Is a city “dynamic” just because its charts point up and to the right? Chuck uses a week in the UK to question that assumption. In Manchester, a swelling population of 20‑somethings looks like success, until you notice how many smaller places have been drained to supply that energy. In one of those towns, residents speak of decline, crime, and the loss of their pub, even as few can name a moment they truly felt unsafe. Across focus groups, government programs, and carefully planned districts, he traces the same pattern and asks: when growth is easy to measure, what deeper dynamism are we missing?
Hey, everybody. This is Chuck Marohn with Strong Towns. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. It's been a while since we've done a solo episode with me chatting. For some of you, this is your favorite. Some of you are just going to skip right over this, so I probably said it at the beginning: it's nice to chat with you.
I love interviewing people. I love hearing from them. I love having those conversations. Sometimes, when I'm traveling, like right now, I've had a long stretch of travel and it gets hard to schedule these things. I also, when I travel, build up a lot of things that I want to talk about, and a lot of things that give me insight I wouldn't get if I just stayed in the office.
In the early days of Strong Towns, I traveled a ton, and we had this joke: if someone offered me a hot dog and a couch, I would show up and speak. We were doing everything we could to share the message every place we could. This movement doesn't need me to do that anymore. In a sense, the fire has caught, and it's creating its own heat and combustion. Now, when I'm out on the road, there is a certain acceleration. When I can go talk to places, and we have multiple other people out speaking and doing these engagements, it really does add fuel to the fire and accelerate things. But if I went away and stopped doing this, nothing horrific is going to happen. I still do it, though, and I do it partially for me.
I learn so much being out on the road.
You hear about politicians who travel around and go to all these places. In the presidential election, you've got to spend months in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. I've heard it argued that this is a really good filter to put people through because you actually have to meet real people struggling with real issues and learn about things you could maybe fake your way through in a debate or with speech prep or having a writer assist you. You can't fake it when you're out on the road. You can't fake it when you're actually talking to people.
I found that same thing, and it's almost like a superpower. I've been doing this on the road since 2011, so I'm 15-plus years into this. You could not get the education in American places that I've been able to get by being out on the road. I don't think I'm smarter than other people. I don't think I have some deep well of knowledge. I love to read. I'm an obsessive reader, sure, but the thing that I've gotten, that very few people have received, is the ability to go to places, meet with people, hear their take, hear their issues, and see and experience it firsthand.
I've spoken Strong Towns in every U.S. state. I have been to every major city. I don't go as a tourist, where I'm going to see the three high spots and then leave. I've walked neighborhoods in most of these places. It has given me a wealth of appreciation, a wealth of insight, and a lot of love for this country, the people in it, and the things they're going through. I feel like I have a perspective that is not deeply informed in every way, because I know there are things I'm ignorant of and things I don't get and don't understand. I accept that. You could live multiple lifetimes and not learn it all. But I've had the privilege of being able to visit a lot of places, and it's given me an insight that very few people have.
I say this as a preview because I was invited to spend a week recently in the U.K., touring around. This was not a tourist trip. This was a working trip, but I got to experience and understand different parts of the United Kingdom as a way of helping have a conversation about dynamism.
I think I'll go through my trip a little bit and give you some of my insights from along the way. But let me preface it with this: I think I've said this before, but I'll say it again. I generally don't read news from U.S. news sources. I don't watch cable news. I don't listen to the podcasts that news and policy people do. I don't read Matt Yglesias. I don't listen to Pod Save America. There are certain things people here do that I think they think make them well-informed, and maybe they are. I don't do those things.
I have a New York Times subscription. I have a subscription to The Atlantic, which I do enjoy. I've got a Wall Street Journal subscription. A lot of those, I will look at the headlines and read an article here and there, but I'm not reading any of those sources religiously. The news source that I read religiously, and some of you will gag, but I find it really helpful, is The Economist. I think I've subscribed to it for 20 years. I like The Economist primarily because their take on U.S. news is not unbiased, because we all have a bias, but it is not inundated with the American bias. The stories they choose and the things they focus on tend to have an outsider's lens, which is a lens that I appreciate.
They also have news from around the world. While I don't think I'm the most worldly, informed person in the world, a big portion of the news that I consume is what The Economist deems important from different parts of the world. I've found that has come in handy and given me decent perspective. If I'm going to spend an hour a day on news, three-fourths or half of that is from The Economist.
The Economist is based in the U.K., so they have an extra helping of U.K. news. I know who the prime minister of the U.K. is, and I know some of their politics, because you get it in The Economist. It is treated, in a sense, as equal with other things that in the global economy would be much larger. But because it's The Economist, England is given oversized coverage, let's say.
So I'm going over there, talking about, listening to, and learning about dynamism. From my reading of The Economist and other sources, dynamism is one of those issues that the U.K. has struggled with for some time. Why is their economy not as dynamic as other economies? I'm going to simplify this down for the discussion, because the magazine is called The Economist. It's funny from a guy who spends a lot of time bashing or questioning the views of economists, but this is one of the conversations that economists are having about the U.K.
Oftentimes, dynamism is simplified down to growth, or some related metric of growth that can be tracked, measured, cataloged, and contrasted across different regions. There's a sense that the U.K. has experienced underperformance in growth and productivity. They've, in a sense, lost their mojo, lost their dynamism. I'm not sure I agree, but that was what I was there to have a conversation about.
My week started in Manchester, a northern city in England. Manchester was presented to me as the most dynamic U.K. city outside of London. As a little aside, I did get to go to Poynton. Those of you who have read Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, my second book, know that I wrote a little bit about Poynton. It has the intersection that was designed by Ben Hamilton-Baillie, the shared-space intersection. They removed the traffic signals, pavement markings, and signs, and have an open, shared-space intersection as a solution to what was otherwise a very nasty traffic problem. I got to go see it, walk around it, and film it. I shot a little video of it, and that will be on my YouTube page.
Most of my day in Manchester was spent in a meeting with economists and others talking about the issue of dynamism, and then getting a tour around the city to look at some of this. I feel like American economists are the worst in terms of hubris and lacking humility. I did not find that with the people I was in the room with. There were some assertions of fact, and then a lot of questions. I appreciated the fact that we dwelled a lot on the questions.
But I'm going to give you one of the assertions, because I'm going to skew it. I think it is a bad underlying assertion. The assertion was: Manchester has something unique that they've been able to capture that has resulted in tremendous productivity growth and dynamism, and we should figure out what that is and export it to the rest of the U.K. There were charts showing this. You've got productivity going down across many places, and then it goes up in London and Manchester, while other cities are going the wrong way. Liverpool is going the wrong way.
To me, this is not a complex question. You can step back and look at Manchester, and this was affirmed as I went around and looked at the city. If you take the population pyramid of Manchester, and for those of you who don't know what a population pyramid is, this is something used by demographers where they look at the age distribution of people within the city. At the very top, you'll have people who are 100 years old. At the bottom, you'll have people who were just born. Flowing out from the sides is the percent of the population in that place that is of that age. What you get with a really healthy population pyramid looks like a triangle, a pyramid. You have a lot of young people and then diminishing fewer older people at the top.
If you look at a city like Liverpool, their population pyramid looks like a box: a lot of older people, proportionately not as many working-age people, and not as many young people. It is a place that, demographically, would not have much dynamism. If you look around the U.K., a lot of the demographics that you're going to see in cities are a box, or in some cases even have a gap in working-age people.
When you think of a population pyramid, ages zero to 18 or zero to 20 are not, in economist-speak, productive, contributing parts of society. They actually cost a lot. It costs a lot to send people to school and provide services to young people. But if you've got people in their 20s, you've got a great working-age population. That's where you get your dynamism. That's where you get your entrepreneurship.
When you have people in their 30s and 40s, they tend to be the people who are starting businesses or creating a lot of employment opportunities for others. Not necessarily the high productivity that you get with 20-somethings who are willing to work really cheap and really hard, but people who are at a different point in their careers. That's where you get your entrepreneurs, investors, startups, and all that. Then you have people in their 50s and 60s, who tend to be the capital for a system. They tend to provide the investment money. They have accumulated resources, and they're going to spend and invest that in things that will grow. A healthy economy has a lot of people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. That middle group creates this sync back and forth, where you get good capital investment put into businesses with good, cheap, young workers.
Manchester has a population pyramid that looks like a ski slope, and then like a Christmas tree. It's skinny at the top, broadens out in the 20s, and then comes in and goes down like a tree trunk. There are very few of the expensive young people, very few of the expensive old people, and lots and lots of people in their 20s who are willing to work really hard, work late, don't cost much, and spend a lot of their money on discretionary things. These are a great part of a dynamic workforce, the base of a dynamic workforce.
Manchester has huge dynamism. They don't have huge dynamism because they birthed a bunch of 20-year-olds and they finally reached that point in life. They have a lot of dynamism because they strip-mined the rest of the country of 20-year-olds. Many of them went to London, and many of them ended up in Manchester. When we walked around and looked at it, you could see that. It was obvious. It was everywhere.
Manchester has made a lot of investments in the kind of housing in the downtown that young people looking to meet other young people and swap DNA would want to live in, near restaurants, clubs, parks, gathering places, theaters, and exciting things. This is a really cool, fun, hip place to be. The type of housing, the little plazas, the walkability, all this stuff in the core of Manchester, were new, exciting investments. They were all really cool. It was a lot of fun. This is a really exciting place to be. I get why they're proud of it, why they like it, and why they would be excited about the level of dynamism they've been able to create there.
Here's the problem: it's not replicable. Particularly if you're not going to have an aggressive immigration policy where you're going to import a bunch of 20-somethings and strip-mine other parts of the world to bring them there. The Manchester strategy is not one that can be replicated over and over again. There's no other place to strip-mine to bring to some other town. Sound familiar?
The following day, I was in a small town. I'm not going to name it because I was invited to be part of a focus group, and I agreed that the focus group and the people in the room would be anonymous. This was a real focus group put together by professionals who do this for a living. They got a random sample of the population in this place and brought them in.
It was a good representative sample. You had people with obviously different origin stories from around the world. You had immigrants and long-time residents. You had men and women, blue-collar workers and white-collar workers, young people and old people. It felt like a good mix, a fairly good cross section that put a check in every demographic box you would want.
The thing they were trying to get at in this survey was the impression people had of their community, of their city, and of what needed to happen to make things better. That second part came out of the discussion, because they did a good job of not presupposing that everybody would think the place was doing poorly. But pretty uniformly, everybody thought the place was doing poorly.
When we went around and heard from people, the answers were: it's dying, it's going the wrong direction, we're losing our future. It was a lot of the things I have heard across small towns and rural areas for my entire life. It's a lot of the things that people say about my own community, where I live: the young people are leaving; the people moving here are not like us; they don't share our values or our commitment to this place; we see rising crime; we see deterioration; things are falling apart; taxes are going up and services are going down; nothing quite seems to work; we don't have enough jobs. It was this ongoing litany of things.
I'm saying all these things, but I'm not validating them. I am passing them on as they were spoken. In fact, at the end of the 90-minute focus group, I was invited to ask my own questions if I had anything I wanted to ask. I asked a few questions, but I'm going to present one because I think it's indicative of what I've seen here, what I see in a lot of places, and what I experienced in the U.K. during my time there.
Part of the feedback in the focus group that recurred over and over was that people felt unsafe. They felt that crime was up and that it was negatively impacting their community. They felt their community had changed in a way that made them feel insecure and unsafe. Again, I'm going to reiterate: there were immigrants in this room. There were different races. This was a universally shared opinion. The sense was that things had been safe at one point, and things were no longer safe.
That kept coming up. So I asked the question: in the last 12 months, describe an experience you had where you felt unsafe or in danger. I gave people time to think, then I went around the room and looked at every individual person. Nobody had one. It was a little awkward. I said, this doesn't have to be that you experienced a crime or were assaulted. It could just be a time when you felt unsafe, when you thought, this is unsafe, I don't feel comfortable right now. Again, I went around the room. Finally, one younger woman described walking down a street, seeing a group of men gathered on one side, and crossing over to walk on the other side of the street to avoid them.
In other words, it did feel like, and I guess this affirms some of the things I've seen and experienced here, that we are more afraid of crime and more afraid of each other than our own experiences would suggest. I think you can draw a lot of conclusions from that. I'm trying not to, but this has always been one of my pushbacks on focus groups. When you ask open-ended questions like, how are things going, what is working well, what's not working, you get open-ended, nonspecific answers. But when you ask people, okay, you said you think crime is a big problem here, you think safety is a big problem here, and you yourself don't feel safe. Describe a time when you didn't. What you find is that people can't do it.
Do we have enough parking? No, we don't have enough parking. Describe a time when you had to look more than five minutes for parking. No one has one. These are some of the traps that we fall into. I think we all have our theories and suspect why this happens. I'm sure social media reinforcement is a big deal. When I was a kid, before we had social media, you would have said, well, the media is telling us this group or that group is creating crime, so be afraid. I don't know. It's not my area of expertise. I just see the phenomena over and over.
We were in a small town. I want to say this was around 50,000 people, so not as small as mine, but certainly not Manchester and certainly not one of the major U.K. cities. It was very illuminating. One of the things they talked about, and I'm going to bring this up because what I did the next day circles back to this, is they lost their pub.
They used to have a pub they would go to, and for whatever reason, it went out of business. It was funny because I was sitting in the back. They introduced me at the beginning. There were a couple other people observing as well, but I was the only American. They talked about their core downtown. They don't call it Main Street; they call it High Street. Their pub is gone now, and someone built a Taco Bell in their downtown. Someone brought this up as a point of disgust, and then they turned around and looked at me as the American, as if I would like that. I didn't tell them about Taco John's, but that's what we export. Anyway, the pub was a big deal. A lot of them came back to it because it was something they had known and something that was now gone.
The next day, I was invited to go to Number 10 Downing Street and meet with an adviser to the prime minister. This was a big deal. That's pretty cool. I've been to the White House three times. Never to the White House White House, always to the executive office building that is connected by tunnel right next door. I've never been in the Oval Office, the West Wing, or any of that. I've been in the executive office building. In Downing Street, I actually went through the door and got my picture taken outside. It was pretty wild.
You go in, there's a guard, and you give up your cell phone and computer. Then they take you around. I had my meeting, and then they showed me around and let me see the rooms that are on the news, where the prime minister sits with a foreign dignitary. It was pretty surreal. This is the seat of one of the most important and influential governments on Earth, and I was right in the middle of it.
The adviser I got to talk to advises Keir Starmer on multiple things, but one of the things we talked about extensively was this program they have called Pride in Place. I feel like this is the kind of response that a non-dynamic place would have to a lack of dynamism. I say that not to make fun of them or impugn them, because this is the kind of thing we would do, too. We have done things like this.
The idea is, and I'm sure people who like the program would represent it differently than I would, but essentially, the U.K. local government scene is organized a lot like the anti-property-tax progressives in our country would like. In our country, there are anti-property-tax conservatives, who basically want to gut government and have no taxes. Then there are anti-property-tax progressives, who want the state to provide everything and not have a layer of local government that does this stuff. Basically, the U.K. is organized like the latter.
Predictably, they're frustrated with the decisions that local governments are able to make, the limited things they are supposed to do, and the lack of dynamism that comes out of that. Pride in Place is meant to create, I'm going to say it in my way, not how anyone presented it, but I did test this out on a few people and they said, yeah, that's probably what it is. Pride in Place is designed to create a separate layer of local government that would be, quote, more responsive to the people. I heard that thing about responsiveness a lot.
The idea was this group of local government would be more representative of people and would work more closely with people to identify nontraditional things. Not things like where to build a road, where to put sewer and water, or where to pick up and carry the garbage. None of those menial tasks that we've delegated to local government. They are going to be in charge of the things that matter to people. So, the pub. If this Pride in Place group in a local city says the thing we really need in our community is not a new road or a new whatever, but a pub because we lost our pub, there is a fund of money through Pride in Place that you could use to establish this pub.
I did a lot of listening, asked a few questions, and tried to reserve judgment. I'm still trying to reserve judgment to some degree because this is not my country. I clearly am not grasping all of the context, and I clearly don't understand enough of it to render a definitive verdict. But it seemed weird to me. It seemed like the kind of program that a country without dynamism would do because it didn't have dynamic cities.
I was very honored to be there. I am still honored and grateful that I got the opportunity to go. Everybody was very kind and gracious. They had read my stuff. I've been to the White House, and people there have said, yeah, we read Strong Towns, and then you talk to them and they really haven't. I take that back: I was there for a gathering once that was really cool, and I had a couple meetings there where they had read Strong Towns stuff. That was pretty cool.
But I have been to a lot of places where they say they read Strong Towns stuff and they haven't. At Number 10, they had read old stuff. They were quoting deep hits to me, not the thing I wrote last week or last month, but things I had written five or six years ago that were deep cuts. It would be the B-side of an album, the middle track. They had actually listened to it. That was very flattering.
I'm not here saying disparaging things. With humility, I clearly don't understand all of it and how it works. But the Pride in Place initiative, which my understanding is has gone across government, so you had a Tory government and now a Labour government that both supported this, seems like a bad idea to me, or an incomplete idea. I had another meeting later that day with a bunch of people invited to come and chat about U.K. dynamism. That meeting was very exciting and had a good cross section of people. But I want to talk about what I did during the evening.
The next day, I went out to Canary Wharf in London. The way to describe Canary Wharf is that it is the London version of Tysons Corner. Outside of D.C., you have the new, exciting suburb with all the latest design, all the latest ideas, and large amounts of money put into building a better version of a suburb, or an adjacent part of a city. We're going to do it right. We're going to do it well. It's going to be the hot place to be, particularly for younger people, and it will be really cool.
When I went to Canary Wharf, that's what you saw. This is not old London. It is not traditional London. It felt like you had taken an old wharf and redeveloped it with lots of money into something really nice, shiny, new, cool, and modern. The place was inundated with young people on a Thursday night, with lots of people out to eat, out to drink, having fun, and hanging out. The Tube stop was gorgeous. I actually went out there and went to a play. I've been to a few plays in London. It's a great scene. I wanted to see Canary Wharf, so I saw the Hunger Games play, which was traumatic.
It's one thing to watch the movie The Hunger Games. I've watched the movie and read the book. Both are disturbing in a lot of ways, but you kind of get past the idea that it's kids at some point, particularly if you've seen the movie a second time. But when you're in a theater, and it was one of these oval theaters with seats all around it, it's pretty intense when you're five feet away from a kid simulating being killed. It was disturbing. I've got two daughters who are young adults now, 19 and 21, and I left there thinking I would not bring them to this.
Anyway, I went out to Canary Wharf just to check it out. The urban design was fantastic. The train station was amazing, efficient, beautiful, and clean. The fountains, walkways, street design, buildings, and restaurants were all so well done. It was really nice, not nice in an old London, organic, historic way, but nice in a Disney park kind of way. Everything was in the right place. Everything had been thoughtfully designed and laid out. As you see in most of Tysons Corner, you've basically got really smart people who went in and built a really cool place.
A lot of people are going to call this dynamic the same way that a lot of people would call Tysons Corner dynamic. I think it was, but it's not my definition of dynamic. Let me give you this, then I'm going to move on, and then we'll get to my definition of dynamic.
Tysons Corner and Canary Wharf are things that were built all at once to a finished state. If you listened to my conversation a couple weeks ago with the guy from California Forever, this is my fundamental critique of California Forever, the new city they're trying to build in Northern California. You have all the most brilliant designers building in the most brilliant ways, using all the modern techniques and insights. My friend Steve Mouzon was very complimentary about how they're going about their urban design, and I agree with that. This is Culdesac in Tempe, too. You've got really smart people doing something really smart.
Is it dynamic? To me, the open question with Canary Wharf, Tysons, California Forever, and Culdesac is this: you've built something beautiful. Can it change over time? Can it adapt to something new? Can it become a different version of itself when that is necessary? I think when you look at a place like Seaside, you would think, no, but then you go there and it has adapted. It has changed. It has reinvented itself. Can Tysons Corner do that? Can Canary Wharf do that? I don't know. I suspect not, but the jury is still out.
I spent my last day in Cambridge, and actually went to the university. I got the most astounding tour of the old part of the university, including some of the colleges. I got to go in the large cathedral, including up in the roof, which blew my mind. It was completely wild. I got an intimate tour of a place that is historic in a way that here in the United States we struggle to understand. I have one of the oldest houses in my city. It was built in 1914. They reroofed this building for about the fourth time in 1914. This is an old, old institution.
To be able to go around and talk to people who had lots of reverence for it and lots of understanding of it, and to recognize that it has produced some of the greatest mathematicians, physicists, poets, writers, thinkers, and politicians, was remarkable. This is a deeply historic place. But we also went to look at the dynamic new part of Cambridge. This is again part of the university. I would describe it as about three normal city blocks long. It felt like an industrial park, if you actually had real industry, or like a tech industry park: the way everybody who builds a business park hopes it will someday look.
The one building I got to go in was a high-tech astrophysics kind of science place. There was a layer where they had classrooms and multiple layers with offices. Then we went down, and there were multiple layers of laboratories where people were doing experiments on devices I couldn't figure out. It was pretty wild stuff in a very modern building.
It was hard for me not to look at this place and think about the morning, when I went out of King's Cross. I'm going to imagine that King's Cross Station is going to be there 100 years from now, 200 years from now, 300 years from now. Maybe it won't be. Maybe it will become obsolete because of something we do between now and then. But it's been there hundreds of years, and it's absolutely astounding. It's a massive investment.
I went to Cambridge and went to the cathedral. My guess is that cathedral has been there 400 years and will be there 200, 300, or 400 years from now. The building we were in with all the tech labs, latest gear, and nice offices was very modern. It couldn't have been more than 10 years old. It was new and high-tech. They said it was one of these places that is going to attract minds from all over the world, as if Cambridge can't attract minds from all over the world just by being Cambridge. But this is their version of being on the cutting edge. It was deeply impressive. It was pretty wild.
But I looked at that building and thought, this won't be here 100 years from now. There will be something different that needs to go here, or it will go somewhere else, and this will be torn down or converted into something lesser. It was not in a location or in a design meant to undergo multiple reasons for existing. It was an amazing building, with all kinds of cool stuff going on. I don't think you could look at what was taking place inside that building, in terms of people doing cutting-edge science, and not say this adds to U.K. dynamism. It absolutely does.
But from my perspective, which is really a bottom-up city perspective, which is why I was brought there in the first place, it seemed like the kind of dynamism you can create, like Manchester, in one place, at one time, in one way. If you measure it just right, you can say, wow, we've got a lot of dynamism. But you have to measure it in that one way. You have to look at a very narrow scope and not see everything else that's going on.
So I flew home thinking about this idea of dynamism and everything I had taken in, learned, and been exposed to, and trying to put it into a coherent thought. How should we think about dynamism, particularly when you look at a city like Manchester that is having this productivity growth and all this exciting stuff going on, and then look at the other cities I toured that were not experiencing that kind of dynamism? How should we think about dynamism across those places? I came up with one insight and then a description of what dynamism means to me.
Here's the insight. I did share this a little bit when I was there with some of the groups, and there was consensus around this. I feel like we have to reach an understanding that dynamism is not going to be measured in GDP. Dynamism is not going to be measured in productivity growth. Dynamism is probably not going to show up in the economic statistics that economists like to use.
I say that the same way that I talk about density. I've said many times that I don't think you can simply say a prosperous place or a productive place is a place with density. But I do think that when you build productive places, you tend to get places that are more dense. The problem with that is teaching to the test. You tell planners, hey, productive places tend to have high density. Then they go out and build high density and they don't get productivity, because density is the byproduct of productivity.
I think productivity growth is not a measurement of dynamism. It's a byproduct of a dynamic system. I realize that I'm mincing words and using some nuance here, but I really do think we can take any system and make part of it dynamic if we're willing to make the rest of it not dynamic. That seems very obvious. We can experience growth over here if we are willing to not have growth and not have dynamism over there. The question is: how do we make all of these systems dynamic?
When we use standard economic statistics as a measurement, we're going to be led astray because we're going to correlate things and find things that are not actually part of a dynamic system. We built Canary Wharf, and it's got dynamism. If we just go out and build this kind of thing everywhere, we'll get dynamism. We got Manchester, and look, they put in nice streetlights, or they have an old part of town that's walkable and folksy. If we just do that, we'll get dynamism. It's not how it works.
Here's what I wrote down: Is dynamism an outcome, or is dynamism just a description of a healthy system? In other words, can we go out and measure dynamism, say growth, productivity growth, or GDP, or does dynamism describe the type of system from which growth and productivity growth emerge? I think it's the latter. If you ask what that system looks like, it looks like it has high levels of adaptability: buildings that can be reused, streets that can change, parks that can adapt, and living arrangements that are flexible. It has the ability of individual actors within it to adapt and change. It's adaptable. It's not built all at once to a finished state.
It is sensitive to feedback. We don't strip you of your local taxation and do all of that out of London. We let you make your own decisions. Sometimes that will result in good, and sometimes that will result in bad. But we want things to be very feedback-sensitive. We want you to experience the upside gain, the joy, and the downside pain, the misery, of your own actions and what's going on there so that, with adaptability, you can fix things.
A good dynamic system is going to have redundancy. It's going to have slack. It's not going to be hyper-efficient. It's going to have spare parts sitting around that can be used to adapt, change, and be flexible. You have sensitivity to feedback and adaptability, and now you have spare resources or capacity to utilize, to adapt, to change, and to respond to stress and opportunity.
A dynamic system is also going to have a low bar of entry. We're not going to have it just be a place where the wealthy or connected can participate, but a place where everybody, regardless of where you start out, can get a toehold or foothold. This doesn't mean everybody gets access to High Street, the center of town. But it does mean that if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a startup, if you want to cut hair, mend clothes, or whatever your thing is, there's a place for you to do that, a place that would dynamically work and accommodate you. We have to have a low barrier to entry. If you want to get into a home, we've got a way for you to do that that meets everybody's needs.
A system that is dynamic is going to have a diversity of approaches, what I wrote down as multiple small bets. In other words, it's not going to put everything on red. It's not going to put everything on one approach. It's going to have multiple ways of doing things, and some of those are going to work really well. Maybe competing ones will work well for a while. Maybe one will become dominant, and things will evolve into that. But it's always going to allow different ways of doing the same thing, different ways of delivering things, different ways of trying things. It's going to be open to this level of diversity.
A really dynamic system is going to have a low cost of failure, so we can get people in with a low bar of entry. If things don't work out, it doesn't ruin them. They're able to try again and again and figure things out. It doesn't require a bunch to get in, and there isn't a bunch of downside when it doesn't work. I think what we're talking about here is something that looks like an ecosystem more than it looks like a tree. A rainforest has lots of small competitors, lots of small things going on, and the occasional large tree. I feel like the economy we've tried to build here in the U.S., and certainly we see this in the U.K. as well, is one where we build a lot of big trees and think the underbrush takes care of itself. A low cost of failure means you can get in and get out when things don't work out, switch and change, and it's not going to end your life or set you back in a way you can't overcome.
A dynamic system has distributed knowledge. One of the advantages of the internet age is that we've made knowledge a lot more accessible for a lot more people, but we still privilege insider knowledge, insider access, and insider awareness in a big way. I think a dynamic system is small enough that the important knowledge within that system can be broadly shared and understood.
Look right now at what's going on with the betting markets here in the U.S. There was a soldier recently arrested, not a banker, not a politician, a soldier, for placing a bet on something when we went into Venezuela with a recent military action. He was able to place that bet because he had advanced knowledge and awareness of what was going on. This kind of thing happens all the time in financial markets, to an insane degree by privileged insiders who never get prosecuted for it and nothing ever becomes of it.
I do think that a really dynamic system doesn't have this asymmetry of information and asymmetry of the way to benefit from that information. There will be some people with an asymmetrical ability to have information, but they will not be in a position to benefit from it. The people who are in a position to be benefited or harmed should have a distributed knowledge platform. This is not just a matter of information being shared. It's actually a matter of scaling the system so that it's the right scale for information to be processable and understood.
The last thing I put down is that resources become more efficient over time, but are not immediately optimized. This is one of those things I feel economists repeatedly get wrong, and it has infected our society and culture. I see it a bit in the English system, too. There is this emphasis on efficiency, and efficiency is a value. Efficiency is good. We should strive to be more efficient. But efficiency comes later in a process, when something has been figured out. You don't rush in immediately to optimize. You don't try to make things efficient right off the bat.
Efficiency is not a really good value at the start. If you go back to the third thing I said, we've got adaptability, sensitivity to feedback, and redundancy. We've got spare parts and slack in the system. Slack in the system is the opposite of efficiency. I don't think we want efficient systems, but what I talk about is resource efficiency over time. By resource efficiency, what I mean is the idea of using every part of the buffalo, using every part of the resources you have in a way that is system-wide efficient, but individually perhaps inefficient or unoptimized.
This can be a little abstract. When we focus only, as economists, on efficiency, we lose something. But when we look at pairing different opportunities together, this is almost like an emergent trait. If we look at the rainforest, the tree grows old, dies, and falls over. The tree is then absorbed. It's used for habitats, eaten by insects, consumed by fungus, provides shelter in a different way, and opens up space for new trees to grow. All these things happen that are individually maybe not efficient, but system-wise make efficient use of that tree, that resource.
That's what I'm talking about on a city scale. Are we able to have enough dynamism from the top to bottom of the system where small players can emerge among the larger players, or actually, larger players emerge from the smaller players, but we keep enough of that smaller-player system so that every bit of the resources within our community can be utilized, not exported, not shipped out, not fleeing the community, but optimized?
If we can do these things, I think then what you have is a dynamic system. The more we trend toward having systems that are adaptable, systems that respond to feedback, systems that have spare parts around, have a low barrier to entry, a low cost of failure, have multiple small bets, distribute knowledge, and use their resources efficiently over time, these are places that will be and will exhibit characteristics of dynamism. But this is a completely different system from the one we have now.
You don't get to that by creating a program to create a redundant government, or a little grant here, or in the U.S. context, putting a little sewer and water over here or a new business over there. This is actually a system of organization that itself manufactures or produces dynamic places. Guess what? That's what our cities were before the Great Depression.
I had to remind someone this week that Strong Towns is not a nostalgia organization. We're not arguing that we should go back to the 1920s and build our cities that way and everything would be great. I don't think everything would be great. But if we're trying to take systems today that are static, that lack dynamism, that are falling behind, that are not producing the outcomes we want, that are suboptimal, that are falling apart, that we're not able to sustain, where taxes are going up and services are going down while we watch the cities around us crumble, and we say we need more dynamism, then we can learn a lot from pre-Great Depression cities. We can learn a lot from places that were built when you had to be dynamic in order to make it.
Our extreme affluence, and I say that in a U.S. and U.K. context, has allowed us to smooth out a lot of the roughness and take away a lot of the stress. But when you take away the stress, you also take away the feedback sensitivity. You also take away the adaptability and the redundancy in the system. You grind that all out.
When we point to NIMBYs as being against change, we often focus on the human aspect of this. We call them bad people, as if they're doing something antisocial or disagreeable, when we should realize that what we've done is conditioned people to expect that things will never change. Static is the opposite of dynamic. In college, I had a class in static systems and a class in dynamic systems. They're very, very different.
I'm deeply grateful that I got to spend this week in the U.K. I learned a lot. A lot of what I learned is applicable here as well. If we want systems that produce dynamism, if we want systems that create dynamic outcomes, we have to focus on the elements of that system, which are quite the opposite of the way we have tended to organize ourselves in the 20th and now the 21st century.
Strong towns are dynamic. Strong towns create dynamism. A Strong Towns approach is going to help us get to where we need to be. I feel like there are a lot of good people out there trying to figure this out with the tools they have that are not dynamic, that are static tools: a new program, a new source of money, a new layer of government. But at the same time, I also feel like I'm saying something obvious, something that anybody who has thought about this for any amount of time has thought. You can't create dynamic systems with static tools. You can't create reaction and dynamism with rigidity. It just doesn't work. If we want an outcome, we have to actually do the system differently. We have got to build in a Strong Towns approach.
Thanks, everybody, for listening, and keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care, everybody.
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