Urban planners often find themselves between two worlds: to demolish or preserve; exert patience or expediency; extend established ideas or exert new. For Merritt Clapp-Smith, that fulcrum role, that position of “holding tension” of two or more ideals, feels familiar and allows her to plan communities creatively, with joy, equity, and balance in mind.

Today, Merritt is a newly-minted entrepreneur and independent community planning consultant, after almost a decade working for the City of St. Paul, and years working for private firms and other cities. Her first joy in this new role was choosing “Moxie” to christen her company of one. “My first boss, back when I was an intern, complimented my work and said, ‘You have a lot of moxie,’ and that stuck,” Merritt offers, as she describes this next phase of her career. “That is a quality I want to feel and cultivate. It’s energy and an intent to DO things: to look at the way things are, question them, and try something different with a collaborative spirit.”

Merritt’s trajectory in urban planning started early. After high school, she earned an opportunity at Cornell University to join an inaugural undergraduate program in urban and regional planning. Her college counselor thought Cornell’s new course would fit Merritt’s smarts, curiosity, and interest in seeing the world from different points of view. “I wrote an essay,” Merritt remembers, “that described my life in two worlds: city and country. During the school year, my family and I lived in the city – in a racially-mixed neighborhood with the energy and social dynamics of an urban place – and we spent summers at the family cabin, in the woods of the St. Croix River Valley. Two different vibes, two different experiences. Both places were part of me; each shaped who I was.”

Moxie / mak-se / courage, pep, chops, know-how, skill, experience, savvy

With that as her foundation, Merritt spent four years considering how people connect to place and examining place as a tool that can shape lives for the better. With her Cornell degree in hand, Merritt began practiced her urban planning and her urban noticing skills in Japan. Newly married, Merritt landed in Yokohama, a dense and dazzling city, located in an outer ring of the sprawling, mega-metropolis of Tokyo. “Yokohama has ocean views,” she exudes, Japan’s largest seaport, plus “an extensive train system, high rise buildings, and a high value placed on community.” In Yokohama, ”individuals are valued as participants in community,” she says. “If an individual’s actions are positive or shameful, it reflects on community.” Citizens, then, must balance individual desires and behaviors with community needs, complying with a cultural mandate “to remain in good standing” with the larger world around them.

Her Yokohama experience sharpened Merritt’s recognition of opposing forces in society and lent an understanding of human and environmental interconnectivity. “We affect each other in very deep ways, in everything we do,” she says. “We can’t look at an individual’s acts and decouple ourselves from responsibility.” Yokohama’s highly built environment and human density also impressed on Merritt the value of green and shared spaces. She noticed that every ounce of public park space was animated, used for different activities, by different people, at different times each day. “That taught me, as a planner, to invest in amenities that cut across boundaries, to create public spaces where different people can interact and coexist in a neighborly way.”

Merritt spent 11+ years as a Principal Planner with the City of St. Paul (2006-2017), a stint that honed her boundary-spanning approach. Among other municipal projects, and for over a decade, Merritt guided the once-in-a-century opportunity to plan an entirely new neighborhood - on the former Ford Motor Company’s Twin Cities Assembly Plant, on the bluffs of the Mississippi River - from the (recently decontaminated) ground up. The 135-acre site (now called Highland Bridge) is one of the biggest single-site development projects in St. Paul in modern times, in terms of acreage and complexity, and promises a “new urbanism” model of a walkability, ecological sustainability, and a built-environment that encourages a strong “sense of place.”

Highland Bridge Neighborhood, artist’s rendering

Merritt’s was the monumental task of guiding the Highland Bridge project from concept to completed plan. This project, like many urban projects, was fraught with challenges ranging from environmental to financial to interpersonal. Merritt was cognizant of how the various sides in the design debate might emerge, and she welcomed (even as she braced for) the engagement, noting in retrospect, “A lot of people showed up who didn’t like the direction of the project. And they were doing what they SHOULD do: they tracked, they followed up, they spoke up. Others, who DID support the project, also showed up.” She held the tension of the various points of view. She was also aware of how those opposing sides might look to outsiders and critics, those neither closest to the action nor keen to nuances or overlapping shared values, adding, “From the outside, it looked like the two sides were always far apart. Like our political parties today. It’s hard to see common ground from the outside.”

St. Paul and its many project partners broke ground on the Highland Bridge site in July of 2020, near the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and just weeks after the murder of George Floyd, ensuing civil unrest, and our collective racial reckoning. The confluence of those events – layered atop decades of civic underinvestment in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities – confirmed that the City’s equity in housing, recreation and transit at Highland Bridge were timely and on point. Yet density became a flashpoint for some, and some neighbor’s temperatures flared. Undiminished, Merritt says those bumps and others added hue to her thinking on process as an evolving art form: “I thought a lot about the public engagement piece, about how we create a forum in which people can feel constructive. We want to avoid a public meeting where people yell into the mic at their neighbor because of a difference of opinion, or because we haven’t allowed enough time for people to say their piece and find common ground with others. One way we do that is by starting conversations among neighbors and stakeholders earlier in the process, not waiting until the 11th hour to let the public have their say.”

Acknowledging the complexity, Merritt sounds hopeful, confident, and JOYFUL as she embarks on her solo urban planning consultancy with Moxie. She is excited to work with communities embracing diversity and who, like her, are bold enough to hold multiple views at once. “Let’s get folks talking about the future,” she exudes, “let’s ask them what they want. Let’s build comfort into our places, and a sense of community. Let’s offer the chance to connect, to meet our neighbor, and talk about the easy things and the difficult things.”