Strong Towns | Charles Marohn | Talks at Google

What people said

richardfey · 2021-05 · Recommendation

If you like this topic I recommend this talk: [VIDEO] It has a great explanation of the difference between complex and complicated, and the fragility of our systems compared to nature's ones.

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imtringued · 2021-02 · Recommendation

>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 Charles Marohn regarding this topic: [VIDEO]

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panick21_ · 2022-08 · Reference

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 cost for very little in terms of property tax. Not to mention that such a development pattern makes city centers less attractive, and that is exactly the place where cities could be making actual money. Often is actually the poorer denser areas of the city that financially support the sprawl of the richer part of the city. So instead of plastering solar panels all over parking-lots ever effort should be made to eliminate the parking lots themselves. Infill development has to be done, and the city needs to support it with by relaxing their often borderline sociopathic zoning orders (along with a host of other harmful regulation). Changing the development pattern would save far more energy then plastering parking lots with solar panels will ever do. And not only will it help for the environme

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