10 Webcasts to Get Your Town or City Back on Track

If it’s impossible to identify the exact year in which the suburban development pattern became the default approach to building cities, it’s clear that by the 1950s Americans had gone all-in on the suburban experiment. This abrupt move away from the traditional development pattern—discarding, in the relative blink of an eye, the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years of city-building—represented the largest human experiment ever undertaken.

The results have been dreadful:

Our auto-oriented development experiment, now in its third generation, has allowed the United States to experience decades of robust growth. Despite this success, our cities and states—big and small, led by liberals and conservatives alike—are now struggling to find the money to do basic functions. Simple things like maintain sidewalks, fix potholes and keep public safety departments adequately staffed. How can this be?

The answer is that, in this new and enticing model, we’ve sacrificed resiliency for growth. In the pursuit of jobs and economic development, American cities have spread themselves out beyond their abilities to financially sustain themselves. All those roads, all that sidewalk, all those pipes....they are really, really expensive. We're starting to understand that building it all was the easy part. Maintaining it generation after generation is hard.

And now, as budgets everywhere are frayed, our leadership obsessively seeks—in true Ponzi scheme fashion—more and more growth using this same, experimental model.

America’s cities don’t need more growth. What they desperately need is a different development pattern, one that restores the resiliency and financial productivity of the pre-automobile approach to a modern America. 

While we can’t pinpoint the exact year the North American development pattern went off the rails, it is possible to mark 2021 as the year your town or city starts to get back on track. We at Strong Towns have named 2021 the Year of Action. Internally, we’re shifting attention, energy, and staff time to giving people more of the resources and support they need to put the Strong Towns message into action in their own neighborhood.

As part of the Year of Action, this February and March, we are presenting ten webcasts that will give you the tools you need to make your town or city more economically resilient. We’re calling it the Local-Motive Tour. Topics include clearing the path for small-scale developers, establishing a street design team, growing the entrepreneurial ecosystem in your community, finding collaborators, and many more. 

Eight of the webcasts will be broadcast live, but you’ll also get forever access to the archived event. You can sign up for individual “stops,” or buy a round-trip ticket for a steep discount and get two additional recorded webcasts. Oh, and Local-Motive Tour participants will be eligible for Continuing Education credits through AICP.

For more information—including a full list of topics, guest speakers, dates and times—click here. If you’re ready to register, click the button below.

The Local-Motive Tour leaves the station on February 4. Hope to see you on board!