Upzoned - Is “Build It and They Will Come” Backward?

“Build it and they will come” sounds confident until the project is finished and nobody comes. The Neighborhood Playbook, a placemaking guide built around testing what people actually respond to before making larger investments, turns 10 this year. Carlee Alm-LaBar revisits it with coauthor Joe Nickol of Yard & Company and Max Musicant of The Musicant Group, asking what a decade of use says about planning places through action instead of prediction. The tension between planning and doing remains: how much should a place decide up front, and how much should it discover through action?

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• "Activating Spaces and Developing Places with "The Neighborhood Playbook"" by John Pattison, Strongtowns.org
• Downzone:
  • Strong Towns National Gathering in Sacramento, California June 4-7 2027 (Site)
  • More Than True: The Wisdom of Fairy Tales by Robert Bly (Book)
  • Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Updated and Expanded by David Graeber (Book)
  • Daily Dad (Site)
  • Hell on Wheels (Site)
• Carlee Alm-LaBar (LinkedIn)
• Joe Nickol (LinkedIn), Yard & Co. (Site)
• Max Musicant (LinkedIn), The Musicant Group (Site). Practice of Place (Substack)
• Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom.

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