We’ve explored the outside of Fairfax County’s Eden Center before, but what does the inside of this surprisingly fine-grained strip mall look like?
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Incrementalism is not an end in itself. Nor is it about a “small-is-beautiful” aesthetic for its own sake. Instead, it’s a practical pathway toward resilient, financially sound places.
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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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We glorify our country’s rough-and-tumble entrepreneurial history, yet we often look down on people who embody it today, and on the commercial landscapes that result.
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Local and state governments have stepped in to fill the gap for businesses when the federal response was either too slow, too small, or not tailored to the right needs.
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Comparing the process of furnishing two apartments—one in Ecuador, the other in the U.S.—was a reminder: order and efficiency aren't always what they're cracked up to be.
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Investing in a supposedly “smart” future won’t overcome the failure to get the “dumb” stuff right. The former mayor of Seattle explains.
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Every year, Black Rock City burns down. But could it be the role model your city needs?
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Incrementalism is not an end in itself. It’s not about stubborn insistence on some sort of small-is-beautiful aesthetic for its own sake. Incremental development is a practical means to the end of resilient, financially sound places.
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The core neighborhoods of our big cities and our small towns have more in common than we might think.
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This week on the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck talks with behavior change and sustainability expert Ruben Anderson about the good life, and how we fool ourselves into thinking we can use systematic rationality to create it for ourselves.
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A tactical urbanism success in Cincinnati demonstrates the ability to solve problems on our streets—in this case, parking for dockless scooters—by rapidly prototyping solutions in low-cost, low-risk ways.
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In working to create better places, keep the stakes low, so even skeptics are more willing to indulge some risk. Take a little step. Root the conversation in reality. Then adjust and press on to those big plans.
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What does Strong Towns have to do with Mormonism?
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Rather than allow for natural pedestrian movement and traffic calming, my city has recommended funnelling pedestrians into a signalized crosswalk so they can wait their turn to cross the street in an approved manner. I believe that is the wrong answer to the right question.
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As I engage more in this work of neighbourhood-level doing, the role of local knowledge is becoming clearer to me. It seems almost cruel that at a certain scale, local knowledge is worth everything.
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If you can't take a large problem and break it down into small, doable increments, you're not thinking hard enough.
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In an era of looming economic, social, and environmental disruption, the urban planning profession needs to be talking less about how to make cities efficient and attractive and more about how to make them resilient to the worst-case consequences of our actions. This is where Strong Towns thinking fits in.
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A reference list of Strong Towns terminology.
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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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