I have written about Chuck Marohn, founder and chief evangelist of the Strong Towns movement, many times. Not long ago I urged elected officials and citizen activists wanting to revitalize Virginia’s small towns to read his blog. Marohn is, hands down, the leading thinker today about building more prosperous, livable, and sustainable communities” in America’s small towns.
At long last, Marohn is coming to Virginia. As the guest of the Partnership for Smarter Growth, the Coalition for Hanover’s Future, and the Virginia Conservation Network, he will be holding one of his “Curbside Chats” at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland tomorrow (Tuesday) evening.
How can our towns get stronger—not weaker—when our economy changes? How can we repopulate our empty streets and empty storefronts? What can we learn from the earliest days of city building about building better places tomorrow? And how can active citizens, local officials, and ordinary people like you and I make it happen today, no matter how badly we’re starting off?
This live Curbside Chat is an opportunity to hear Strong Towns’ answers to these questions, and to participate in a community-specific discussion about how the Strong Towns approach can improve your city.
This core Strong Towns presentation is a game-changer for communities looking to grow more resilient in an uncertain future.
Find out more here.
Chuck fuses Smart Growth and fiscal conservatism — akin to what I did much less successfully when I published the “Smart Growth for Conservatives” blog. He is acutely aware of the nation’s perilous fiscal condition. While others focus on the entitlement state, Chuck explores the contribution of runaway, low-ROI infrastructure spending — what he calls the “growth Ponzi scheme — to undermining local government finances. He has dissected the damage done by traffic engineers to our transportation system. Among other contributions, he coined the term “stroads” to describe street-road hybrids that provide neither the connectivity of streets nor the higher-speed mobility of roads. He believes in taking lots of small bets with public investment rather than betting the farm.
I hold Chuck in high esteem because he consistently questions the conventional wisdom, much as I try to do in Bacon’s Rebellion. Yet his thinking has not hardened into orthodoxy. He’s always incorporating new ways of looking at the world. I look forward to hearing what he has to say. I highly recommend the event to readers of Bacon’s Rebellion.
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