Place-making — the often invisible work of creating and improving the spaces we all share — is a complex, sprawling field of work.

There are dozens of organizations, movements, frameworks, and individuals all working on how cities and communities function — each approaching the problem from a different angle, each with their own language, their own priorities, and their own theory of change.

Some of them have been at it for decades. Some have changed laws. Some have redesigned streets and rewritten zoning codes and built real, substantial followings.

What most of these organizations share, and what drives everything we do here at Principles of Place, is a common underlying goal: improving quality of life in the public spaces we all live in and move through every day.

This post is about helping you understand that landscape — who the major players are, what they’re actually working on, and how they fit together. And toward the end, where Principles of Place fits into all of it.

It’s worth starting here, because the landscape is not always what it appears to be.

Who’s Working on This

If you’ve spent any time in this world, you’ve probably encountered Strong Towns.

Built around the work of Chuck Marohn — an engineer and planner who had a genuine reckoning with what his profession had actually produced — Strong Towns makes a rigorous and often uncomfortable case that the way most American cities and towns are physically built is financially unsustainable. It’s underpinned by a rather simple basis; the infrastructure required to maintain sprawling, car-dependent development costs more to maintain than the tax base it generates — and the gap eventually comes due. When it does, it’s the people living in those places who absorb it in the form of deteriorating roads, reduced services, and a municipal government that’s perpetually behind.

This is not abstract. You can look all across America and see evidence of this. Strong Towns has walked the streets of hundreds of small towns with a financial analyst’s eye and made this case compellingly. Their work is important, and their diagnosis is largely correct. But fiscal sustainability and quality of life, while related, are not the same thing. A town can get the numbers right and still be an unpleasant place to live.

The Congress for the New Urbanism — CNU — has been working since the early 1990s on the argument that the physical design of places is not a cosmetic question. It’s a determinative one; the functional usability of an area has a real impact on the well-being of its inhabitants.

How streets are laid out, how buildings meet sidewalks, how a neighborhood mixes housing types and uses — these decisions govern whether a place feels alive or inert, walkable or hostile, human-scaled or built for no one in particular. CNU’s influence is real, and it has produced several important offshoots:

The Missing Middle Housing framework, developed by architect Daniel Parolek, makes the case for the duplexes, fourplexes, and courtyard buildings that American zoning has largely made illegal.

You also have some interesting approaches like Tactical Urbanism, developed by Mike Lydon, offers a methodology for low-cost, temporary interventions that let communities test ideas before committing to permanent change. In a similar fashion, Better Block has transformed streets temporarily in cities across the country to show neighborhoods what a different version of their environment could feel like

They have all proven that good design matters enormously. A well-designed neighborhood eliminates whole categories of friction that a poorly designed one creates. But design, too, is a piece, not the whole picture. A beautifully designed neighborhood that no one can afford to live in has solved a different problem than the one most people actually have.

Affordability is the territory of the YIMBY movement — Yes In My Backyard — a loosely organized national network including California YIMBY, YIMBY Action, Open New York, and dozens of local affiliates.

Their argument is that restrictive zoning is the engine of the housing crisis: by making it illegal to build most types of housing in most places, American land use policy has engineered an artificial scarcity that prices people out of the places they want to live. If you can’t afford to live somewhere, everything else about that place is irrelevant to you.

The YIMBY movement has been the most politically aggressive of any of these groups, with real legislative wins in California, Montana, and elsewhere. They are also, if you watch what they actually advocate for, frequently willing to accept housing that is cheap, aesthetically indifferent to its context, and designed with little apparent interest in whether the result contributes anything to the neighborhood around it. The urgency driving that posture is understandable, but the tradeoffs it produces are real, and worth being honest about.

The Complete Streets movement, housed within Smart Growth America, has spent years making the straightforward but contested argument that streets should be designed for people, not just cars. Over 1,700 jurisdictions have now adopted Complete Streets policies, requiring that pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders be considered in street design — not as afterthoughts but as primary users. NACTO, the National Association of City Transportation Officials, works at the technical level, developing the actual design standards that cities build to. And Vision Zero, originating in Sweden and now adopted by dozens of American cities, makes the case that traffic deaths are not accidents but design failures — and that streets can be built to eliminate them.

All of this is meaningful work. Streets designed exclusively for cars are, by definition, hostile to everyone who isn’t in one. Changing that default changes what’s possible for everyone who uses those streets on foot, on a bike, or in a bus. But better streets, on their own, don’t automatically produce better places.

Adam Paul Susaneck’s project, Segregation by Design, deserves its own mention because it’s doing something different from most of the others. Using archival photographs, aerial imagery, and maps, Susaneck documents how highways and urban renewal were used — deliberately and systematically — to divide cities and destroy Black and immigrant neighborhoods. This wasn’t collateral damage. These communities were targeted because they had the least political power to resist. The friction embedded in certain places and experienced by certain communities is not a natural or market-driven outcome. It was engineered. Susaneck makes that undeniable, visually, and the work matters precisely because understanding how we got here is not optional if we’re serious about getting somewhere better.

Jeff Siegler’s consultancy, Revitalize or Die, operates from the premise that the root problem in struggling communities is often apathy — not laziness, but the specific despair that sets in when people stop believing their place is capable of changing. No policy win, no design intervention, and no funding stream can revitalize a community whose residents have given up on it. Civic health, in Siegler’s framing, is the prerequisite for everything else. He’s right about that.

And Ray Delahanty — CityNerd — is worth knowing about simply because he’s reaching people none of the formal organizations are reaching. A former transportation planner with nearly 400,000 YouTube subscribers, Delahanty makes the technical knowledge that lives inside these movements accessible to people who never went to planning school. That kind of translation is rarer and more valuable than it gets credit for.

Where Principles of Place Fits

Principles of Place exists in this same world, but differs from everything above in a couple of important ways.

The first is straightforward: we’re a publication, not an organization. We’re not out in the field advocating for policy changes, lobbying city councils, or running demonstration projects. What we’re doing is observing, documenting, and discussing — looking at what’s working in cities, what isn’t, where momentum is building, and where the conversation isn’t happening yet that probably should be.

The second difference is in perspective. Each of the organizations above operates through a specific lens. That focus is a feature, not a flaw — it’s what allows them to go deep and produce real expertise. But it also means that each one is, by definition, not looking at everything else. Principles of Place is deliberately trying to hold the broader view. Not because any single lens is wrong, but because quality of life in the places we share is not a single-lens problem. It’s interconnected, compounding, and resistant to being solved one piece at a time.

The reality is that none of this exists in a vacuum. A town’s fiscal health and the design of its streets are connected. Housing supply and walkability are connected. Civic morale and the willingness to invest in public space are connected. The work any one of these groups does lands differently — sometimes dramatically differently — depending on what else is or isn’t happening around it. And in some cases, the movements themselves have quietly made a bigger claim than their lens can support: not just that their piece matters, but that solving their piece solves the larger problem.

There is this notion that one well-pulled thread unravels the whole knot — but it doesn’t.

Very few cities are one thing away from being great. The places that have gotten meaningfully better have almost always done so because multiple things improved together — design and affordability, streets and civic investment, housing supply and the quality of what got built. The improvements compounded. The whole exceeded the sum of the parts.

That’s what we’re paying attention to here. Not any single lever, but the full picture — where things are moving, how they’re connecting, and what it actually looks like when a place starts working better for the people who live in it.

There’s a lot to look at, and we’re just getting started.