“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants“

Sir Isaac Newton

We don’t claim to rival Newton’s genius, but we take his advice to heart: the world is full of great ideas and timeless patterns—human-scaled ways of living that still work. Why not build on them?

Yet too often today, everyone in the real-estate chain—planners, designers, architects, engineers, financiers, developers, builders, and the officials who set the rules—are locked into preconceptions that guarantee mediocrity and spawn unintended side effects.

What if we began as if there were no “experts,” no professionals, only a world of inspiring examples? What if we first visited places we love and asked why they delight us? The answers lead to very different designs—and to a very different way of bringing them to life.

Across these places runs a single thread: the people who live with the results had a hand in shaping them—the town, the plazas and streets, their own homes and workplaces. They were guided not by mere profit but by human interest. The details reflect what they cherish.

The team behind MarketTowns is, for now, informal—driven more by a shared vision than a hierarchy. What began as a dinner conversation evolved into a book, soon to reach its fourth edition. Lately it’s clear this is more than a good idea; it may be a doable answer to the mounting challenges of our time.

Those challenges are everywhere: globally we face climate change, the threat of war, economic instability, and the fear of future pandemics. Closer to home, housing grows unaffordable, jobs become less secure, children learn more from their phones than from real human interaction, and our health suffers from the way we live and eat. MarketTowns offers a human-scaled, practical approach to enable people to form communities that protect from these threats and build places where people can thrive.

So this page titled About Us is, in truth, About You.

What kind of life do you want to live? Where—and how?

“Preconceived notions are the padlocks that keep real-estate minds from imagining anything beyond the next subdivision.”