Chuck sits down with Ryan Johnson, the founder of Culdesac Tempe, the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the U.S. They discuss the realities of living in and developing a community like Culdesac.
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There is nothing radical or reckless about letting your child cross the street. So why are parents across the country facing criminal charges for doing just that?
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How did one of the most dangerous streets in Rhode Island turn into a safe and comfortable place for people to walk, bike, and shop? It’s all about community and local context.
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Chuck sits down with Steve Nygren, the founder of a unique community just outside of Atlanta called Serenbe. They discuss the process of creating Serenbe, which features walkable, mixed-use “hamlets” surrounded by nature.
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Instead of relegating walkability to college campuses and tourist towns, let’s embrace it as a key to community strength.
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Advocates agree: better urban planning starts outside, not in a conference room. Walking your neighborhood reveals what reports can’t.
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The U.S. senior housing market is poised to shift from a surplus to a shortage in the next five years. In this episode, Abby and Norm Van Eeden Petersman, Strong Towns’ director of Movement Building, discuss the implications of this shift and how to give more options to seniors. (Transcript included.)
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In historic cities, land was treated as a scarce resource and every inch of it was used with ingenuity. This created productive and charming places that could meet the evolving needs of residents. Here are a few ways we can bring that traditional productivity and adaptable charm to modern cities.
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The way we design our places forms a lesson in being in that space. Children learn important lessons from third places that bring us together — lessons they can’t learn in private spaces like yards that isolate us in the name of privacy.
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To create change, you need community engagement. Unfortunately, many cities have complicated systems for engagement that take a lot of time and effort to work with. Here's how one community in West Virginia is cutting through that red tape.
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Conducting a walking audit is an quick, easy and free step that anyone can take to start improving their place. In this article, trained architect and urban designer Edward Erfurt demonstrates how to do so, using a recently completed sidewalk project in his community as an example.
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Driving from my dismal exurban hotel to the walkable downtown of a Florida beach town led me to a resolution: Start seeking out the kind of lodging that accentuates the best reasons for visiting a place, and hopefully discourage the kind of development that’s contributing to its demise.
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All of the land used in cities can be divided into two categories: Places and Non-Places. Places are productive destinations, while Non-Places are unproductive padding between destinations. Once these Places and Non-Places are marked on a map, it becomes obvious how much land cities waste on Non-Places.
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Thousands of elected officials and people who work in local government want to make their streets safer. Here’s how you can help them do that.
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Why is it that when a place is [pick one: walkable, bikeable, beautiful, lovable, inviting, human-scale], it so often gets coded as being “gentrified” and therefore elitist? When only the rich can afford nice places, the solution isn't to stop creating such places but to create vastly more of them.
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When it comes to Halloween adventures, the traditional development pattern always comes out on top. Here’s why.
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When analyzing car crashes and identifying ways to prevent them, local experts — residents who are familiar with the crash sites — can often identify issues and solutions that technical experts miss. Here's how technical experts and elected officials can tap into that local expertise.
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North America's built environment makes it too dangerous for most children to walk to school. Edward Erfurt, Strong Towns' director of community action, knows that from experience. Here's how he's planning to make the street outside his son's school safer.
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Greenfield development may be appealing to people who are fighting the housing crisis, especially on cheap rural land. But if these developments are the only places with housing affordability, people who can't drive — whether due to age, disability, or finance — are out of luck. That's not a real solution.
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If you could ask anything from a downtown redevelopment project, what would it be? For a lot of people, it’s a place to sit. This may be surprising to some, but public seating plays an important role in creating prosperous communities. Here are a few of the reasons why.
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