There are a lot of reasons that Strong Towns founder and president Chuck Marohn is excited about finally writing a book that encapsulates the message of our organization and our growing movement . But one maybe-less-obvious reason, which Marohn describes on a recent episode of our Upzoned podcast, is that the book is a chance to ask a broader series of questions about human nature that go beyond public finance and the physical form of our cities: “How do people with really good intentions—people...
Mar 27, 2019•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 422
A lot of professions and organizations have an unspoken code, one that says, “We may air our disagreements internally, but to the rest of the world, we present a united front.” The police and the military, for example, tend to be this way. Families are often this way. This code can engender a really powerful sense of solidarity, which isn’t always a bad thing. But do civil engineers need a code like that? And what happens when speaking out for badly needed reform offends those who see it as an u...
Mar 18, 2019•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 421
You are grossly negligent if you show a conscious indifference to the safety of others. In other words, you’re aware that the safety of others is endangered, but you don’t do anything to act on that knowledge. Virtually nothing Strong Towns has done or said in ten years has inspired as much anger or controversy as the times we have argued that the engineering profession, for designing and building unsafe streets, deserves a share of the blame for the statistically inevitable tragedies that occur...
Mar 12, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 420
In a bizarre round of the endless, massively multiplayer game of Telephone that is the internet, a recent Forbes headline pronounced, “ Wealth Guru Plans Dutch-Style Car-Free Bicycle-Friendly City Near Boulder, Colorado .“ Other publications quickly jumped on the story about a supposed eco-friendly, urbanist, cycling utopia in the works at the base of the Rockies, which would have a population of 50,000 people in a single square mile and be the joint project of a Dutch urban design firm and a po...
Mar 04, 2019•54 min•Ep. 419
Once a month, we host Ask Strong Towns, a live Q&A webcast open only to Strong Towns members and select invitees, to give you a chance to ask your burning questions about our vision for change, and how the Strong Towns approach might apply in your unique place—and give us a chance to share our answer with the world, so it might help other Strong Citizens . Here’s the audio from our February 2019 installment of Ask Strong Towns with founder and president Chuck Marohn and communications direct...
Feb 28, 2019•1 hr•Ep. 418
We have a public safety epidemic in America. And it starts and ends on our roadways. In 2017, over 40,000 people were killed in motor vehicle crashes in the U.S. More people are killed in traffic each year than by firearms. And a huge proportion of those crashes involve vehicles that are speeding— 26% of them , according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Pick just about any news report or radio or TV interview on this topic at random, and you’re likely to hear two solutions ...
Feb 25, 2019•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 417
For the fifth installment of our Strong Towns Podcast Greatest Hits series, we revisit a 2017 conversation between Strong Towns podcast host Chuck Marohn and acclaimed writer and photographer Chris Arnade. Arnade has a history that makes him unusually well-positioned to see things from multiple angles. His life has taken him from a small town in Florida, to a PhD in particle physics, to 20 years as a Wall Street bond trader, to producing a powerful series of photographic essays for The Guardian ...
Feb 18, 2019•55 min•Ep. 416
The fourth entry in our Strong Towns Podcast Greatest Hits series is part 2 of a 2-parter from 2015 ( Click here for Part 1 ). In this series, our founder and president Chuck Marohn breaks down, quote by quote, a talk by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called “ Small is Beautiful, but Also Less Fragile .” We’ve called Taleb the Patron Saint of Strong Towns thinking, because his insights about risk, uncertainty, and fragility have profound implications for how we build our places. Traditional cities, Taleb...
Feb 05, 2019•57 min•Ep. 415
Today we're sharing the audio (video is available on our website ) from our January 29th Ask Strong Towns: Celebrity Edition webcast conversation featuring Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn and one of America’s top experts on mega-retailers (both big box stores and online titans such as Amazon), Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. We’ve featured Stacy Mitchell before, including this interview back in 2016 , in which she discusses her book Big-Box Swindle (a book of which C...
Feb 04, 2019•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 414
Is a city more like a washing machine or a cat? No, it's not a riddle—but it probably sounds like one unless you've read the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb. And whether or not you’ve read Taleb, if you're interested in how cities are complex, unpredictable, adaptive systems—and how we ignore that fact at our peril—we have the podcast for you. The third entry in our Strong Towns Podcast Greatest Hits series is part 1 of a 2-parter from 2015. We'll run part 2 next week. In this episode, our founder...
Jan 28, 2019•51 min•Ep. 413
In this classic episode from 2015, Chuck talks with Steven Shultis, a longtime friend of Strong Towns, about low-income urban neighborhoods and, in particular, urban schools. Shultis started the blog Rational Urbanism to chronicle his experiences and thoughts on living in a poor neighborhood of a poor city—Springfield, Massachusetts—not out of necessity but choice. Steve and his family made that choice because their neighborhood offers, in many ways, an excellent quality of life—walkability, com...
Jan 22, 2019•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 412
In fall 2014, Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn participated in the America Answers forum put on by the Washington Post, sharing a stage with, among others, then-Vice President Biden and then-Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. In this reflection recorded after the fact, Chuck analyzes clips of three forum participants’ remarks on the subject of infrastructure spending: Andrew Card, who served as White House Chief of Staff under George W. Bush and Transportation Secretary under George H.W. Bu...
Jan 14, 2019•57 min•Ep. 411
Chuck provides a brief update on where we're at with the Strong Towns Podcast and what to expect in the coming weeks.
Jan 09, 2019•9 min•Ep. 410
Our last new podcast episode of this year finds Strong Towns founder and president Chuck Marohn busily baking cookies ('tis the season), and musing on a series of questions posed to him by a Detroit-based journal. The questions get at the heart of some of the hot-button issues in urban planning: the legacy of systemic racism in our cities, the role that urban planning might play in combatting and correcting for this legacy, and how 21st-century fads (the "creative class", new transportation tech...
Dec 10, 2018•53 min•Ep. 409
Today on the Strong Towns Podcast, we're bringing you the audio from the latest edition of our live, bimonthly ask-us-anything webcast, Ask Strong Towns . On November 16th, 2018, we invited Strong Towns members to ask their questions—any questions at all—of our founder and president, Chuck Marohn, and our communications director, Kea Wilson. Questions answered this time include: • My city of Bothell (suburb of Seattle) and the cities all around us charge impact fees on new construction that cove...
Dec 03, 2018•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 408
Listen to the audio from our November 2018 live webcast Q&A with renowned urban planner, walkability expert, and author of Walkable City Rules , Jeff Speck.
Nov 26, 2018•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 407
This is the final day of our fall 2018 member drive. Today, we're sitting by the phone waiting for you to call. Seriously. If you've been waiting — been putting this off all week — we're here to help you get past the finish line. Here's the number: 844-218-1681. Ask for me. Ask for Kea. Ask for Daniel or Jacob or Bo or Michelle. We're all sitting here waiting for you to call. We'll chat a little and then get you signed up to be a member of Strong Towns. It's really that easy. Or, just sign up on...
Nov 16, 2018•11 min•Ep. 406
Strong Towns founder and president Chuck Marohn is in Boerne, TX today to give the Neighborhoods First talk: one of our signature presentations. It's all about how to shift from a strategy of a few large, high-risk investments to many small, incremental ones. The support of our members is helping us get this message in front of more people every year. And it's paying off. Not least of all in Chuck's hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota. In this podcast episode, Chuck talks about an ongoing controvers...
Nov 14, 2018•15 min•Ep. 405
Our cities are struggling financially. But culturally, we lack a common understanding to explain why this is, let alone decide what to do about it. Many people want to believe we’re simply not paying enough taxes. Others believe that our tax rates are too high. We might have too little regulation, or not enough. Some say we need an active government, and some, more of a free market.… But at Strong Towns, we don’t see things in such binary ways. Plenty of Americans wish we would listen to the exp...
Nov 13, 2018•17 min•Ep. 404
A decade ago, I sat down and wrote a series of blog posts, inaugurating a space that would eventually grow into the worldwide phenomenon known as Strong Towns. Much has happened in the intervening years—so much since I was that lone voice in the wilderness—but one thing has remained constant: it’s our audience that turns these ideas into a movement. This week is our fall member drive. We’re sitting at just under 2,500 members, an astounding number by historical comparison, but relatively small c...
Nov 12, 2018•14 min•Ep. 403
In our last podcast , I spoke with Aaron Renn, the Urbanophile , about the city of Carmel, Indiana. It was an opportunity to learn more about Carmel's controversial experiment in large-scale, debt-driven suburban retrofit, and an opportunity to hear, though the voice of an authentic supporter, about what Carmel is doing. It is different than other North American suburbs, and while Strong Towns has not delved deeply into what is happening there, we’ve been prompted to do so many times. Some podca...
Nov 05, 2018•1 hr•Ep. 402
.... But where's that familiar intro music?! If you're looking for the regular Strong Towns Podcast, never fear—it'll be back next week. Today we're cross-posting a recent episode of Upzoned , a podcast we launched in September featuring Strong Towns's own Kea Wilson, Chuck Marohn, and occasional guests. Each week, they pick one recent news story that's part of the Strong Towns conversation, and they discuss it in depth. We wanted to make sure you haven't missed Upzoned —there's a new episode ev...
Oct 29, 2018•27 min•Ep. 401
Can you build a better kind of city, one that will hold its value through the ages, through sheer brute force and debt—lots of debt? This is the bet on which that the Indianapolis suburb of Carmel, Indiana has gone all-in. In this week's episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck Marohn talks about Carmel with Aaron Renn, better known to the internet as The Urbanophile. Renn is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research , where he focuses on urban, economic development, and i...
Oct 22, 2018•59 min•Ep. 400
Strong Towns President and Founder Chuck Marohn is an avid reader, and every year, at the end of the year, Chuck publishes a short list of his favorite books of the year. The 2017 year-end list included a book called Dreamland by LA-based journalist Sam Quinones, about the rise of the American opioid epidemic. Recently, Chuck spotted Sam on social media describing himself as a fan of Strong Towns, and thought, “Can this be the same guy?” It was, and so for this week’s Strong Towns Podcast, we br...
Oct 15, 2018•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 399
The way we finance our cities has a huge impact on what gets built, when, and where. So if you’re inclined to think the municipal bond market is the most boring subject we could tackle on the Strong Towns Podcast, think again—because we have a truly eye-opening discussion for you today, on a topic with profound implications for anyone who cares about city building. Chuck talks with Jase Wilson, the founder and CEO of Neighborly , a startup which seeks to democratize public finance by making it p...
Oct 08, 2018•47 min•Ep. 398
This bonus episode of the Strong Towns Podcast is cross-posted from our other podcast It's the Little Things. Want to better your community but don’t know where to start? Enter It’s the Little Things : a new, weekly Strong Towns podcast that gives you the wisdom and encouragement you need to take the small yet powerful actions that can make your city or town stronger. It’s the Little Things features Strong Towns Community Builder Jacob Moses in conversation with various guests who have taken act...
Oct 08, 2018•33 min•Ep. 397
Last week, Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn spoke at the International Conference of City Managers in Baltimore. He described the reaction in the room as a mixture of “Yes, that describes my situation,” and “That might describe other places, but under my leadership, things here are under control.” In other words: a very standard reaction from a group of professionals. The Strong Towns message can be really difficult for professionals, people whose job it is to manage the day-to-day operations...
Oct 01, 2018•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 396
In July, fresh out of a particularly useless focus-group session of the type with which all planners and local government types are familiar, Strong Towns Founder and President Chuck Marohn wrote an article entitled “Most Public Engagement is Worthless.” It touched a nerve with many readers, and it prompted longtime friend of Strong Towns Ruben Anderson to write his own response post taking Chuck’s argument even further: “Most Public Engagement is Worse than Worthless.” Chuck and Ruben have a fr...
Sep 24, 2018•56 min•Ep. 395
If Strong Towns is not Sprawl Repair, then what is it? This question was posed to use on Twitter. Strong Towns Founder and President, Chuck Marohn, answers it in this monologue podcast. Sprawl Repair, sometimes also called Suburban Retrofit, is a concept that Marohn describes as “brilliant, but silly.” The brilliant part is a recognition that it takes real genius to adapt these incredibly difficult sites. Taking suburban homes, big box stores, and office parks – places that are not designed to b...
Sep 17, 2018•58 min•Ep. 394
Introducing Upzoned : a new podcast from Strong Towns! Strong Towns is dedicated to providing in-depth, thoughtful analysis on everything about the way our world is built—and that can take a little time. But sometimes, a hot new story will cross our desks that we need to talk about right away. That's where Upzoned comes in. Join Kea Wilson, Chuck Marohn, and occasional surprise guests to talk in depth about just one big story from the week in the Strong Towns conversation, right when you want it...
Sep 14, 2018•34 min•Ep. 393
