 When I think philosophically about the work we all do, I think that we as a species assign value to people based on the environments we ask them to live in, and I think most people are worth more than a lot of the environments we ask them to live and work and attend school and shop and play in. And when you look around American communities, there are far too many of those neighborhoods that make you sort of disgrace to be an American. It's an embarrassment that people are asked to live in those neighborhoods, and mayors because they're directly elected by their citizens understand that, and they understand that connection to people and the ability that the built environment has to improve people's daily lives. I mean, by making people healthier because they can walk to their neighborhood shop instead of having you drive everywhere, making people more socially aware because they have places to interact with their neighbors, public plazas, libraries, et cetera, at their access. The Residence and City Design is a 22-year-old program that was founded in 1986, and it's run as a partnership of three organizations, the National Endowment for the Arts who founded the organization in 1986, the American Architectural Foundation, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. We run what we call institute sessions where we bring together six or eight mayors at a time. And over the course of three days, each mayor presents a case study of an urban design issue, something that's actually happening on the ground in their community, not some theoretical or far-off case study, but a problem, a challenge they're trying to solve. Where do we locate the new stadium? How do we improve this run-down street? How do we find a new housing type that works for this neighborhood that's lacking for the right mix of housing to meet the needs of their current residents? And then we have a team of six or eight nationally-known design experts from different fields, architects, planners, landscape architects, transportation engineers, real estate developers, and over those three days, they workshop through these mayors' case study issues. The mayors offer political strategic discussion points, and the designers offer their feedback and design advice. So for the mayors who attend, it's real problem-based, place-based learning. It's not sitting in a lecture hall and listening to a theoretical discussion about principles of urban design. It's seeing it actually applied to something that you know on the ground in your community. So in that sense, we find it very effective. Also because we keep the group small, we have only six or eight mayors and six or eight designers in the room. It's conversational. It's informal. We encourage friendly dissent and disagreement around the table. So the mayors are really engaged in the discussion. And so for that reason, we find it's pretty transformative. They go home and they're radically transformed. It's an important question. And it's one that, I mean, frankly, if they're not asking it directly, that's the question that the mayors are asking or wondering in the back of their head when they attend the Mayors Institute, like, oh, why have these guys dragged me away from town for three days to talk about design and architecture. They think of it as just sort of attaching a nice cornice to the top of the building and making things look pretty. And I think those who really understand the power of design go home understanding how design and planning can help them with other goals that they have in their administration. They didn't get elected to office on a platform of making the city more beautiful. That's a very uncommon, unpopular platform to get elected on. But they want to promote economic development in their community. And if you are able to successfully promote redevelopment with the right incentives, with the right zoning structure, with the right policies for development and for design, then you can actually turn around the economic and the physical and economic landscape of the community. You can generate new taxes in neighborhoods where the land was vacant and lying fallow and was not really a source of municipal income. And then mayors also get elected to office worried about things like improving safety and crime. And there's a lot of things that having a more healthy, more vibrant, more vital neighborhood where people are out walking, where people know who their neighbors are because they see them and interface with them every day, makes for a healthier, safer community. And so if they can take that long-term vision and see how a well-designed atmosphere and a well-designed physical landscape of the community can help meet these other goals, then that's what makes it a natural fit for the mayors to take on the physical planning and design of their community as a part of their platform. Frankly, the capitalist system that we use to develop our land makes it such that in a lot of communities you can get away with designing, with building things without designing them. And the real estate development industry can push things through. And if given no incentives, if given no vision by the community, and certainly if given no restrictions by the community, they will build the least expensive thing that they can. And that often means something that's not well designed because, you know, design takes time, costs money to a developer that's not enlightened and doesn't understand how it could affect their bottom line to have a better design project. That seems like the easiest thing to push through, just sort of a big bulky block, whatever we can get designed fastest and built fastest and built cheapest. So I think that that sort of leads to a lowest common denominator in the design and development community. But what we see is that when communities are proactive and put forward a vision and say, nope, our waterfront is about this. It's not about anything you can build. It's not about whatever you think, you know, parking in front makes your retail tenants happier. Our community stands for good design. We stand for a livable community. We stand for making some place that people want to walk and be with their neighbors. And so through restrictions, through developer incentives, through a design review process, or just by putting out a planning document that says, this is our vision for the waterfront. And if you build to meet our vision, we will help you and we will support you through that development process. And that's why you should come to our community because we have a vision and that's, frankly, an economic advantage to a developer. There are some initial forays into making measures of city-wide sustainability, trying to, you know, look at a rating system for cities. For instance, if you're, you know, if you can check 15 out of these 19 boxes and your city is sustainable or gets whatever award or label. And I think that some of those programs could do a lot of good. The challenge is they're always trying to balance the fine line between rewarding really exemplary behavior. I mean those cities that are pushing the envelope, constantly working for more sustainability and also bringing along the average, the medium city. So if you're rewarding really exemplary behavior, you're going to give the top rating to, I don't know, Seattle, New York, Chicago, Austin, Texas, a handful of these cities that have very progressive populaces. Their mayors have a lot of flexibility. They have very hot real estate markets, frankly, so that gives them a lot of municipal budget to spend on sustainability initiatives. Then you're really going to be rewarding just those communities. And does that do anything about lots of other communities around the country that are not experiencing the same real estate market, that are having, in fact, declining populations, that are dealing with increase in crime rates and sustainability is just one other difficult thing that's on their platter. Or you're going to, you know, reward everybody for sort of trying, for doing something, for improvement on their sustainability efforts. It's hard to design a program that does both, that really rewards truly exemplary behavior and also is popular enough and useful enough to a broader range of cities that it will shift the median of performance level. That's a tough thing to do in one program. When you're in an architecture studio, frankly, you're given these projects and these problems that have this, you know, set of criteria and they're never really more than one people's opinion that you have to balance. So that's not a skill we're necessarily teaching in architecture school. Your client wants this, but the neighbors want this. You know, how would you go about trying to negotiate that? So that's, I think, a skill that people are having to learn on the job, frankly, in these fields and an important one. But it just takes this mindset that the person who's signing your paycheck is now the only person who matters. That the built environment sort of belongs to everyone because we're all having to walk through it or buy it or near it.