Los Angeles, where the car is famously king, may have one of the best shots of any American city of becoming a car-optional place at scale—not just in a few trendy neighborhoods lucky enough to have good transit. Here’s why.
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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.
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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Pine Island, MN (population 3,000) has huge dreams, yet they can’t take care of their basic systems. Who pays the price?
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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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How much road does your city have—and how much does it actually have the money to maintain? We compare “calories in” to “calories out” before we binge on ice cream; what if we took the same approach to our infrastructure budgets? One city did, and here’s what they found out.
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Why does modern architecture so often lack human-scale or comforting qualities—and what did World War I have to do with it? What would a real free market in urban development look like? Why are California cities’ latest efforts to produce more housing backfiring? This and more in our top stories of the past week.
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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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A video interview with Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn describes the origins of the Strong Towns movement and how it helps cities—especially smaller ones—reclaim local control of their future stability and prosperity.
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Join Strong Towns for immersive experiences designed to help you make the Strong Towns approach real in your place.
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Mid-size regions like Kansas City don’t have the affordability struggles of, say, a fast-growing Denver or Seattle: they have their own unique challenges instead. Here’s how the “natural” affordability of homes in these places can be turned into an opportunity for an urban renaissance.
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“We’ve gotta be perfect. If a negligent driver kills someone, people see it as a necessary evil. But if a cyclist runs a red light, or a scooter hops onto a sidewalk alongside a busy street, we are just jerks driving crazy little vehicles with no regard for the law.”
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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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San Bruno, California laid out a detailed blueprint for more housing. One developer followed that blueprint. $3 million and 3 years later, the city killed his project anyway.
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This place is a work horse. It grows small businesses from scratch without recourse to bank loans or government subsidies. It provides products and experiences that are genuinely needed in the community. And it costs almost nothing to create.
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Two small Tennessee towns reveal the mighty power of a traditional downtown square—even one that isn’t designed to achieve its full potential. It’s simply the most foolproof and financially productive style of development there is.
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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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A real market urbanism looks like an organic system, where as many distortions as possible are removed and we’re left with irrational, fallible humans transacting with each other as freely as possible. There is good reason to correlate that with the traditional development pattern.
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When is it worth it to retrofit financially unproductive, auto-oriented places with walkable, mixed-use development? That dying shopping mall on the edge of your town? What about a brand new downtown for a sleepy bedroom community that never had one? This and more in our top stories of the week.
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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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