An odd-bedfellows coalition of businesses, faith-based poverty advocates, and an idiosyncratic right-wing mayor, helped expand transit in one of the most auto-centric cities in the country. Here’s how.
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Easy money and uncontentious budget meetings sound nice in theory. But private and public sectors beware: lack of stressors can make decision-makers undisciplined and obscure huge bills that are sure to come due.
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Information about our city’s revenue, expenses and liabilities is usually presented in ways that disempower most people from making informed decisions. But what about folks who aren’t a Level 20 Spreadsheet Wizard? How can we use data to better tell the story of where we are now — and empower more people to write the story of their city’s future?
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Public spaces are often shortchanged in government budgets. Yet they provide outsized benefits compared to how little our communities usually invest in them. Public spaces should be celebrated and protected. Here are four reasons why.
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The advocacy group Transportation for America makes a bold move on transportation funding. We applaud them for it.
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Designing a traffic intervention after the tragic death of a pedestrian. Pitching the Strong Towns approach to a local service club. Developing missing middle housing. These are just some of the conversations happening on the Strong Towns Community site, where members offer each other encouragement and practical guidance on how to build the block-by-block revolution.
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Chuck Marohn talks in his new book about the “spooky wisdom of cities” that developed as humans co-evolved with their complex human habitats. Some modern cities have taken more of this wisdom to heart than others. Tokyo, for example, has taken a very different approach to many of the same issues facing its American counterparts. And we’ve got pictures to prove it.
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A trip to Italy reveals the physical, social, and even cultural benefits of walking. But coming home to the auto-oriented U.S. reveals something too: just how dangerous, difficult, and unpleasant we’ve made things for pedestrians.
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The story of Shreveport is one of small steps leading to big payoffs, especially in building community.
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Building stronger towns isn’t just about planning, engineering and development. We need to address questions about cultivating rich and abundant lives in our neighborhoods. How do we live out our values when so much of the built environment seems to be working against us?
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Conventional approaches to public investment tend to be expensive, dull, difficult (or impossible) to undo, and often divorced from the lived struggles of real people. There’s a better way.
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Is growth inherently bad? Are declining neighborhoods really a good investment? And, most of all, can we actually make the changes we need to make our communities stronger? Chuck Marohn answers these and other questions about his new book Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. What questions do you have?
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Santa Ana’s Michele Martinez has an incredible story. She grew up in an environment with poverty, gang violence, and drugs. But she became a “positive disruptor” and used a Strong Towns approach to create big change in her community.
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We chose Memphis to kick off the Strong America Tour for a reason: the city is both an object lesson in what has gone wrong in American cities, and what could go right. And Memphis’s example helps us see why in places that are going to experience a renaissance, it’s going to come from the grassroots.
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An urbanist abroad discovers that Tokyo faces many of the same challenges as U.S. cities — off-street parking, pedestrian safety, utilizing space, etc. — but is addressing them in very different ways.
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Endless growth is a luxury we literally can’t afford. Here’s why the path to true prosperity requires local communities to opt out of an economy of greed and bring decision-making back home.
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The wait is finally over. The Strong Towns book is out today! Here is information on where to buy, as well as one simple, 30-second thing you can do that could make all the difference.
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The Strong America Tour isn’t just a chance for us to get out and talk about the Strong Towns vision. It’s a chance for us to capture firsthand how members of the movement are bringing that vision to life in their own places.
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Ancient cities reveal the extent to which humans have co-evolved with their complex human habitats. As we were making our cities, they were making us. And yet we’ve discarded much of this hard-won wisdom of the past.
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The ideas behind Strong Towns began in my small town of Brainerd. A tour starting in Memphis is designed to bring them home.
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