The shopping mall, an icon of America’s suburban experiment, has fallen on hard times. But don’t start cheering; that doesn’t mean we should assume that one comes next will be a better deal for communities.
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In this episode of our podcast It’s the Little Things, Jacob chats with Darren Smith—Founder, President, and CEO of Traipse—about how you can boost your historic business district with gamification, including how to gamification can boost tourism, get more traffic for merchants, and make your historic business district the destination it deserves to be.
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Two recent articles illuminate a troubling trend toward locking ride-share, bike-share and scooter users onto proprietary platforms, making it harder to plan trips that could really free us from car-dependence.
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Urban neighborhoods can appear either stubbornly resistant to change, or prone to sudden, cataclysmic change. One reason is that we’re all constantly adjusting our behavior based on what we think everyone else believes the future holds.
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Is a desire for local character your jam? If so, fight for missing-middle commercial space in your neighborhood. Fight for the corner bar and the corner store. We need an approach that is much more flexible, more true to what humans want from cities, and messier.
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We don’t form our opinions about beauty, the value of a dollar, or the value of a house or neighborhood, in a vacuum—we come up with those beliefs based on a long chain of assumptions about what we think other people think.
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In an earlier Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck Marohn chatted with urban analyst Aaron Renn, who made the case for Carmel, Indiana’s massive debt as an investment in a high-quality place for posterity. In today’s episode, Chuck pushes back more forcefully on the assumptions underlying Carmel’s big gamble.
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In New Hampshire, the state charges local planning boards with looking at whether the zoning they have created is going to make a town prosperous. This implies a clear obligation to do the math on costs and benefits of new development.
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Retrofitting an urban, neighborhood school to resemble a suburban campus is bad public policy. Doing it in the name of safety is incoherent.
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This week, we looked at how local development regulations get the details wrong, how the American Dream of homeownership is evolving, another way to measure a community’s underinvestment in maintenance, the challenges of transportation in rural America, and more.
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We know how to make our streets so safe that no cyclist really needs a helmet. Should we all wear them anyway?
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Strong Towns principles aren’t just good for your community’s bottom line. They’re good for its health and well-being too. Here’s a one-stop guide to some of our best content explaining why.
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As American families abandon traditional trick-or-treating for “safer” alternatives like Trunk-or-Treat, a rare opportunity for neighborhood community engagement is lost.
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Being carless in rural communities, whether because of finance or circumstance, can be a debilitating and isolating situation. How can we meet rural America’s transportation needs in meaningful yet affordable ways?
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