Aaron Lubeck is putting citybuilding back into more people’s hands.

For more than two decades, Aaron has worked across the small pieces that make up a city.

Historic buildings. Infill lots. Houses. Zoning codes. Neighborhood development.

His career began in design and construction, with work spanning historic preservation, green building, and affordable housing. In 2012, he developed Durham’s first net-zero-energy home, fitting a high-performance new house into an established historic neighborhood.

Today, Aaron is Development Principal at The Rocket Shop, where his work continues across design, building, land planning, and development.

He also writes extensively about the places we build.

Aaron is the author of Green Restorations: Sustainable Building and Historic Homes and the children’s book Heather Has Two Dwellings. His essays explore housing, localism, development, zoning, new towns, architecture, and the people who shape cities one project at a time.

That writing also runs through Southern Urbanism, the organization Aaron founded to create a home for practical citybuilding across the South. He writes its Jacobs Column and has helped build the publication into a place where builders, designers, developers, advocates, and local leaders can share what they are learning.

Southern Urbanism has also pushed beyond publishing. Its work includes the Faith-Based Housing Initiative, which helps congregations explore how land they already own can become housing.

Aaron spends time teaching builders too. Through the Incremental Development Alliance, he helps people understand neighborhood infill, site planning, zoning, adaptive reuse, and the mechanics of getting smaller projects built.

All of that work keeps returning to a similar scale.

The building. The lot. The block. The local person willing to make something happen.

Aaron has built a career around giving more of those people the tools, ideas, and confidence to shape the places around them.