“My wife and I were moving to Cincinnati,” says Nickol, “and I wanted a good grounding in what was happening in the city. Kevin and I talked about that for all of four or five seconds, and then we talked for two hours about what we were noticing around city growth and development, from his perspective doing boots-on-the-ground economic and neighborhood development, and what I was seeing doing master planning and development planning all around the world.”

Together, Nickol and Wright identified a major gap in the conventional planning process. Think of the conventional approach to planning as a spectrum. On one side, says Nickol, you have the grand visions for the future of a city or a neighborhood. These are the people “camped out in a church basement or rec center, putting dots on a map and talking about what needs to change in 30 years.” On the other end of the planning spectrum you’ve got hope for change—new development, new connections, new parks, safer streets.

“And then,” says Nickol, “there’s the giant gap in-between, where very few plans wander into: What can we do next weekend?”

This gap is a significant barrier to creating the kind of resilient, human-centered development that neighborhoods actually want and need. To address it, Nickol and Wright got a grant from People’s Liberty to create The Neighborhood Playbook, an innovative guide to helping both developers and residents create positive change. Later, they founded YARD & Company to build on the momentum generated by The Playbook.

The Neighborhood Playbook is a physical product, not an app or PDF. It is made to be written in, marked up, doodled in, and kept in your back pocket as you walk a neighborhood. Users progress through a series of five steps, or “plays.” And it’s written for both developers and residents (two playbooks in one), but ingeniously designed so that the two groups literally meet in the middle.

This is important, says Wright, because the Playbook attempts to answer the question: “How can development happen with a place instead of to a place?”

I interviewed Joe Nickol and Kevin Wright about The Neighborhood Playbook, its impact in Cincinnati and beyond, the flaws in the mainstream “If you build it they will come” approach, and much more.