The Adaptive Urbanism Turn
Field States’ last Annual Benefit Report told the story of a boutique design studio becoming a focused force for place-based transformation. In 2024-2025, our work was intensely focused on the Old Town neighborhood that surrounded our office – a place in need of care and design and strategy – where we were civically involved and developed projects focused on cultural and small business activations on the ground floor, and converting an office building into a hub for advanced manufacturing innovation.
When we published the last Report, we were laser focused on the Venice Biennale. In the summer of 2025 Production Potential – our argument that vacant office space can become advanced, clean, urban manufacturing – was featured as a Special Project at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, seen by a global audience from May through November 2025. It stretched our design and delivery capabilities, and pushed us to develop research, analysis, and visualization. We anticipated Field States using that momentum to pivot toward (or, sharpen our focus on) downtown production projects.
What has happened instead is far more interesting. Over the past year, we have developed a theoretical and applied framework we call Adaptive Urbanism. This includes downtown production, but only as one example of a much broader set of responses to a deeper trend in American urbanism: the pacing problem. The world moves faster, today, than the systems that design, build, and govern cities. The built environment cannot keep up with what we need from it. Adaptive Urbanism is a systematic approach encompassing financial, institutional, analytical, and designerly imperatives – it is how cities learn.
Adaptive Urbanism grows naturally out of my doctoral research, but it is only possible through brilliant work of the Field States team and the support of our clients.
Simon Giles, a long-time colleague who has become a deep thought partner and author of Adaptive Urbanism, is focusing, in particular, on its applied dimensions. We welcomed Catalina Sanchez as operations director, and expanded Mora’s role as urban designer. Our team of independent contractors, Bryan Boyer, Kim Smith Claudel, Ewan Robertson, and Emi Day, contributed robustly, and we were lucky to have terrific interns, Nick, Malaya, Maggie, and Maya. We worked with The Port of Portland, the City of Portland, Re:Vision, Prosper Portland, and property owners.
With the development of Adaptive Urbanism, we set an intention to cement our regional reputation, expand into new markets, build organizational capacity beyond founder dependency, and launch a four-part platform. We have made meaningful progress along each dimension, while navigating the challenges of local politics and slow building climate. The through-line across expansion and contraction is a clarified purpose.
That is to say, this is the year Field States found its center; Adaptive Urbanism is a strong motive force for our mission, and a clear lens through which we now evaluate every place, advise every client, and write every essay. This field does not need another tagline. Adaptive Urbanism is, instead, a claim about what good urban work is: not maximizing near-term return or imposing a fixed plan, but restoring a place’s capacity to absorb economic, technological, climatic change without stranding its buildings, its capital, or its communities.
Around that center, the firm resolved into four arms that had been latent for years: Field States (consulting), Field Discovery (knowledge and editorial), Field Ventures (investment and development), and Field Tech (technology). We are launching (or soft-launching) these in sequence, to avoid over-extension and stabilize our capacity to deliver on each before attempting the next.
We have invested heavily in building this capacity, and expect returns through the second half of 2026 and beyond. This report articulates our direction and our limits, as well as a full self-evaluation using the B Lab Standards. We found our mission is clear – and that our work makes places better through building adaptive capacity – but we do not yet measure it. Closing that gap is a primary focus for the next year.
Matthew Claudel Founder & CEO
Field States exists to help places adapt for the better by designing physical, economic, institutional, and analytical tools, and putting them to work in real places. When we succeed, buildings, districts, and systems that can absorb change and keep creating shared value under conditions of radical uncertainty. As an Oregon Benefit Company, we measure success not only in financial return but in public value created: assets kept from stranding, districts made more resilient, and the public good that arises from accessible governance and finance.