One Step at a Time: The Emergent Nature of Strong Towns Advocacy
I’ve been hosting The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast for about a year now, and once in a while, it’s fun to look back and consider what I’ve learned from conversations with my guests. As someone interested in the perpetual thought experiment of how to improve the city where I live in the Strong Towns fashion, I’m always curious about how folks on the ground got started, how they figured out what steps to take and how they created meaningful results.
Well, I have good news and bad. The good news: It’s not as hard as you might think. No one I’ve interviewed has had to spend thousands of dollars on an expensive degree, run for office or spend their free time studying technical knowledge to begin advocating for a safer, more resilient city. Sure, some people did make these kinds of choices, but it was because they wanted to, not because it was necessary to get started.
More often than not, getting started looked like simply noticing something that could be better, getting involved in some small way, and taking small but meaningful actions, guided by curiosity. My favorite example of this is the story of Ally Smither, who went from professional opera singer to freeway fighter simply by volunteering with a local organization of neighbors protesting the expansion of Interstate 35 in Austin. It was an unforeseen career change (she’s now Senator Molly Cook’s chief of staff) but it resonated with her values.
Still, I get it; not having a clear plan or roadmap can make starting feel overwhelming. This was a “brain freeze” that kept me unmoving in my own civic engagement journey because I couldn’t predict the next step. I like roadmaps, I like knowing what I’m going to do…not having those figured out ahead of time made me nervous.
So here’s the bad news: You won’t ever get that roadmap. Your engagement adventure is more likely to start with some observations and deciding to take a step. That might be meeting with a city staffer or elected official to ask questions, volunteering with an already active group, or attending a public meeting. That’s how it happened for Armando Moritz-Chapelliquen. He heard about plans for an abandoned warehouse that would decrease his neighborhood's quality of life and jumped into action, knocking on doors to inform neighbors about the plans. He didn’t know ahead of time exactly what it would take to challenge a city’s development plans; he just got started and let the next steps reveal themselves. That eventually led the city to abandon those plans and hold more robust conversations with residents about the future of the warehouse.
This is probably my biggest takeaway from these recent conversations: The next steps are less likely to be clear from the start and much more likely to reveal themselves over time once you get started. This is what makes civic engagement an adventure. You don’t know from the start where the path will take you, what you’ll learn or what alliances you’ll form along the way, but all of those experiences tend to work together to reveal the plan and the path forward.
This is how Jessica Peacock found herself becoming more of an expert on zoning than she could've ever imagined. She knew she wanted to reopen her family’s grocery store and that it would require a rezoning. Instead of trying to fully understand the process and learn everything she needed ahead of time, she jumped into the fray. She successfully got her family’s property rezoned and aspires to reopen the property as a community market.
We should welcome the emergent nature of civic engagement because it lets us respond to the reality of our cities — to their unique context, resources and constraints, things you’re not likely to have insight into at the start. When you keep moving one step at a time, you’re able to respond in real-time to what you’re learning and modify your goals and strategies based on that information.
So, if you’re waiting for a perfect plan or roadmap to start advocating for a stronger, more resilient city, here it is: Just take one step.
Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.