A Review of our New Book on The American Conservative

The American Conservative recently ran a thoughtful and resoundingly positive review of our new book, Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Volume III. In it, Elias Crim shares some background on the Strong Towns movement and explains why he's excited about this newest volume in our series:

As membership in Strong Towns continued to grow since its founding in 2008, Marohn noticed he was building a very diverse coalition—big city and small town, Republicans, Democrats, and independents. It is a movement of common-sensical citizens who simply care about their town’s well-being and are not completely hag-ridden by ideological fixations. 

Rather than offering the usual prescriptions, he and his colleagues challenge audiences to think carefully about buzzwords like gentrification, sprawl, smart growth, and something Marohn calls “the infrastructure cult.” 

The new anthology from Strong Towns, with pieces from several contributors in addition to Marohn, touches on these topics and others, such as the rise of suburban poverty, why engineers should not design streets, democratizing the economy, and a call to end routine traffic stops. Like all of the writing from Strong Towns, these articles represent some of the best localist, non-technical social innovation happening today.

Marohn’s original focus on making our towns “strong” now clearly extends to more than fiscal strength. For example, he and his colleagues have begun to talk about community wealth-building as one factor that is important in creating a good or just town. 

And yet there is no Strong Towns methodology—which is part of the method—beyond their stress on the incremental, small experiment-based, fine-grained, bottom-up approach to development. Suddenly Chicago planner Daniel Burnham’s oft-quoted advice, “Make no small plans,” seems out of date. Today, a Strong Towns response might be “Big plans: that’s the problem, Dan.”

You can read the full review here. 

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