A Hopeful Movement for Fearful Times

Something profound has happened to my view of the world over the past decade or so. I am more fearful about the future than I've ever been. But I am also, in a strange way, more hopeful about the future. 

I didn't expect the latter. And that hope has everything to do with why the Strong Towns movement has become a philosophical home for me, and why I'm asking you to support this important movement for change this week, during our biannual member drive, with a donation of any amount.

A sustaining membership at the $10 or more per month level, though, will get you a free copy of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. Which you want to read. Seriously. It's the best distillation there is of the ideas articulated over 11 years of the Strong Towns blog—and yet it transcends the scope and gravity of what you'll find on the site on any given day.

Strong Towns weaves together a deeply human story about how we build community. It's about how we think (or too often fail to think) about the relationship between financial value and moral/intangible value. And most importantly, it offers the beginnings of a template for creating a world we can be justly proud to pass on to our children, in a time in which so many of us feel like we're floundering to salvage the broken one we inherited from our parents.

I'm a member of that often mocked/memed/caricatured Millennial generation. While I agree with critics that generational labels are mostly lazy stereotypes, I do think there's something to be said for the power of collective experience to shape, if not beliefs and personality traits, at least some sense of a shared worldview or zeitgeist. For my cohort, a short list of those things has to include:

• the 2008 financial collapse and its aftermath;

• the looming backdrop of environmental calamity, punctuated with bursts of terror from California wildfires or Texas flooding;

• the slowly, subtly corrosive effects of social media on our relationships;

• the rancor unleashed by the 2016 election and related events since, which has challenged the sense of many of us that we know our own country or our fellow citizens as well as we thought we did.

A lot of the people I know are in a near-constant state of low-level, looming dread and agitation. It's like the weather we live under. Different concerns become emotionally intertwined: does it even matter if the dread I'm feeling is over "Will I be able to pay off my student loans?", "Is a war or economic recession on the horizon?" or "Will I say something today that will offend and anger people I care about?" We may respond to all this dread with deadpan irony and meta-humor, with righteous anger, or by checking out in exhaustion.

Many in my generation long ago stopped believing that our material standard of living will be as high as that of our parents. Many, including me, don't expect that our kids' material standard of living will be as high as our own. And we have good reason to think we will live to see places we love crumble and deteriorate—we're already seeing it happen in a physical sense, from Flint to Florida.

We find ourselves struggling to make positive change in a world of zombie institutions. A lot of people from all over the political spectrum can agree that some of the consensus ideas of the late 20th century—about how prosperity is produced; about how our cities ought to be designed; about the value of economic growth for growth’s sake and the sustainability of the global financial system—are intellectually bankrupt. A lot fewer people can agree on any sense of what is supposed to replace these paradigms.

Not that there’s any shortage of answers. These are boom times for both old political ideologies, among them resurgent capital-S socialism and capital-N nationalism, as well as plenty of newfangled get-out-of-jail-free cards (among them the notion that Modern Monetary Theory will save us from the consequences of running deficits, massive spending programs will save us from the climate crisis, and autonomous vehicles will save us from the havoc cars have wreaked on our cities).

Yet I think many of us greet with a well-earned cynicism anyone who insists that there’s an easy out from the predicaments our society finds itself in. There simply isn’t a Deus Ex Machina coming to save us.

How to Build Something From Nothing

And so we come to Strong Towns. I was drawn to this movement in its early days by my own confirmation bias. I was a dyed-in-the-wool urbanist living the car-free life in San Francisco, and here was this guy—a conservative (!) from a small town in my home state, no less—reinforcing everything I wanted to believe about how unsustainable the suburbs were, but from an angle—financial solvency—I’d never considered.

I’ve stayed around (and now work for Strong Towns full time) for a very different reason. The thing that I now find most profoundly important about Strong Towns is that we articulate a vision of the future that doesn’t require the machinery (political, financial, or institutional) of the recent past to build it. This is important when you lack confidence that that machinery is going to continue to operate—or that we should even want it to.

In a world of limitless economic growth, we could continue to “solve” our cities’ problems (read: punt them into the future) by throwing resources at them. Build bike lanes and transit with the table scraps the highway-builders leave us. Electrify our vehicle fleets; replace highways with high-speed rail; resolve housing crises with massive construction programs.

We don’t live in that world. Infinitely expanding consumption is a dead end, and I believe the only question is what kind of destabilizing crisis will knock us off that path first.

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The Italian village of Gradara. Via Flickr.

And so what makes us fundamentally different from some visions of how to reform our built environment is that Strong Towns celebrates the ability to build something from nothing. You see it in our appreciation for the cities of antiquity and the spooky wisdom passed down to us by those—far poorer and less technologically advanced than we are—who built places that manage not only to be standing but to inspire awe centuries later. You see it in our embrace of the low-tech, “original green” sustainability of our ancestors. You see it in our focus on tactical urbanism, community activism, bootstrapping entrepreneurs, and small-scale developers—anybody who’s out there doing a lot with a little. You see it in our determination to bring about bottom-up, viral change, rather than top-down change led by institutional actors.

Strong Towns emphasizes that the recipe for a great place is a timeless one, that it’s a low-tech one, that it works best when unencumbered by a surplus of technical expertise. That we know how to do this: we just need to rediscover it, and then get out of our own way.

I believe that on some level, anyone who’s strolled down a street that has existed for centuries (whether in Rome, Tokyo, Mexico City, Boston, Savannah or New Orleans) and felt themselves put deeply at ease by the harmonious proportions of the buildings and the spaces between them, and the sense of unthreatening intimacy with complete strangers that is brought about by sharing a space built to the human scale, understands this.

If people who were dramatically, orders of magnitude poorer than us, could build a world by hand that still makes us feel awe today, then what excuse do we have?

None. And the Strong Towns movement is made up of people—of wildly different experiences and sometimes prior assumptions—who get that. I get to talk with enough of those people nowadays that it gives me genuine hope. I have confidence that, however little the future hands us to work with, we’re going to create some great places together.

(Cover photo via Flickr)

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