Strong Towns

A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity

By: Charles L. Marohn Jr.

Narrated by: Matthew Boston

Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's summary

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he cofounded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem.

You'll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles - and why it just doesn't work. New development and high-risk investing don't generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Listen to this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens' quality of life.

Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.

©2019 Charles L. Marohn, Jr. (P)2019 Kalorama

Eye opening

This was an amazing book for how cities have been planned in the US and how a bunch of it has been wrong. We need to go back to how we used to plan cities. Great read.

The Story of Communities

Creates a compelling narrative about growing and developing our communities. The work the author has done to convey the sense of urgency to save the communities we love is both terrifying and hopeful, creating the motivation to improve our lives at the most basic levels.

VERY LIKELY THE AVERAGE PERSON DOES NOT KNOW THIS:

WE NEED TO ALL KNOW WHAT Charles L. Marohn Jr. POINTS OUT in this Audible .

HAVE THE LOT OF US LEFT OUR COMMUNITIES IN THE HANDS OF DUMMIES???

CONSIDER THE CONTENTS and ANSWER THIS URGENT QUESTION FOR YOURSELF

I WAS SURPRISED TO LEARN WHAT I HAD TAKEN FOR GRANTED ALL THESE YEARS

IT IS TIME TO LISTEN UP AND START PAYING ATTENTION...

If you ever wondered “how did we get here?”

This book provides simple yet profound insight into humans and our built environment. In North America, we have forgone generations of hard earned, incremental knowledge of what works and what doesn’t work in cities, and replaced it with what works for cars. Chuck skillfully presents the context for this decision and the repercussions of it in easy language that is understandable at any level of technical knowledge. It turns out that our shift to car-dependent suburbs has led to everything from an unsustainable addiction to economic growth to a total loss of what it is city government is really meant to do.

My only wish is that Chuck had read the book himself.

Excellent listen!

As a soon to be architect, I find this book to be both interesting and insightful. The call to listen and understand what the community needs and then make small steps at a time towards improvement is both useful and actionable. We are so caught up in the new and fancy that maintenance falls to the wayside and causes us to believe a place lacks value because of it's appearance, even when it is genuinely more profitable and productive than the new. This book will definitely be a staple in my at-home library. Loved it!

Narrator should have been the author

Having listened to Strong Towns for years I am disappointed Chuck did not narrate thus it would have been much more authentic.

Worth a listen and considering

On one hand, Marohn is willing to consider some overarching structural issues, even of an epochal scale (eg, Individualism since the Enlightenment), but on the other, major structural considerations don’t figure into his worldview or thinking about cities. That said, there seems no harm in his “conservatism,” which is primarily fiscal (despite his soft attack on 20th century real estate and finance, or capitalism), not social. Moreover, it may be that his most worthwhile points, like incrementalism, are fairly non-ideological. In the end he might be better off with a non-ideological framework (and not go into “I’m a communist at home and an libertarian at the federal scale” blah blah), in the way Jane Jacobs avoided such issues and wrote timeless work. So while he is no Jane Jacobs, he is one of our best voices on behalf of cities and communities today.

If only every City Council was forced to read

This book will change how you look at your city and every city around you.

Transformational

Some might expect a book about urban design written by an engineer to be dry and pedantic...this book is the opposite: a philosophical bombshell. I was moved to tears at many points, but also impressed with the thorough citation of sources and information to investigate further.

Eye opening

This book give eye opening details about the thing we all know is killing our cities, planned suburbs. In my city we have lots of neighborhoods with gates. I had a suspicion these communities within our city were detrimental to our city as a whole but Marohn puts a price tag on those developments. I’m just a teacher but this book should be a must read for anyone in city government.