Strong Towns | Charles Marohn | Talks at Google 

This guy + notjustbikes = next American golden age

Here because of the Not Just Bikes channel. Love the talk.

Praying for the YT algorithm to promote this talk to everyone out there - super insightful!

"our cities should not be worried about forcing people to walk a block or two, they should be worried about not being worthy of a one or two block walk" 37:00. This 100%

Please, America. Listen to this man. 🙏

i wish i could like this a million times over. not only are his ideas incredibly powerful and hit home on so many levels for anyone who has the experience of North American urban living, but he's also an absolutely terrific speaker. he makes you want to run through a wall for him.

I like how he's talking money, economics and taxes. Maybe it will make people understand that this lifestyle cannot persist.

The strong towns movement is what the United States needs.

Stop subsidizing parking!!!! End minimum parking requirements!!!!

This is great, I have been following guys with a similar message to this for years (namely Andres Duany and James Howard Kunstler), and I'm very happy to now be discovering Charles Marohn, who delivers this all-important information and message with great eloquence. Millions of people should be viewing this video, not just 10k. Jeez!

The bit about Detroit was really sobering 20:15.

This is a Magnum Opus, a Manifesto on American History and Architecture.

One should not underestimate of how much zoning in this plays a role, much of it motivated by making sure that "undesirable" people cannot move to where you (the desirable people) have moved. Great example is Lexington, MA, which literally went on the barricades to stop the red line extension because they were afraid to have black people move there. Now they live in traffic purgatory.

Zoning rules have a huge role in all this. Most of the reason you don't have complex neighborhoods comes down to zoning. In most small cities, you simply can't put a convenience store in a subdivision, even though that subdivision has excellent sidewalks and is otherwise walkable. Why do we think of walkability only in terms of walking for its own sake vs having something to walk to? Why can't I walk to a small store in my neighborhood? I'd love to be able to walk a block or two and get milk or bread instead of hopping in the car and going to the MegaMart. Heaven forbid you not want to budget 2 hours and $200 for a single mega grocery trip, but rather just want to get a single bag of some small items a 10 minute walk away. Strong countries are built on strong states. Strong states come from strong cities. Strong cities come from strong neighborhoods. Chuck is absolutely correct about the bottom up approach being the only viable path.

Wow one of the most comprehensive talks on this subject

“We need to make cities worth a two block walk.” Hear hear!!

Chuck is a legend

“‘Maintenance Free’ simply means that it will never be Maintained.”

@ 35:40: Do that small thing. Interestingly, during the pandemic, this is what many towns did. Seating outside, with allowing patrons to consume alcoholic beverages, suddenly was ok, and no American mass-extinction occurred. Pop-up shops on sidewalks, widened sidewalks and closed or narrowed city streets. Moody Street in Waltham, MA, or Main Street in Nashua, NH, were never as attractive.

High-density areas are cheaper to live in, since you can rely on public transit, biking, and walking rather than a car, saving a ton of money that would otherwise go to fuel. Most infrastructure will cost less per resident, and more space will be available on the city outskirts for parks, warehouses, and other low-density developments which couldn't happen due to urban sprawl.

Fantastic talk 🔥

Just shows perception is not always reality. The “poor” people are the hardworking people keeping things going.

"THE PROPERTIES OF A RAIN FOREST ARE EMERGENT. YOU CAN'T GO OUT AND CREATE A RAIN FOREST" @24:21

What a great talk. Why don't politicians talk like this?

MAKE BETTER USE OF WHAT WE HAVE!!! Yes! The first R in the recycling triangle is reduce waste. The cheapest construction project is one that didn't happen.

Wondered what people were talking about with the Diverging Diamond fiasco. I wondered what this 'fiasco' was. After looking it up, it sounds like it was just a bunch of unfounded internet outrage that ignored what was actually said in order to 'refute' Charles without actually addressing what his critique was. It went from being about the fact that gigantic overworked highways are expensive and alienating at the human scale (even if he acknowledged it is efficient for traffic) to an argument that it was successful simply because it reduced pedestrian injuries. Ignoring that this is just moving the goalposts from the entire stated theme of this video and what Charles' work seems to be focused on: the financial unsustainability and thus irresponsibility of these large scale and expensive infrastructure projects, which kick the can of maintenance down the metaphorical road. If people watched this video and have an ounce of comprehension, they can see that he is challenging the previous decades of design, so we can avoid the need for those sorts of dangerous eyesores like the DDI in the first place. The rest of the globe has examples of ways that accomplish transport and livable places, but America has a fondness for doing things differently. .. no matter how stubborn or inefficient. Why? Because some people make a profit while doing so. But everyone ignores the long term, cumulative maintenance costs: another form of real debt. This talk was before the pandemic, but this year has contributed toward the difficulties of every city to simply keep up with sewer, road and water maintenance. Companies have stopped bothering to renew office leases, and discover they are happy to save that money while also finding that many of their employees are happier working from home, without an unpaid and boring or stressful commute. For being able to spend less time on the road, burning gas, and more time with family. TL;DR: The DDI does what it was made for better than what came before... but it's still a polished turd. The point was never to congratulate it for being well-polished, it's to point out that it's still shit.

We need more strong towns!

The 1940s car biased suburbia development messed people’s perception of wealth up. It isn’t always about whether the families look like they are clean and simple. It’s about their productivity. I always say to people that wealth is not on the surface, as you can be plentiful in textures but still have low productivity and still be as constrained as someone with lesser quality of surroundings. (I.e. car, watch, clothes, fancy technology). I derive true wealth to be someone’s ability to use the products and objects around them in good resource management and productive mindsets to benefit their overall experience (i.e. choosing the bike over the car for shorter journeys so they can save money, switching their products which require fossil fuels over to electricity for things like heating and cooking, so they don’t have as grand a maintenance cost etc.) This isn’t about preferred textures from the big box store catalogue, it’s about building your life so you don’t have insecurities such as financial or housing lifestyles.

Damn this person should be a president of all countries

This subject is covered in depth by the RU-vid channel "Not Just Bikes". People-centric should be the top priority. If that means walking or driving a car, then so be it. He is loathe to blame cars, but after WW2, the USA went car-centric, and the world followed.

Amazing talk. Thank you.

This is incredible and I hope America listens to the this man. I'm curious, though, what can be done to encourage people not to live in the suburbs? Part of the appeal is that it is so much more affordable to live in the suburbs than going into the heart of a city. An apartment in the heart of NY or Toronto is outrageously expensive but if you go to the outskirts of the city it's so much more affordable. I guess maybe I don't understand what the average person (who isn't a city planner) can or should do about any of this. It's interesting to learn about, though.

Not just bike brought me here :)

Thx, good talk!

Amazing speaker, we should be talking about this more. I would like to hear him on solutions tho

I moved from the burbs into the city near light rail. Best decision. Life is better.

18:13 Three-car garage with attached house. ROFL!

This guy is great!

I am reminded of this quote from an old right conservative, "Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host. The conservative takes care that nothing in a society should ever be wholly old, and that nothing should ever be wholly new. "

Funny thing, Charles Marohn is one of those rare Republicans that aren't attached to financially insolvent suburbia. This guy is actually practicing what he preaches (fiscal conservatism). They'd probably call him a RINO nowadays.

So sad seeing the main street of his town today versus the way it started and grew.

Great talk thank you.

4:37 Fresno boundaries from 1897... Watch that growth!

Read Progress and Poverty by Henry George

Fantastic talk

These ideas need to catch fire.

Really good & useful

Brilliant guy.

super interesting!

I am a plumber and I love little plans

Tell cities, no new malls. Transform old malls first.

The ideology he's preaching was once called "conservatism", it's a hard ideology to come by anymore

Strong Towns red-pilled me...

It would be nice if this talk overlaid the slides that he's talking about while he's talking about them.

Too bad the slides are not showing.. though I really like the suit Charles!

32:39 Peoria Illinois!!

yes

At 33:40 he mentions Steve *something* .. can anyone decipher what he's saying.. Mazan? I can't find on Google.. Seems interesting..

Also all the codes.

Any available research on the affects of large scale apartment complexes that get dumped into the isolated neighborhoods

❤

@34:03 Eventually if we keep on this path we’ll end up with a country not worth defending.

34:55 fix a struggle - just do it: tactical urbanism en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_urbanism

We need little bodegas in suburbia

Time for said change.

perhaps it would help if our kids are/were to be attracted to stay and or come back... instead of dreading i.e. "can't wait to run off away etc..."

People would rather live in unsafe communities where they die from traffic accidents due to bad infrastructure design, than to live in unsafe communities where people die from violence caused by social issues. It's more instinctive to us as a species to fear a another man than a car. But America might be that one beautiful culture where both of these communities can flourish together. Having both more car accidents and homicides than other comparable developed countries. Of course poverty, social issues, car culture, gun culture, gun laws, car ownership, traffic laws etc are a part of it, but, we seem to forget the impact of urban planning and infrastructure on both crime and traffic safety. While a drunk guy driving in America killed a man, a drunk guy driving in Europe injured a guy. You can blame the drunk guy all you want; but the difference between life and death in the situation was the urban planning and infrastructure. And if you cram all the poor people into projects and into inner cities, then guess what; it's gonna be hard for a kid growing up there to be an example of social mobility. The American attitude is often that of responsibility of the individual; you blame the kid when he starts dealing drugs. But you didn't grow up in his artificially contructed neighbourhood where all the unemployed were squeezed together, so, you don't really understand that if you were in his shoes then you might be throwing your shoes on a wire to signal you've got a new batch of drugs coming in. It's not just your individual personality which caused you to be a working member of the community, it's about the circumstances which shaped you. And America's urban design is one of the root causes for several of it's major problems, especially traffic related deaths and homicides. There isn't a single country in the EU with higher homicide rates or traffic-related death rates than the US, not a single one. Even Norway which is a very car dependent country, the US has 6 times as many traffic related deaths. Caused by poor urban planning more than anything else.

Most of homeless & high crime is near towers too.

"We all have to copy Detroit." - Feels like watching a horror movie and screaming at the screen "No, don't go in there!".

1 million poor people will pay more tax than 10 billionaires.

They are spending it in police, fire , ems

Most Canadian cities that the downtown makes more money, only if office & condo towers. But these areas don’t look like the old strip mall in other pictures. Now my city has over 40% empty towers now &it’s getting worse.

That's what happens under capitalism, the wealth gets striped out by the ultra wealthy and the working class gets left to suffer the consequences

4:30 oh man you know stuff’s going pear shaped when Fresno comes up. Fresno, the butt filled ashtray of California. Care to guess its political distribution?

I really wish Charles L Marohn would read my comment and respond to my question/criticism about philosophy, which is: Isn't building a completed brand-new development/ecosystem the LOGICAL HOLISTIC INTEGRATED way of doing things? .e.g such as the FANTASTICALLY WONDERFUL Swiss train system. Isn't that BETTER THAN STUPIDLY INCREMENTALLY TACKING ON stuff, such as making a car-dependent city, then tacking on a bike lane by painting a line down the road, then tacking on a handicap ramp, as an afterthought?

My city is always hype todo crazy uppy things, but doesn’t want to clear snow & stuff, but for crazy crap they find all kinds of money. Need new examples. Crack house or abandoned homes don’t pay taxes.

They should do a discussion about how actively Google engages in censorship.

Gradual is good. Bootstrapping.

*shows Williamsville* "This is another place in Upstate New York." Dude, this is literally in the suburbs of Buffalo, which you were just talking about.

I love the confidence Chuck has in declaring that the outcome a political process, taxable value, is a measurement of economic activity and financial productivity. Wonderful stuff. I can' imagine why nothing of the sort is found in academia.

Great talk, horrid camera work. Got dizzy watching.

You said 13,500 people twice when talking about home town.

This talk could have done with some more calculations and graphs

This doesn't make sense to me. If cities are built all the wrong ways, Why aren't they dying? Why is no one in charge trying to fix it? Like what is the timeline for something to cause change?

Suburbs of Rome are bland & boring too. Been there.

Surprised/confused he didn't say a word about race.

"the sidewalk ends right off screen" unfinished and pointless, like most google products

His answer at the end about the automobile is disappointing. The other nations that he’s talking about, don’t rely on the automobile as much because they haven’t built their infrastructure around the automobile alone, they’ve built it around multiple modes of transportation, and they’ve made not having a car a possibility because of it. That should be the goal. You shouldn’t need a car just to live in society. Period. I feel he’s missing his own point here. Kind of weird.

"Chuck is absolutely correct about the bottom up approach being the only viable path." No. THAT is what he is wrong about. Yes - governments ABSOLUTELY SHOULD give everyone a choice: walk, bike, car. Absolutely SHOULD, in fact, pander MORE to walking, biking than to cars. However, where Marohn goes wrong is pushing vague philosophies such as "bottom up approach". Top-down approach where you plan EVERYTHING so everything is INTEGRATED is EXACTLY what we should do. Idiotically piece-meal additions & renovations in a chaotic unplanned manner is exactly what has been done wrong for thousands of years: as he talks about it: the trial and error approach that has led to countless failures. He is talking about trial and error of evolution as a JUSTIFIED thing, without emphasizing the countless errors/failures.

he talks about the ills of suburbs and only says the word suburbs like one time

I am handicapped. I am not going to ride a bike or walk three blocks. I am also not going to share a wall with a noisy neighbor.

Go out and create unique and interesting microcultures in your immediate area so companies can monopolize and profit from it. He doesn't even acknowledge the fly in the ointment to all his flowery ideas: gentrification.

It is America, however hard you campagne, you are not going to talk people out of their cars. End of story.

Multifamily homes is a terrible idea. lets say you bought your side of the duplex 20 years ago and it is starting to need repairs, wages have remained stagnent as workers output has become more efficient, while cost of living and building materials have inflated. You cannot afford to repair out of pocket , and banks refuse to finance mortgages on multifamily homes. It's the wealth disparity, and the rich refusing to pay taxes. Construction of a big box store or chain hotel is often publicly subsidized, in some cases they do not even pay property taxes because they claim the sales tax and jobs will make up for the city footing the bill.

Well, this guy no longer has any credibility after his Diverging Diamond fiasco. But you can fail that hard and survive in America.

Just read about this guy opposing the Diverging Diamond, currently on a youtube safari down voting all his videos.