What's so ironic about American planners who like Jane Jacobs is that (early) Jane Jacobs hated American planners. The introduction to *Death and Life* is an anti-planning screed, while she salts other parts of the book with anti-planning snark. Sometimes I wonder how well planners read the book.
In addition, Jacobs in many places pays homage to individuals who make cities work while acting in uncoordinated ways. The *sidewalk ballet* has no choreographer.
The problem is that we have a housing crisis. It would be lovely to let small scale initiatives take priority but when anti-development narratives are the baseline, neglecting government power is a recipe for disaster. There’s a reason leaders for the past 1700 years have quoted Jesus but governed like Caesar, not the historical Caesar who forgave his enemies and was later rewarded with betrayal and death but his successor Augustus who was the real autocratic article. There’s an Eastern formulation of this ‘阳儒阴法, Extoll Confucianism while practicing Legalism’. This isn’t to say that the Strong Town approach isn’t good, but it is unrealistic. We must hope that future development schemes utilise good urbanist principles because the alternative isn’t a flourishing of infill development to the scale we need, it’s continued stagnation and decay.
You're absolutely right to name the urgency. We are in a housing crisis. But that urgency is exactly why we need to challenge the underlying assumptions about how we got here.
It’s not a coincidence that our current crisis emerged after decades of top-down policy, infrastructure-driven land use, and one-size-fits-all housing strategies. Centralized planning didn’t fail because we didn’t do enough of it. It failed because it inherently ignores complexity, feedback, and local capacity.
So the argument that we must now double down on those same methods—because they’re the only ones powerful enough to address the scale of the crisis—is circular. It’s like saying we need more fire to put out the blaze.
The Strong Towns approach isn’t naïve or unrealistic. It’s what realism actually looks like: acknowledging fiscal limits, working with community knowledge, and building systems that are adaptable, not brittle. It doesn’t reject coordination or bold action. It just insists those actions grow from local strength rather than bureaucratic force.
Hope is not the strategy. Action is. But the kind of action we need starts with listening, not dictating; with iteration, not imposition; with trust, not abstraction.
The most “unrealistic” thing we could do right now is pretend that the same strategies that brought us here will somehow deliver us to a better place, this time for real.
Thanks for the reply Charles. I suppose my response centres around the assumption you make that it is realistic to believe that this large reserve of ‘local strength’ as you put it, actually exists. From where I’m standing, the local strength is all on the side of suburban car enthusiasts that think a three-story apartment block is the projects. I’d love to be proven wrong in this but I fear the success stories will be to the crisis enfolding as the single raindrop is to the rushing river.
In response to your embrace of localism, I respond with the Japanese experience. Japan emphatically does not leave housing policy to localities. It has a robust federal framework that prioritises the needs of those seeking housing and those who build it and gives minimal to no shrift to the complaints of existing homeowners. The result? Incredibly inexpensive housing, remarkable diversity in housing types, mixed-use walkable developments abound. To me this says that top-down planning actually can work very well. The poison was in the ideals of the planners, not their methods. You may tell me that Americans are not Japanese. This is true, they are worse. Their ideology of demanding vast amounts of personal space and ability to drive anywhere cheaply must go. The only difference is whether it goes gently starting now or swiftly when the house of cards they have built collapses on them. One thing I do know is that they will never choose themselves.
I get where you're coming from. If all you see are angry public meetings, performative outrage, and local resistance to even modest change, it’s easy to conclude that “local strength” is a myth. If you only look at the noise, then yes, the default view is bleak.
But that’s not the full picture.
We see, every day, people doing amazing things. Neighbors patching sidewalks, re-striping streets, running incremental infill projects, pushing their councils to act. Are these the majority? No. But they’re not outliers either. They’re just drowned out by a system that empowers obstruction, delays progress, and then tells us the problem is the people.
You’re absolutely right that our system invites cynicism. It practically begs you to give up on local action and demand a national fix. But that’s not because people are incapable of figuring things out; it’s because they’re embedded in institutions that assume they can’t, and then prove it by design.
So no, I don’t believe the future will be saved by a single heroic raindrop. But I also don’t think resignation is a strategy. The system we have breeds alienation. If we want something better, we need to build a system that rewards initiative, responsiveness, and trust.
We really need local government to stop being helpless tools of state/federal implementation and focus on serving the day-to-day needs of their people and the place they live. Doing so is really easy, but it would be a radical revolution.
I agree with everything you wrote here. It's a significant problem of modernity that we want a top down solution to problems that were created by other top down solutions. We just need to put enough really smart people in charge and given them enough power, then then the utopian vision can finally be realized.
Except the metaphor. Caesar and the Roman Empire, regardless of their flaws, weren't exactly the antithesis of Christianity, especially given how the Empire allowed local culturea to remain and would eventually help spread Christianity hundreds of years after Christ. After all, "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and render unto God, that which is God's". Granted, I suspect much less falls into the former category there than the latter.
My question is what is the solution to get from the current regime to the proposed solution? Replacement, in my view, requires that we have a bridge. Otherwise, the change is too abrupt and damaging.
Great case studies . Federal funding often comes with a lot of restrictions due to people wanting the money to be accounted for in ways that make it too hard to spend, And a lot of these top down planners impose these box ticking everything bagel lists of requirements that appeal to stakeholders but clearly make it much tougher to carry out the project. Also I think that when you have award winning designs you probably have a relatively expensive price tag.
What's so ironic about American planners who like Jane Jacobs is that (early) Jane Jacobs hated American planners. The introduction to *Death and Life* is an anti-planning screed, while she salts other parts of the book with anti-planning snark. Sometimes I wonder how well planners read the book.
In addition, Jacobs in many places pays homage to individuals who make cities work while acting in uncoordinated ways. The *sidewalk ballet* has no choreographer.
The problem is that we have a housing crisis. It would be lovely to let small scale initiatives take priority but when anti-development narratives are the baseline, neglecting government power is a recipe for disaster. There’s a reason leaders for the past 1700 years have quoted Jesus but governed like Caesar, not the historical Caesar who forgave his enemies and was later rewarded with betrayal and death but his successor Augustus who was the real autocratic article. There’s an Eastern formulation of this ‘阳儒阴法, Extoll Confucianism while practicing Legalism’. This isn’t to say that the Strong Town approach isn’t good, but it is unrealistic. We must hope that future development schemes utilise good urbanist principles because the alternative isn’t a flourishing of infill development to the scale we need, it’s continued stagnation and decay.
You're absolutely right to name the urgency. We are in a housing crisis. But that urgency is exactly why we need to challenge the underlying assumptions about how we got here.
It’s not a coincidence that our current crisis emerged after decades of top-down policy, infrastructure-driven land use, and one-size-fits-all housing strategies. Centralized planning didn’t fail because we didn’t do enough of it. It failed because it inherently ignores complexity, feedback, and local capacity.
So the argument that we must now double down on those same methods—because they’re the only ones powerful enough to address the scale of the crisis—is circular. It’s like saying we need more fire to put out the blaze.
The Strong Towns approach isn’t naïve or unrealistic. It’s what realism actually looks like: acknowledging fiscal limits, working with community knowledge, and building systems that are adaptable, not brittle. It doesn’t reject coordination or bold action. It just insists those actions grow from local strength rather than bureaucratic force.
Hope is not the strategy. Action is. But the kind of action we need starts with listening, not dictating; with iteration, not imposition; with trust, not abstraction.
The most “unrealistic” thing we could do right now is pretend that the same strategies that brought us here will somehow deliver us to a better place, this time for real.
Thanks for the reply Charles. I suppose my response centres around the assumption you make that it is realistic to believe that this large reserve of ‘local strength’ as you put it, actually exists. From where I’m standing, the local strength is all on the side of suburban car enthusiasts that think a three-story apartment block is the projects. I’d love to be proven wrong in this but I fear the success stories will be to the crisis enfolding as the single raindrop is to the rushing river.
In response to your embrace of localism, I respond with the Japanese experience. Japan emphatically does not leave housing policy to localities. It has a robust federal framework that prioritises the needs of those seeking housing and those who build it and gives minimal to no shrift to the complaints of existing homeowners. The result? Incredibly inexpensive housing, remarkable diversity in housing types, mixed-use walkable developments abound. To me this says that top-down planning actually can work very well. The poison was in the ideals of the planners, not their methods. You may tell me that Americans are not Japanese. This is true, they are worse. Their ideology of demanding vast amounts of personal space and ability to drive anywhere cheaply must go. The only difference is whether it goes gently starting now or swiftly when the house of cards they have built collapses on them. One thing I do know is that they will never choose themselves.
I get where you're coming from. If all you see are angry public meetings, performative outrage, and local resistance to even modest change, it’s easy to conclude that “local strength” is a myth. If you only look at the noise, then yes, the default view is bleak.
But that’s not the full picture.
We see, every day, people doing amazing things. Neighbors patching sidewalks, re-striping streets, running incremental infill projects, pushing their councils to act. Are these the majority? No. But they’re not outliers either. They’re just drowned out by a system that empowers obstruction, delays progress, and then tells us the problem is the people.
You’re absolutely right that our system invites cynicism. It practically begs you to give up on local action and demand a national fix. But that’s not because people are incapable of figuring things out; it’s because they’re embedded in institutions that assume they can’t, and then prove it by design.
So no, I don’t believe the future will be saved by a single heroic raindrop. But I also don’t think resignation is a strategy. The system we have breeds alienation. If we want something better, we need to build a system that rewards initiative, responsiveness, and trust.
We really need local government to stop being helpless tools of state/federal implementation and focus on serving the day-to-day needs of their people and the place they live. Doing so is really easy, but it would be a radical revolution.
Well while we may differ on the details, I sincerely hope your vision comes to pass.
I agree with everything you wrote here. It's a significant problem of modernity that we want a top down solution to problems that were created by other top down solutions. We just need to put enough really smart people in charge and given them enough power, then then the utopian vision can finally be realized.
Except the metaphor. Caesar and the Roman Empire, regardless of their flaws, weren't exactly the antithesis of Christianity, especially given how the Empire allowed local culturea to remain and would eventually help spread Christianity hundreds of years after Christ. After all, "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and render unto God, that which is God's". Granted, I suspect much less falls into the former category there than the latter.
My question is what is the solution to get from the current regime to the proposed solution? Replacement, in my view, requires that we have a bridge. Otherwise, the change is too abrupt and damaging.
Great case studies . Federal funding often comes with a lot of restrictions due to people wanting the money to be accounted for in ways that make it too hard to spend, And a lot of these top down planners impose these box ticking everything bagel lists of requirements that appeal to stakeholders but clearly make it much tougher to carry out the project. Also I think that when you have award winning designs you probably have a relatively expensive price tag.
I've got a piece in development that's basically "against the comprehensive plan"