Even before the pandemic, towns and cities across North America were drifting toward bankruptcy...and many of them didn’t even know it. Now’s the time to take control of your community’s financial future.
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We recently shared the Strong America presentation at Talks at Google during a recent trip to Manhattan.
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The Strong Towns approach to city building is fundamentally different than conventional practice. Here’s a short list to help you see the difference.
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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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Today we kick off our member drive, your opportunity to support this bottom-up revolution and bring needed change to cities across North America.
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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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Information about our city’s revenue, expenses and liabilities is usually presented in ways that disempower most people from making informed decisions. But what about folks who aren’t a Level 20 Spreadsheet Wizard? How can we use data to better tell the story of where we are now — and empower more people to write the story of their city’s future?
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A first look at the Strong America Tour presentation, this one from our recent visit to Seattle.
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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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We chose Memphis to kick off the Strong America Tour for a reason: the city is both an object lesson in what has gone wrong in American cities, and what could go right. And Memphis’s example helps us see why in places that are going to experience a renaissance, it’s going to come from the grassroots.
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