The Importance of Incrementally Building Principles AND Incrementally Putting Them Into Practice

Strong Towns has always emphasized the value of incrementalism, in both theory and practice. An important, but not always emphasized, feature of the continuum between theory and practice is decision points: those moments when the work of educating others about the consequences of our built environments, and the work of building political support for changing regulations and creating policies that reflect an awareness of those consequences (let’s call all that the theorizing part) culminates in a decision which authorizes or at least provides support for changed approaches or actions regarding our built environment (let’s call that the practicing part).

Simply put, incremental labor must exist on both sides of those decision points. Without it, too often all that hard theorizing work gets set aside, because following through on decisions—that is, the actual practical work of implementation—seems too hard or, when confronted with other urban priorities, too theoretical to be taken seriously.

My engagement with the problem of keeping up one’s incremental work even after decisions have been made began with an intersection a little over a mile from my house on the west side of Wichita, Kansas, where two major arterials, Central and Ridge, meet.

*Central and Ridge, on the southwest corner, looking northeast.*

*North of Central and Ridge, on the west side of Ridge, looking south.*

It is not a pleasantly walkable intersection, nor a location of any kind of real artistic activity or civic engagement. It’s a stretch of two stroads, surrounded on all sides with various forms of human habitation (single-family homes and apartments complexes), and which therefore ought to be areas of organic commerce and social interaction. But instead, it has long since been overtaken by the automobile-centric road mentality: make things as wide and as structured as possible, because that enables (and, of course, encourages) speed.

Wichita, like too many American cities, has accepted that imperative as a ruling one. As a result, the sorts of opportunities for commerce and “street life” along a place like Central and Ridge are predictable: banks, gas stations, discount stores, and whatever else can hold onto some parking until they go out of business. Locations around this intersection that actually generate social capital along with money are rare.

*Southwest corner of Central and Ridge.*

*Looking northwest along Central, just west of Central and Ridge.*

For all its depressing busy-ness, this is an intersection I know well, because I bike along Central all the time when I want to make a straight shot east toward Wichita’s downtown, or sometimes when I’m biking to the west side’s farmer’s market and bike lane connections at Sedgwick County Park. I don’t have any illusions about the pedestrian- or bicycle-friendliness of this intersection or of the arterial corridors which feed into it. They are dangerous places. Still, when you have most of these stretches of road, in all four directions from the intersection, filled with housing and families and people—people who will want to move and not always will be able or will desire to do so solely in their automobiles—conflicts with the stroad-ish designs which dominate here are inevitable.

Perhaps that conflict is part of the reason why Central and Ridge, along with 17 other locations around Wichita’s “Established Central Area,” were identified in our city’s Places for People Plan as a “Community Core” node which requires, and also discourages, certain development practices.

Places for People is a wide-ranging set of planning guides, investment strategies, and zoning recommendations, hammered out through years of meetings and studies, and formally embraced by the city of Wichita in 2019. For a near entirely automobile-centric, suburban-model, low-density city like mine, its passage was an encouraging sign, and the triumph of all sorts of incremental “theorizing”: conversations, listening sessions, workshops, and more. It emphasized the need to increase walkability and connectivity across the city, encouraged infill construction and discouraged expansion into undeveloped land, proposed limiting zoning restrictions and improving support for pedestrian and other non-automotive transportation choices, and more.

Insofar as the intersection of Central and Ridge is concerned, Places for People identified it as a site which needs “redevelopment that is contextual to the [in this case, multi-family residential and small-scale commercial] environment in which it is occurring.” The fact that the intersection added, during a routine expansion long ago, a tiny sunken path with benches on its southwest corner, suggests that, as implausible as it may seems when you take in the whole location, the people who actually know this space well recognized that the possibilities for promoting walkability there were not negligible, and Places for People validated that.

*The hidden southwest corner of the intersection, looking east towards Ridge.*

But rather than building upon such tiny incremental steps, as the theory behind Places for People clearly articulated, the northeast corner of Central and Ridge is going to get a new used auto dealership. Not a development particularly “contextual” to the hope for walkability or local commerce, obviously.

It’s fair to acknowledge that the northeast corner of Central and Ridge was long occupied by the empty shell of a gas station and car wash which had gone out of business. Directly north of it you have low-cost apartments; across the street from them you have single-family homes. Surely it must have been depressing to have an empty lot take up that corner over the years.

*The northeast corner of Central and Ridge, looking south, last year.*

*Same corner late this spring, looking north across it towards Central.*

But nonetheless, what is the point of even having a set of incrementally developed, theoretically tested policy stipulations and priorities if those in charge of implementing them are, at the point of decision, going to respond to development proposals from business interests by simply pushing the policy objections aside? I don’t want to be unfair to folks whom I have every reason to believe are doing their jobs to the best of their ability, but still, I can’t help but wonder.

Initially, Wichita’s Metropolitan Area Planning Department (MAPD) looked at the proposed development, looked at the site, and made their decision. In line with what a “Community Core” (a Plan-defined site of potential walkability and street-level commercial development) requires, they found that since a used car lot at Central and Ridge would not “capitalize on existing multi-family residential and transit service” and would likely “set a precedent for approvals of future applications … not in conformance with the principles of the Places for People Plan,” they recommended the proposal be denied.

But Wichita’s Metropolitan Area Planning Commission (MAPC) can overrule the recommendations made the staff responsible for following up on Places for People, and here they did so, with one member making the comment that “[t]his property has been vacant for an awful long time,” that “something needs to happen there,” and that “[a]s far as [the] Wichita Places for People Plan [goes], people are going to drive, they’re not going to walk even to go across the street [at this intersection].”

As someone who bikes through Central and Ridge regularly, I can understand their instinctual judgment. But in a city as overbuilt as my own, that judgment might seem intuitively plausible about any intersection in Wichita. And if we’re going to actually have policies which reflect the slowly emerging understanding of the need to do something about the consequences of our built environment, don’t we need to start implementing the decisions they point toward somewhere?

I tried to make this point when I spoke against the development when it came up for discussion at my councilmember’s district advisory board (DAB) meeting, where it went before being sent on to the city council for final approval. I should have known that the person taking the minutes wouldn’t know what “stroad” meant, and I made the mistake of not explaining my jargon more clearly, because when the final report was made to the city council, the summary written by the city communications representative concluded: “No members of the public spoke in opposition at this public hearing.”

Though the city councilmember who presided over the meeting is familiar with and supportive of Strong Towns principles (he, at least, knew what I was talking about when I called Central and Ridge stroads), the proposed development passed the DAB and was later approved by the city council pro forma, without any discussion or dissenting votes.

Some of the conclusions I could draw from this process might be:

Start attending meetings earlier (I wasn’t aware of the proposed development for that corner until I saw it on the agenda for my district advisory board meeting).
Don’t use terminology you aren’t certain that everyone you’re speaking to are familiar with.
Find the time to organize with residents and others that have more immediate skin in the game than a bicycle commuter like me.
Visuals are always nice. What if I’d brought a photo of that forlorn, forgotten pedestrian development on the southwest corner of Central and Ridge, to emphasize that at least some people are aware of the desire of those who live all around these stroads to have some room—and, development-wise, some real commercial reason—to walk?

Another possible conclusion might be: be choosy in picking one’s battles. Maybe Central and Ridge was always going to be a lost cause; and maybe any development, simply to get some activity on that southeast corner, even if it doesn’t respect the Places for People Plan, was fated to be a political winner. But for myself, I see yet one more conclusion, one having to do with keep the correct (incremental!) connection between theory and practice in mind.

City planners and urban designers were central to the fiscally and environmentally unsustainable built environments that we’ve inherited from the past century, and so surely their historical actions and their legacy in terms of building codes and more deserve much critique. But the last 30 years have also seen the New Urbanist critiques of the 20th century, and then you have the Strong Towns message of the past decade finally bubbling up into much of the profession. The fact is that we really do have more and more people today trying hard, within their own specific political, economic, and cultural contexts, to build more sustainable, more walkable, more healthy cities. Wichita’s Places for People Plan, for all its limitations, is a hopeful example of that, one of hundreds across the country.

And yet, there is an abiding suspicion—sometimes well-grounded, I’ll admit, but often, I would insist, not—that the principles guiding these new recommendations reflect hopeless theories. They just aren’t practical, the accusation goes; in real life we know what the actual development priorities must be. It's true that many people complain (as some have here in Wichita) about any remotely “theoretical” alternative plan for urban spaces, simply because their notion of ordinary convenience is oriented around automobile-centric development patterns. But the instinctual reactions of some cannot be allowed to become an excuse for not continuing the incremental and practical work of implementation which made an accomplishment like Places for People, and the changes it points toward, opens up the possibility for in the first place.

Central and Ridge is going to get a used car lot, and some will be happy with that. But there were planners pointing out how that development wouldn’t help move the city in the direction that it needs to go, and that’s the theory we need to hold onto. In the meantime, we gird up our loins, to the use the Biblical phrase, and keep incrementally practicing. For me, that means defending the ideas behind an improved built environment through writing pieces like this, but also continuing to bike through that intersection—and maybe now, inviting some people to visit the unused, but still hopeful pedestrian corner there, to see what practices we can incrementally remind decision-makers of, next time developers propose something new.

Russell Arben Fox grew up milking cows and bailing hay in Spokane Valley, Washington, but now lives in Wichita, Kansas, where he runs the History & Politics and the Honors programs at Friends University, a small Christian liberal arts college. He aspires to write a book about democracy, community, and environmental sustainability in mid-sized cities, like the one he has made his and his family's home. He also blogs on politics, philosophy, religion, books, bicycling, roads, farming, pop music, and much more at In Medias Res.