Strong Towns

by Charles L. Marohn Jr.

  The urban core of Detroit has seen tremendous revitalization, with mega-project public investments in stadiums and infrastructure complimented by private investments in office towers, hotels, and condominium units. These neighborhoods are becoming increasingly exclusive with poorer residents being priced out to more suburban areas.

  There are also pockets of affluence out on the far edges of the community, where newer suburban investments – including malls, big box stores, and single-family residential subdivisions – are still in the first-generation, Illusion of Wealth phase of development. In many ways – metaphorical but also sometimes literal – these areas are walled off from the rest of the region. Depending on their ability to use their political influence to garner continued government subsidies, these may be the last holdouts of a vanishing way of life.

  In between the core and these remote strongholds of affluence sits a vast area in transition. Most of this transition zone is overwhelmed with despair, with neighborhoods vanishing as the homes burn, rot, or are razed. There is no real land value and so all the natural financial mechanisms for renewal are absent. The modest wealth that remains is being systematically destroyed. These are not happy places, and it is jarring to the senses to see them.

  Within this despair, however, there are pockets of wealth creation where – in places that seem mostly random and unpredictable – people have come together to form small, interconnected neighborhoods. In many ways these new neighborhoods resemble the first iteration of my hometown that I described in prior chapters. There are frequent use of common walled structures, multiple ways to make a living, essential goods and services within walking distance, eyes on the street policing, and many of the other resilient characteristics found in traditional development patterns.

  It is these new neighborhoods that I find so inspiring, that I think we can learn a lot from. For a city with such a depth of poverty and wide chasms of wealth inequality, these special places hold the promise of renewal. Like a seedling emerging in the springtime, these places need to be nurtured, but not overwhelmed with affection.

  I was present at a speech given in 2016 by Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan where he promised that no Detroit neighborhood would be left behind. While it was an absurd statement that belied every discernible fact on the ground, I’m fine cutting the mayor some slack. Even today, there is no cultural dialogue in Detroit about intentional neighborhood abandonment. There is no room for the mayor to state the obvious.

  And so a destructive cultural farce ensues, one that demands the allocation of scarce resources to places with no future, while the areas of despair continue to atrophy, the people in them trapped in a feedback loop of decline. We must do better.

  Paramedics are trained in the practice of triage. The process arose during wartime when there were too many patients for the medical systems to handle. As difficult as the triage conversation is – and we’re talking here about the lives of heroes shattered on a battlefield – it is obviously necessary and, ultimately, compassionate.

  Triage divides patients into three categories. The first is those who are likely to live, regardless of what care they receive. These patients become a low priority because they can fend for themselves, at least until more urgent needs are addressed.

  The second category are those patients who are unlikely to live, regardless of what care they receive. In extreme triage cases, these patients are abandoned. In less urgent situations, compassionate steps are taken to ease the suffering of those whose passing is imminent.

  The final group is those for whom immediate care might make a positive difference in outcome. For triage personnel, this is where the maximum effort is made. It is these people who we can snatch from death. It is this group of patients to whom we can give a higher quality of life. In financial language, these are high return-on-investment scenarios.

  If we can have this conversation about human lives, we can have it about neighborhoods. We can have it about roads and pipes. We can have it about garbage collection and fire protection. And we can do this with intention, giving our actions the maximum opportunity to align with our compassion, in contrast to the low expectations of a long decline.

  Our cities must embrace the challenging task of harmonizing competing objectives. This is not easy, but it’s what leadership will look like in the coming generation.

  Making Difficult Decisions within a Complex, Adaptive System

  Once we accept the cities are complex systems, we are forced to come to grips with the reality that we can never fully understand them. More to the point, what we often think of as simple and obvious solutions to the problems we face are simple and obvious only because of our limited understanding. The more we truly know, the less clear things become.

  Which neighborhoods are likely to survive the long decline? Which neighborhoods are likely to decline? Most importantly, where in the unknown will new neighborhoods coalesce? It’s tempting to put a theory in place and charge ahead. After all, this is how Americans have operated for the past three generations (and, arguably, humans prior would have acted if given the same means for transforming their habitat).

  Wall Street trader turned author and philosopher Nassim Taleb suggests that there are confident ways to live in a world you don’t fully understand. They begin with acknowledging the limits of our capacity to predict the future. From his book The Black Swan:

  If you know all possible conditions of a physical system you can, in theory, project its behavior into the future. But this only concerns inanimate objects. It is another matter to project a future when humans are involved, if you consider them living beings and endowed with free will.

  If you believe in free will you can’t truly believe in social science and economic projection. You cannot predict how people will act.7

  Prediction is a central feature of modern public policy, particularly for cities. Yet, with complex systems, prediction provides false comfort. Again, from Taleb:

  Artificial, man-made mechanical and engineering contraptions with simple responses are complicated, but not “complex,” as they don’t have interdependencies. You push a button, say, a light switch, and get an exact response, with no possible ambiguity in the consequences. But with complex systems, interdependencies are severe. You need to think in terms of ecology. . . .

  In the complex world, the notion of “cause” itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined.8

  Our cities now lack the resources to compensate for prediction mistakes. We can’t pretend to know the future and we’re too fragile to place huge bets on a specific outcome. We are like that primitive farmer knowing we need seven different plots but realizing we have only one. We’re going to have to innovate a new approach.

  Curtis Carlson, a corporate CEO who now works with organizations on improving innovation, is credited with a statement on innovation that aligns with Taleb’s insights. Dubbed “Carlson’s Law,” it goes:

  In a world where so many people now have access to education and cheap tools of innovation, innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.9

  I think it’s rather clear that Americans prefer “smart” over “dumb,” yet time and again, Americans – especially the more affluent ones – have an even stronger preference for order over chaos. We have the luxury of tolerating a lot of dumb in the pursuit of order.

  If you doubt this, think back to the last time you sat at a traffic signal in the middle of the night. You can see in all directions, there are no cars anywhere in sight, yet you wait for the light to turn green. You sacrifice your own ability to think and act independently on your judgment, as well as your time and fuel, for the sake of order. This is so accepted it’s done without any thought given to the tradeoff.

  Complex systems maintain order at the macro level only because they have some chaos at the fractal level. Ecosystems do not become stable by suppressing volat
ility but by experiencing it regularly at levels designed to make the system stronger. This is the core of Taleb’s antifragile insight.

  Traditional cities weren’t stable because they lacked chaos; they were stable because routine difficulty forced the community to constantly adapt, to continually harmonize competing objectives. To say it another way: Things were tough and so people had to work together to figure it out. When they did, they survived and potentially thrived. When they didn’t, those places went away.

  Nobody at the state and federal level is going to solve the problems we face in our local communities. Yes, there are things that can be done – and I’m going to outline some of them in subsequent chapters – to make rebuilding easier, but the recipe for the strengthening of America’s cities is not something that will be bequeathed from on high. We must do that, together, starting in our own neighborhoods.

  Therefore, the rational responses we seek to this broad set of challenges must emerge from our efforts. If we’re going to respect the complex, adaptive feature of cities, it is that emergent nature that must be the humble takeaway. We must resist the imposition of grand solutions and the instant implementation of a big idea.

  The great urban planner Daniel Burnham said, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood,” and to that I generally agree. I would add, however: Take only incremental actions; they alone expose the flaws in our thinking that allow us to ultimately reveal true wisdom.

  Many people have suggested to me that the challenges we face are so overwhelming that we must take grand action. They insist that the threats we face, including those outlined thus far in this book, are so monumental that working incrementally, allowing responses to emerge over time, is simply not an option.

  I believe the exact opposite: The problems we face are so enormous, so intertwined and multifaceted, that the only way to approach them with a full appreciation of the stunning level of complexity they hold is incrementally.

  We’re starting from a point where no civilization has ever been. No society has ever conducted an experiment of this magnitude on itself, transforming not only the development pattern of an entire continent, but literally discarding the knowledge for how to build the habitat that co-evolved with us. There is no guidebook for us to follow. The path ahead from where we are today is not clear.

  If we’re going to have broad American prosperity, if we are to experience the comfort and stability of being truly strong and successful, Americans must again embrace a chaotic but smart approach to evolving our cities. To harmonize competing interests in a successful human habitat, our response to these stresses needs to emerge from within, not be imposed from the outside.

  Notes

  1 https://www.peakprosperity.com/

  2 James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2005).

  3 Steve Mouzon, The Original Green: Unlocking the Mystery of True Sustainability (New Urban Guild Foundation, 2010).

  4 https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/8/25/stroad-nation.html.

  5 Alan Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City (New York: Vintage Books, 2012).

  6 https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/the-changing-geography-of-us- poverty/.

  7 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (New York: Random House, 2007).

  8 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile (New York: Random House, 2012).

  9 https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/opinion/05friedman.html.

  7

  Productive Places

  A few blocks from my home there is a restaurant with several historic photos hanging on the wall. I’ve seen them many times but had never stopped to look closely at them, until one day I was waiting for a table and my eyes lingered on a photo of a circus parade passing through a historic downtown. It was a fantastic scene.

  The stagecoaches were traveling in procession down the middle of the dirt street. Crowds had turned out to watch the spectacle; they were standing on the wooden walkways, lining the public realm. The men were wearing suits and hats while some of the women had parasols. A few kids ventured out into the street, many holding hands with an adult.

  As a person, I loved the energy of the space, but as an urban planner, I also marveled at the design. The buildings lined up to create a strong edge. They were perfectly spaced across the street at the just the right ratios to create that sense of place. The structures themselves were grand: two and three stories with strong vertical proportions and pleasant symmetry, all with subtle ornamentation. The stores opened onto the street, with large windows, sometimes covered with awnings and balconies.

  I was in awe of this place, and then I realized it was a photo of my hometown from 1904. A handwritten inscription near the top read, “West Front Street, Brainerd Minn.” It was a street I knew well. Yet, while Front Street was a mere block from where this photo hung, the image I was looking at was a world away.

  I obsessed about the photo to the point of figuring out exactly where it had been taken. I placed myself there and captured an updated image. The contrast is stark. Front Street is now a collection of mostly empty parking lots and modestly occupied buildings. There are few reasons to congregate on today’s Front Street, and even fewer people doing so. The grandeur is long gone, replaced by a sense of desolation.

  During my lectures, I often display these two images in sequence as an example of how the experimental development pattern has impacted cities. One time, when I was speaking at Boise State University, a student raised their hand after that sequence to provide a comment.

  This young man informed attendees that he was from Costa Rica, that his was a very poor country, and that they could not afford to build the way he experienced cities being built in the United States. According to him, Costa Ricans must build their cities one block at a time. Before they can build a second block, they must make sure that every gap on the first block is being used, otherwise they won’t be able to afford it. He reiterated that Costa Rica was a very poor country.

  The people who built that street in 1904 were poor as well. More accurately: They did not have an abundance of resources to waste on mistakes. The Costa Rican student was describing the approach used by cultures who are aware of their own fragility. For him, the waste and unproductivity of the modern American development pattern is disorienting. Only the richest country in the world could build so much and make such poor use of it.

  The United States is now a very poor country as well, especially our local governments. Yes, there are pockets of extreme wealth, and there is a lot of money velocity to provide the illusion of progress, but we do not have resources to squander. We must act like our ancestors, taking incremental steps in the dark.

  This may sound scary, but it’s actually liberating. Looking at that photo of the 1904 street, one realizes that these people did not have zoning codes. They did not have approval processes, boards, and committees to oversee construction. They weren’t forced to invest in miles of pipe and streets in order to have “shovel-ready” sites. They didn’t spend their time chasing state and federal grants. They didn’t hand out tax subsidies. They likely didn’t employ any engineers, planners, or economic development staff.

  They didn’t have any of the tools that we have come to believe are essential to building a successful place, but there it was. They didn’t even have 30-year mortgages, yet this collection of lumberjacks managed to build a place deep in the northern woods of Minnesota that was not only spectacular to behold, but financially productive, adaptable, and full of economic opportunity.

  The way they did this is easy: They copied what they knew worked. They took the materials they had on hand and they built using an approach that had been proven successful over thousands of years of refinement. They made modest investments over a broad area over a long period of time, growing their city incrementally upward and incrementally outward, all while evolving to become incrementally more intense.

  Every city, every neighborhood, has this same
capacity for incremental improvement. There is nothing preventing any North American community from growing stronger, wealthier, and more prosperous. Nothing.

  A Simple Math Problem

  The urgent constraint we must address is one of simple math. In the infinite game of building a community, our ongoing expenses currently exceed our ongoing revenues. Our liabilities exceed our wealth. To address this math problem, our wealth must increase and/or our liabilities must decrease to the point where our ongoing revenues exceed our ongoing expenses. That math is as humble as it is merciless.

  If we were only dealing with a math problem, however, it would be easy. Human habitat is about far more than math. It includes the messy interpersonal relationships, the complex cultural context, and the historical civic commitments that we have made to each other. In short, we must fix the humble math problem while simultaneously harmonizing multiple competing objectives. That’s what it means to build a real place.

  This is where the mechanical professional approach gets in the way. Among urban planners, and many other city-building professionals, there is a consensus that increasing density is a solution to most problems. Density can be measured in dwelling units per acre or people per acre; it’s the same concept. The theory is that, if we add more units or more people, the financial situation will be improved, which will give us the resources to solve other problems.

  I’m not a fan of the density metric. My sense is that density, at best, is a byproduct of success, but never the cause. I’ve seen horrible developments built with optimum density, but terrible design and site location. I’ve also seen beautiful, low-density construction that was financially viable and well integrated into the community. Success may correlate with density but building density does not cause success.