Vince Graham

Vince Graham is a US-based real-estate developer and self-described contrarian who works to combine time-tested lessons with modern advances, creating places of enduring aesthetic, economic and social value. Across more than four decades his career has involved adaptive reuse, historic renovation and the building of human-scale neighbourhoods.

He began in 1991 with Newpoint, a traditional neighbourhood on Lady Island near Beaufort, and followed it with I’On in Mount Pleasant, one of the earliest full-scale New Urbanist communities in the United States. Both were modelled on the older neighbourhoods a mile away rather than on a style guide: narrow streets, shallow setbacks, houses close enough together that a street reads as a room.

Getting them approved was the hard part. I’On took years of negotiation with a town whose zoning code effectively forbade the kind of place that town already contained, which is the paradox his work keeps running into: many of the most admired neighbourhoods in America would be illegal to build today. His firm Loci has since developed further projects around Charleston, and that obstacle, regulatory rather than architectural, is what draws him to the Free Cities idea.

He hopes the Free City concept can create greater opportunities for a more humane and fulfilling built environment.