I recently had the opportunity to attend the Nygren Placemaking Conference in Serenbe, Georgia. Serenbe is a master-planned, self-proclaimed “wellness community” on the outskirts of Atlanta that has attracted international attention for its unorthodox development approach. In its layout and built form, Serenbe has more in common with a village in the English countryside than with most of the suburban subdivisions that pepper the forests around Atlanta.

Serenbe founder Steve Nygren, a veteran of the Atlanta hospitality industry, tells his practiced origin story as follows. Alarmed by the encroachment of subdivision developers on the scenic Chattahoochee Hill Country where he and his family owned a farmhouse, Nygren decided to reach out to his neighbors and build consensus around an alternative to the business-as-usual expansion of Atlanta’s exurbs. Over an exhaustive, multi-year process involving no shortage of peach cobbler, the area’s major land owners and the Fulton County government reached an agreement: a small fraction of the land in the hill country would be developed in a compact, New Urbanist fashion to accommodate projected population growth. The majority, in exchange, would be set aside as rural and natural preserves, through transfers of development rights (TDRs).

Serenbe is the first of those compact communities to break ground in the area. Over a decade in, it is now about 15% built out, with approximately 650 residents. Many of the businesses in the community cater to healthy-living trends: a yoga studio, a spa, a farm-to-table restaurant. Serenbe’s key selling points to prospective residents are health—air quality, local food, and ubiquitous access to nature—and an idyllic vision of community in which residents are involved and invested.

I first read about Serenbe a decade ago in the New York Times, and since then, the development has received no shortage of plaudits… as well as some pointed skepticism. CityLab compares it to the utopian intentional communities of bygone eras, many of which ran aground on their own ambition. Fast Company points out that it’s part of a broader trend of wellness communities that has become very big business indeed for a certain type of well-heeled buyer. The general thrust of press coverage is a combination of admiration for what a nice place it is, and doubt that the model has broader applicability.

At Strong Towns, what we’re concerned with is the long-term resilience of the places we, as humans, build. And when we say that, here’s what we mean:

A strong place is adaptable: it can evolve in the face of disruption—economic, social, environmental—to continue to meet a community’s changing needs.

A strong place is fiscally sound: it produces enough real wealth to pay for the maintenance, in perpetuity, of the infrastructure that supports it.

A strong place is iterative, and never finished: it is built by means of “small bets” rather than large gambles, so that the feedback received can inform the next set of incremental experiments and investments.

These are the questions I had in mind as I visited Serenbe: how does it hold up according to those principles?

Serenbe is intriguing to me because it embodies some real contradictions: it is master-planned, high-end real estate, and has been developed according to a tightly controlled and orchestrated vision. And yet it embraces the organic in some ways you wouldn't expect. It is, in its internal design and infrastructure, a paragon of sustainable practices. And yet it is completely tethered to the economy of metropolitan Atlanta, dependent on that economy (and likely on the proximity of the world’s busiest airport) for its existence.

I anticipate I’ll write a more thorough piece in the future on Serenbe’s planning principles and future trajectory. For the moment, let's just take a tour.