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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How do we minimize the chance that our best intentions will go awry and leave everybody worse off? Let’s set these 3 ground rules.
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Conventional approaches to annexation — and even annexation reform — have failed to create stronger cities and towns. Here’s a modest proposal for a better way.
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Wastewater engineers and the communities they serve may be suffering from the same delusion—that the good life will go on forever.
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Every major historical event is accompanied by predictions that it will change everything forever. For the most part, it never does.
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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 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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A retrenchment in the stock market will be devastating to our cities. It’s also inevitable and, in some ways, necessary.
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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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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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If public officials are going to use debt to pay for things, they must be vigilant about their lack of real skin the game.
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We must work to reduce the negative impacts on our cities and towns before we try the next trendy planning intervention to solve our problems.
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Most of our investments need to be riskless, but a small fraction need to be high risk, high reward.
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What is going on in the doughnut of despair surrounding downtown Detroit is not a policy choice. It is a consequence of policy choice. There is no bringing back the illusion of wealth or, to paraphrase Tomas Sedlacek, Detroit can not get back its unsustainability.
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Can we help cities become antifragile by changing the way they receive aid from the state?
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Jane Jacobs was actually more about how to think than what to do.
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An update on the Antifragile book club.
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