Hazen Elwood is a student and Local Conversation member in Calgary, Alberta. Norm and Hazen discuss ways to build an advocacy network and the power of raising local awareness through storytelling. (Transcript included.)
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If you think cars are speeding down your residential street, you're almost certainly wrong. That doesn’t mean cars are moving at a safe speed, though.
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Rosaline Hill is a registered professional planner and awards-winning architect from Ottawa, Canada. She joins Tiffany to discuss the complexities of housing reform and to explain how she helps municipalities visualize and argue persuasively for development. (Transcript included.)
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Saeed Vahid, a Local Conversation leader from Richmond Hill, Ontario, joins Norm to talk about how his group collaborates with city officials and how the expansion of the Greater Toronto Area has affected Richmond Hill. (Transcript included.)
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Calgary is transparent about it’s finances. Now it’s time to uncover where value is being created—and where resources are being drained.
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Kip Santos is a trained civil engineer and construction manager who quit his job to build Local Conversations full-time. Now he splits his time between the U.S. and Canada, nurturing the groups he's founded and building missing middle housing. (Transcript included.)
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Officials in Ottowa, Canada, are showing that local governments don’t need to accept expensive and unproductive projects, even if they have a lot of momentum behind them.
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Co-hosts Abby Newsham and Chuck Marohn discuss the challenges faced by Victoria, Prince Edward Island, a town of 139 residents. They talk about how very small towns like Victoria show the absurdities of the Suburban Experiment best — and feel its consequences most keenly. (Transcript included.)
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Do speed cameras actually make roads safer, or are they just another enforcement tool that fails to address the underlying design issues that cause speeding in the first place?
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Spencer Coyne is the mayor of Princeton, British Columbia. He joins this Bottom-Up Short to explain how he’s implementing the Strong Towns approach in his city, including how to incrementally reform a zoning code and how to do a lot with a small amount of funding.
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Sometimes, small advocacy efforts seem like they’re not worth the time or effort. But every small action plants seeds for future change, both in your city and in yourself.
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Having to shut down major pieces of infrastructure because it can’t afford to repair or replace them is a bad position for a city to be in. But in some cases, it’s just the wake-up call officials need to start making better decisions.
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In this episode of Upzoned, co-hosts Abby Newsham and Chuck Marohn talk about satellite communities and the psychological phenomena that incline people toward large projects.
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In this episode, host Norm Van Eeden Petersman is joined by Ken Kunka, a consultant and coach for small-scale developers, to talk about the ways he helps people build stronger communities.
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Local governments often use terms that downplay, minimize or obscure the severity of a situation. While this isn’t a malicious or even conscious decision, using language that is inaccurate or that the general population doesn’t understand makes it very difficult to build a strong town.
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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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I’d rather smother a boot in gravy and eat it than deal with a labyrinth of city regulations, procedures and fees. Loopholes are a great way to avoid that. Here are three loopholes to help you move forward when your project is running up against a bureaucratic nightmare
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For a city, being in good financial condition isn't just about having good reporting practices and not defaulting on debt payments. It's about fulfilling responsibilities and providing a good quality of life to residents.
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In this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck takes a look at a recent fatal car crash that took place in Ontario, and the response from local law enforcement on Twitter/X.
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Winnipeg, Manitoba’s new transportation plan uses all the right words to seem like it’s prioritizing maintenance and multimodal transit, but its funding allocation tells a very different story.
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