Somehow, as a society, we’ve drifted from ordinary people being able to build their own homes on a cash basis in an interactive, iterative way, to immense, hyper-elaborate habitats.
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It’s no wonder that some people oppose new housing when the housing and infrastructure projects they see are disruptive construction work that drags on for years.
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We must stop building more infrastructure in our cities and switch instead to a model of intensive maintenance, combined with making better use of what has already been built.
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There is much we can learn from cities of the past—especially small, remote cities that grew up around the exploitation of natural resources.
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What if we had a class of semi-amateur developers 10 or 100 times larger than it is today?
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Cities are learning they must be able to flex and bend with the rising tides of change.
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Conventional planning is based on what professionals think people want or need. Now imagine a city that improves according to the actual needs and desires of its residents. The first is a gamble, the second is an adaptation.
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Incremental change doesn’t mean slow change. In fact, unleashing the power of the many to make small changes in response to immediate needs may be the only approach that is up to the scale of the problems our cities face.
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It’s an article of faith among many that big and tall buildings don’t belong around small and short buildings. But does this idea actually stand up to scrutiny?
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The work of building your Strong Town doesn’t end with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, because the work is never done. That shouldn’t be discouraging. Rather, it should give our efforts meaning and energy.
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What can go wrong when you pin all your economic hopes on a big, shiny new project? Milwaukee, the planned site for this summer’s Democratic Convention, may soon find out.
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The way we grow our cities today produces a few winners and many losers. Here's how to get back to places that serve all of us.
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The stars of a home makeover show are setting their sights on a much larger goal: a whole town. Strong Towns advocates weigh in on the worst—and best—that could happen.
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See examples of “spooky wisdom” in communities across North America, submitted by readers and members in the Strong Towns Book Club.
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The Strong Towns movement offers a template for creating a world we can be justly proud to pass on to our children, in a time in which so many of us feel like we're floundering to salvage the broken one we inherited from our parents.
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The most brilliant innovations in building cities are already embodied in the traditional development pattern, a foolproof approach to creating resilient and productive places that was developed the hard way.
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We chose Memphis to kick off the Strong America Tour for a reason: the city is both an object lesson in what has gone wrong in American cities, and what could go right. And Memphis’s example helps us see why in places that are going to experience a renaissance, it’s going to come from the grassroots.
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Come on, Chuck, just give it up already and tell us what works. If it were only that easy.
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Denton, Texas seemed to be on the verge of an important step toward financial resilience: allowing its core neighborhoods to incrementally evolve and provide much-needed new housing. Now, is the city on the verge of moving in the wrong direction instead?
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We need to solve our housing affordability problems, but not by ignoring context and embracing “orderly but dumb” means.
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