In this episode of our podcast It’s the Little Things, Jacob chats with Jenna Jarvis—environmental engineer out of St. Louis, Strong Towns member, and winner of our Why I Joined Strong Towns fall member drive contest—about how you can start decide which of our ideas to implement first, including how to start small, how to get your peers involved, and how to keep the momentum going as you plan new actions.
When a new brewpub, restaurant, or entertainment venue opens in your town, is this a sign of growth, or merely a shift in where patrons spend their dollars? And what does that imply about cities that subsidize such things?
Historically, a decentralized, trial-and-error process was how cities “discovered” which urban design features worked best for their own circumstances. Let’s look at the evolution of front setbacks in New York to understand how this works.
Professional planners are trained to yearn for tighter urban design controls, as if cities without comprehensive, top-down planning would devolve into chaos and disorder. In reality, cities evolve according to mechanisms that allow us to gradually discover optimal urban design across time.
The story of Jayme Closs should give us cause to hug our children a little tighter, but then to love them enough to send them out boldly into the world.
This week we looked at how to design streets to slow cars without speed enforcement; how traffic engineers still don’t know how to think like pedestrians; what we can and can’t control about urban growth; the myriad benefits of local bookstores; the far more dubious benefits of dollar stores; and more.
New Jersey has been using a “cap and trade” model to let single family neighborhoods buy their way out of growth for decades. Should your city follow suit?
The Strong Towns Knowledge Base is where we bring you answers and practical advice tailored to questions you submit, by crowd-sourcing the collective wisdom of our movement. Every Friday morning, we’ll be spotlighting something new from it.
In this episode of our podcast It’s the Little Things, Jacob chats with Jenna Jarvis—environmental engineer out of St. Louis, Strong Towns member, and winner of our Why I Joined Strong Towns fall member drive contest—about how you can start decide which of our ideas to implement first, including how to start small, how to get your peers involved, and how to keep the momentum going as you plan new actions.