Can built environments grow even stronger after experiencing some form of destruction?
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If the U.S. is advancing in its ability to build things, why does it seem like our places are falling apart?
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Many people who want to change things for the better in their place want an example of another town or city that’s already got it all figured out—somewhere they can copy. Here’s why that won’t necessarily work.
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Let's talk about some core Strong Towns concepts: complexity, incrementalism, fragility, and more!
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Here are some touchstone concepts that help underlie the Strong Towns view of how to achieve a world full of places capable of growing bottom-up prosperity
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Planning must become a job that planners can actually do in a 40-hour work week. This will require a different approach to planning, altogether.
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Cities evolve like ecological systems—a neighborhood, like a forest, has a life cycle. The fundamental question of planning needs to shift from “Should our neighborhoods change?” to “How should our neighborhoods change?”
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“Though many of our worst problems are big, they do not necessarily have big solutions. Many needed changes will have to be made in individual lives… and in local communities.” Wendell Berry wrote these words about reforming agriculture, but they apply to building Strong Towns as well.
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Cities need to be exposed to low levels of stress and disorder in order to become more antifragile over time. Technocratic planning which seeks to make our world too predictable merely sets the stage for future crises.
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Cities are complex, organic, emergent things—and we impose top-down order on them at our own peril.
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Jane Jacobs was actually more about how to think than what to do.
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The decision to pursue a career in urban planning: what's the value of it in a world where we acknowledge the fundamental complexity and unmanageability of cities? Planners as the conservation biologists of the urban ecosystem.
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The global climate is a complex system. Economic markets are a complex system. Why do we react so differently to these different forms of complexity and what can we learn from those reactions?
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A Strong Town is a resilient or antifragile town: one that can weather unforeseen disruptions to its economy, society, and environment. Building Strong Towns means creating the conditions for experimentation and being comfortable with the lack of a road map for what the future will look like.
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The complexity of humanity always makes better places than the simplicity of cars.
#wecandothis
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Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage, to move in the opposite direction.
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Cities are complex places. We need to embrace the complexity, and the difficult and sometimes painful feedback that comes along with it, if we want our cities to grow strong and resilient. Best of Blog 2014.
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