Starting the Strong Towns Conversation With the Urban Thinkers Book Club
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When you see it, you can’t unsee it: Our development pattern affects everything and everyone. It chooses what small businesses succeed, who gets to walk to school and who takes a bus (if there’s a bus), where people cross the street (jaywalking or not), how safely people drive, how people live (in affordable homes or on the streets), and so much more.
We have to change the way we build our cities for the better. We must change our city's growth habits from “what can we get funding for” to “what can we do right now, with the resources we have.”
The problem of how we build our cities is monumental. But we can’t use monumental, big solutions to fix it (that’s how we got here). Instead, we must start small and work our way up.
Hundreds of people joined the Strong Towns movement this week. Are you ready to play a part?
For planner Samantha Carr in Toronto, Ontario, the first step for inspiring change was to inspire a new way of thinking. As a way to bring together planning professionals, she started an Urban Thinkers Book Club—and one of the club’s monthly novels was Confessions of a Recovering Engineer by Strong Towns president Charles Marohn.
“One of the best parts of the club is bringing folks that aren't always necessarily in a room day to day together to have those discussions,” said Carr. Despite her original thought that only planners would be interested in a discussion on the best practices for building a city, it turns out that many people under multitudes of different professions relate to the subject. As Jane Jacobs said, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
After reading the first chapter of Confessions, Carr and other professionals in the room appreciated what Charles shared: that the system followed in their daily profession did not have all the answers. The structure they followed was not perfect. “He felt like he was really doing the good work for that community,” Carr said, reflecting on Charles’s journey told throughout the book. “He realized there was an inherent set of values driving that [work] and that he didn’t really question as a professional in that space.”
Carr’s book club is growing, just like the Strong Towns movement is growing. One aspect the group appreciated about the Strong Towns message is it can be understood by everyone. You don’t have to spend years striving for a professional engineering license, or work as a planner for decades, to be able to talk about how your neighborhood should be built. “The book does a really good job of making something that feels exclusive to the knowledge of a particular set of professionals that have gone through that training process … by breaking it down and making it more of a conversation.” said Carr. “It helped lower that barrier and made it feel accessible to understand those concepts and then be able to talk about them with other people.”
The Strong Towns mission is here to support people like Carr in starting the conversation in their community, and ultimately to help them build a stronger town. But it isn’t possible without you. Yes, you, dear reader. Your donations make it possible for the Strong Towns staff to continue producing articles like this, writing books, and creating YouTube videos and podcasts, all for the purpose of inspiring and helping the true heroes of this mission: our Strong Towns members.
You can make a difference today. You can become a Strong Towns member. Not only will you be supporting the Strong Towns mission nationwide, but it will be the first step to making your town a stronger place.
Seairra Jones serves as the Staff Writer/Story Producer for Strong Towns. In the past, she's worked as a freelance journalist and videographer for a number of different organizations. She currently resides between small-town Illinois and the rural Midwest with her husband, where they help manage a family homestead. When Seairra isn’t focusing on how to make our towns stronger, you can find her outside working on the farm, writing fictional tales in a coffee shop, or reading in a hammock.