Making your community stronger is too big a job for one person to do alone. Here’s how one Strong Towns member connected with likeminded people in his own city…and some practical steps on how you can do the same.
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Rural communities across the Midwest are careening toward collapse, and all at the same time. What this means for the region as a whole. Small towns need Strong Towns too.
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The downtown may not seem as vibrant as it once was. But there is more there than meets the eye, and this community in Pennsylvania is using the arts to build a future every bit as bright as its past.
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Kansas City has more freeway lane miles per capita than any other city in the country…and possibly the world. Can a city so devoted to edge development for the last 60 years pursue a more fiscally responsible approach to development? There are reasons to be hopeful.
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They left a city that is the envy of urbanists everywhere, for a small town seemingly in the middle of nowhere. The cofounder of the Little Free Libraries movement reflects on what makes his rural community strong.
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As the demographics of a small Minnesota town change, people there are discovering the power of social capital and a rich associational life. Here’s how some residents of St. James came to feel at home for the very first time.
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The Strong Towns movement is comprised of real people in real places. We’re meeting more and more of them on the road. Now we’re sharing their stories in a new social media campaign.
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At the heart of top-down approaches to both criminal justice and city planning is a misconception about true “efficiency.” Restorative justice — like Strong Towns — is the bottom-up alternative, drawing from the wisdom of the past while taking the longview on success.
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In the criminal justice system, as in city planning, the perceived need for “efficiency” is often at odds with the deeper needs of the community. Yet that’s not how our societies evolved to handle conflict. How can we restore some of the wisdom of the past? A fascinating conversation about the intersection of restorative justice and building stronger towns.
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Those two things are all you should need to be able to make sense of your city's zoning code. At least that's the philosophy guiding South Bend, IN planners as they overhaul the city's regulations to be more legible and useful.
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A “green belt” suburb with its roots in the New Deal faces pressures associated with conventional, auto-oriented development. How should residents approach decision-making so that the town’s future is as rich as its past?
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A walk down a thriving main street like this one will be a reminder why our downtowns are worth protecting and nurturing.
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Is growth inherently bad? Are declining neighborhoods really a good investment? And, most of all, can we actually make the changes we need to make our communities stronger? Chuck Marohn answers these and other questions about his new book Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. What questions do you have?
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The Strong America Tour isn’t just a chance for us to get out and talk about the Strong Towns vision. It’s a chance for us to capture firsthand how members of the movement are bringing that vision to life in their own places.
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The ideas behind Strong Towns began in my small town of Brainerd. A tour starting in Memphis is designed to bring them home.
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A leading infill developer in Victoria, BC is building beautiful homes that address the housing crisis and make neighborhoods stronger. They’re also changing the conversation about what’s possible.
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In Seattle, policy victories tend to be long-fought and hard-won. What will it take to achieve a city that can flex, evolve, and meet its residents’ needs in a more organic way, without every change becoming an arduous political battle?
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My bedroom community’s streets are aging, and we recently learned that we need to double our pavement preservation spending to keep them from declining further. Here’s what we’re doing about it—and why the Strong Towns philosophy is instrumental for us.
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A remarkably diverse coalition of activists is moving the needle in Seattle on the question of who—and what—belongs in the city’s neighborhoods. And they’ve scored two big policy victories in 2019. Is it enough?
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Cary Westerbeck—Strong Towns member and Founder of Bothellites for People-Oriented Places (Bo-POP)—shares how you can create people-oriented places in your own community, including how to educate people about people-oriented places, how these places create more financially resilient places, and how you can demonstrate your vision.