As the gap between academic theory and everyday pragmatics begins to shrink, the need to address the role of communication scholars who study and live in urban environments becomes apparent. Communication scholars are uniquely positioned intervene and help facilitate the ways people talk about envisioning and creating their cities and public places and spaces. As two communication scholars with (different) corporate consulting career backgrounds and (different) scholarly pursuits, we seek to discuss what a theoretically informed, practically inspired framework for how to: 1) navigate the balance between “consultant” and “scholar”, 2) enhance discussion and research about what a “better” community/city/neighborhood entails, and 3) balance reflection of how language shapes what we understand a city “to be” with the practical components of facilitating talk about the city that people involved with its everyday life envision it “to be”.