Chris Arnade’s Dignity is a striking look into the faces of “back row” America—the poor, the homeless, the addicted, the forgotten. And it’s a challenge to us as a society to design policies that respond to their needs and values.
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Vision Zero aims to end all traffic deaths. Can they do it on a national scale?
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Thor Erickson—a longtime leader in the neighborhood and civic nonprofit sector—shares how you can use nonprofits to build strong neighborhoods in your own community, including how to bring your unique perspective to neighborhood investment, how to partner with your local government, and how to get your community behind your mission.
Giorgio Angelini’s documentary Owned chronicles the commoditization of homeownership in the U.S. and its fallout—both for those who were left out, and for those who were sold promises that we’re now struggling to fulfill.
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What if to build Strong Towns, we don’t just need to think outside of our partisan political boxes, but stop thinking of them as boxes at all?
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We’re sharing the video and audio from our July 2019 live webcast Q&A with Jordan Deffenbaugh and Jim Hodapp, primary organizers of Strong Towns Local Conversations Strong Towns Sioux Falls and Strong Indy.
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Traditional architecture has evolved through millennia of trial and error to harmonize with our unconscious impulses, make us feel comfortable and encourage positive social behavior. Modernism too often throws those lessons out the window—and one architect thinks the trauma of World War I had something to do with why.
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Unpacking “smart cities” hype through a Strong Towns lens: when should we get excited about technological fixes to our cities’ problems? And when is sticking with a low-tech (but tried, tested, and resilient) approach more prudent?
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Andy Diaz—founder at Urban Acres in Peoria, Illinois—shares how you can use local food to build community in your own neighborhood, including how to find the right investment for your neighborhood, how to grow your efforts incrementally, and why cities like Peoria and beyond need more $1,000 heroes (not $1 million heroes).
A failed mall can feel like a monument to your community’s economic failure. A presidential hopeful has an idea to bring them back to life. But is it a good thing?
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Greta McLain—Artistic Director at GoodSpace Murals, a Minneapolis-based organization that promotes community development through public art—shares how you can use public art to build community in your own city or town, including how to create a tribe of public art advocates in your community, and how to turn stakeholders leery of public art into advocates.
Rafa Wright—Detroit native, community leader, and soon-to-be owner of a new, Detroit-based neighborhood grocery—shares how you can make neighborhood-led investments in your community, including how to observe where people struggle, how to find the right investments for your neighborhood, and how to get your neighbors involved in the process.
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There are huge swaths of 1950s and 1960s suburbia that need a bit of TLC—and expensive, top-down “sprawl repair” isn’t going to be up to the task. What’s required is a more patient, grassroots approach. Urban planner John Yung has some ideas.
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You might think you want your government to be as streamlined as efficient as possible—until a hacker takes down your whole data network in one fell swoop.
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Planting a tree, fixing a sidewalk or a street light, painting a crosswalk: these are some of the highest-returning investments we can make today. So why aren’t our cities oriented toward them? Two very different conversations featuring Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn explore this question.
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Once a month we host Ask Strong Towns, a members-only live Q&A webcast. Here’s the video and audio from this month’s.
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Strong Towns has been urging cities to end single-family zoning for ten years. But are cities listening?
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For decades, many city leaders have thought the only way to end blight was to tear down the eyesores and start fresh. Mobile, Alabama had another idea.
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Ed Morrison—author of Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership—shares how city leaders can grow their economies by fostering collaboration on a local level, including how to find existing assets in your community, how to encourage existing organizations to focus on a shared goal, and how to incrementally pursue that goal.
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Scott Ford, former Director of Community Investment for South Bend, Indiana, knows a thing or two about how to turn around a declining place’s fortunes. He shares some key insights with us.
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