You Say You Want a Revolution

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

What do you do when you need to change everything?

This is the impossible question that has preoccupied me my whole adult life. Fifteen years ago, wondering about it made me an outlier. I was a college kid who called myself an anarchist and read critiques of civilization, even as I was way too straight-laced and too philosophical—not remotely the let's-start-building-the-barricades type—to ever fit in with actual anarchists.

Today I don't think I look so out-there anymore; I see a lot of people asking the question. How do we reorient our economic and political systems to better serve people's real needs? The rot at the core of that apple is a lot more plainly exposed than it was a generation ago; the world in 2020 feels like it's in a permanent state of emergency. I think we nearly all perceive this, even if we might radically differ in our diagnoses of the problem—let alone our prescribed treatment. 

There's an answer our culture is very comfortable with: in short, that a massive problem warrants a massive, coordinated response from the highest levels of leadership. War metaphors pervade our discourse: postwar America is the society that launched a War on Poverty, then a War on Drugs, promised that No Child would be Left Behind, and that has unsurprisingly taken to often discussing the policy responses to the 2008 financial crisis, global climate change, and now the coronavirus pandemic in war terms.

The question we're good at obsessing about is How is the government—and it's almost always the federal government, specifically, that occupies our minds and our mass media—going to mobilize our collective resources to defeat this threat?

For a certain type of crisis—one far-reaching enough to require a centralized response, but also one whose dimensions are known—this kind of thinking is actually right on. Think of something like acid rain. A few decades ago, this was a huge problem particularly in the industrial Northeast. Its chemistry and cause were clearly understood: emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from heavy industry and motor vehicles. The US Congress and the EPA responded, with amendments to the federal Clean Air Act and a cap-and-trade system, and the result is that emissions of these substances have seen dramatic reductions at relatively low cost. It's a textbook example of when we can craft effective top-down policies: when we have a clear cause-and-effect chain, and a clear ability to isolate and influence the causes.

But there are other kinds of crises that aren't like that. These are crises characterized by the failure of complex, adaptive systems. These are wicked problems: they snowball and metastasize in unpredictable ways. The social and economic effects of the coronavirus and the human response to it, for example, are in this latter, complex domain. The spread of the disease itself, which can be well understood through mathematical modeling, is not. (If you’re a reader of Nassim Taleb, think of problems that belong to Extremistan versus Mediocristan.)

Our prevailing cultural narrative routinely mistakes complex problems for merely complicated ones. When you're dealing with a complex dysfunction in which every action sets off a cascade of unpredictable consequences, there is no war-footing mobilization that is going to cut it. There is no silver-bullet program that is going to do the job.

To confuse these two types of crises—complicated but ultimately contained in scope, versus complex and ultimately undefinable—is to make a classically human mistake. It's the mistake made by those who confused the military problem of toppling Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq (something we knew how to do, and did quickly and efficiently) with the social/cultural/institutional problem of winning the peace after doing so (something that both ends of the U.S. political spectrum now judge a miserable failure with a decade and a half of hindsight).

The track record of top-down policy in American cities is not a whole lot better than the track record of the U.S. in Iraq. Our cities are littered with the bones of policies intended to stem inner-city decline that either worsened it (urban renewal, freeway construction, suburban-style redevelopment in urban areas), proved somewhat ineffectual (the Fair Housing Act, incentive-based economic development programs), or had unanticipated harmful consequences decades later (downzoning of neighborhoods, efforts to boost homeownership by pumping up mortgage lending). A postmortem for each of those warrants an essay of its own, but what I want to highlight here is the general point.

You cannot solve the breakdown of a complex system with a top-down, technocratic solution. It doesn't mean there is no place for centralized policy, but that such policy will at best be inadequate to the task every time. You’ll hit a point of diminishing returns, and/or run out of political will. And at worst? The farther-reaching and more centralized the policy, the more likely that its unintended consequences will end up haunting us.

How Revolutionary Change Actually Works 

“When you need to change everything, you must look to create the kind of change that snowballs, that seeds its own next step, that inspires a thousand other small experiments for each successful one.”

When you need to change everything, you must look to create the kind of change that snowballs, that seeds its own next step, that inspires a thousand other small experiments for each successful one. You are looking to create memes that will propagate through the culture at large. You are looking to create change that is—and please forgive the unfortunate phrasing given the times, but it's the best metaphor there is—viral.

This is what wildly successful, revolutionary social movements do. They become something that nobody is directing anymore, and are therefore not limited by the capacity of anyone to direct them, or the foresight of any entity to anticipate how the problem will evolve or what second- and third-order consequences will emerge.

I've found it urgent to change how cities are built—not just one city or neighborhood, but cities almost everywhere—for as long as I can remember. Discovering Strong Towns helped me articulate what I already perceived: the prevailing post-World War II pattern of development is a giant, uncontrolled experiment in how we finance and build our places, and how we inhabit the land. It's one that is both ecologically and financially ruinous.

I’ve found a home in the Strong Towns movement because it doesn't just put forth a vision of cities that I like, but also reflects a thoughtful understanding of how to do the work of changing our development pattern. Strong Towns advocates are those who get that you can't dismantle the master's house using the master's tools.

Sure, enough well-placed advocates might nudge key top-down institutions to change, but unless that change is accompanied by a cultural shift from the bottom up—one informed by constant local feedback—it will be fragile. Any victories would be vulnerable not only to shifting political winds, but more importantly, to the inevitability that the smartest planners and policy minds will still get it wrong. Just as it was inevitable that we would get Iraq wrong, just as it is inevitable that our institutions will get aspects of the response to climate change or new cybersecurity threats or the coronavirus economic shock wrong. We’ll get it wrong because it is impossible to get it wholly right: that’s the nature of complexity.

"When The Asteroid is Coming"

The notion that a big problem requires a big, coordinated program or policy response is deeply embedded in our culture. As a result, it feels so obvious to many people that they get offended by a contrary answer. Rejecting "big plans" reads to them as a case for timidity or inertia. One memorable negative reaction I've encountered to the Strong Towns vision of bottom-up change was this one, in a comment left on an essay we published last year:

“Can't wait for the asteroid to be coming right at us and people like you saying we can't afford to save ourselves. Good stuff.”

This metaphor is actually fatally flawed. The proverbial asteroid is a physics problem. It is complicated, but solvable through mathematics. The effects on human society after the asteroid hit would be complex and messy and awful (if we survived it at all), but predicting an asteroid's path and impact is a manageable task with modern computing, even if stopping it from hitting us would require an immense and costly mobilization of technological resources.

Compare that with the problem of turning around a continent-wide experiment in mass suburbanization which is bankrupting us. The latter requires addressing local, state, and federal policies ranging from zoning codes to federal mortgage insurance; the entrenched practices of the financial industry and real-estate developers; the distortions in land values and settlement patterns already baked into our cities from decades of bad growth practices; and most crucially, a whole host of sticky cultural beliefs and values that have grown up around what the ideal community looks and feels like. That is a fundamentally different kind of problem.

Responding to that complex problem requires public policy changes, but more than that, it requires a whole new set of cultural beliefs and narratives. These, in turn, inform patterns of doing things that become repeatable and scalable—not rigid blueprints. You give people the intellectual tools to build something that works and to replicate what works about it—and adapt it to their local needs. Then you turn them loose with those tools, and to share the tools with others.

The most exciting work happening in cities today is all of that approach: disseminate the intellectual tools, instead of copy-pasting the finished product. Tactical urbanism is a great example. The work of networks of incremental developers, revitalizing overlooked buildings and neighborhoods, is another. These things are infinitely scalable because they are bottom-up responses.

Strong Towns is here to be a guide for those who want to improve their places by starting from the bottom. I’m proud to identify with this movement. If you’re inspired by the bottom-up revolution we hope to foster, and you’re in a position to help keep it growing, take a moment to become a member.

Become a Member

Cover image of “La Liberté guidant le peuple” (1830), by Eugene Delacroix, via Wikipedia.

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