What Does a Nation of Strong Towns Look Like?
There is someone out there desperate for their community to change. Maybe they can’t find an affordable place to live. Maybe they can’t drive and there is no other way to get around. Perhaps they want their kids to be able to walk to the store, play in the park, and experience the kind of life that is too human to be relegated to nostalgia.
It could be that they feel tension about their taxes going up, public services being cut, and there being no credible alternative on offer beyond merely slowing the decline. They have probably recognized by now that the “all politics is national” state of public discourse is not going to provide a solution. Yet, something needs to be done.
This is a person ready for change. There are millions of them in cities big and small, all over North America. All they need is a guide, someone to give them an approach that allows them to address their community’s problems.
This is our hero. This person will change everything. Strong Towns exists to help them.
What Is Strong Towns?
Strong Towns is an advocacy organization that primarily uses media to grow and support a movement for change.
We recognize that America’s post-war pattern of development, which we call the Suburban Experiment, created tremendous economic growth, but it did so at the expense of future generations. We live in that future.
American cities are now burdened with more infrastructure, facilities, and promises than their tax bases can support. We respond to the stress of insolvency by trying to grow even faster, using the same underlying approach that created our problems. Basic maintenance is overlooked while our leaders aggressively pursue the latest flashy project on offer. Good people seem stuck in a bad system.
Strong Towns is the heart of a growing movement to replace the Suburban Experiment with an approach that is financially strong and resilient. This approach resonates with our hero, who sees that the current path is destined for failure, and knows we need a paradigm shift to build great places.
How Does Strong Towns Support Community Heroes?
Strong Towns is growing and supporting a movement for change. The change we seek will occur when there is a critical mass of thought and action making the Strong Towns approach self-evident to local leaders and the people they serve. We use three core strategies to pursue our mission.
Strategy #1: Inform and Inspire a Movement
We give community heroes the knowledge and the language they need to be advocates for change. Strong Towns publishes new content each weekday. Articles, podcasts, videos, and social media posts are all designed to communicate big ideas, core insights, and new strategies to a broad audience.
The narrative framing of this content is intentionally local and non-political, emphasizing the need to work together across our differences. It is all Creative Commons licensed, free to access, reproduce, and share.
For those who want to delve deeper, the Strong Towns Academy provides in-depth online courses and live training sessions. The Action Lab curates resources and best practices for those ready to get to work.
Millions of people read Strong Towns content each year, making strongtowns.org one of the most influential platforms shaping public discourse around city building, economic growth, and community development.
Strategy #2: Expand the Movement’s Size and Influence
Community heroes are stepping up every day to push for a new approach. Strong Towns puts the wind at their backs by changing the cultural conversation happening around them. Ideas from the movement, such as the “stroad” and the “Growth Ponzi Scheme,” are becoming part of everyday discussions in local communities, opening doors to a broader reconsideration of all the issues addressed in Strong Towns’ articles, videos, and courses.
The Strong Towns team travels North America, hosting events, lectures, and workshops. We meet people in person and build relationships that reduce resistance to change. Our membership program reinforces a sense of solidarity. Strong Towns has 5,000 active members; nobody pushing for bottom-up change will ever be alone.
To reach new people and expand the movement, we utilize a robust marketing and idea distribution system. Paid advertising, public relations, and sophisticated media outreach help us reach millions of new people each year, exposing them to ideas and planting the seeds of support for a bottom-up approach.
Strategy #3: Mobilize the Movement for Action
When a community hero is ready to act, they need the support of a team. The Local Conversations program joins community heroes together to put Strong Towns ideas into action where they live. We connect people, put them through an onboarding program, and then support them as they do their work. There are currently 170 active Local Conversations with hundreds more in the formation process, putting us on a path toward 1,000 conversations by 2026.
The Community Action Lab is our approach to broadly shifting the conversation in a specific community. While deploying all of our content, communications, and movement-building strategies within a set geography, we train a local Action Team to implement Strong Towns approaches. The melding of message with action is powerful.
We bring Strong Towns members together for an event we call the National Gathering. More than a traditional conference, the event highlights the success stories of community heroes, giving others a chance to learn from and be inspired by their accomplishments.
What do Strong Towns Heroes Accomplish?
People who once felt helpless and alone are connecting with neighbors to become effective changemakers. A substitute teacher advocating for active transportation in Temecula. An artist using his craft to make Baltimore streets more walkable. Citizens in Philadelphia using traffic cones and temporary bollards to create protected bike lanes. We highlight local heroes on our podcast, The Bottom-Up Revolution, and in other media across the Strong Towns platform.
Local Conversations are a major catalyst for change. One in Michigan is restoring its city’s tree canopy. Local Conversations in Texas, Wisconsin, and North Carolina have made nearly a hundred bus benches to give transit users rest and dignity. Local Conversations in four states have set up bike valet parking programs, both to help people ride to community events and to demonstrate to their cities that more people would ride if there was adequate bike parking.
When a Local Conversation in Illinois hosted its first trash pickup day, 27 people attended, including two city councilors. They picked up 20 bags of garbage. When the two council members noticed that 80% of the mass was cigarettes, they were inspired to think about what could be done to reduce smoking.
Local Conversation members are speaking up at city council meetings to change zoning codes, hosting- community events (street fairs, student bike buses, documentary screenings, etc.), doing tactical urbanism projects to protect pedestrians, fighting urban highway projects that will decimate inner-city neighborhoods, caring for parks and community gardens, and much more.
What Does a Nation of Strong Towns Look Like?
In the voices of a growing number of local heroes, Strong Towns ideas are emerging from within an environment of overlapping crises to challenge the status quo and put places back on the path to prosperity.
Instead of making local investment decisions based on the whims of federal and state grant programs, local leaders are asserting their own priorities. The question “what can we do, right now, with the resources we have” is on the way to replacing “what can we get funded” as the focus of our attention.
A Strong Town is obsessive about where people struggle to use the city as it has been built. Those observations lead to urgent action. Things get better before our eyes.
In a Strong Town, friends and neighbors come together “to do what they can,” which is the official call to action of the Strong Towns movement. Individual contributions to a collective effort allow everyone to witness their community becoming better over time. Success means everyone can live a good life in a prospering place.
Charles Marohn—known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues—is the founder and president of Strong Towns. He is a land use planner and civil engineer with decades of experience. He holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning, both from the University of Minnesota.
Marohn is the author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity (Wiley, 2019) and Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town (Wiley 2021). He hosts the Strong Towns Podcast and is a primary writer for Strong Towns’ web content. He has presented Strong Towns concepts in hundreds of cities and towns across North America.