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A review by jung
Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn Jr.
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
2.75
Probably the biggest insight of this book is that often rich suburbs provide less in taxable value per acre than urban areas, even those seemingly financially poor, yet we provide much more in-terms of services and upkeep to the former. A generally engaging dissection of american planning and development through the city-as-adaptable-ecosystem lens. Marohn’s approach of looking at city infrastructure requirements through the small-scale economic interactions between people is pretty compelling, as is the hegelian dialectic lens that he looks at ancient cities with, although i think Marohn beats around the bush of the simple thesis that american suburbia has been economically and culturally disastrous and completely gutted a way of living that has been perfected over thousands of years.
it was cool to understand the development policies put in place that led to urbanized sprawl, as well as the accounting logic used to justify such massive developments. ex. the claim that building a major road will bring X dollars of economic value to a town is generally totally unfounded and is used to justify the development cost. Thinking about the investment we put into american cities did make me view roads, bridges, etc. as liabilities in the future.
The crux of this book- that american cities are financially insolvent due to the infrastructure and maintenance requirements needed is one bay i can get behind; however, Marohn could have used more concrete numbers to explain this. I generally agree that the amount of road and electrical and water infrastructure needed in suburbia exceeds what is extracted through taxation, but Marohn’s doom-and-gloom approach of the impending descaling of our current cities asserts itself as inevitability, while not having the groundwork to prove it (he uses detroit as an example of this economic decline, and claims most american cities will see something similar within 30 yrs.)
Marohn also lost me in the weeds when he started going into modern monetary theory and the federal reserve lol. I don’t think it needed to go that deep to explain why we develop the way we do, and that chapter was basically a wash. Still: relatively informative approach to american city restructuring, and ways in which our current cities fail us.
it was cool to understand the development policies put in place that led to urbanized sprawl, as well as the accounting logic used to justify such massive developments. ex. the claim that building a major road will bring X dollars of economic value to a town is generally totally unfounded and is used to justify the development cost. Thinking about the investment we put into american cities did make me view roads, bridges, etc. as liabilities in the future.
The crux of this book- that american cities are financially insolvent due to the infrastructure and maintenance requirements needed is one bay i can get behind; however, Marohn could have used more concrete numbers to explain this. I generally agree that the amount of road and electrical and water infrastructure needed in suburbia exceeds what is extracted through taxation, but Marohn’s doom-and-gloom approach of the impending descaling of our current cities asserts itself as inevitability, while not having the groundwork to prove it (he uses detroit as an example of this economic decline, and claims most american cities will see something similar within 30 yrs.)
Marohn also lost me in the weeds when he started going into modern monetary theory and the federal reserve lol. I don’t think it needed to go that deep to explain why we develop the way we do, and that chapter was basically a wash. Still: relatively informative approach to american city restructuring, and ways in which our current cities fail us.