All too often, development happens to a neighborhood rather than for a neighborhood or with a neighborhood. “The Neighborhood Playbook” can help.
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Professional planners are trained to yearn for tighter urban design controls, as if cities without comprehensive, top-down planning would devolve into chaos and disorder. In reality, cities evolve according to mechanisms that allow us to gradually discover optimal urban design across time.
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When you’re moving about in the world, it’s really hard to appreciate just how much land is devoted to accommodating high-speed car travel—or just how much life we could cram into the same piece of land if we didn’t have to.
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The Strong Towns movement offers a template for creating a world we can be justly proud to pass on to our children, in a time in which so many of us feel like we're floundering to salvage the broken one we inherited from our parents.
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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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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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At Strong Towns, we have a lot of good things to say about the kind of places we built before the automobile era. Does that mean it’s really all just about nostalgia for a simpler time? Hardly.
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We hear it everywhere we go: people want, and cherish, the kind of complete neighborhood where you can meet most of your daily needs within a 15-minute walk. What will it take to create more such places in North American cities and towns?
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Once ubiquitous, then endangered, the American front porch is making a comeback. From rocking chairs to rock music, a conference near Oxford, Mississippi celebrates the past, present, and future of the surprisingly powerful front porch.
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“Sustainable” is a buzzword that often conjures images of technological wizardry aimed at solving environmental problems. But what if our ancestors knew a lot more about sustainability than we give them credit for?
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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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During a semester in Spain, I realized that an urban, walkable place need not imply high rise buildings, crazy traffic and overcrowded streets. Traditional development offers the convenience and productivity of urban living at a small-town pace.
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We use the phrase “traditional development pattern” in dozens of Strong Towns essays. Here’s your one-stop-shop explainer article as to what that means.
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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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We’ve destroyed so many traditional, human-scale neighborhoods in America that we tend to think of the ones that remain—like New Orleans’ famous French Quarter—as inherently exotic, the kind of place you love to visit but certainly wouldn’t live. Let’s stop treating timeless, great urban design like it’s only for tourists.
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Come on, Chuck, just give it up already and tell us what works. If it were only that easy.
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An interview with Steve Nygren, developer of Serenbe, Georgia, about how Serenbe is unlike conventional suburbia, and why Nygren thinks it holds lessons for how all of our communities could achieve a better way of life at a lower cost.
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Your Strong Towns Knowledge Base question of the week, answered here.
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It matters what size chunks we build our cities in. Making room for many small-scale development projects on small lots is the universal historical model for a reason, and modern cities could stand to get back to it.
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Professional planners are trained to yearn for tighter urban design controls, as if cities without comprehensive, top-down planning would devolve into chaos and disorder. In reality, cities evolve according to mechanisms that allow us to gradually discover optimal urban design across time.
Read More