Having a city filled with one type of tree may look pretty, but what happens when pests or pestilence start killing off that particular tree species en masse?
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The effects of winter weather on your town is one way to gauge its resilience.
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Here are some touchstone concepts that help underlie the Strong Towns view of how to achieve a world full of places capable of growing bottom-up prosperity
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Centralized systems are good at getting us cheap food, cars, and toilet paper—until they’re not. They’re also really bad at isolating deadly outbreaks.
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One of the key thought leaders who has inspired the Strong Towns movement has an admonition and a warning for the world—about how our institutions got so fragile in the face of a crisis like the present one.
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The ultimate irony of our economic system is that the only mechanism we have to satisfy our needs is to increase our neediness.
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We've traded stability for growth, but now we find that we have neither.
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Centralized systems are good at getting us cheap food, cars, and toilet paper—until they’re not. They’re also really bad at isolating deadly outbreaks.
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The coronavirus is revealing how fragile our economy is. (Look no further than disruptions to the global supply chain.) As we rebuild, will we double down on the failed status quo…or build something ANTI-fragile?
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The more efficient we make our systems, the more fragile they become. To make our cities stable and prosperous, our development pattern needs to become less efficient.
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There is no better way to discredit a campaign to reduce auto fatalities than to compare the risk of death by auto crash to the risk of death by viral pandemic.
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We have to stop looking at the stagnation and decline of our blocks and neighborhoods as a normal part of the development process.
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Easy money and uncontentious budget meetings sound nice in theory. But private and public sectors beware: lack of stressors can make decision-makers undisciplined and obscure huge bills that are sure to come due.
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In North America, stadium projects are almost synonymous with silver bullet disasters. But does that have to be true?
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There is no such thing as a truly free market; the market exists within a system of rules and incentives. And in America today, that system privileges stability and efficiency at the federal level, at the expense of making our cities and towns fragile.
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Cities evolve like ecological systems—a neighborhood, like a forest, has a life cycle. The fundamental question of planning needs to shift from “Should our neighborhoods change?” to “How should our neighborhoods change?”
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The best judgments are made with a “scout” mindset—your job is to survey the terrain and understand it—rather than that of a “soldier” whose job is to win a battle (or an argument). A social scientist explains the difference.
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Come on, Chuck, just give it up already and tell us what works. If it were only that easy.
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Cities need to be exposed to low levels of stress and disorder in order to become more antifragile over time. Technocratic planning which seeks to make our world too predictable merely sets the stage for future crises.
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Cities are complex, organic, emergent things—and we impose top-down order on them at our own peril.
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