Quick, inexpensive interventions do more than add a little color to a place. They can catalyze the transformation of a neighborhood into a better connected, more prosperous place.
Read More
Parts of the country are slowly re-opening. Here are eight tips on how to showcase the things that make your town or city great.
Read More
Placemaking is about making your city livelier and better connected. It’s also a powerful economic strategy. And right now is the time get serious about it.
Read More
The downtown may not seem as vibrant as it once was. But there is more there than meets the eye, and this community in Pennsylvania is using the arts to build a future every bit as bright as its past.
Read More
Salvador “Sal” Galdamez—founder and president of nonprofit York XL—shares how you can bring your neighbors together around bottom-up action to create more prosperous, healthy, and empowered neighborhoods.
Read More
Civic leaders, professional planners, activists and practitioners, or simply good neighbors — all of us can do better at acknowledging the ripple effect our decisions (large and small) have on our communities. These questions can help.
Read More
Strong Towns member Austin Taylor—Parking and Sustainability Coordinator for Provo City, Utah—shares how you can use tactical urbanism to create safer streets, including how to plan your intervention, how to get local government involved, and how to use your intervention to create lasting change.
There are huge swaths of 1950s and 1960s suburbia that need a bit of TLC—and expensive, top-down “sprawl repair” isn’t going to be up to the task. What’s required is a more patient, grassroots approach. Urban planner John Yung has some ideas.
Read More
A nonprofit placemaking organization is bringing events, parks, public art and more to downtown Fort Smith, Arkansas, one playful experiment at a time.
Read More
In working to create better places, keep the stakes low, so even skeptics are more willing to indulge some risk. Take a little step. Root the conversation in reality. Then adjust and press on to those big plans.
Read More
The less you look like everyone else and the more you look like yourself, the better off you’ll be. This truth should be driving your town’s development. In fact, creating a distinctive sense of place is your competitive advantage.
Read More
One of the best ways to deeply understand the place you live is to slow down—way down—the way you get around it.
Read More
Untapped, a six-week pop-up beer garden in the landmark Tennessee Brewery in downtown Memphis, might well have been a goodbye party for the long-neglected building. Instead, it caught a local developer’s interest and led to a second life for the historic structure.
Read More
To visit the Hapi Fresh Farmer’s Market in Akron, Ohio, is to see the beginning of a journey. Seeds have been planted to draw in more residents, more businesses, and to nurture a return to prosperity for the neighborhood.
Read More
A new book from AARP’s Livable Communities initiative showcases 100+ examples from America’s inspiring local leaders.
Read More
After the crowds clear, what type of long-term impact does a public event leave in its wake?
Read More
Here are 8 small things you can do to make a place more inviting, productive and happy.
Read More
A year after Strong Towns shared its message in this rural Minnesota region, small-scale improvement projects abound.
Read More
Here are the three core characteristics you need for a successful urban center, plus how to creatively make them happen on a shoestring budget.
Read More
American communities need to shift away from a big box retail strategy to a local, placemaking retail strategy. When placemaking urban centers become the default model, local retailers flourish and a broad, diverse Democratized Economy emerges.
Read More