Introducing Unconventional Urbanism
An exploration by Abby Newsham
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Hey everyone, I’m Abby Newsham, an urban planner based in Kansas City, Missouri.
If you’re an avid podcast listener, you might recognize me from Upzoned with Strong Towns. After six years with the show, I’ve decided to start something new: Unconventional Urbanism.
This idea began after a recent visit to my hometown of St. Louis.
During this trip, I revisited a place I grew up exploring called the City Museum. It had been years since I’d been, and walking through it again was a surprisingly touching experience. The chaos, the creativity, the layering of materials and ideas felt like stepping inside the very things I’m most drawn to: art, architecture, urban design, sculpture, natural materials, and the magic of incremental change.
I later watched a documentary about its founder, Bob Cassilly, and realized something I hadn’t fully understood before. He wasn’t just an artist. He was an incremental developer in the purest sense. Imperfect. Creative. Stubborn. Visionary. Unconventional.
A recent trip to Disneyland in Los Angeles, and my later watching of the “Imagineers” series had also given me the same feeling. So did my trip to Spain to see the architecture and art of Antoni Gaudí, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. And my travels to Guanajuato, Querétaro, and Mexico City to see beautiful mosaics and natural architecture. Appreciating what people have built with their own hands and creativity.
And the word “unconventional” stuck with me. What draws me to citybuilding isn’t just policy or process. It’s people. Specifically, the kind of people who can’t help but tinker with the world around them. The ones who refuse to settle for the default.
They don’t just install a door… they find one with character, or they make it beautiful.
They don’t just plant shrubs… they turn their yard into something expressive, alive, even strange. They reuse materials, layer meaning into spaces, and create places that feel deeply human.
These are the people who led me to organizations like the Congress for the New Urbanism, the Incremental Development Alliance, and Strong Towns. Not because they follow a formula, but because they challenge it. This spirit is also what led me to creating Small Developers of KC eight years ago.
Upzoned was rooted in current events. It asked: What’s happening right now? How does it relate to the Strong Towns conversation?
I’ve realized now that news doesn’t really inspire me. People do.
Unconventional Urbanism is a shift in focus for me. It’s about the individuals shaping places in creative, scrappy, and often overlooked ways. Artists. Small-scale developers. Designers. Planners. Entrepreneurs. People doing meaningful work that doesn’t always fit neatly into a category.
This project is an exploration of ideas. More importantly, it’s an exploration of people. The goal is to surface stories that expand how we think about citybuilding and to build a shared understanding of how places come to life.
If there’s one thing I believe, it’s this: the future of our cities, towns, and neighborhoods won’t be built by convention alone. It will be built by the people willing to do things differently.
And if we’re lucky, “unconventional” will one day be conventional.