Builder
Alicia Pederson wants courtyard living to become ordinary in American cities.
The idea came partly from experience.
Alicia spent time living in a 16th-century palazzo in Florence, where homes gathered around an interior courtyard. Years later, living with her own family in Chicago, she watched families reach the point where their apartments no longer worked for them. The next rung of the housing ladder was often a million-dollar house or a move somewhere else.
She started looking seriously at the courtyard block.
The basic pattern is old. Several buildings line the edges of a city block around a shared interior green space. Apartments can face both the street and the courtyard. Buildings can be divided among different owners and developers. Shops and other uses can occupy the ground floor. The result can support substantially more housing while still giving families light, greenery, room to play, and a smaller social world immediately outside their doors.
Alicia founded Courtyard Urbanist to study how that pattern could work in North American cities.
Her work digs into the details that determine whether it ever gets built: setbacks, lot coverage, stairs, parking, parcel sizes, unit layouts, financing, fire access, building codes, and the economics facing small developers.
Increasingly, that research is becoming development work. Courtyard Urbanist is creating repeatable building patterns, evaluating sites, working with architects and developers, and developing tools intended to make courtyard projects easier to design, finance, and deliver.
In Chicago, Alicia has also proposed a much larger ambition: make the city a world capital of courtyard urbanism, with a network of mid-rise blocks built by many developers over time.
Her work starts with a housing type.
The bigger idea is a city where families have more ways to stay.
The courtyard changes what density can feel like.
Instead of every piece of open space being pushed to the edge of a development, residents share a protected space at the center of the block. Children have somewhere nearby to play. Homes can look toward greenery. Neighbors have a place to encounter one another without stepping directly onto the street.
The buildings around it can stay relatively small too. A single block can contain different buildings, unit types, owners, and developers while still adding up to one coherent place.
That combination is what Alicia keeps returning to.
More homes. More ways to build them. And a form of city living that gives families more reasons to stay.
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