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The impact that Damon Rich had on the city of Newark when he served as chief urban designer and director of planning from 2008 to 2015 caught the eye of many, including the MacArthur Foundation, which recently awarded Rich a coveted MacArthur Fellowship.In announcing the grant, a $625,000 endowment over five years, the foundation noted the transformation of Newark as one of several outstanding projects that defined Rich’s work. It applauded his creation of “vivid and witty strategies to help residents exercise power within the public and private processes that shape our cities.”

Rich, 42, co- founded in 1992 the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), which worked with educators, artists, architects and others to develop programs that engage community-based organizations to address tenants’ rights, affordable housing and infrastructure. In 2009 he created a panorama of the City of New York for the Queens Museum to help visitors experience the foreclosure crisis. And in Newark, he teamed up with Ironbound Community Corporation to transform the waterfront along the Passaic with public parks and trails, and he was instrumental in the effort to replace Newark’s zoning and land use regulations to encourage environmental justice and accountable development.

Rich is the co-author of “Street Value: Shopping, Planning and Politics on Fulton Street,” (2010). His work has been exhibited in many venues, including the Netherlands Architecture Institute, the Newark Public Library, the Museum of Modern Art and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In 2015, Rich and Jae Shin co-founded the design studio Hector.

In a recent sit down with NJBIZ, Rich described his work, his influence and his vision for the future in New Jersey and across the country. The following is an edited version of the interview.

NJBIZ: Did you ever expect to win the MacArthur Fellowship?

Rich: Not really. I thought of the MacArthur Fellowship as something that was awarded to amazing artists and cultural figures and scientists who study things that I don’t understand.

NJBIZ: In what ways do you feel your work in urban planning affected Newark?

Rich: Before I came to Newark, I had worked as an architect, and also as a municipal official in the New York City Parks Department. Most significantly, I had founded a non-profit organization called CUP, the Center for Urban Pedagogy, and the majority of CUP’s activities are centered on creating more productive conversations and actions in the planning and development of the places where we live.

When I came to Newark in 2008, it was an amazing challenge to try to take those lessons learned in smaller organizations and scale them to an entire city, and to have to apply those skills within a municipal planning office, which is sometimes, as your readers are well aware, in the center of major debates and deliberations of how places should develop.

NJBIZ: What do you think separated you from the rest of the architects and urban planners working in Newark?

Rich: I was lucky to be schooled by many veteran Newarkers. This is a place that has a long tradition of ambitious development as well as active residents who want to engage in conversations about the future of their city. Some of the biggest projects that I had the chance to work in Newark and now as a partner in a private practice, really depended on those broad coalitions to push things forward.

In terms of the Newark riverfront, when I began my work with the city government, I was given a stack about four feet high of unrealized plans by federal government, by private land owners, by city agencies, by non-profits. Yet only recently did those entities look beyond their own plans and [understand] how more value could be unleashed by bringing their work together.

NJBIZ: What special development dynamic do you see at work in Newark?

Rich: For me, value from real estate development and planning really comes from the many people and things that come together in a place. When I look at the long history of development in Newark, at least the last 100 or 120 years, I see both a lot of activity, and a lot of exclusionary activity that cut short  development potential. I see many real estate developers who remain very uncomfortable in the space where their projects not only abut other developments but are joined and connected to them.

My hope about the current high point of development in the city of Newark and really across North Jersey, is that we try to learn those lessons the best we can. And rather than realizing that value in our individual projects, we find better ways to capture bigger value working collectively.

NJBIZ: What does the development currently unfolding make you feel about your work?

Rich: It’s an exciting time to be in Newark and that has been true for 100 years. With investments comes immense potential. However, for those of us working in real estate in Newark, it’s important we reflect on previous eras that seemed like breakthroughs.

It’s easy to look at the Gateway Center and say, ‘this was a tremendous victory for its time, it’s a tremendous investment and development.’ Yet, because of a narrowness of conception from today’s market, it looks like a seriously outmoded product.

If you think about the characteristics that are most celebrated in terms of major locational decision, whether it be an Amazon or other major players, we hear about the diversity of cities, the variety of cities, the walkability of cities. So a product like a Gateway Center, that had as its hypothesis that a better office would be one that had an enclosed mini version of a city within itself, I think seems like it is going to be threatened with competition.

When I think about investment that is going on today, I am looking for how we can get beyond some of those past achievements and figure out how to bring the full life force of the city to bear in the way that things get built.

NJBIZ: And how do you think we can go past what has been built?

Rich: I think it begins with a more comprehensive approach of value creation in the real estate market. By which I mean, rather than conceiving products that are primarily geared towards a white-collar worker housed in a suburban location who is commuting every day and arrives at his or her office not very motivated to go beyond the deli in the skywalk, we need to think more broadly about the kind of life and lifestyle and interactions that we’re looking to accommodate.

That means in the city of Newark, in my experience, whether it was working on the overhaul of the city’s zoning, whether it was pushing forward real estate development projects like Prudential and Panasonic, or making major public infrastructure investments in the street and in transit, my first question is: who in this city has something to say about this issue that can be useful in terms of how we imagine designing it and implementing it? Where are the many places where value exists in this city? So rather than walling off that value, the way you could say that many early developments did, we can connect to it.

NJBIZ: Do you think that there are areas that despite everything that has gone on in the city, still have the opportunity to bring new life?

Rich: Funny enough, the main thing they tell you about the award is that it is for the work you have not yet done. So, they put a challenge down. Yet, they say, it certainly builds on what you have done previously.

I’ve been very lucky to work for three mayors in Newark, to work for two city governments, to work for non-profits, to work for the private sector as well.

As I think about my future, we are trying to innovate ways we work with complex coalitions of private industry, community organizations, government agencies, advocates and schools to create these spaces that are more democratic, more accountable and more valuable.

In the city of Newark right now, as it has been for 100 years, there is strong and active deliberation of the direction of the city. It’s a city where you can’t really walk a couple blocks without hearing six opinions about the fight for Amazon or a decision about management of public housing or about rent control or around zoning changes.

Our challenges in Newark are related to those of other cities and towns, which is about the evenness of development. It’s about [whether] we are doing the best we can to connect all of the parts of the city to the benefits that come from investment. I’m not the only Newarker that notices difference in the investment climate from the center of our downtown to the West Ward, to the South Ward and other neighborhoods.

One of the things I want to do as an urban designer and planner is to figure out how development need not be kept inside a glass jar or a silo within the areas of the city that are proven for a certain type of product. That we can find ways to bring that kind of prosperity to all corners of the city.