Welcome to Strong Towns!
Thank you so much for joining the Strong Towns movement!
Bookmark this page as a one-stop shop where you can easily explore Strong Towns resources and connect with other Strong Towns members in your area. If you have any questions, or if you don’t find exactly what you’re looking for, don’t hesitate to reach out. Contact Norm Van Eeden Petersman, our Member Advocate, at norm@strongtowns.org.
Start here: Strong Towns 101 Course
Want to learn how to make your community more economically prosperous and resilient, no matter what lies ahead? This short, four-part course gives you the tools you need to get started in clear, understandable language, with practical action steps.
Course members will learn about:
The insolvency crisis facing America's cities and towns
How this happened (and why it's not your fault)
How to approach these challenges with a Strong Towns framework
Strong Towns Articles & Podcasts
Each week, we publish 10–15 new articles. We also produce three weekly podcasts. You can check out the daily feed at strongtowns.org/stmedia.
If you want a few recommendations to start with, check out the following:
12 Ideas That Embody How Strong Towns Advocates Think
Engage with Email and Social Media
We have an email list where we regularly send bite-sized takes on Strong Towns issues. And while social media is a strange place, we share intelligent stuff every day, both new and from our archive, along with our take on stuff we see from other places. We’d love to connect with you:
Explore the Strong Towns Approach
Strong Towns Founder and President Chuck Marohn has written two books, both from Wiley & Sons: Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (2019) and Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Towns (2021).
Action Lab
We created the Strong Towns Action Lab to put resources and examples into the hands of people ready to do something. You can explore by topic, as well. This is where we are curating our most important, most actionable resources from the last 12 years. We are continuously expanding this resource.
Events
We do a broad range of events all around North America, as well as online. These include:
In-person events.
Workshops.
Walking tours.
Virtual events.
Community boot camps.
These events are designed to accelerate understanding and adoption of Strong Towns ideas and principles. To learn more about our upcoming events, click here.
Strong Towns Academy
Explore this series of online courses on core Strong Towns topics. Thousands of people have already registered through our free “Strong Towns 101” course. We also have in-depth courses on transportation, housing, and urban design, with still more courses coming soon. All our courses are eligible for continuing education credits.
We have also released a batch of excellent webinars for people who want to take action. These are one-hour sessions on various topics, with direct steps for immediately accomplishing things.
Local Conversations
All across North America, Strong Towns members are creating Local Conversations. Local Conversations are groups of Strong Towns advocates and members who live in the same place, and meet to discuss how Strong Towns principles can make their place stronger. To see if there is a Local Conversation near you—or learn how to start and grow your own—visit the Action Lab.
Community Action Lab
A 24-month program, the Community Action Lab is the most comprehensive resource Strong Towns offers. We choose five communities each year, and work on multiple fronts to:
Introduce Strong Towns ideas to their town, city, or county.
Engage the public in conversations about growth and public investment.
Train local leaders to apply the Strong Towns approach to the challenges and opportunities facing their community every day.
Crash Analysis Studio
The Crash Analysis Studio creates an alternative framework for analyzing car crashes. The studio sources traumatic collisions from motivated citizens, and then brings together a panel of technical and non-technical experts for a video discussion of the crash. The panel goes beyond merely blaming crash victims to instead analyze the multiple factors that caused the crash and, subsequently, identify what can be done to reduce the frequency and trauma of future crashes.
These video sessions are free to attend for the general public and are released afterwards as an online series. Then, Strong Towns will help you take these models and resources and establish a Crash Analysis Studio in your own community.
Connect with Other Strong Towns Advocates
In addition to connecting locally, we encourage Strong Towns advocates to connect across distance. Two of the best ways to do this are via the Strong Towns Facebook Group and on Slack.
The Strong Towns Facebook Group is a space to build relationships with other readers and members of the Strong Towns movement.
Slack is filled with different discussion "channels" where readers, listeners, and members share ideas and converse on Strong Towns-related topics. Slack is accessed by invitation only, but we're happy to include you. Just answer a couple simple questions here and we'll get you set up soon.
The Strong Towns Toastmasters Club is your place to learn from others and become a persuasive advocate of the Strong Towns message where you live.