Katy Clagett is a commercial real estate appraiser and activist. She joins the podcast today to talk about the ways that bottom-up projects can build community, as well as her experiences with spearheading this kind of project.
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Here’s how advocates in Omaha, Nebraska, got their Department of Public Works to complete a quick-build street safety project so fast that “it felt like waving a magic wand.” (Hint: Find out if your community has a business improvement district, stat.)
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In this episode, host Abby Newsham is joined by Andrew Ganahl, managing partner of a real estate development company that specializes in urban infill housing, to discuss townhouses.
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On this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck discusses safe streets advocacy with Amy Cohen, the co-founder and president of Families for Safe Streets.
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You’ve just completed a Crash Analysis Studio and you have a report in hand. Or you found the "Beyond Blame" report compelling and you want to share it with your community. Now what?
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In this episode of Bottom-Up Shorts, host Norm Van Eeden Petersman is joined by Sarah, a Local Conversation leader, to talk about the bike racks she and her friends have been building and installing around their city.
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Build a bipartisan coalition. Launch a pilot project. Speak to the core issues facing your community. That’s how Spokane, Washington, was able to eliminate costly parking mandates. Here's the full story.
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"Be the change you want to see in the world." It’s a slogan many aspire to live by, including Professor Gingrich of Dordt University in Iowa. He’s doing just that this year, bringing his students to the forefront of the evolving traffic engineering field by training them in crash analysis and safe street design.
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I’ve mostly left Twitter/X over the past few months. Strong Towns, the organization, has pulled back substantially, as well. I want to explain why because it’s for different reasons than the increasing partisan divide (although that doesn’t help).
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In this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck explains how election years affect a nonpartisan nonprofit like Strong Towns. It’s kind of ugly, but it doesn’t change our mission.
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Like many Strong Towns advocates, you may struggle with imposter syndrome, feeling like you’re not qualified enough to talk to city officials and staff about changing the way cities are designed or operated. But it’s essential that you keep speaking up. Here’s why.
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All of the land used in cities can be divided into two categories: Places and Non-Places. Places are productive destinations, while Non-Places are unproductive padding between destinations. Once these Places and Non-Places are marked on a map, it becomes obvious how much land cities waste on Non-Places.
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Collaboration (or community input) is discussed at great length within the urban planning profession, but it’s often lost in actual practice.
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In this debut episode of Bottom-Up Shorts, host Norm Van Eeden Petersman is joined by Manav Sharma, a Local Conversation leader, to discuss his group’s use of stickers in their advocacy.
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Strong Towns ideas have started permeating the wider culture at an increasing rate. But even as many cities and organizations embrace the movement, others twist it to serve their own agendas. Now more than ever, the movement needs advocates who uphold the true principles of building strong towns. It needs you.
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Thousands of elected officials and people who work in local government want to make their streets safer. Here’s how you can help them do that.
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Chuck is joined by Norm Van Eeden Petersman, Strong Towns’ director of membership and development, in this special Member Week episode to discuss the history of the Strong Towns movement and how members have brought it to heights Chuck never could’ve imagined.
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Today, host Abby Newsham is joined by Norm Van Eeden Petersman, the director of membership and development for Strong Towns, to discuss a recent resurgence of interest in mixed-use neighborhoods that has led some cities to allow for small corner stores even in residential-only neighborhoods.
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Why is it that when a place is [pick one: walkable, bikeable, beautiful, lovable, inviting, human-scale], it so often gets coded as being “gentrified” and therefore elitist? When only the rich can afford nice places, the solution isn't to stop creating such places but to create vastly more of them.
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At Strong Towns, we're very conscious of the words we use and the way we tell stories, especially those involving car crashes. It's not because we're trying to be dramatic; it's because we're trying to change the conversation entirely. And you play an important part.
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