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Reviews
Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn Jr.
tiemeinbows's review
5.0
Really fascinating stuff, I would encourage anyone who is interested in the viability of their local community to read this.
jacobnsbrier's review
5.0
Well presented information about how we arrived at current development practices, beyond just zoning laws but also how we approach new opportunity. Compelling case made based on the author's personal experience -- including his misconceptions along the way.
nolanbrey's review against another edition
5.0
A real paradigm shift in thinking about the built world, very good
lukeestrada10's review
4.0
This is the kind of important book that leaves me feeling helpless. It does not end on a down note or anything, Marohn gives a lot of room for hope and rebuilding, but it just sucks that now these are all problems that we have to deal with. Why couldn't I have been born a Boomer?
chloe_601's review
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
4.0
Oh wow Ben Wyatt would love this book. This book has a lot of good insights on how cities and places sprang up and grew over time, and how the past pattern of incremental changes and expansion produced resilient communities that functioned as complex human ecosystems. It goes into how our current top-down development patterns, especially in suburbs and car-oriented cities, make things complicated instead of complex and thus are unable to adapt and are more prone to failure.
I liked a lot of the points that were made, especially on how the suburbs are financially insolvent and just aren’t sustainable long-term, as well as the social cost and how the shift to endless growth and consumption instead of stability for communities is leading to our detriment on a micro-level as well as a societal one.
But I did find myself getting annoyed in places because the author makes good points but a lot of the conclusions were reached through a fiscally conservative/libertarian lense. A lot of the focus on the book is on numbers and accounting, and while it makes sense to say that a city can’t be losing money year over year if it wants to continue in the long term serving its citizens, I really don’t like the way it was worded where the author says cities have to run a profit. Some of the social commentary bordered on conservative, but there were some good points to pick up on, about the value of communities and talking/getting to know our neighbours. Overall, it’s interesting to see how good urban design and walk ability not only makes for nicer, healthier cities, it also makes sense from a financial perspective which may help get more libertarian-minded people to join in the cause of making our cities better.
I liked a lot of the points that were made, especially on how the suburbs are financially insolvent and just aren’t sustainable long-term, as well as the social cost and how the shift to endless growth and consumption instead of stability for communities is leading to our detriment on a micro-level as well as a societal one.
But I did find myself getting annoyed in places because the author makes good points but a lot of the conclusions were reached through a fiscally conservative/libertarian lense. A lot of the focus on the book is on numbers and accounting, and while it makes sense to say that a city can’t be losing money year over year if it wants to continue in the long term serving its citizens, I really don’t like the way it was worded where the author says cities have to run a profit. Some of the social commentary bordered on conservative, but there were some good points to pick up on, about the value of communities and talking/getting to know our neighbours. Overall, it’s interesting to see how good urban design and walk ability not only makes for nicer, healthier cities, it also makes sense from a financial perspective which may help get more libertarian-minded people to join in the cause of making our cities better.
lkedzie's review
2.0
It's pretty, but is it sociology?
In chapter 2, the author starts to describe the history of his own hometown, as emblematic of other towns in the midwest and elsewhere, with a focus on its growth being cheap and incremental. Now I am merely a C-tier historian and urbanist, but I wondered about the accuracy of this. I cannot speak to his hometown in particular, but the history of town development in the midwest is, well, a lot sexier, often tied to the railroad and some premiere shenanigans where they played more than a few sides for money, or were various sorts of land scams that ended up working out (see Corn Kings and One Horse Thieves).
Now, the author does note the railroad's influence in passing, albeit as a positive model, but he emphasizes the poverty and deprivation of the early cities, including a chapter where he blames most of today's problems on post-war affluenza on the part of the U.S.. But this omits the vast natural resources that such towns like his own were afforded by the landscape of the Midwest to use (see Nature's Metropolis), and at the risk of getting overly political, the whole 'stolen land' aspect creating the conditions where such poverty had a backstop.
I am on the author's side. We are similar politically and I share his goals. But sup with a long spoon here. This book reminds me the most of Tyler Cohen, but choose your preferred personage out of this class of public intellectuals: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Jared Diamond, Noam Chomsky, Yuval Noah Harari, and Patron Saint Malcom Gladwell. Smart, well-educated, clever people who write well and aspire to write something truly for the ages. And it is, almost, it is certainly provocative and usually has a bigger picture sort of correctness to it.
But particularly as you drill into it, and make no mistake that my comments above are not meant to be such an exercise, only an outline, a reader can get to feel uncomfortable, because it has the vibe of lies told to support the truth, or a good work of persuasive text that creates the sort of underlying risk of discovery bias when someone throws out the baby with the glossed over fact.
But assuming that you are not basing your whole political platform off of this one particular book, it reads spritely and tackles complex topics with clarity. But I cannot recommend it for the worry that it will do more harm than good.
In chapter 2, the author starts to describe the history of his own hometown, as emblematic of other towns in the midwest and elsewhere, with a focus on its growth being cheap and incremental. Now I am merely a C-tier historian and urbanist, but I wondered about the accuracy of this. I cannot speak to his hometown in particular, but the history of town development in the midwest is, well, a lot sexier, often tied to the railroad and some premiere shenanigans where they played more than a few sides for money, or were various sorts of land scams that ended up working out (see Corn Kings and One Horse Thieves).
Now, the author does note the railroad's influence in passing, albeit as a positive model, but he emphasizes the poverty and deprivation of the early cities, including a chapter where he blames most of today's problems on post-war affluenza on the part of the U.S.. But this omits the vast natural resources that such towns like his own were afforded by the landscape of the Midwest to use (see Nature's Metropolis), and at the risk of getting overly political, the whole 'stolen land' aspect creating the conditions where such poverty had a backstop.
I am on the author's side. We are similar politically and I share his goals. But sup with a long spoon here. This book reminds me the most of Tyler Cohen, but choose your preferred personage out of this class of public intellectuals: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Jared Diamond, Noam Chomsky, Yuval Noah Harari, and Patron Saint Malcom Gladwell. Smart, well-educated, clever people who write well and aspire to write something truly for the ages. And it is, almost, it is certainly provocative and usually has a bigger picture sort of correctness to it.
But particularly as you drill into it, and make no mistake that my comments above are not meant to be such an exercise, only an outline, a reader can get to feel uncomfortable, because it has the vibe of lies told to support the truth, or a good work of persuasive text that creates the sort of underlying risk of discovery bias when someone throws out the baby with the glossed over fact.
But assuming that you are not basing your whole political platform off of this one particular book, it reads spritely and tackles complex topics with clarity. But I cannot recommend it for the worry that it will do more harm than good.