Strategies in Building Strong Towns with Incremental Developments with Charles Marohn, P.E. – Ep. 44

placemakingpodcast@gmail.com Facebook-f Twitter Linkedin Instagram Strategies in Building Strong Towns with Incremental Developments with Charles Marohn, P.E. – Ep. 44 About the Guest One of the best shows yet is coming your way! I am excited to share this next conversation with all of you. Charles Marohn is the Founder and President of Strong Towns and the author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. He is a Professional Engineer (PE) licensed in the State of Minnesota and a land use planner with over two decades of experience. He holds a bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning, both from the University of Minnesota. He has presented the concept of Strong Towns in hundreds of cities and towns across North America. He is featured in the documentary film Owned: A Tale of Two Americans, and was named one of the 10 Most Influential Urbanists of all time by Planetizen. “Strong Towns supports thousands of people across the United States and Canada who are advocating for a radically new way of thinking about the way we build our world. Strong Towns believes 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 financesBut most importantly, they 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.” In this episode, we are going to discuss the mission of the Strong Towns movement, the attributes of successful developments and how they can impact the surrounding neighborhoods and towns, and how developers can learn from the past in order to help build developments that ultimately benefit their cities and communities. There is loads of great information in this episode and I greatly appreciated Charles for taking the time out of his extremely busy schedule to discuss this topic of Strong Towns with me. As always, if you have enjoyed the show, please subscribe to the show and share with your friends in the industry. There will be more exciting conversations on the shows to come. Main Take-Away’s From This Show This was another interesting episode to record. I thoroughly enjoyed Charles candidly sharing his story behind founding Strong Towns and the various revelations he came across on his journey. From just beginning to ask questions about “successful” City spending to the formulation of his thoughts on what truly successful developments are and can be. As mentioned in the show, this wasn’t just a dive into the history of Cities, but truly a deep dive into understanding humanity as a whole. There were so many great talking points that Charles shared throughout the discussion, so it is hard to just pick three for my main take-away’s this week. The following main topics of the show come from an understanding in City Planning, Engineering, and Development that Charles possesses. As an incremental developer, you are fighting against forces much bigger than yourself. (i.e. subsidized capital) Private Public Partnerships; the good, the bad, the ugly. There are a lot of basic business principles that Cities could very well adopt that will make them much stronger. As always, I will dig into each of these “take-away’s” every week on the blog. So, without further a due, here we go!