Edward Erfurt
Edward Erfurt is the Chief Technical Advisor at Strong Towns. He is a trained architect and passionate urban designer with over 20 years of public- and private-sector experience focused on the management, design, and successful implementation of development and placemaking projects that enrich the tapestry of place. He believes in community-focused processes that are founded on diverse viewpoints, a concern for equity, and guided through time-tested, traditional town-planning principles and development patterns that result in sustainable growth with the community character embraced by the communities which he serves.
Statewide zoning reform isn't producing the wins everyone expected. An architect reveals why: the permissions may have changed, but the reflexes never adapted.
Across the country, it’s clear that what truly makes a city resilient isn’t the plans, grants, or programs—it’s the people who care for one another and invest in their communities.
Small, precise zoning code text revisions can be a game-changer for communities facing housing shortages.
Better communication isn’t complicated. If your city wants more incremental development, start there.
For many small developers, the hardest step isn’t swinging a hammer or drawing a site plan; it’s figuring out where to start. Here's how Bentonville, Arkansas, is fixing that.
If you want more affordable, resilient, and context-sensitive housing, you need to equip your residents to build it. Here's how Sacramento did it.
On paper, backyard cottages were legal in Tallahassee, Florida. In practice, they were nearly impossible to build. Here's how the city changed that.
Cities shape themselves around what is easy and what is hard. If you want good development, you need to make it easy to do.
The challenge facing most small-scale developers isn’t vision or willpower. It’s isolation. If you want to get their builders' projects off of paper, you need to help them connect with a network.
West Virginia’s $1.6 billion Road to Prosperity program was supposed to cover maintenance costs and reignite economic growth. Seven years later, the money’s gone and the situation has gotten worse.
Leon Krier leaves behind a generation of designers, planners, and urbanists who see the world differently because of him. I owe him more than I can put into words.
When we recognize the housing crisis as a systems and strategy problem, we realize that there is no shortage of things cities can do right now to address it.