The Local Leader's Tookit: A Strong Towns response to the pandemic (and an America of community power you'll want to hear)
If you are looking for a rich American conversation about community power, which places itself below and beyond the exhausting Red-Blue/Republican-Democrat divides, you should attend to how the Strong Towns movement is responding both to the pandemic, and to the election result.
We mentioned them in an editorial a few weeks back, and in the meantime, they’ve come through with a major new report, The Local Leader’s Toolkit (download PDF here).
The web discussion about it is above, and it’s fascinating to observe Strong Towns’ balancing of forces. On one side, the need for direct and mutual assistance at a neighbourhood level, on the other the managerial and regulatory powers of local and federal government - and how the latter might often be in tension with community power (reminiscent of the strategy of Flatpack Democracy).
There’s a certain about of “told you so” about their discussion - and understandably so, they’ve been speaking for a decade about the need to develop the resilience and self-determination of “strong towns”. What we found most interesting about their toolkit were the long-term (one year and beyond) prescriptions, reposted below:
The things we need to focus on doing immediately are clear. The further we look out into time, however, the more ambiguous the path becomes. Nobody knows exactly what is going to happen, so we need to remain flexible in our thinking and nimble enough in our approach to adjust to changing circumstances.
Just like a strong and healthy human body is more likely to overcome a viral infection, a strong and healthy community is more likely to withstand unexpected trauma, and perhaps even grow stronger in the process.
In that sense, the Strong Towns Approach is a lot like regular exercise and a healthy diet for the community. We need to create the habits and practices that allow us to productively respond to stress while growing stronger and more prosperous over time.
Local leaders can build a Strong Town by prompting their community to do the following:
• Rely on little bets, not transformational projects. In the book Little Bets, author Peter Sims describes how low-risk actions can help us discover, test and refine ideas. We can apply this approach to the places we live. The book Tactical Urbanism: Short-Term Action for Long-Term Change, by Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia, is a how-to guide for making low-risk, high-return investments in a place. Identify the minimum viable project, get it up and running, see what happens, then refine the approach.
• Emphasize resiliency, not simply efficiency. Darwin’s core insight was never “survival of the fittest” but survival of the most adaptable. When we fine-tune our systems for efficiency of execution, those systems lose their adaptability. They become fragile and prone to failure. They lack resiliency. A Strong Towns approach recognizes that success over the long term cannot be mass-produced through some efficient process. It must be built incrementally over time.
• Design to adapt to feedback. Cities are complex adaptive systems. They need to be able to respond to feedback at the block level. When we freeze our neighbourhoods in place, we make them fragile. A Strong Towns approach not only welcomes feedback, it favours approaches that allow individuals and businesses to adapt their places incrementally over time.
• Use bottom-up action, not top-down systems. Instead of developing a grand, top-down plan, we must humble ourselves to learn from those around us. When we make the effort to humbly observe where people struggle to live in the places we have built, and then respond quickly with the minimum viable project that can make that struggle a little bit easier, we will discover that we can iterate our way to success, even on a limited budget.
• Conduct as much of life as possible at a personal scale. People are the indicator species of success. There is an overwhelming correlation between places built for human beings and financial productivity. The more places we build that scale to humans instead of automobiles, the more financially successful we are going to be.
• Always do the math. Local governments budget year-to-year, yet they tend to be amazingly casual about debt and, even more so, about taking on long-term maintenance obligations. When we don’t hold ourselves to a rigorous financial approach, we tend to descend into dogmatic thinking and start relying on our convenient urges instead of prudence. Cities are not collections of people serving the public balance sheet. Quite the opposite: the public balance sheet needs to serve its people. To ensure we’re doing this, we have to keep score. Rigorously and obsessively.
With an understanding of the Strong Towns approach, here are eight ways to focus your ongoing efforts:
Painting the intersection, Mt Pleasant, Missouri. By Anne Heathen
1. Focus on your downtown and an ecosystem of neighbourhoods. A strong and prosperous place is a healthy ecosystem. Traditional neighbourhoods around a core commercial centre form the most adaptable, productive, and strong form of development. These places need to thicken up and become vital again. That’s where our iterative and incremental efforts should begin.
2. Focus on neighbourhood compatibility and not simply use. Fragile development approaches focus on separating all elements of human habitat into monoculture pods. This is what use-based zoning does, even though monocultures are uniquely fragile. Development regulations need to focus on overall compatibility instead of trying to solve every potential conflict with different degrees of isolation.
3. Focus on expanding housing opportunities. Top-down financing has provided local communities with an abundance of single-family homes and clusters of high- density apartments, but this is like a forest with only two types of plants: sequoias and ferns. Housing types that fall somewhere between these two are often called the “missing middle” and they’re “missing” partially because cities make them difficult to build. There is enormous demand for expanded housing opportunities and we need to respond to that feedback.
4. Focus on transportation as a means, not an end. Spending money on transportation does nothing for us if it doesn’t make us stronger and more prosperous. Throw out the transportation wishlist (and it’s critical to redirect staff or they will keep pushing for these projects). Shift capital investment dollars so that 90% or more goes toward maintenance, with the remainder directed to neighbourhood-focused enhancements identified using the Strong Towns 4-Step Approach to Making Capital Investments.
5. Focus on economic development with a gardening mentality. In good times, nearly every city was out trying to hunt for their next business, paying whatever it took to get them to town. Winning a race to the bottom meant financially losing for the community over the long run. Focus on growing your own ecosystem of businesses, replacing your imported goods and services with locally-produced alternatives whenever possible.
6. Focus on leveraging public spaces. When cities had excess resources, we could pretend that parks were mere recreational amenities. Poorer cities of the past built spectacular parks by recognizing their capacity to improve surrounding property values. Instead of building a parking lot, physically connect your community to your park with improved walkways.
7. Focus on your people. Public engagement must shift from something we do formally as part of a process to something continually ongoing, collected at the point of human experience. Think of a restaurant with a suggestion box versus one where the owner stops by the table while you are eating. That’s the shift we need to make.
8. Focus on reducing debts and liabilities. Cities are burdened with decades
of legacy obligations from the suburban growth era—promises that now rob communities of options. The obligation to maintain a road or repair a pipe has real consequences on people’s lives if ignored, so it’s not clear how these unpayable local commitments are rebalanced to fit local capacity. We should be cognizant of not expanding our liabilities while we find ways to adjust community commitments to match community resources.
For more, download PDF here. And here’s the Strong Towns website.