Like Flatpack Democracy in the UK, America's Strong Towns movement aims to empower communities at the right scale
Charles Marohn, founder of America’s Strong Towns movement
Flatpack Democracy is one of our lodestars at A/UK - a way of doing community and empowerment and local democracy which really puts hands in the power of everyday people. But from our usual surfing-around, we were delighted to find what looks like an entirely parallel, but unconnected, phenomenon happening in the US: the Strong Towns movement.
From their About page:
For generations, North American communities have been growing—or at least, they've been building. But as we've paved endless roads, raised countless buildings and put more and more infrastructure in the ground, we’ve given almost no thought to whether future generations will be able to afford to maintain the world we'll leave them with—or how many of the things we build are making our communities worse places to live today.
The Strong Towns approach is a radically new way of thinking about the way we build our world. We believe that in order to truly thrive, our cities and towns must:
Stop valuing efficiency and start valuing resilience
Stop betting our futures on huge, irreversible projects, and start taking small, incremental steps and iterating based on what we learn
Stop fearing change and start embracing a process of continuous adaptation
Stop building our world based on abstract theories, and start building it based on how our places actually work and what our neighbors actually need today
Stop obsessing about future growth and start obsessing about our current finances
But most importantly, we believe that Strong Citizens from all walks of life can and must participate in a Strong Towns approach—from citizens to leaders, professionals to neighbors, and everyone in between. And that means we need you.
The starting point for this seems to have been a book by Charles Marohn, called Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity - but which has now become a media operation, online courses, a vibrant online community (and offline), and a paid membership.
Marohn is a card-carrying Republican, but is far from doctrinaire. His ethos for a vibrant small-town culture sounds very much like the initiative-taking citizens of Frome, the home of Flatpack. From this review:
Strong Towns makes a strong case for a more rational view of development and infrastructure, from federal highway policy down to a single stretch of sidewalk. The best investments in the built environment are maintenance of neighborhoods that have stood the test of time, he says.
“See a streetlight out: replace it. See a weed: pull it. See a crosswalk faded: repaint it. See a sidewalk broken: Fix it. The neighborhoods that are generating such wealth for the community need to be showered with love.”
It’s also interesting to see how alive the Strong Towns network has become during the Coronavirus break out - articles on how daily walks can reacquaint you with your neighbourhood, how Covid may reverse the trend towards suburban sprawl, and much else.
Note: an interesting take on Strong Towns from a sociocracy perspective.