Two simple photos show the difference between a street simply designated 20 miles per hour, and one actually designed to be safe. We can't regulate our way to safety.
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When an intersection checks all the boxes on the traffic engineer’s checklist—efficient flow, reduced crash rate, check—but remains a completely hostile place for humans, and we point that out, what happens? Often, the engineers don’t even seem to hear what we’re saying.
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The dollar store might seem like a smaller, friendlier alternative to the big box. But its proliferation tells us something powerful about the way we build our towns.
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Wide, fast avenues through residential areas act as moats. They divide residents from jobs, resources, and each other, and harm cities’ prosperity and quality of life. Here’s one example of such a “moat.”
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Nature is the original chaotic but smart designer. By landscaping our urban spaces with native plants, we can realize cost savings, improve quality of life, and achieve ecological benefits.
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Our collective willingness to maintain infrastructure that has outlived its economic rationale will evaporate in due course. Only the truly productive bits will survive the fullness of time.
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How one city made a grave mistake when it let itself be defined as a place people pass through, or one they leave every morning to go somewhere else. And how it could start to undo that mistake.
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In this episode of our podcast It’s the Little Things, Jacob chats with Jordan Deffenbaugh—primary organizer of the Local Conversation Strong Towns Sioux Falls—about how you can spread the Strong Towns message locally, including how to spread the vision among your neighbors, how to give your neighbors a sense of ownership in the process, and, most important, how to get into the nitty-gritty of making your city or town stronger.
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Learn to dispel the common myths you hear from transportation agencies with regard to safe streets. The guidance isn’t as sacred as they want you to believe.
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When building our cities, we have come to value efficiency over redundancy. Want to see this become a problem? Just wait until it snows.
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We’re signing off for 2018. Thank you for the amazing year.
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Tulsa, OK is the latest city to offer remote workers some tempting incentives if they’ll move there for only a year. Is this a smarter approach to economic development, or do our cities need to #dothemath?
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Why all these new storefronts are sitting vacant.
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For a struggling city, negative perceptions from with the community can send it into a spiral of decline. It takes a major shift in perspective to get the city back on track.
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Here’s Chuck Marohn’s annual list of his favorite books he read in 2018.
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The closing of the mall’s anchor store exposes how fragile the community’s business model is, providing an opening to shift approach.
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Minneapolis just became the first major U.S. city to embrace a key Strong Towns principle: every neighborhood should be allowed to evolve to the next increment of development.
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What does it take to be a small-scale developer in a struggling part of town? To put your money where your mouth is and participate in incremental neighborhood revitalization? One of our staffers knows firsthand.
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Automated vehicle technology will do nothing to make our streets better places to be.
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Two simple questions can help us understand why different groups don’t seem to speak the same language about growth and development in cities, and why seemingly-strange political alliances form around these issues.
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