The most brilliant innovations in building cities are already embodied in the traditional development pattern, a foolproof approach to creating resilient and productive places that was developed the hard way.
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The advocacy group Transportation for America makes a bold move on transportation funding. We applaud them for it.
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A trip to Italy reveals the physical, social, and even cultural benefits of walking. But coming home to the auto-oriented U.S. reveals something too: just how dangerous, difficult, and unpleasant we’ve made things for pedestrians.
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A first look at the Strong America Tour presentation, this one from our recent visit to Seattle.
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Conventional approaches to public investment tend to be expensive, dull, difficult (or impossible) to undo, and often divorced from the lived struggles of real people. There’s a better way.
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Is growth inherently bad? Are declining neighborhoods really a good investment? And, most of all, can we actually make the changes we need to make our communities stronger? Chuck Marohn answers these and other questions about his new book Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. What questions do you have?
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Endless growth is a luxury we literally can’t afford. Here’s why the path to true prosperity requires local communities to opt out of an economy of greed and bring decision-making back home.
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Ancient cities reveal the extent to which humans have co-evolved with their complex human habitats. As we were making our cities, they were making us. And yet we’ve discarded much of this hard-won wisdom of the past.
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The ideas behind Strong Towns began in my small town of Brainerd. A tour starting in Memphis is designed to bring them home.
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Strong Towns believes towns need to be obsessive about their revenues. But does that really mean building more revenue-generating prison centers?
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The best financial investments our cities can make are those that humbly respond to how people struggle.
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Think tanks and government agencies aren’t solving our housing crisis nearly as fast as our cities need. Should we let the public have a shot—and give the person with the winning idea a big prize if they can make a dent?
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California recently passed a statewide rent control bill. Will it protect tenants, alleviate the housing crisis, and strengthen communities? Or is it another massive #california intervention that will do little to clean up the mess made by the LAST massive intervention?
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Public officials trying to make their city’s street more humane are often thwarted by the professional engineers giving them advice. If that’s your city, it’s time to make a change.
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Patrick Deneen, author of the bestselling Why Liberalism Failed (hint: he doesn’t mean the political left), talks with our own Chuck Marohn about the political crisis facing Western societies, and how rediscovering a sense of rootedness in community—defaulting to loyalty over “looking for the exits”—might be the answer.
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The Strong America Tour starts this week with a swing through the Pacific Northwest. Here’s what to expect.
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The most successful companies iterate. Before they go “all-in” on a new product, they prototype, test, learn and adapt. If only there was a similar process cities could use before committing massive resources to something that may not work. Oh wait, there is! In defense of the much-maligned pilot project.
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We can destroy and rebuild all kinds of places and measure success in terms of Gross Domestic Product, but lets stop pretending that trading local wealth for national growth is a good thing.
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Hint: the Right isn’t any better.
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The unproductive use of infrastructure has put most cities, even those that are superficially prosperous, in a position where they won’t be able to afford to maintain what they’ve built. The signs of this crisis are everywhere—if you’re willing to look.
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