Who Is the Strong Towns Message For?

Strong Towns advocates at the recent National Gathering in Charlotte, NC. (Source: ZED images.)

A pediatrician, a pastor, a software developer, a pilot, and an urban planner walk into a bar. (Or, well, a happy-hour drink line.)

It’s not the setup for a dumb joke; it’s a small sampling of who I encountered at the Strong Towns National Gathering this May in Charlotte, North Carolina. Our 500 attendees were a remarkably eclectic group in almost every way.

Our membership has been like this for a long time: not a professional clique, but a broad sampling of everybody who loves and cares deeply about a place. If you are drawn to Strong Towns, it’s because you’re someone who looks around you with a mix of frustration and determination, someone who can’t help but imagine the neighborhood you call home not as it is, but as it ought to be.

I’ve witnessed this for years, but it still astounds and delights me that a whole bunch of people who don’t design cities for a living, and who didn’t have an employer footing the bill, chose to come to Charlotte in the middle of a work week to spend a day convening with and learning from others like them: grassroots changemakers.

The cultural difference between the Strong Towns half of this conference and the CNU half of this conference is really fascinating.

— M. Nolan Gray (@mnolangray) June 2, 2023

Our Content Strategy: Both Accessible and Substantive

Strong Towns is a movement for anyone who wants in. As the editor-in-chief of our content stream, it’s my job to keep us deliberate and insistent about this. The change we hope to inspire is in the spirit of Jane Jacobs, who famously wrote, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

When you read a Strong Towns article or watch a Strong Towns video, it might be about urban planning, or transportation engineering, or the nuts and bolts of housing development, but it is not written primarily for the people who do that work.

We are deliberately accessible in our writing, avoiding not only jargon, but also language that more subtly serves to signify a set of professional commitments and associations. We want to write about places the way ordinary people think about places. For example, we’ve had discussions internally about making an effort to talk about “people walking” instead of “pedestrians.” We write about “means” of transportation, not “modes.” Saying “mode” is for transportation planners and those who want to sound like them. It’s a subtle form of in-group signaling that says, “I know what I’m talking about, and this conversation is only for people who know what they’re talking about.”

When it comes to how the world you inhabit affects you—your ability to make connections, to get where you need to go, to live a productive and rewarding life—you know what you’re talking about as well as anyone. That is the deep conviction that animates our work here at Strong Towns.

But we also know that you need to be able to speak the language of the people who make the decisions about the built environment. The engineer redesigning your street. The planner administering the zoning code. The developer putting up the new apartment building down at the corner. Effective advocates for change understand how the people they’re trying to influence think; how they speak; how and when they make decisions.

We’re here to be your translator. Your bridge. We write, at times, about highly technical issues. The hidden incentives that explain why your neighborhood looks the way it looks. The economics and politics of city building. Our commitment to you is to deliver that substance without dumbing it down, but in language that cuts through the jargon and the gatekeeping.

Internally, we call it “Smart Content.” Our litmus test for this is made up of three rules:

1. Is it credible to technical professionals like engineers and planners? That is, is it free of error or misrepresentation of the things they know to be true?

2. Is it credible to elected officials and other community leaders? Is our content something they could proudly put before their constituents and say, “This has greatly influenced my thinking, and you should read it, too”?

3. Is it emotionally and morally resonant to everyday citizens? Is it clear what the human stakes of the story are and why you should care?

We’ve expanded our content production capacities dramatically in the past year, in line with these priorities.

We have a team of staff writers now, covering the struggles and the success stories you need to know about, whether it’s fighting freeway expansions in Louisiana and Texas, taking livable space back from excess parking in Fayetteville and Philadelphia, or incremental developers reviving neighborhoods from the ground up in South Bend and Memphis.

Since this time last year, we’ve added an amazing video production team and a better-than-ever YouTube channel.

We’re more active, on more platforms, on social media than ever before.

We continue to develop our library of Strong Towns Academy courses, and connect you with experts in transforming cities through programs like our Local-Motive Tour webinar series.

That’s what we’re doing to support you. You, reading this, are the ones who are going to bring about a stronger development pattern in North America, by forcing the issue when needed and changing minds in your community. We are your navigators and your translators when you need one.

Now it’s time for a confession: For a long time, I didn’t think it would work. This approach of writing for everyone, speaking to everyone. I was wrong.

I’m an urban planner and a policy geek. I began reading Strong Towns in about 2010, and the blog, as it was then, spoke my language. Our founder Chuck Marohn was a disillusioned planner and civil engineer speaking largely to others like himself, assuring them that they were not alone or crazy in feeling that the whole system they were a part of was producing radically destructive outcomes, over and over and over. I liked the wonky deep-dives into TIGER grants and TIF, federal funding formulas and form-based codes.

As our audience rapidly expanded and our list of contributors grew, I worried that Strong Towns risked “dumbing down” its reputation for incisive, iconoclastic, and unusually clearheaded analysis of complex issues. I cringed a little at the thought that we would turn into clickbait—you know, ”Here Are 9 Reasons To Fall in Love With Walkable Streets!”

I was wrong. I didn’t need to worry about becoming fluffy clickbait. What was actually true was that we had tapped into a huge audience of people who had a keen understanding that something is wrong with the way we build our places. And you were hungry not just for affirmation, but for substance, depth, clarity, and, most of all, for actually effective ways to take action toward living in a more resilient place.

I had to unlearn my instincts about who the serious people in the room were. Whenever our members get together, it reaffirms the truth: anyone at all can be a serious and effective advocate for change. The atmosphere when Strong Towns-minded people get together is electric. No professional silos, no timid conventional wisdom; just passion and curiosity and impatience to make a difference.

I’m proud to be in dialogue every day with this incredible movement, producing content that helps you improve the places you love. I hope you’ll take some time this week to support our shared efforts, too, by becoming a member or renewing your membership. Don’t worry if you don’t have the means to give a lot: literally any amount helps.

Thank you, and keep doing what you can to build a strong town.

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