Strong Towns | Charles Marohn | Talks at Google
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters link it in housing and urbanism threads as a clear explanation of unsustainable car-oriented development and fragile systems.
What it is
Charles Marohn of Strong Towns presents, in a Talks at Google session, the ideas from his book on why many North American towns struggle financially despite decades of growth. He argues for incremental, bottom-up city building as a path to local prosperity.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2021 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Recommends imtringued · 2021-02 · on “California’s affordable housing problem is really a national one”
>You're being very unfair here. When you choose a place to live you are not only choosing the structure in which you reside, you are choosing the surrounding environment as well. The expectation that one can settle down and expect their city to be built to a finished state which is kept frozen in time is an incredibly damaging mindset. City planners have to predict what is going to happen in the future decades ahead. People didn't do this 100 years ago. They didn't do this thousands of years ago. They did something far simpler. They built their city and then they rebuilt their city, house by house, incrementally, one step at a time over decades to match changing needs. Here's a talk by Charl
Recommends richardfey · 2021-05 · on “Artist faked being a billionaire to photograph New York City’s best views”
If you like this topic I recommend this talk: [this video] It has a great explanation of the difference between complex and complicated, and the fragility of our systems compared to nature's ones.
Cites screye · 2021-02 · on “Why Tech Moguls Are Obsessed with Building Utopian Cities”
Urban Design and police has become a kafkaesque mess. It has become near impossible to summon the political will to actually build something livable. Developments generally lean towards familiar and easy, instead of building anything interesting. Tragically, in many parts of the world, one of 3 types of plans fall in the easy+familiar domain. You have the grossly inefficient suburbs of the US, lifeless concrete planned cities of communist fame and wild-best of haphazard urban densification as seen in Indian cities like Bangalore. What's even worse, is that the average consumer is woefully under-equipped to recognize problems with this system until it is too late. It isn't until their kids st
Cites imtringued · 2021-03 · on “Californians aren’t leaving the state en masse but are leaving San Francisco”
According to this talk [0] the reason is that the newly established car industry encouraged a massively unsustainable development pattern that eventually led to the bankruptcy of the city and since its the first city to be built with this pattern it was also the first to fail. Lots of other cities are suffering the same fate. New low density development at the edge of town at the expense of the self sustaining downtown core and then at some point the maintenance costs exceed the tax income and you get a city wide decline. [0] [this video]
Cites panick21_ · 2022-08 · on “Solar canopies on parking lots”
You know what would be 10x better for society? Not have a society where half of every city is compromised of parking lots. The car and parking lots problem is a huge part issue in the US in particular. Not only is the whole concept incredibly bad environmentally, in terms of CO2 of course, but also emissions and other problems like cities being hotter and causing water management issues. These parking lots are also a huge economic problem a symptom of the reason why so many towns are functionally broke. Encouraging cheap building for box stores or fast food restaurants with huge parking lots represents and incredibly uneconomic proposition and is losing cities money. Lots of infrastructure c