5 Lessons about Healthy Cities from Arian Horbovetz and "The Urban Phoenix"

If you’ve been a regular reader of Strong Towns for any length of time at all, you’ve no doubt become acquainted with the work of Arian Horbovetz. A Strong Towns contributor since 2016, Arian lives in Rochester, New York. He regularly creates amazing content around issues like walkability and bikeability, public transit, public spaces, smart development, and much more.

Arian is also the founder of The Urban Phoenix, a multimedia platform (blog, podcast, and videos) that is changing the national conversation about what it takes to creates strong, vibrant neighborhoods and cities. His site has been read a half-million times since 2015.

Strong Towns content manager John Pattison recently recorded a special interview with Arian to look back on the first five years of The Urban Phoenix. Together, John and Arian discuss why it’s important that conversations about revitalization include not just major metropolitan areas like New York, Chicago, LA, the Bay Area, etc., but also small towns and mid-sized cities. They talk about the unlikely origin story of The Urban Phoenix, how the conversation around urbanism and Strong Towns has changed in upstate New York in just a few years, and why Arian prefers the term “Robust Belt” to “Rust Belt.”

Then Arian unpacks five key lessons he’s learned during the first five years of The Urban Phoenix. He and John discuss:

  1. Why housing and racial inequality are the most difficult hurdles our cities face

  2. Why the cities that will achieve economic success are those that focus on people

  3. Why, generally speaking, cities aren’t that different from one another

  4. Why community change is “ten steps forward, nine steps back” — and how we can keep from getting disheartened

  5. Why one person can make a difference (with great examples!)

Arian Horbovetz is a kindred spirit, and, in many ways, The Urban Phoenix can serve as a template for people who want to change the conversation in their own regions. John and Arian talk about that too.

There’s so much good stuff here that we want to make it available not only as a video but as a downloadable audio file.

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