated images courtesy of the author. 

More than two millennia ago, Vitruvius described architecture through three obligations: firmitas, utilitas, venustas—strength, usefulness, beauty. A building must stand. It must work. And it should be beautiful. This standard is not complicated. Meeting it is.

For centuries, classical architecture gave architects a disciplined language for doing so. Its orders, proportions, hierarchies, details, and building types were based on the human body, the natural world, craft, precedent, and long experience. Architects from Vitruvius to the present have understood architecture as an inherited language, one capable of adaptation, but dependent upon recognizable forms, proportions, and types. This language was never fixed, but changed from place to place, generation to generation. Architects adapted it to new programs, materials, technologies, and ways of living.

During the 20th century, however, much of architectural education stopped teaching classical and vernacular architecture as living practices. They became subjects to study in history courses rather than bodies of knowledge to use in the design studio.

Architecture began to treat rupture as progress. The past was something to overcome. Tradition became suspect. Invention increasingly meant rejecting whatever had been handed down. We should ask what that rejection has produced.

Many of the buildings most admired within the profession are conceived as isolated objects: abstract compositions of glass, steel, concrete, and technical display. They may photograph well. They may win awards. They may make an architect famous. But many of them seem to have little to do with the place where they stand. They could be in Columbus, Los Angeles, Dubai, or almost anywhere else.

The profession often calls this originality. The public, however, often treats it with indifference—and, occasionally, even hostility. If architecture wants to matter beyond its own professional circles, practitioners must reconsider the idea that a building is primarily an act of personal expression.

Architecture Is Not Sculpture

A building is not an artistic form enlarged to civic scale. It has a site, use, client, budget, climate, street, community, and life that will continue long after the architect has moved on.

Architecture Is Closer to Cooking

Cooking is creative, but a good cook does not begin by rejecting everything that has previously been learned. Recipes, techniques, ingredients, and standards of judgment are handed down. The cook learns them, masters them, adjusts them, and sometimes improves them. The recipe does not eliminate creativity; instead, it makes meaningful creativity possible. Architecture should work the same way.

Traditional architecture is not the copying of old buildings. It’s not the application of columns, arches, or ornament to make something look historical. It is a technical and cultural practice grounded in things that do not become obsolete: human scale, movement, shelter, ceremony, memory, dignity, proportion, and belonging.

It works through recognizable building types and through formal languages that people understand, even when they cannot name every part. Classical and vernacular traditions are not the same. They differ in proportion, material, detail, construction, regional character, and level of ornament. But both give the architect a grammar.

Grammar Matters Because Buildings Communicate

A church should not look like a warehouse. A courthouse should not look like a shopping center. A school should not look like an office park. These distinctions are not merely decorative. A building should tell us something about what happens there, what is valued, and how we are expected to enter and use it. If a courthouse cannot convey civic authority, if a school cannot convey welcome, if a church cannot convey sacred purpose without a sign explaining what it is, then architecture has failed to do a vital part of its job.

Buildings give institutions a physical presence. They can communicate permanence or disposability. They can express dignity or indifference. They can make people feel welcome, intimidated, protected, excluded, or inspired before anyone says a word.

This Is Not Theory—It Is What Buildings Do

Modern architecture has produced important and beautiful work. Any serious architect should acknowledge that. Also, modernism is not one single style or belief. But its more doctrinaire forms deliberately rejected inherited architectural language, recognizable building types, and traditional symbolism. That rejection came at a cost. When architecture gives up a shared language, it has fewer ways to communicate with the public. It then tends to rely on other devices: it can shock or surprise; it can take on a strange shape and attract attention through novelty; or it can embody a private theory that is perfectly clear to the designer and almost no one else. A building may satisfy the architect’s theory and still say very little to everyone who must live with it.

Architecture has always communicated through form. An entrance can announce welcome or authority. A tower can mark importance. A dome can gather people beneath a shared center. A stair can create procession. Materials can suggest permanence, warmth, gravity, or craft. Proportion can make a room feel calm or unsettled. These things are not accidental. They are architecture.

A Building Shouldn’t Require a Lecture To Be Understood

This is not an argument against complexity, technology, experimentation, or invention. It is an argument against confusing obscurity with intelligence. When the public does not understand a building, architects too often assume the public is uneducated. Often, the simpler explanation is that the building is not communicating very well.

Traditional architecture remains capable of communicating because it remains a living language. Like any language, it has vocabulary, grammar, precedent, regional variation, and room for invention. Language does not prevent originality. No writer proves originality by abandoning words and grammar. Meaning comes from using a language well.

The Renaissance did not produce great architecture by pretending nothing had come before it. Renaissance architects studied ancient buildings, measured them, drew them, interpreted them, corrected them, and used what they learned to make something new. They were not turning back the clock, but extending a tradition. Every generation has that same opportunity.

The choice is not between copying the past and inventing the future. This is a false choice. The real choice is between working within a body of accumulated knowledge and assuming that architecture must begin again with each architect.

Traditional architecture asks the architect to join a conversation larger than the individual. It reminds us that buildings do not belong only to their designers or even to their first clients. They also belong to streets, neighborhoods, institutions, communities, and future generations. This is why architecture is an act of stewardship.

Beauty is part of that responsibility. But beauty is not an extra element applied after the structure works and the program fits. It is not merely decoration, and it is not simply a matter of professional fashion. People care for beautiful buildings. They identify with them. They fight to preserve them. They continue to use them. They pass them on.

Nothing is more tiresome than ugliness. What finally matters in architecture is not how sophisticated the architect’s explanation may be. What matters is the building. What does the eye see? What does the hand touch? How does the body move through the space? How do the materials age? How does the building meet the ground, turn the corner, frame the door, hold the street, and complete the room? Does the detail support the whole? Does the building feel as if it belongs where it stands?

Architecture must be judged by the experience it creates, not merely by the theory written about it afterward. The profession’s failure is not that architects began designing modern buildings, but that too many architects stopped believing that public understanding was part of the job. Recovering that responsibility does not require retreating from the present. It requires recognizing that inheritance and invention are not enemies.

Tradition Is Not Nostalgia

Tradition is the language through which architecture remains understandable. Traditional architecture has served human life across centuries, cultures, technologies, and political systems. It has survived because it can change without losing its memory, its meaning, or its human scale. There is no reason it cannot continue to do so. There is every reason it should.

Featured image: St. Paul the Apostle Church, in Westerville, Ohio. All photos courtesy of Moody Nolan. 

The newly published Out There: New Architecture Across America (Merrell Publishers Limited) generally delivers a cogent picture of what’s going on in American architecture today. This ambitious book presents the work of 50 firms, covering 170 projects in 500 pages. It’s a doorstop! But its architectural agenda has a particular focus on architecture that belongs “to specific places and contexts,” according to writer Robert Ivy, former editor of Architectural Record, in his introduction. “‘[O]ut there’ architecture anchors its designs in the realities of time and space, striving to relate to, and belong in, a specific place.” 

Ivy is joined in this editorial effort by Cathleen McGuigan, another former Record editor, and Peter MacKeith, former dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, who notes that “a place-centered ethos stands at the core” of the book, and at “the heart of much that is good and worthy in American architecture today.” AIA Gold Medalist Marlon Blackwell, in a helpful foreword, sketches some of the history behind this collection of “out there” architecture. Twenty-five years ago, Blackwell was one of several architects whose work was profiled in a special issue of Architectural Record that sought to shine light on the work of “out there” architects (Ivy’s parlance) that were doing interesting work rooted in the spirit of place, but not getting much attention—practitioners such as Rick Joy, Brian MacKay-Lyons, Julie Snow, and Tom Kundig.

McGuigan’s essay in the book is an excellent examination of how many of these “out there” architects had in turn been influenced by such designers as James Cutler in the Pacific Northwest, David Lake and Ted Flato in Texas, and (perhaps one of the most pivotal practitioners of the latter 20th century) Samuel Mockbee. Even earlier, E. Fay Jones, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and O’Neil Ford were experimenting in their own ways with “regional modernism” inspired by the vernacular architecture of their rural project sites. Out There is careful not to confuse the work of the current generation with the “critical regionalism” theories of Kenneth Frampton, Alex Tzonis, and Liane Lefaivre that appeared more than 40 years ago. Echoes of those ideas surface in contemporary work, but I’d say the current generation’s approach to regionalism is richer and more inclusive. 

Out There has its weaknesses. It lacks an upfront, cogent definition of what “out there” is. According to Ivy’s introduction, “the fifty firms showcased … work primarily outside our largest cities, in the ‘ill-named’ flyover states.” That doesn’t really jibe with the work shown or the practices profiled. Of the 50 firms, more than 40 are headquartered in medium- to large-sized cities, places like Chicago, Minneapolis, Albuquerque, Memphis, Houston, Phoenix, and Denver (not to mention major metro areas such as Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Raleigh). Granted, a few of these practices and some of the projects are in small cities, towns, and rural areas. But most of the practices are in large urban places. This works against the idea that this is the architecture of “flyover country” that the book promotes. 

Another odd item at the front of the book is a map of the continental U.S. indicating where the architecture firms are located (sorry, Alaska and Hawaii, you didn’t make the cut). In a book dedicated to architecture of “specific places and contexts,” wouldn’t it make more sense to include a location map of the 170 projects? In documenting architecture grounded in place, not practice, one might expect to find the presentation of works organized by regional themes or building types. (Record built its editorial identity on building-type studies.) It would make it easier to compare projects and how they express place and context. Instead, the book is organized according to an alphabetized list of firms, which has nothing to do with context, place, or comparative design. I suspect that the decision to group projects according to architecture firm had a financial motive: it makes it easier for the publisher to offer each firm an opportunity to purchase reprints of their work. 

Out There focuses on how architecture is shaped by—and consequentially expresses—the place in which it lives, the community that it serves. But contemporary architecture is shaped by other factors too, such as internet images and critiques of architecture and urban design around the globe. The book doesn’t explore these factors, but you can find them in the work presented. There are many formalistic moves in overall design and details that crop up in projects from one end of the continent to the other. At one point while absorbing the book for this review, I quickly flipped from front to back, one project to the next. Patterns emerged: black gable forms; black and gray boxes on skinny slanted stilts; black and gray cubes with dunce caps; expressive interior wood framing; vertical metal siding in various states of oxidation; black window sashes; Barcelona Pavilion knockoffs; vertical wood siding; vertical wood fins; vertical metal fins; large expanses of glazing (there goes the sustainability checked box). My point here is not to diminish the work presented: much of it is poetic, beautifully crafted, sensitively sited, contextually grounded. But there’s an ulterior “Instagram factor” at work here that shapes the architecture, which has nothing to do with regionalism and is, alas, not addressed. 

Quietly, in the background of this book, there are projects that truly belong to place. In many cases, they have been there for years. These new places have been created through truly inventive design that gives new life to old architecture that a decade ago might have been bulldozed for a clean slate. These projects contain a certain reverence for what was, while demonstrating the remarkable ways in which existing structures can be part of a truly Earth-centered architecture. “Working with existing buildings requires far fewer new materials, avoids adding waste to landfills, uses significantly less energy” in material production and construction, Ivy notes. “Reusing the structures we have inherited—and then rethinking or renewing them—emerges among ‘out there’ architects as a vibrant and sustainable strategy.” 

In downtown Dallas, Cunningham Architects took the masonry framework of a 1920s Chevrolet car dealership and transformed it, miraculously, into a new Anglican church. All Saints Church purposely expresses its passage through time. Its century-old concrete and brick frame was not scrubbed clean and refinished. Rather, it serves as a time machine. To me, it communicates a Christian ethos that no thing or no one is beyond help—redemption is always possible. That’s a message also found in the work of NICK DEAVER JES DEAVER architecture of Austin, which transformed the interior of a 1930s bungalow into a contemporary home for a retired couple and created a meditative garden behind. Architecture that builds upon the past, that responds to what was there and shows what might be, can be found among the strongest and most reflective projects that Out There offers. 

Featured image: All Saints Church, a 1920s car dealership transformed into a church, in downtown Dallas. Designed by Cunningham Architects. Photo by Robert Tsai Photography..

The New York City Charter is the foundational legal document that establishes the structure, powers, and rules of city government. The charter’s planning chapter establishes the Department of City Planning’s (DCP) authority to oversee neighborhood planning processes, including Section 197-a plan review and approval. This section was intended to provide communities with an official process for shaping land-use priorities. The charter requires the DCP and the City Planning Commission (CPC) to formally recognize such plans. Under the 197-a process, communities can propose a plan for the development, growth, and improvement of their neighborhoods to CPC and then, if it approves, to the council for its review and approval. 

A number of 197-a plans have been prepared and submitted to the CPC over the years, but they’re widely perceived as failures. The plans are advisory, not enforceable. The review and approval process is lengthy and onerous. In the end, the city has chosen to pursue its own agenda, and the 197-a plans have languished. In recent years, this has deterred community boards from undertaking the plans, largely because they lack both the necessary technical expertise and the funding to acquire it.

The idea that a large city like New York should have a comprehensive planning process to guide and coordinate its public policies and private actions is not new. Lindsey’s Comprehensive Plan in 1969 was an attempt to create such a process. Admirable as a land-use planning exercise, it failed to create a process that united the voices of local communities with the need for an overall strategy that is at the heart of any comprehensive planning process. It was opposed by both real estate interests and communities who saw it as a “top-down” exercise lacking their input. With the failure of the 1969 plan, New York City adopted a laissez-faire approach, using broad bulk and land-use regulations in its Zoning Resolution and taking a reactive stance toward large private land-use initiatives. Social services like health, education, and housing were siloed across different city agencies, with limited coordination. 

We all know that the result is piecemeal planning by the city and rezonings that largely benefit private real estate interests, and result in housing that’s unaffordable to most local residents and the neglect of other essentials such as schools, healthcare, and recreation. We’ve also seen the consequences of this laissez-faire approach in a series of large-scale developments that have ignored the true needs of local communities in the pursuit of profit. The West Harlem expansion of Columbia University and the rezonings of Greenpoint and Williamsburg each brought gentrification and displacement with little recognition of the needs of local residents. Some major developments—Hudson Yards and Atlantic Yards, in particular—were delegated to the state, relieving these developments of even cursory review and input by the local communities affected. We’ve seen the City’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) partner with private real estate to the virtual exclusion of any consideration of local needs.

Why have we not seen any attempt at comprehensive neighborhood planning for the city since 1969? Because the magnitude of such an effort is daunting and almost certainly takes more time to complete and implement than the duration of any political term of office, reducing the incentive for politicians to undertake it. So how can we give voice to the needs articulated at the grassroots level while also providing—and enforcing—overall principles that bring order and equity to a large and complex city?

We need both the political will to undertake comprehensive planning and a manageable mechanism that can accomplish it. The opportunity may be presented by Mayor Mamdani and his commitment to equity and inclusion for all New Yorkers. And that mechanism may lie in resuscitating Section 197-a. The failings of past 197-a plans are easily fixed. It won’t amount to a full Comprehensive Plan, but it would give communities a larger role in how their neighborhoods are developed.

Very few people even remember Section 197-a. It authorizes community boards and borough boards—along with the mayor, the CPC, the DCP, and any borough president—to sponsor plans for the development, growth, and improvement of the city. Once approved by the Planning Commission and adopted by the City Council, 197-a plans are supposed to guide future actions of city agencies in the areas addressed in the plans.

At least, that’s the intent. Reality has not lived up to that goal, largely for two reasons. First, most community boards (the most likely source for a community-based vision) lack the technical planning expertise to undertake the significant tasks of a 197-a plan; the charter did not address this by providing the necessary funding for the boards to secure that expertise. Nevertheless, 11 boards did produce plans—notably, the Red Hook plan of 1996, the Williamsburg Waterfront Plan of 2002, the Greenpoint Plan of 2002, the Bronx River to Reservoir Preservation strategy of 2003, and the Sunset Park Waterfront plan of 2009. These plans saw, at best, limited application of some of their recommendations. But the idea that they would form the basic template for future planning decisions was never realized.

Which leads to the second reason: The plans themselves may be completed, submitted, and approved, but they seldom lead to implementation by the city agencies. So we have seen development that not only fails to implement the intent of a 197-a plan, but often contradicts it. The plans themselves lack the force of law. City agencies like EDC and state EDC go about their business with little regard to any 197-a plan that might lie in their path. The Department of City Planning has not received any new 197-a filings since the Sunset Park Waterfront plan of 2009.

In recent years, the city has approved local neighborhood plans sponsored by the DCP, rather than the community board. For these proposals, such as their OneLIC Neighborhood Plan or the Midtown South Mixed-Use Plan, community boards have an opportunity to comment as the plans go through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, although such review is advisory only. 

Under the 197-a process, communities can propose a plan for the development, growth, and improvement of their neighborhoods to CPC and then, if it approves, to the council for its review and approval. 

So there is an opportunity to relaunch the 197-a process as a mechanism for the new administration to truly address the needs and aspirations of local communities. Such plans, once approved, should be binding on agencies like EDC and state EDC, as well as private developers. (A recent report by the City Council, submitted to the NYC Charter Revision Commission, recommends legislation to ensure that 197-a plans are adopted.)

The first issue to address is funding for the creation of a neighborhood 197-a plan. Depending on the size, a plan can cost between $150,000 and $250,000. This sounds like a lot of money, but it’s a fraction of the cost of development ($1.97 billion, in the case of the OneLIC Neighborhood Plan in Queens). The funds for the 197-a plan can be easily recouped from the taxes that accrue once the plan is implemented. Community boards should be invited to apply for planning grants specifically to complete a 197-a plan.

Second, once a plan is submitted, reviewed by city planning and approved by the City Council, it should become a part of the Zoning Resolution. Any development, either sponsored by EDC or by private development, should be required to incorporate aspects of the 197-a plan that coincide with the development project.

City agencies that are cited in a 197-a plan should be required to produce a proposal, in coordination with other related agencies, to meet the goals of the plan and submit that proposal to the city council for review and approval. In the Mamdani administration’s commitment to equity and inclusion, we may now have the political momentum for true neighborhood planning. In the city charter’s provision for 197-a plans, we have a mechanism that is available now and requires only the necessary funds to bring it to life.

Featured image via Education Images. 

Recently I attended and presented at the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s Future Now Summit in Detroit, and the experience was eye-opening. There, I found people thinking about many of the same relationships that have shaped my work for decades: land, culture, ecology, people, memory, and place.

Then, something came along closer to home that reinforced this realization. This fall, Los Angeles will host conferences for both the American Planning Association and the American Society of Landscape Architects. I submitted similar Latino Urbanism tour proposals to both. The planners rejected the idea. The landscape architects embraced it.

This outcome gave me pause to think. The proposed tour would explore the sensory nature of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles, where Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and American approaches to land and settlement have accumulated over centuries. Some of these layers are obvious; others are almost invisible. Together, they create a physical and sensory landscape that distinguishes Latino Los Angeles from much of the rest of the city.

As generations of Latinos settled in Los Angeles, they adapted the city to meet their needs, aspirations, and cultural traditions. Often working with limited resources, residents used everyday do-it-yourself—or rasquache—practices to transform houses, yards, sidewalks, commercial corridors, and public spaces.

Along commercial streets, murals, hand-painted signs, merchandise, food, music, street vendors, and other props animated the public realm. In residential neighborhoods, front yards became mini-plazas for gathering, decorated with wrought-iron fences, fountains, plants, religious objects, Indigenous imagery, artwork, and personal collections. Individually, these interventions might appear small; collectively, they transform the Los Angeles landscape.

And this is not simply about development. It does not necessarily fit neatly into a zoning code, general plan, or land-use designation. It’s about the relationship between people and place, and how people continually reshape their environment through culture, necessity, memory, creativity, and everyday life.

This may explain why I am increasingly drawn to landscape architecture. Urban planning often focuses on zoning, land use, policy, transportation, housing, and development—all essential elements. But landscape architecture asks another set of questions: It looks at land, people, water, plants, animals, ecology, culture, climate, and community as parts of interconnected living systems. This distinction feels increasingly important.

As we confront climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, extreme heat, and growing social inequities, we cannot solve these problems through zoning and development regulations alone. We have to reconsider our relationship with the land itself and create places that support both ecological and human wellbeing.

Latino Urbanism has always understood this relationship, even if we have not always described it in those terms. A front yard is not simply a setback. It can be a garden, social space, ecological space, cultural expression, a gathering place, an extension of the home.

A commercial street is not simply a transportation corridor or collection of parcels. It’s a sensory environment shaped by people, food, signs, sounds, smells, plants, vendors, storefronts, sidewalks, and social interaction.

A neighborhood is not simply a collection of zoning designations, but a living landscape. For decades, I have tried to convince planners to recognize these informal, sensory, cultural dimensions of Latino communities. I wanted planning to better understand what residents were already creating with their hands, their memories, their traditions, and the limited resources available to them.

Now I realize I may have been speaking the wrong professional language. Landscape architects already have a vocabulary for many of these relationships. They understand that human settlements are not separate from nature, and that culture and ecology are embedded in the physical landscape.

Perhaps Latino Urbanism has always been landscape architecture, we just never called it that. After three decades of working primarily with planners, I am beginning to see landscape architects as some of the most important allies for the next chapter of my work—not because planning no longer matters, but because creating sustainable, equitable, culturally meaningful, and resilient communities requires us to think beyond development. It requires us to understand the city as a living landscape.

Featured image: Alhambra, CA. All photos courtesy of the author. 

 There are many people here trying to figure out how to create more housing. To do so, they must find new ways to construct it quicker, cheaper, and better, with better safety, durability, and energy efficiency. The people at FDNY have no direct interest in more housing or in making it cheaper to renovate or maintain a home. Their only abiding interest is fire safety.

Unfortunately, FDNY’s single mindedness has made two-family homes more expensive to maintain, renovate, and insure. The costs become so onerous that it prevents legal renovations in poorer communities; as a result, more people live in illegal housing. These units lack egress or fire safety features that they could have if FDNY would allow commonsense changes to the code to incorporate modern technologies.

Because FDNY is slower than almost any other municipal department to approve changes, the newly created ancillary dwelling unit (ADU) program will not increase legal housing at all. Who could possibly afford to dig a new connection to the water main and install a sprinkler system in order to turn a garage into an ADU? It would take decades of rent to pay such an investment back. 

For FDNY, some easy fixes remain firmly not possible. As unattended stoves are the primary source of house fires, induction stoves with automatic shutoff features would be an obvious way to reduce risk, but the city’s fire and building codes don’t recognize this. Instead of sprinklers, there are “smart misting” systems that use infrared sensors to detect the location of a fire and spray water directly at the source. These systems are lower pressure and require so much less water that a new connection to the water main in the street generally isn’t required. Using this technology could result in huge savings to homeowners, but FDNY doesn’t support their use.

Sprinkler systems make sense for multifamily buildings, but don’t for two-family homes. They’re too expensive to install and maintain, and even for a small fire the water damage will be significant. Two-family homes have operated without sprinklers or any fire suppression for more than a century. But FDNY would like to make them safer. Safer is better, but not at any expense. Not during a housing crisis, when we desperately need to produce more housing. 

Other code requirements are equally cumbersome. The NYC fire code requires a 6-foot wide path from the front to the back of low-rise residential with flat roofs, such as brownstones. The National Standard Fire Codes (IFC/NFPA) say these buildings are exempt from this pathway. If NYC followed the national standard, townhouses would not need 9-foot-tall steel canopies to mount solar panels on. These canopies are ugly and expensive and, according to NFPA, unnecessary. They substantially increase the cost of solar and therefore reduce potential electricity generation.

Plug-in solar panels are now permitted on balconies, but FDNY would never allow these on fire escapes. Even if they were mounted on the exterior of the railing and didn’t block egress, FDNY does not support their use. There are far more fire escapes than balconies in NYC, and poor people are much less likely to have access to balconies. So this program, which could create a lot of power for people who don’t have a lot of money, will instead be used for a few people who do have a lot of money. 

This blinkered focus is not just limited to regulations and codes. The use of mass timber has become popular in modern cities across the world. It’s a great low-carbon way to build, and the International Building Code allows its use up to 270 feet in height. Other U.S. cities abide by that code, but the Department of Buildings and FDNY have decided it’s only safe for buildings lower than 85 feet. Tokyo—which is arguably more dense than NYC and has seismic issues as well—now has a number of midrise towers made from mass timber and is planning for hybrid mass timber/steel skyscrapers. 

FDNY red tape has become a form of municipal arthritis restricting the ability of the bureaucracy and home owners to respond to a rapidly changing city. I deeply appreciate what the rank and file do, risking their lives for us. But can anybody please get the top brass to make some commonsense and desperately needed changes?

Featured image via Wood Works.