A Good Life in a Prosperous Place

What does success mean for a Strong Town? Explaining this is one of the most difficult things I’m asked to do, both because it is so clearly obvious to me and also because, if you can’t see it, it generally means you’re looking in the wrong place.

The Suburban Experiment provides the tantalizing prospect of ultimate achievement. We can plan for something, go do it, and then be done. We can toil every day in the belief that some day the labor will end because we will have achieved what we set out to do.

I’ve seen this with engineers who delay their retirement to complete that last sewer extension. Or the mayor who runs for reelection so that they can see that grant request finalized. Or the school superintendent who wants to oversee the new building construction approved by voters. It’s the desire to see something through to completion.

Brainerd, Minnesota (1904)

I don’t deny the sense of accomplishment these tasks can bring, but it’s not how we measure success in a Strong Town. The sewer will someday need to be dug up and completely replaced. That grant request is a transaction that brings fleeting benefits, and possible long-term commitments. I’m watching my school district preparing to raze an historic school that was someone else’s ribbon-cutting a century ago. 

In other words, none of these things ever end with completion. We entertain a form of self-indulgence, or merely-self-delusion, when we look at the world so narrowly. Success in a Strong Town is not measured by the number of projects seen to completion because there is no completion. We’ll never be completely done.

Building a Strong Town means to live a good life in a prosperous place. That’s it.

There is a saying from Judaism that helps explain what a good life is. 

“It is not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but you are not free to desist from it either.”

Jane Jacobs describes cities as co-creations, something we build together. That effort is ongoing. It starts with what we have today, as modest as that might be, and it proceeds incrementally through time, with each of us doing what we can to make things better. 

None of us is responsible for finishing the work. To take it a step further: none of us can finish the work. It is arrogance to believe otherwise. We will struggle, but we will all leave behind something that is less than perfect.

Yet, we must struggle. We must do the work. Doing the work is the very definition of leading a good life. We are not free to desist.

A good life is a life of meaning, one where your individual contributions towards reaching the perfect completion add to the intergenerational partnership you both inherited and will pass on. A good life is one spent doing good. We all have that capacity.

Even so, living in a Strong Town is more than having a good life. It’s a good life in a prosperous place. This is where we have the most change to make.

Our ancestors around the world had lives far more difficult, with far fewer material comforts, in places of lesser accomplishment and success, than nearly all of us do. Yet, they almost all experienced prosperity in a way that seems elusive to us. That’s because prosperity is also not a destination but a measurement over time.

To live in a prosperous place, the work has to matter. The effort you are not required to complete, but from which you must not desist, has to result in things getting better. In this intergenerational partnership, each of us builds onto a solid foundation that allows the next generation to get that much closer to perfection. The measurement of that building is prosperity.

Today, the co-creation described by Jane Jacobs has been replaced by a deferment. In the Suburban Experiment, we now build things to a finished state and then, through paying our taxes and fees, expect that it will be maintained on our behalf. We expect that this entire edifice of physical, economic, and cultural infrastructure will be sustained if we simply render our payment. We are called upon to defer the work to others. Sometimes they even ask our input.

Even worse, those who do step up and do the work—whether it’s building homes for people, trying to fix a dangerous street, cleaning up a park—are often thwarted by the systems we’ve created to deliver us our completed product. These heroes spend their energy, they do their work, struggling without seeing a comparable level of progress. That is the opposite of prosperity.

Success for a Strong Town means living a good life in a prosperous place. It is an approach where everyone is called upon to do what they can with what they have. It means working incrementally, across generations, in a struggle to fix things that are wrong. It is a shared effort to add to a solid and stable foundation, one that will lift us ever closer to an elusive perfection. 

The Strong Towns movement is about helping people do the work, but it’s also about making sure they experience the prosperity that should rightly come with that struggle.

This is the very last day of our member drive. Thank you for being here with us during this week. We have tremendous gratitude to everyone who helps others through this non-profit movement. You are our heroes.

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