Let’s look at how alleys fell out of favor in the American development pattern, and how this relates to zoning codes and ADUs.
Read More
Looking at the history of the alley reveals not only why they were once so useful, but why they are underutilized in many cities today.
Read More
Overlooked and neglected for too long, it’s time to rediscover the strength-building potential of the American alley.
Read More
Somehow, as a society, we’ve drifted from ordinary people being able to build their own homes on a cash basis in an interactive, iterative way, to immense, hyper-elaborate habitats.
Read More
Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood survived the 1921 race massacre, only to be ultimately destroyed by a more unrelenting foe: interstate highways.
Read More
Five decades ago, Delft made some urban planning decisions that granted children the freedom to freely and safely wander the streets of their city.
Read More
Today, prosperity isn’t gold, land, or natural resources; it’s know-how.
Read More
In this new series, we’re looking at Collier County as a case study for how insolvent growth persists in Florida. What's the history behind Collier’s development, and where is it headed?
Read More
There is much we can learn from cities of the past—especially small, remote cities that grew up around the exploitation of natural resources.
Read More
In the postwar era, North American cities bulldozed whole blocks and neighborhoods for freeways, parking, and urban renewal. Old fire insurance maps can help us piece together what happened.
Read More
An incredible video from 1906 San Francisco—colorized and digitally remastered—depicts a time when streets were truly available for every type of user.
Read More
Before the age of the freeway, Kansas City was famously a streetcar city. The pattern of development that streetcars fostered was a highly productive one that has stood the test of time. In fact, it still generates an outsized share of the city’s wealth today.
Read More
What can generational theory tell us about the crisis we’re facing now, and how we will emerge from it?
Read More
The world’s cities have played host to a lot of human misery over the ages. But they’re also a vehicle for the very best that humanity is capable of. That isn’t going to change.
Read More
Most Americans have never lived in a time when “the inner city” wasn’t a locus of poverty, physical blight and social disintegration. Yet many of us fail to grasp the extent to which public policy had its thumb on the scale from the start in creating those conditions.
Read More
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.
Read More
Cities evolve like ecological systems—a neighborhood, like a forest, has a life cycle. The fundamental question of planning needs to shift from “Should our neighborhoods change?” to “How should our neighborhoods change?”
Read More
No name better symbolizes idyllic 1950s suburbia than Levittown. How these massive, master-planned communities—the epitome of America’s suburban experiment—have fared over 70 years tells a less rosy story.
Read More
It’s not just those who work in or with local government who have something to offer to the Strong Towns movement. Our work touches on deeper questions of how we live in community, and this is why we seek to learn from psychologists, philosophers, historians, and—in one classic 2013 podcast interview—even a religious scholar.
Read More
Historically, a decentralized, trial-and-error process was how cities “discovered” which urban design features worked best for their own circumstances. Let’s look at the evolution of front setbacks in New York to understand how this works.
Read More