Gift Guide: Great Books for Lovers of Strong Towns

Strong Towns is an organization that reads. We believe that ideas can change minds and, by extension, communities and the world. We asked the Strong Towns team for books that offer readers unique perspectives on issues affecting the places in which we live and work. Consider these titles for the localist and urbanist readers on your holiday list.

All shopping links lead to Bookshop.org, which connects customers with local bookstores across North America. 

Reclaiming Your Community: You Don’t Have to Move out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One, by Majora Carter

This is the book I’ve been waiting for in so many ways. Majora Carter is a hero and her writing gave me great joy. As someone who has stayed in a struggling place I love rather than pursue greater wealth and opportunities elsewhere, I felt an immediate connection to Carter. Her assessments of the challenges that “low-status communities” (her term) face is spot on, and her prescriptions for making them better come straight out of the Strong Towns playbook.

And, most impressively, she’s living it. The neighborhood projects she has been part of are equal parts amazing and simple, a combination that inspires action. I was able to have Carter on the Strong Towns Podcast earlier this year and lots of listeners reported being inspired by her to roll up their sleeves and get to work in their places.

Unlike a lot of books that intersect with America’s racial conversation, this is one I can share with everyone. It’s not that Carter pulls punches, but she writes in a way that is relatable, accessible, and empathetic. Her goal is to make things better, and help others make things better, and that shines through even when she challenges us to look within ourselves.

—Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn

(Source: ORO Editions.)

Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, by Jorge Almazán with Joe McReynolds and Naoki Saito

For my money, Tokyo is one of the most interesting cities in the world, and Emergent Tokyo was one of the most exciting books of 2022. The authors explain how much of the Japanese capital’s famed vitality and quality of life owe themselves to a bottom-up urbanism that flourishes in the city’s quieter corners: its intimate alleys and labyrinthine neighborhoods. There, Tokyo becomes a city where the barriers to entry to entrepreneurship and placemaking are low, and residents participate in shaping the environment of their city in decentralized but profound ways.

—Strong Towns Editor-in-Chief Daniel Herriges

(Source: Bloomsbury Publishing.)

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, by Alexandra Lange 

Shopping malls get a bad rap as gaudy temples of suburban consumerism, or the default setting for the zombie apocalypse. But this highly readable volume reveals them to be more symptom than cause, and the reasons will be familiar to Strong Towns followers. The rapid expansion of the Suburban Experiment in post-WWII North America eliminated all the traditional placemaking markers where people were now moving, and the earliest mall designers were just trying to replace them. Victor Gruen, who built North America’s first enclosed mall near Detroit, hoped to recreate a mixed-use space for shopping, entertaining, and family outings similar to a town setting in his native Austria. His designs found eager customers in the ever-expanding suburbs. Unfortunately, this model doubled down on the disinvestment in cities, squandering decades of inherited wealth in the process and spawning a host of social and infrastructure problems. You’ll learn about how Boston’s Faneuil Hall spawned the food court and how a mall in Texas continues to thrive while so many of its peers fail, as well as examine creative plans to retrofit existing malls with new uses that better serve their communities.

—Strong Towns Staff Writer Ben Abramson

(Source: Change Media.)

Debt: The First 5000 Years, by David Graeber

At Strong Towns, we’re cognizant (and when warranted, critical) of how debt is used to finance new developments, particularly at the expense of existing places, roads, and people. We’re concerned with a particular definition of debt and, more acutely, the process by which debt transforms. But how did debt become a commodity? What even is debt? David Graeber’s book lives up to its title and chronicles a sweeping history of debt, credit, and trade systems. From dusting off the earliest known bookkeeping system in ancient Sumer to dissecting modern schemes of refinancing, this (big) book offers fascinating insights into the psychology of transactions. In the process, it ponders what understanding this history could mean for our future, an idea that may resonate with fans of Strong Towns. The thickset book is offset by Graeber’s signature conversational style, which stealthily reconciles expertise and approachability, sacrificing the integrity of neither.

—Strong Towns Staff Writer Asia Mieleszko

(Source: Vesa S.)

Happy City, by Charles Montgomery 

This book is chock full of insights into the human experience of living in stronger and weaker places. Charles Montgomery's writing is accessible to a wide audience and he helped me understand the impacts of our design choices.

—Strong Towns Member Advocate Norm Van Eeden Petersman

Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry

My colleagues recommended some great nonfiction books, so I want to add something different: the novel Jayber Crow, by my favorite writer Wendell Berry. Berry’s novels and short stories are all set in and around the fictional village of Port William, Kentucky. The title character in Jayber Crow is not originally from Port William; rather, his parents died when he was only three. Aging relatives in Squires Landing, a few miles from Port William, take him in, but several years later they die, too. “I was a little past ten years old,” Jayber says, “and I was the survivor already of two stories completely ended.” He is sent to an orphanage in central Kentucky, and doesn’t return to the area until he drops out of college and goes looking for “a loved life to live.”

When Jayber arrives in Port William, the town needs a barber, a job he happens to know how to do. He spends the next fifty years cutting hair, gradually being drawn into the life of the community. To paraphrase Wes Jackson, Jayber becomes native to his place. Jayber falls in love with a girl who marries a man unworthy of her, and for decades he loves her from afar. He performs several essential services for Port William. Besides cutting hair, Jayber’s barbershop becomes a meeting place. Whether they need a trim or not, men are always stopping by to share the latest news, catch up, or just watch life happen on the street outside the shop window. The old men tell him stories, and Jayber becomes a guardian of the town’s communal memories.

There are two lines from Jayber Crow that I think about often. Jayber says, “I will have to share the fate of this place. Whatever happens to Port William happens to me.” That’s one. The other is this: “To feel at home in a place, you have to have some prospect of staying there.” Perhaps more than others, Strong Towns advocates feel the dissonance between what their communities could be and what they are. They grieve more than most the squandered resources, the wasted opportunities, the misused land, and the poor choices (no matter how well-intentioned) that make their towns and cities more fragile and less hospitable. One option open to some Strong Towns advocates is to move, to go somewhere that isn’t always getting in the way of its own safety and prosperity. Others choose to stay put, and to work with others to make their places even a little bit better for the next generation. Whether you are native to your place, or in the process of becoming native, I think you—and the people on your gift list—will find the barber Jayber Crow to be an inspiring companion.

—Strong Towns Community Builder John Pattison

(Source: NPR.)

Make Way for Ducklings, by Robert McCloskey

This children's classic is a wonderful story that conveys an important message about the impacts of street design on the lives of the vulnerable.

—Strong Towns Member Advocate Norm Van Eeden Petersman

Strong Towns Merchandise

May we humbly suggest that Strong Towns merchandise also makes a great gift? You’ll find appealing t-shirt designs and baseball caps sure to spark a conversation. Best of all, your purchases help support our efforts to amplify the Strong Towns message across North America.