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.
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.
Conventional thought would tell us that the new commercial developments in a city should be the most productive compared to the older buildings downtown, but that’s not necessarily the case.
This formula for improvement is observable and repeatable. How will you apply it in your place?
"Something as innocent as freshly fallen snow becomes the guilty culprit in halting the functions of our public schools."
Have you ever been dismissed at city hall when bringing up a persistent issue in your community?
"The art of a successful redevelopment project is understanding the regulations and the process for approval of the project."
Sometimes all you need to make a street less dangerous for kids is a tape measure, paint roller, and a few hundred dollars of road paint.