Can a nation of strong towns compete in a globalized world? (And how much should that matter?)

Editor’s Note: This article is the second in a two-part series. In it, Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn answered some great questions he received from a book club about his book Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. You can read Part 1 here. It has been edited slightly for readability.

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Because implementing the goals of Strong Towns will require negotiation and compromise with groups having diverse and possibly conflicting goals, the principles of negotiation seem relevant here. In the book Getting to Yes, readers are introduced to the idea of principled negotiation and focusing on interests rather than positional bargaining. That leads to several questions:

• What do you consider to be the primary interests underlying Strong Towns?

• Are there interests held by Strong Towns that are also held by its main critics?

• Where do you see the main points of contention arising?

• Can you give examples of ways to achieve the interests of Strong Towns (both shared and unique to the movement) that might be contrary to the practices and methods laid out in Strong Towns?

Primary Interests: Financial Solvency and Community Stability

I don’t think people who would be critical of our approach in one way or another would necessarily oppose these interests, but they don’t value them as highly as we do. I think what they are missing is that solvency and stability are prerequisites for anything they want to do, so in a sense I think they are taking them for granted when they should be obsessing over them like we do.

Image via Unsplash.

The main point of contention is that a lot of people—especially professionals but also those with an inflated sense of their own insights—believe they understand the problem their cities face and the solution that will fix it. They may understand one facet, but there is no way they understand the full complexity of human habitat. If they were seriously trying, they would be humbler in their diagnosis and their prescription. 

Hubris isn’t a problem, however, until you combine it with big budgets and centralized power. Without money and power, there is only so much damage a public official or professional staff can do.

In terms of other ways to achieve the interests of Strong Towns, I think it is important to note that Strong Towns is more of a journey than a destination, more of a process than a result. At the block level, there will always be judgement calls and nuanced decisions that may or may not be consistent with what I would personally do, but I’m willing to be wrong—and likely am in many instances—as long as we’re working at the right scale. 

We like to say that you can be a liberal or a conservative or anything you put on a spectrum and still be a Strong Towns advocate, so I don’t see just one way of doing things. In terms of action, the primary different between Strong Towns and our critics is that we want bottom-up, distributed (chaotic but smart) power and our critics generally want top-down, centralized (orderly, but dumb) power. I don’t see how you can nurture a complex, adaptive system to be a Strong Town with most critical decisions being made distant from the direct feedback—positive or negative—of those decisions.

It will likely be hard to convince cities en masse to stop servicing outer suburbs, since doing so will be telling the owners of those homes that their properties will soon be worthless. Houses being overtaken by rising ocean levels come to mind. How do you propose overcoming this political challenge?

I don’t think we have to. The system is failing on its own. All we have to do is have an alternative model in place, with some credibility in its practice, to offer people when they are looking for answers as to why things are falling apart and not working. I never spend time trying to convince the person living on the cul-de-sac in the suburb that they should change their mind or approach—reality is going to ultimately take care of that for me. Our energy is better spent elsewhere.

When I imagine the kind of “strong town” described in the book, I tend to think of a pre-industrial revolution village or town. After listening to your podcast episode from February with Tim Carney, I became more convinced that these were the truly strong towns and that we left behind spooky wisdom much earlier than WWII. What spooky wisdom do you think that we gained between the post-enlightenment period to WWII?

I am reading a book about life in medieval cities and am trying to understand this dynamic myself. It’s an interesting question.

Laurel Street in Brainerd, MN. Image source.

I think it is important to note that cities of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment were very similar to those pre-Enlightenment. With rising affluence there came an increased standard of living and you started to see the kinds of things you might have seen in ancient Alexandria, Athens, or Rome—cities would grow incrementally outward, open spaces would be created within the cities, urban design would mature and increased sanitation and cleanliness would improve overall quality of life.

I think it is also important to note that I would consider most European cities I have been in to be closer to a Strong Towns result, even though they have also become Americanized in their approach to development. This includes cities completely destroyed in World War II and subsequently rebuilt in the pattern that was destroyed. They could have done something else, but they stuck to the spooky wisdom.

I guess I’m trying to say that the traditional development pattern is a chassis for prosperity that I think the Enlightenment built upon, but did not actively denude. Even the advent of railroads didn’t denude it. It was only our centralized growth policies here in America that mined that historic productivity and converted it to short-term financial gains. We burned hundreds of years of productivity—many generations worth of struggle—in a generation-and-a-half. We borrowed from another generation or two in the future to keep it going. My guess is we will keep trying to do that until we are unable to any longer.

So, was there new spooky wisdom added to our development pattern from the 1700s until the Great Depression? I’m sure there was, but it alludes me as to what that might be (and thus we’ll continue to call it “spooky”). 

I have not been to Brainerd, Minnesota [where you live], but I understand it to be a “Main Street” town. The Main Street towns I have been to are still fairly spread out, and I have trouble imagining those towns as actually being pedestrian-friendly. For example, the number of grocery stores necessary to service even a modestly-sized city seems enormous unless you allow a big box store to enter into the market. Are Strong Towns “capped” at a certain population size?

The neighborhood I live in used to have a dozen different grocery stores. Today it has none. 

I used to do planning work in a little city here in Minnesota. I was sitting around with some of the “old timers” and they were telling me about all the businesses that used to be there. They started listing them all: two hardware stores, butcher, bakery, barbers, florists, and on and on. This was a city that presently has a couple of realtor’s offices, a restaurant, and a gas station. I asked these guys what time period they were talking about and they said the 1960s.

I looked back and the city had a population of about 500 then. The main difference is that in 1960 you would take a train (one a day) or a very slow auto trip to get to the next major city, which was 20 miles away. That meant there was a local market for all of those businesses. Today everyone drives the 20 mile trip, or further, and none of those local businesses can be supported.

So, I don’t think there is a minimum, really. Is there a maximum cap? No, in the sense that I subscribe to Leon Krier’s vision of expansion by duplication. In that model, cities are nothing but a collection of fractal neighborhoods, each functioning in a way similar to its own little town, yet all connected together. That is essentially how Paris works. We could start thickening up our cities to work that way as well.

All images from Leon Krier. Click here for more information.

What would you say are the top five components of a strong town?

Again, I think it is helpful here to think of Strong Towns in this sense as an approach and not a destination. As an approach, there are six components. I’ll summarize them as:

1. Rely on little bets, not transformational projects.

2. Emphasize resiliency, not simple efficiency.

3. Design to adapt to feedback.

4. Respond to bottom up action, not top-down systems.

5. Conduct as much of life as possible at a personal scale.

6. Always do the math.

Without the ability to take advantage of consolidation and economies of scale, how does a nation of strong towns compete in the modern globalized world? 

That’s an interesting question. I’m not sure I look at the ultimate goal as “competing.” What if every local community in the United States found themselves independently stable, prosperous, and self-sufficient—would we need competition with other nations? I don’t think so. 

So, what I struggle with when it comes to competition is this: How much of our prosperity and stability do we give up in order to be more competitive, and what do we gain in return for that sacrifice?

I think we are told that we give up a certain amount of individual security and comfort so that we have an economy that is more competitive, and in return we get a higher standard of living. I’m skeptical of that narrative, especially when it is asserted by those not bearing the cost of that decision. A country that can’t produce enough paper masks for itself in an emergency does not feel very competitive to me, nor obviously free to enjoy a high quality of life, though our theories of global competitiveness suggest otherwise.

I don’t think any local community will ever achieve total self-sufficiency (or that it would even want to), but I would strive for self-sufficiency more than I would strive for competitiveness, both as local communities and as the collection of them we call a nation. 

I find the idea of valuing investments on a $/acre method compelling, but cities at the end of the day need dollars to survive the infinite game and cannot fund services with claims of efficiency. If $/acre valuation was one among a set of go/no-go filtering metrics, what other metrics would you use, and how much relative weight would you give to each?

Well, let me gently challenge that premise. I think value per acre (VPA) is a really helpful metric for showing us the development patterns that are comparatively more productive, but when reduced to a single parcel, I would never use it as a go/no-go filter. Rather, I think it is a good policy tool for helping us establish the types of public investments, development codes, tax structures, and other market and regulatory tools that will help us evolve human habitat that is financially productive and broadly prosperous.

I’m answering this off-the-cuff, so understand that additional input from colleagues and peers may refine this, but if you asked me for a filter to use for a specific development proposal (a building, a subdivision, a new master-planned development), it would be this:

1. Is this the next natural increment of development intensity? If yes, I have no other filter (because it is hard to mess that up and, if you do, it will give you really important feedback at the lowest stakes possible).

2. If no, then I would want to know:

   1. The community’s projected return-on-investment through one replacement cycle of all public infrastructure. It must be positive with a margin for error increasing as the payback window gets further out. I would want this analysis performed by someone zealously representing the community, not a project advocate.

   2. That the public is assuming minimal risk that the project will fail, including that the building(s) are easily adaptable to new uses should the planned use or uses fail to work. If there is any question on adaptability, I would not proceed.

   3. That whatever is built complements the surrounding neighborhood, in style and bulk and connectivity. Is it a good neighbor that will increase the value of surrounding properties? If not, this is an automatic fail.

Also, addressing the first sentence of your question, it is important to reiterate that productivity measured in value per acre is not the same as efficiency. In fact, for most measurements of efficiency that professionals and public policy experts currently prioritize, places that are high in financial productivity are generally low in efficiency.

Here’s a related question to ponder: Is evolution through natural selection an efficient process?

For one version of an answer, consider this discussion we had years ago at Strong Towns. It is one of my favorites.

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