And in 2014 and after, the movement took hold in more institutions:

Every year from 2015-2018, I organized a Small Summit. We convened leaders from a variety of sectors—Strong Towns, AARP, Congress for a New Urbanism, the American Institute for Architects, and the Urban Land Institute, to name just few. We met in one conference room for one day. During our short time together, we shared any and all achievements from the previous year related to small and incremental, we made plans for the coming year, and we looked for opportunities to collaborate.

In fact, the movement of the small and incremental went beyond the fields of urban planning and real estate development. In addition to Strong Towns favorites by Nassim Taleb, books like New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram and Cathedral & Bazaar by Eric Raymond taught us that the small and simple can create incredible complexity, increase both efficacy and participation, and maximize risk-adjusted financial returns.

The “how” of small and incremental development is founded on an even more important “why.” Charles Montgomery wrote about it in The Happy City. But I want to give the last word to Richard Sennett. He is the author, most recently, of Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City. But back in 2011, Sennett wrote:

I’d like close these remarks about the quality of life in cities by focusing on the Holy Grail for urban designers like myself, the quest to build truly mixed-use environments in order that the inhabitants develop a more complex, adult understanding of one another. […] The key to this kind of planning is informality: leaving the mixed spaces loose in form, open to a succession of small entrepreneurs and businesses. […] My argument to you is that alertness and attentiveness to the unfamiliar, the strange, and the uncertain is an adult strength, a form of human development which urban designers and planners like ourselves can foster by taking down the internal, isolating walls of the city.

That sounds like an urban neighborhood where I’d like to live!

The Movement in Miami

I did what I could to help support the movement in Miami. In 2012, I wrote a grant to the Knight Foundation to fund for four years a small urban building prototype course at FIU School of Architecture. The course was designed by department chair Jason Chandler, who also made it a mandatory graduate course and has continued the course to this day with other funding.