In this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck explains how election years affect a nonpartisan nonprofit like Strong Towns. It’s kind of ugly, but it doesn’t change our mission.
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Like many Strong Towns advocates, you may struggle with imposter syndrome, feeling like you’re not qualified enough to talk to city officials and staff about changing the way cities are designed or operated. But it’s essential that you keep speaking up. Here’s why.
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All of the land used in cities can be divided into two categories: Places and Non-Places. Places are productive destinations, while Non-Places are unproductive padding between destinations. Once these Places and Non-Places are marked on a map, it becomes obvious how much land cities waste on Non-Places.
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Collaboration (or community input) is discussed at great length within the urban planning profession, but it’s often lost in actual practice.
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Strong Towns ideas have started permeating the wider culture at an increasing rate. But even as many cities and organizations embrace the movement, others twist it to serve their own agendas. Now more than ever, the movement needs advocates who uphold the true principles of building strong towns. It needs you.
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Thousands of elected officials and people who work in local government want to make their streets safer. Here’s how you can help them do that.
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Chuck is joined by Norm Van Eeden Petersman, Strong Towns’ director of membership and development, in this special Member Week episode to discuss the history of the Strong Towns movement and how members have brought it to heights Chuck never could’ve imagined.
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Today, host Abby Newsham is joined by Norm Van Eeden Petersman, the director of membership and development for Strong Towns, to discuss a recent resurgence of interest in mixed-use neighborhoods that has led some cities to allow for small corner stores even in residential-only neighborhoods.
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Why is it that when a place is [pick one: walkable, bikeable, beautiful, lovable, inviting, human-scale], it so often gets coded as being “gentrified” and therefore elitist? When only the rich can afford nice places, the solution isn't to stop creating such places but to create vastly more of them.
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At Strong Towns, we're very conscious of the words we use and the way we tell stories, especially those involving car crashes. It's not because we're trying to be dramatic; it's because we're trying to change the conversation entirely. And you play an important part.
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The U.S. is in a massive housing bubble fueled by widespread fraud. With banks incentivized to look away and Wall Street and Washington incentivized to keep housing prices artificially high, a bottom-up approach is the only hope for bringing sanity back to the housing market.
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It's difficult to find an accurate political label for Strong Towns. That’s because the way that we as a society talk about politics is structurally dysfunctional. A new, more nuanced way of talking about politics can help us better understand the movement — and how it unites people from all walks of life.
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All Strong Towns members have a hero origin story — an experience that compelled them to get off the sidelines and into the game, to start making things better in their communities. Here are some of those stories. What was yours?
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In this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck discusses the cultural shift that the Strong Towns movement is striving to create and why that shift is so essential to building more prosperous and resilient communities.
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You can’t call something an accident if you’re not doing anything to prevent it. You definitely can’t call it an accident if you intentionally put people in harm’s way through the design of your streets and the positioning of your infrastructure.
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The Suburban Experiment has an 80-year head start on us, but there’s an increasing number of people who recognize the many things they can do to correct it. Join this growing cohort of change-makers by becoming a member today.
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Today, I’m going to show you what election years do to a nonprofit like Strong Towns, one dedicated to working from the bottom up, with everyone, regardless of how messy those relationships can be. It’s kind of ugly.
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It’s Member Drive Week here at Strong Towns. To celebrate, Chuck’s reading some of his best articles that you might’ve missed. Today, he’s reading “Most Public Engagement Is Worthless,” which explains why, instead of focusing on what people think they want, planners should focus on people’s actions and then adjust their policies to compliment the way real people actually live.
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John Pattison is Strong Towns’ community builder. In this special Member Week episode, he discusses the Local Conversations program, how it empowers people to improve their cities, and how becoming a member supports the program.
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From a dangerous transportation system to a development pattern that siphons wealth instead of building it, people who are trying to build stronger towns face many daunting challenges. The good news is that they’re rising to the occasion. Here are a few examples of how people really can change the world one block, neighborhood or city at a time.
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