Charles Marohn will make his third appearance in four and one-half years in the free and open-to-the-public CivicCon Speaker Series on Thursday, March 3.
The president and co-founder of the Strong Towns nonprofit will be delivering a message from his newest book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: A Strong Towns Approach to Transportation. This event is from 6 to 7:30 p.m. CST in the first floor atrium of the Studer Community Institute building, 220 W. Garden Street, Pensacola.
He will explain how the values of engineers and other transportation professionals are applied in the design process and how those priorities differ from the values of the general public. By showing how transportation investments are a means to an end and not an end unto themselves, Marohn reveals how the standard approach to issues like fighting congestion, addressing speeding, and designing intersections only makes transportation problems worse, at great cost in terms of both safety and resources.
In contrast, Strong Towns says its approach to transportation focuses on bottom-up techniques for spending less and getting higher returns, all while improving quality of life for residents of a community. “Fixing our broken transportation system will involve not just engineers, but local residents and officials who have become effective and empowered advocates, connected with others to make real change,” says Marohn.
At the inaugural CivicCon event in September 2017, Marohn shared the Strong Towns approach that believes cities and towns must:
Stop valuing efficiency and start valuing resilience
Stop betting our futures on huge, irreversible projects, and start taking small, incremental steps and iterating based on what we learn
Stop fearing change and start embracing a process of continuous adaptation
Stop building our world based on abstract theories and start building it based on how our places actually work, and what our neighbors actually need today.
Stop obsessing about future growth and start obsessing about our current finances
In 2019, Strong Towns awarded its annual Strong Towns Award to Pensacola and Marohn returned to present the award. At that event he further discussed the concept of not waiting for the “big answer” or big money to solve a problem but to act now by taking small steps to improve life for a small group of people that are struggling. And if something works, then repeat those steps for more people.
Marohn is also the author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity.
Those unable to attend the event in person can watch the event via livestream on the Pensacola News Journal Facebook page or its website.
