“People Always Knowing Where You Are:” What “Southern Urbanism” Means to Atlanta-Based Planner Ryan Snodgrass

This is part of a nine-part series where three students ask three questions to architects, planners, and figures at the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU 32).

Photo credit: Tyler Lahti

This past May, student fellows at Southern Urbanism attended the thirty-second national gathering of the Congress of New Urbanism (CNU) in downtown Cincinnati. While there, the fellows caught up with urbanists from all over the United States and beyond to chat about their work. Each interviewee was asked three questions about what they do and the goals that their work advances. The conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

Ryan Snodgrass is a lifelong Southerner from Mobile, Alabama and an urban designer and a community planner at TSW, a design firm based in midtown Atlanta, Georgia, and offices around the country. Snodgrass mostly works with private developers to see projects through from concept ideas to the creation of real places. 

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ZT: This idea of “Southern Urbanism” or maybe urbanism that's focused on the South, what does that mean to you?

RS: It’s honestly community, for me. Growing up in Mobile, Alabama in a downtown area, you know, I grew up on streets that I could walk to the local bodega, walked down a couple blocks to my grandmother's house and all of our friends and family and friends in between. So that aspect of community, knowing that you're never many blocks away from someone that you could go and knock on their door-- and in those days, bring back home because we didn't have cell phones – that aspect of community. People always knowing where you are, essentially. 

ZT: How do you feel the work that you've done in Georgia is different or similar to some of the other planning work that you see around the country, especially highlighted here at CNU? 

RS: I feel like with the new urbanist movement, there's such a basis of community within that, with our practice and what we want to provide in our developments. It's almost harkening back to that small town, right. You know, traditional neighborhood design, right? It's right in the name.

What I had when I grew up in the South, it’s not just in the South. I'm seeing that other communities across the country also have the same desires for that. So it's just “what kind of architecture are you putting into that community space?” really is the difference.

It's the vernacular architecture of the space, and that's what's so important. You know, when I work with clients and there's a desire to say, do design guidelines, I never want to regulate specifically the architectural style of the development, but really help them through the guidelines and understand basic academic architecture principles of form, massing in relationships between those structures, because that's the basis of what then the architects come in with. The vernacular aspect, that's their focus and their specialty. And then the community comes in and adds that grit that makes it, you know, not ours. And I think this was a big topic of the CNU. It’s not our job to necessarily activate the space, but it's to provide a space for the community to activate themselves. So we can't force that, but we can provide the elements for them to make it their own.

ZT: What have you taken from CNU? What’s been your highlight? 

RS: Really, it's the community of talking with other colleagues and asking questions. You know, the largest benefit I get is having these general conversations in the hallway, meeting up with someone from the last conference and then continuing that network and then, you know expanding their love and that's how we start learning about other projects and what their specialties are and what they see as what's important to a design and that helps you build your understanding and helps you become a better designer.

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Zoe Tishaev is a recent graduate at Duke University. You can find her coverage of last year’s CNU, hosted in our backyard in Charlotte, NC, here.