The Question I Get Most Often

I’ve given hundreds of lectures across North America, one in each U.S. state except for Alaska (and I really want to go to Alaska if someone there wants to make that happen). At this point, I feel like I’ve addressed every question in one form or another, but the most frequent one I receive is some variation of the following:

Chuck, I’ve listened to your thoughts and find them compelling. What city has heard these ideas and made the right changes to their approach? What city has this figured out?

This question used to bother me. It made me feel like I had failed to convey things clearly. How did someone listen to me talk about complexity, about the problems with “orderly-but-dumb” development patterns, about the need to be humble and embrace incremental, bottom-up action, and then ask me what city they can copy?

I've started to take it less personally and recognize the question for what it is: the search for a simple heuristic. That's actually a very human response. Tell me the trick. Teach me the three easy steps. If we're going to do something radically different than what we are doing now, I want to be able to point to someone who did this before. Who can we copy?

Every city that has a comprehensive plan has a statement within it that attests to their uniqueness. “We are a unique community. We have a unique blend of….” I understand why this is an important statement to make, and in a very granular way (the way we all understand our own place) it is true, but the reality is that nearly every American city is the same. We have the same zoning codes, the same street standards, follow the same building codes, finance our development in the same way, look to the same federal programs to help us prioritize what infrastructure to invest in, organize our regulatory and bureaucratic approach in the same way, give our the same subsidies, attract the same franchise restaurants and retail chains, and adopt comprehensive plans that are functionally the same.

And, as a consequence, our cities are all financially fragile in the same way.

The question—whom can we copy—assumes that there are cities out there that essentially opted out of the entire postwar development experiment. There are, but they didn't opt out by choice. We can go visit some ghost towns in rural North Dakota, but there is nothing to learn there. Every city that could opt in is full of humans who found the short-term advantages of this style of growth irresistible.

So, are there cities that got deep into the Suburban Experiment and then took a radically different approach? Yes and no. This is where the entire notion of “unique” comes in. We’ve seen communities do some really exciting things. We’ve watched Fate, Texas, change their development review process to shun unproductive public investments. We’ve seen Memphis, Tennessee, halt all annexations and then start a process of de-annexation. And we’ve watched countless people take small but meaningful steps toward making their places stronger and more resilient.

But has one place nailed it? Of course not. That’s like saying, “Has one modern person nailed it?” People are messy and complex and while we can take lessons from everyone, you are unique and shouldn’t be copying anyone. Neither should the city you live in.

There is no city “doing it right.” There is no place to go and copy. There are tons of lessons to be learned and some are beautiful, insightful, and incredibly compelling. But nobody should be asking to be pointed in the direction of the place they can become a facsimile of. 

I understand the desire for a heuristic, but the question itself is wrong. And it comes from an incorrect understanding of cities as complex human habitat. 

In the 20th century, we did treat cities as machines that could be fine-tuned from the top-down with the right set of codes, investments, and leadership. Here’s the model code that will produce prosperity for a city in upstate New York, Miami, Dallas, and a suburb of Seattle. Here’s the national infrastructure spending program that will put the same set of investments into every city across the continent. Here are the uniform standards for construction financing that will result in the same house being built in frigid Minnesota as is built in arid Arizona. 

No civilization has ever tried an experiment on itself to the scale we have tried our Suburban Experiment. No civilization has reconfigured everything about how humans live—changed our entire habitat—in a few short years as we did. There is no roadmap for what comes next. We’re going to have to figure this out.

Sadly, your city is not unique, but it should be, and from this point forward it needs to become more so. The way you figure something out when you don’t know the path is to try things and see what works. You iterate, incrementally, working to modestly improve what you have and see what you can make better. You don’t make huge bets—that is what got us here—but you do your best to pick up the pieces and start building something better.

Instead of asking me to point you to the city to copy, the proper question to ask is, “Where do we get started figuring this out for ourselves?” For that question, there are a lot of places to learn from, but it all starts with the Strong Towns 4-Step Approach to Public Investment:

1. Humbly observe where people in the community struggle.

2. Ask the question: What is the next smallest thing we can do right now to address that struggle?

3. Do that thing. Do it right now.

4. Repeat.

Complex systems are not machines any more than cities are a collection of streets, buildings, and zoning classifications. If we try to reduce them in that way, we lose not only the essence of what they are, but the most important tools we have for making them better: other humans, their passion, and their ideas.

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