Pay Attention to How a City Makes You Feel

Note: Join Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn in an Ask the Author webinar tomorrow at 12 p.m. Central. As part of our new Strong Towns book club, he’ll be answering your questions about the Strong Towns book. More information here.

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Humans have been building cities for almost 10,000 years. Over many centuries of testing and tinkering, we developed ways of building communities that best support human flourishing. This was hard-won wisdom, the ever-evolving byproduct of an essentially infinite number of little experiments, developed in good times and bad. The result: a way of building that was adaptive, productive, strong.

And then everything changed.

In the first few decades of the 20th-century, North Americans essentially chucked all that time-tested wisdom and started to build cities in ways that would be unrecognizable to our ancestors. Chapter One of the Strong Towns book describes how the towns and cities of today differ from those of yesterday. Here are a few, which we’ve compiled into a chart for the first time (quotes are from Strong Towns):

Another difference—one that can’t be easily captured in a chart—is how these two types of cities make us feel.

Monterosso, Cinque Terre. Image credit.

Think back to an experience you had in a town or city that developed according to the “spooky wisdom” of our ancestors. This could be a different city you’ve visited, a different neighborhood in your own city, or, if you’re fortunate, maybe even your own neighborhood. The experience that comes to mind for me is the time my wife and I visited northern Italy, and the days we spent walking around the five villages of Cinque Terre.

Now remember an experience you had in a neighborhood developed according to the conventional 20th-century approach. For many of us this is as easy as stepping out our own front door.

Compare and contrast the two experiences.

• Did one neighborhood feel more vibrant than another?

• Could you see some of the differences outlined above being played out in the day-to-day of everyday life?

• Which of these two neighborhoods is more likely to still be a livable place in 150 or 200 years?

In the past, we’ve published articles that describe the experiences of some of our writers as they’ve visited countries less in thrall to the North American development approach. For example:

• The Streets of Paris, by Charles Marohn

• Lessons from the Streets of Tokyo, by Andrew Price

• This Neighborhood in Germany Shows Us Why American Planned Communities are So Abysmal, by Taylor Dotson

• How I Learned That an Urban Lifestyle Does Not Imply Living in a Huge City, by Robert Sulaski

• Grand Forks Goes to Copenhagen, by Jonathan Holth

For good reason, we spend a lot of time here at Strong Towns talking about how the suburban-development pattern is bankrupting our communities, making us less safe, and less connected. We urge cities to #DoTheMath when deciding where to invest their precious resources. As vital as those things are, we shouldn’t discount subjective feedback like beauty and how a place makes us feel. These can’t replace the hard logic of things that can be measured, but they are useful nevertheless. They can be our first hint that something here is working…or not.

We’d love to hear more about your contrasting experiences in communities that developed according to time-tested best practices and communities developed according to today’s conventional (and ultimately disastrous) approach. Leave a comment below or—even better—come tell your story in the Strong Towns book club.

Top image of Riomaggiore, Cinque Terre via Unsplash.

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