Basically decent people can support or enable things you find self-evidently bad. It’s easy to caricature them—it’s much harder to truly do the work of seeking to understand.
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Zoning reform is an opportunity for common ground for those on the political Right and Left. What will it take to get there?
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The latest partisan wedge issue—whether or not our suburbs should be allowed to evolve—is actually an opportunity for common ground.
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The entire suburban experiment is dependent on federal subsidies. What’s a truly conservative approach to growing our cities? Freeing them up to develop in ways that are adaptable, responsive to local needs, and economically resilient.
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In the early days of the Strong Towns movement, two supporters helped connect our work to deeper, more ancient conversations about politics, economy, and culture. They continue to inspire.
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We often talk about cities in vague phrases and buzzwords that obscure more than they illuminate. It’s time to stop.
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Nationally, we’re incredibly polarized. But zoom in on the local level—where life happens—and you’ll see we have more bright spots than dark clouds.
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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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Patrick Deneen, author of the bestselling Why Liberalism Failed (hint: he doesn’t mean the political left), talks with our own Chuck Marohn about the political crisis facing Western societies, and how rediscovering a sense of rootedness in community—defaulting to loyalty over “looking for the exits”—might be the answer.
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The Strong Towns vision is a bottom-up revolution, one in which we rediscover the power of thinking small and acting locally. And the power of this vision transcends partisan politics as usual.
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What if to build Strong Towns, we don’t just need to think outside of our partisan political boxes, but stop thinking of them as boxes at all?
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The best judgments are made with a “scout” mindset—your job is to survey the terrain and understand it—rather than that of a “soldier” whose job is to win a battle (or an argument). A social scientist explains the difference.
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Local advocates who are at each others’ throats often have legitimate, but conflicting, aims. Talking about the trade-offs involved isn’t going to make us all start agreeing with each other. But it might make our disagreements more productive.
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New research out of Boston University confirms that those who speak at local public hearings are not representative of the public as a whole. Elected officials seeking to understand constituents’ views should treat these hearings as only one source among many.
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Policy choices are often presented to us as simplistic binaries, or irresolvable clashes of competing values. Have the courage to step outside that box and ask more fundamental questions.
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What two very different reviews of the same movie can tell us about the state of the American political divide.
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So often, what we call “conversation” is simply each person waiting for their turn to speak rather than truly taking in what is being said.
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As a nation, we have multiple, profound predicaments that we need to come to grips with. This isn’t going to end well if we don’t pull together.
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It’s easy to caricature people you don’t know or understand, and it can be satisfying in a superficial way. It’s much more difficult to accept that people are multidimensional, and what you know of one dimension may not represent the entire human being.
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How should the federal government spend its proposed $1 trillion surge in infrastructure funding? Grist recently ran an article, which features several prominent leaders in the fields of transportation and planning offering their answers to this question.
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