Here's What the Strong Towns Movement Looks Like On the Ground
Strong Towns advocates at the recent National Gathering in Charlotte, NC. (Source: ZED images.)
What do I see when I look around me? I see towns and cities that have gone all in on the Suburban Experiment. I see communities betting big on bad hands: building that new stroad or single-family-only subdivision, leveling a block downtown to put in another parking lot, trying to give out more tax incentives than the city up the road in order to lure the next corporate HQ, data center, or big box store.
Once your eyes have been opened to the fragile-making flaws of the suburban development pattern—the conventional North America approach to growth—it’s impossible to unsee. It’s also easy to despair. You start thinking about packing your bags and moving to Amsterdam.
And yet I’m not despairing. In fact, the opposite is true. Why? Because when I look around me, I see something else.
One of the great pleasures of being on the Strong Towns team is the opportunity I have to support and celebrate the work being done by local Strong Towns groups we call Local Conversations. A Local Conversation is a group of Strong Towns advocates in a particular place, who come together to talk about the Strong Towns approach…and then put it into action where they live. There are nearly 140 of these groups, all across the U.S. and Canada, with more coming online every week. Several hundred others are in the works right now. And we expect to have 1,000 (!) active Local Conversations within four years.
In my role as Strong Towns community builder, I get to see and share stories about how Local Conversations are building stronger and more resilient cities.
I see the Local Conversation in Charlotte, North Carolina, building bus benches for weary transit travelers. I see the Local Conversation in Charlotte, Michigan, leading a city-wide tree-planting campaign.
I see multiple Local Conversations, from New Orleans to Shreveport, collaborating on the “un-stroading of Louisiana.”
I see local Strong Towns groups working to fix what is broken in their communities. And I see groups working to protect what’s in danger of being lost.
I see intersection repair projects and block parties, freeway-fighting campaigns, letter-writing meet-ups and city council presentations, neighborhood walks and appearances on local media to share the Strong Towns message.
We recently reached out to Local Conversation leaders to learn more about their groups, and about how we at Strong Towns can help them. We were stunned, yet again, at the breadth and depth of the work these groups are doing. Here are just some of the issues being tackled by our Local Conversations:
Making their streets safer and more productive.
Making their communities more bikeable and walkable.
Expanding housing options by advocating for small-scale developers, missing-middle housing, ADUs, and more.
Improving and expanding public transit.
Ending parking mandates and subsidies.
Making city finances more accessible and more transparent.
Fighting costly and unnecessary highway and road expansions.
Improving and expanding parks, public spaces, and tree canopies.
Helping entrepreneurs and local businesses with economic development efforts.
The ways these groups are working together are as bespoke as the communities, themselves. Here are the most common ways Local Conversations are taking action, again based on that recent survey:
Speaking up at city council meetings, planning commission meetings, and other local government meetings.
Meeting with city officials, small business owners, local leaders, local advocates, etc.
Supporting the work of other like-minded organizations in their area.
Appearing in local media (writing op-eds or guest columns, newspaper and radio interviews, etc.).
Starting blogs, podcasts, and/or YouTube channels.
Doing tactical urbanism projects.
Organizing events.
Organizing neighborhood walks and community bike rides.
Conducting value-per-acre analyses to demonstrate the financial productivity of the traditional development pattern.
Creating or supporting public art.
Doing public engagement.
Helping to get Local Conversation remembers elected to local office or appointed to local commissions.
Hosting Q&A sessions with candidates for local office.
And more!
When tragedy strikes, it’s only a matter of time before someone shares a meme with that famous quote from Fred Rogers: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” Mister Rogers is a personal hero of mine, and I think his advice—“Look for the helpers”—is good. It’s especially good for children. But it’s useful for adults, too, when we begin to despair, when we feel like we’re alone in wanting good things for ourselves, our families, and our neighbors.
As a Strong Towns advocate, you’re not alone in wanting your community to be safer, stronger, and more resilient. Look around you, both literally and figuratively, and you’ll see “helpers.”
What’s more, you get to be a helper. You can join or start a Local Conversation near you. You can also support the work of all those other Local Conversations by becoming a Strong Towns member today.
John Pattison is the Community Builder for Strong Towns. In this role, he works with advocates in hundreds of communities as they start and lead local Strong Towns groups called Local Conversations. John is the author of two books, most recently Slow Church (IVP), which takes inspiration from Slow Food and the other Slow movements to help faith communities reimagine how they live life together in the neighborhood. He also co-hosts The Membership, a podcast inspired by the life and work of Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, writer, and activist. John and his family live in Silverton, Oregon. You can connect with him on Twitter at @johnepattison.
Want to start a Local Conversation, or implement the Strong Towns approach in your community? Email John.