A lot of places that were built on the premise of efficient, manicured order are going to need to pivot to a different vision of the future: one based more on nimble, ad-hoc adaptation.
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Our cities are littered with the bones of policies that failed because we tried to solve complex problems with top-down, technocratic solutions. So how does change happen?
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It’s a shame it took a global pandemic for towns and cities to discover the benefits of low-cost, low-risk experiments.
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The recent remake of a classic video game features an unusual setting—an urban slum—and some surprising real-world insights about how people who have nothing build a place that’s worth something.
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Don’t ask if we can still afford public transit in American cities. Ask if we can still afford the alternative: car-dependent development, and universal car usage as a minimum ante to participate in society.
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What if parking reform efforts could martial the kind of informed, passionate support that we see in cycling advocacy? A new national nonprofit is working on just that.
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Kansas City was once described as the “Paris of the Plains.” Today it is the freeway capital of America. A look at the city’s history of gobbling up land on its outskirts shows why Kansas City could be considered a poster child for America’s radical experiment in suburbanization.
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“We often talk about how megabanks are too big to fail. But the bigger problem is that megabanks are too big to succeed at the very things we most need the financial sector to do.”
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The special tax districts used to finance suburban expansion have been big trouble in past recessions. They’re worth watching now too.
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The lifelong champion of vehicular cycling—an approach that gives in to inhumane street design instead of questioning it—passed away this month. No better time to put his still-influential bad ideas to rest.
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One of the key thought leaders who has inspired the Strong Towns movement has an admonition and a warning for the world—about how our institutions got so fragile in the face of a crisis like the present one.
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Watching the value of your home over the past 10 years might convince you that the U.S. housing market has long since “recovered” from the 2008 crash. The reality is messier: the past decade was, if anything, quite unusual.
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The coronavirus economy is revealing to us that countless people love and want to support small, local businesses—we just have an economy where we’ve stacked the deck in favor of large chains.
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For most cities, the property taxes from single-family homes simply can’t pay the bills. One Minnesota mayor was remarkably blunt about that fact in a recent speech.
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No. They’ve made more obvious a pre-existing epidemic of reckless street design.
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No North American city is overcrowded. Not a single one.
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The world’s cities have played host to a lot of human misery over the ages. But they’re also a vehicle for the very best that humanity is capable of. That isn’t going to change.
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New legislation to address California’s statewide housing crisis looks a lot more like successful efforts in Oregon and the city of Minneapolis. It also looks a lot more like a Strong Towns approach.
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Great urbanism: if it’s good enough for a vacation, then it’s good enough for everyday life.
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The way we grow our cities today produces a few winners and many losers. Here's how to get back to places that serve all of us.
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