What's New in the Strong Towns Action Lab
In January, we launched a new platform, the Strong Towns Action Lab. The Action Lab—designed to help people take local action to build their own strong towns—is organized around four main sections:
Connect to Resources, a directory of ebooks, checklists, how-to guides, toolkits, and web broadcasts
Connect to Examples, a place to discover examples of people taking Strong Towns action
Connect to People, where you can connect with Strong Towns advocates near you and learn how to start your own Strong Towns local conversation
Explore by Topic, where we’ve started to organize the best of our content into collections sorted by topic and subtopic.
Though we spent much of the fall and early winter adding some of our most actionable content, we knew there was still much more work to be done. As Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn wrote when he introduced the Action Lab on January 8:
In true Strong Towns fashion, we have created what we consider to be a minimum viable product along with a commitment to improve it over time. In this Year of Action, we have made that a priority. Fortunately, our members have not only given us guidance on what they need most, but they have given us the resources to provide it.
And we have been improving it. So we want to take a minute to bring your attention to some new items in the Action Lab. Most of this is what we—the Strong Towns staff—have published there in the last couple weeks. But our vision for the site, especially in the Community section, is that Strong Towns advocates like you are actively posting there too—asking and answering questions, troubleshooting the obstacles to action you’re facing in your own city, and more.
With that, here are a few of the latest additions to the Action Lab:
Latest Topics: For each topic in the Explore by Topic section, we include the articles and podcasts we consider to be our top content, as well as case studies and examples. We recently added two new topics to the Action Lab: Tactical Urbanism and Public Finance (also known in Strong Towns lingo as #DoTheMath). Soon, we’ll be adding Strong Towns’s core insights on those topics too.
Action Guides: As Chuck mentioned in his article on Monday, we’re publishing one- or two-page Action Guides to correspond with each stop of the Local-Motive Tour. We’ve put five Action Guides in the Action Lab so far, with more being added each week. Topics include picking your next bike lane battle, finding more small developers in your town, doing the math on a proposed project, and more. (Note: While the Local-Motive virtual tour—ten events in all—must be purchased, the Action Guides are available to everyone for free.)
Questions for Strong Towns: There were a couple of questions that came up in a recent Local-Motive event that we didn’t get to during the Q&A, so our senior editor Daniel Herriges answered them in the Action Lab:
And this is just a few of the new items. We didn’t even mention the new questions that have come in or the first job listing on the job board. Plus, the Action Lab is being updated almost daily. So make sure to check in regularly.