Good Ideas Need Pollinators

(Source: Unsplash, with edits.)

What do you do when you need to change everything?

It’s not a rhetorical question. The mission of Strong Towns is nothing less than to alter the default approach to growth and development in an entire continent.

That’s our goal—as opposed to something more modest—because it has to be. From the smallest hamlet to the biggest metropolis, North America’s cities and towns largely face the same problems, including:

• Ever-growing financial liabilities.

• Backlogs of deferred infrastructure maintenance.

• Diminishing returns on transportation spending.

• Deadly roads that divide communities.

• Neighborhoods in decline or stagnation.

• Difficulty meeting housing needs.

• Struggles to support local businesses and retain wealth within communities.

We recognize that these problems share an important root cause. We all adopted a radical, untested new pattern of development in the mid-20th century. We copy-pasted it across a continent, in forms like zoning codes, street design manuals, planning protocols, and financing arrangements. In the Strong Towns movement, we call this model the Suburban Experiment. It wasn’t anybody’s master plan. Federal policy and the rise of mass automobile ownership established fertile conditions for this new set of ideas to replicate, virally, in community after community.

How do you combat that? What do you do when the problem is a whole culture of development, and not individual cases of mismanagement or shortsightedness?

It’s Bigger Than Us. It’s About You.

Let’s talk about three kinds of big, ambitious challenges. First, there are those projects you can complete by coordinating from the top down. Building a building, or a rail line, falls into this category. Such a project can be vastly complicated, but it is ultimately finite in scope and duration, and follows a logical and predictable set of steps.

Second, there are projects you can complete by mobilizing resources from the bottom up. Winning an election falls into this category. No campaign succeeds without a good ground game: you need volunteer door-knockers and phone-bankers, and ultimately you need a level of organic buzz about the candidate that can’t be scripted or orchestrated. But a well-functioning and well-funded party apparatus is also vital to electoral success, with rare exceptions.

Then we have the third category. There are challenges so large, so ambitious, that you can only hope to accomplish them by giving up control, and letting the movement become bigger than you. Changing a culture falls into this category.

The Strong Towns theory of change is not that we will directly reach every policy maker we need to reach to succeed. It’s not that we will write model codes, publish white papers, or lobby governments. It’s that we will seed a cultural shift by sharing a compelling, morally urgent, and viral set of ideas. And then we will see people pick up those ideas and carry them to their own communities, tweaking them to thrive in the local environment.

In other words, the members of the Strong Towns movement are our pollinators. You help our ideas sprout new shoots here, there, and everywhere, often without the direct involvement of our small staff.

Here’s our part of the deal: We give you tools and insights. We help you connect with each other through things like our Local Conversations program, our Facebook Group, local speaking events, and the upcoming 2023 National Gathering. We also keep creating urgent and compelling content, how-to resources, and online courses like our Strong Towns Academy and our annual Local-Motive Tour sessions with top experts from around the country.

That’s our promise to you. But we also know that, at the end, we’re not going to be the most effective messenger for change in your community. You are.

Bearing Fruit

It’s working. More than ever before, in 2022 we see it working.

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The front-page feature in the October 22, 2022, edition of the Winnipeg Free Press. (Click to enlarge.)

In Winnipeg, they’re asking all the right questions. We helped contribute to an astonishing front-page feature in the city’s paper of record, the Winnipeg Free Press, examining and questioning the city’s longstanding embrace of insolvent, auto-oriented outward growth on the eve of a municipal election. But we were only asked to weigh in because tireless local advocates, including Strong Towns writer and frequent contributor Michel Durand-Wood, were already beating the drum locally, digging into city plans and budget documents to illuminate the high cost of Winnipeg’s Suburban Experiment.

Advocates for the kind of change Winnipeg needs don’t always, or even often, prevail. But the Strong Towns conversation is now happening there in a big way, and it will only grow. It needs to, until it becomes untenable for local politicians to fail to ask questions about the city’s long-term financial resilience, or to have viable answers.

The Strong Towns conversation is bearing fruit all over the place. Among the American cities that abolished their harmful parking mandates this year was Ann Arbor, Michigan. During official discussion, city council member Linh Song brought up the value of a Strong Towns approach to parking and the use of urban land, as well as our crowd-sourced map (with the Parking Reform Network) of cities that have curtailed or ended parking mandates. We know we have numerous advocates in Michigan to thank for spreading the word.

In Memphis, we’ve helped seed a deeper transformation that is now a decade in the making. The city has made a profound shift in policies and priorities, away from doubling down on suburbanization at a financial loss while inner neighborhoods deteriorated, toward reinvesting in the productivity of its core. Memphis is fighting to cut off the gravy train to Mississippi suburbs, which it has subsidized with below-cost sanitary sewer service for decades. In this past year, Memphis also instituted a first-of-its-kind building code reform aimed at making it easier for small-scale developers to build 3- to 6-unit homes on vacant lots in the city’s underinvested core neighborhoods. This is what winning looks like, and we’re proud of the role that Strong Towns thinking has played in helping Memphis realign its priorities.

None of this happens without you, our million local heroes. We may provide the pollen, but you are the pollinators. These urgent ideas don’t spread without your help. Thank you, to every Strong Towns reader and advocate, and this week, I hope you’ll take the time to support us by becoming a member or renewing your membership.

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