Cities need to be exposed to low levels of stress and disorder in order to become more antifragile over time. Technocratic planning which seeks to make our world too predictable merely sets the stage for future crises.
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Why build a downtown transit system if you’re just going to close it at peak demand?
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If your city is struggling to pay the bills, could joining forces with the rich county next door be the answer?
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Cities are complex, organic, emergent things—and we impose top-down order on them at our own peril.
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How do we build Strong Towns in a culture of outrage?
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Incremental development doesn’t mean slow development. Here’s how big places that need housing fast can get there using the Strong Towns approach.
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Almost every suburban house has one. But is the home garage an American institution or a national disgrace?
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When it comes to infrastructure spending, politicians on both ends of the political spectrum get it wrong—but in different ways.
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The story of Jayme Closs should give us cause to hug our children a little tighter, but then to love them enough to send them out boldly into the world.
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New Jersey has been using a “cap and trade” model to let single family neighborhoods buy their way out of growth for decades. Should your city follow suit?
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When an intersection checks all the boxes on the traffic engineer’s checklist—efficient flow, reduced crash rate, check—but remains a completely hostile place for humans, and we point that out, what happens? Often, the engineers don’t even seem to hear what we’re saying.
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The dollar store might seem like a smaller, friendlier alternative to the big box. But its proliferation tells us something powerful about the way we build our towns.
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When building our cities, we have come to value efficiency over redundancy. Want to see this become a problem? Just wait until it snows.
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Tulsa, OK is the latest city to offer remote workers some tempting incentives if they’ll move there for only a year. Is this a smarter approach to economic development, or do our cities need to #dothemath?
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Local governments can’t take on more and more promises without generating enough wealth to meet those obligations—not without a reckoning. We need a radical revolution in how we plan, manage, and inhabit our cities, counties, and neighborhoods. We need a Strong Towns approach.
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Here’s Chuck Marohn’s annual list of his favorite books he read in 2018.
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The closing of the mall’s anchor store exposes how fragile the community’s business model is, providing an opening to shift approach.
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Automated vehicle technology will do nothing to make our streets better places to be.
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Tragedy predictably occurs when our road designs combine high speeds and randomness.
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The most important thing for a local government is to avoid ruin.
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