Steve Nygren is two decades into his post-career career as the "mad genius" master developer of a town-in-progress called Serenbe, Georgia. It's a community deliberately modeled after English country villages and other historic towns—the kinds of places built over 100 years ago that Nygren found he loved to take pictures of and revisit—but located in a very different context: the suburban fringe of Atlanta, Georgia.
Because of that context, Serenbe has not arisen organically, the way an actual English village would have once upon a time arisen from the needs of farmers to access shared services and bring crops to market. Rather, it is being developed over time according to a meticulous vision that not only allows for but seeks to ensure the kind of eclectic, photogenic, deeply welcoming and comforting environment found in the best small villages. Serenbe is an ambitious effort to achieve a better way of living than the conventional suburban model, and to do it by working within a financial and regulatory environment that is normally pre-wired to produce conventional suburbia.
Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn recently interviewed Nygren for an episode of the Strong Towns podcast, and you can listen to their conversation for insights into:
Nygren is adamant that the Serenbe experiment is not a Disneyland-style gimmick, an exclusive luxury, or an irreproducible experiment that requires a "mad genius" to create.
Serenbe's homes are expensive because the community fills an unmet and in-high-demand market niche—the kind of place that gives people a built-in sense of community and psychologically as well as physically healthy lifestyle—in a part of metro Atlanta that has few expensive homes. However, Nygren says, many of Serenbe's development principles are actually less expensive than the business-as-usual alternative. Edible landscaping is cheaper to maintain than ornamental landscaping or grass. Pedestrian-oriented streets are cheaper than automobile-oriented streets. Daylighting stormwater and creating natural corridors for it to flow through is cheaper than investing in huge networks of underground pipes.
"Just because I have expensive houses here doesn't mean that these principles we're applying here can't apply anywhere," he says. And if we applied them more broadly, the potential benefits—not just to our communities' bottom lines, but to our health and psychological well-being— are tremendous.
Greatest Hits #5: Approaching a Divided America With Open Eyes (2017)
Greatest Hits #4: Lots of Small Earthquakes: How a Place Becomes Antifragile (2015)
Ask Strong Towns: Celebrity Edition with Stacy Mitchell
Greatest Hits #3: Is a City More Like a Washing Machine or a Cat? (2015)
Greatest Hits #2: Steven Shultis on "Bad" Urban Schools (2015)
Greatest Hits #1: America Answers Forum on Infrastructure (2015)
2019 Update
We'll Make The World a Better Place By (Insert Your Planning Fad Here)
Ask Strong Towns: November 2018
Ask Strong Towns Celebrity Edition: Q&A With Jeff Speck
You are awesome!
Giving You The Language You Need to Change the Conversation
What do you do when you need to change everything?
Ten Years, Getting Stronger
Carmel is Not a Strong Town
Upzoned #5: Opportunity Zones, But For Whom?
Carmel's Billion-Dollar Bet
The Roots of the Opioid Epidemic: A Conversation With Sam Quinones
Democratizing Local Public Finance by Bringing Back Small-Scale Investors
Beyond the Buzzword: Innovation and How it Can Help Local Government Create Meaningful Change
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
City Manager Unfiltered
Potencial Americano
The ASIC Podcast
The Chris Plante Show
Strict Scrutiny