The Strong Towns Podcast

Chuck and Rachel debrief on a recent trip to Asheville, NC with the team at Urban3, as well as an event in Ottawa County, MI. They also discuss an upcoming trip to McAlester, OK and recent content on the Strong Towns website. 

Mentioned in this podcast:

• Upcoming event in McAlester, OK
• "Plan Everything but how to Pay for it all" by Chuck Marohn
• Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father--and How We Can Fix It by David Goldhill
• Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes
• Public Art Week
• "When the Need to Develop Trumps Public Art" by Jason Schaefer

Northern Spark is a free all-night art festival that has taken place in Minneapolis and St. Paul for the past several years. It's a one-night event but since 2011, it has more than included 535 artist projects in 120 venues, and attracted 222,000 attendees. 

In this interview, Rachel Quednau chats with Sarah Peters, the Associate Director of the Northern Spark Festival, to find out how the event got started, how it has engaged the Twin Cities community, and how other cities can replicate this amazing program.

The 2017 Northern Spark takes place 8:59pm, June 10 until 5:26am on June 11 along the Green Line light rail route in the Twin Cities. Find more info here.

See photos of the event on Flickr.

Richard Florida is a University Professor and Director of Cities at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, he's a writer and journalist, and he serves as senior editor for The Atlantic, where he co-founded and serves as Editor-at-Large for CityLab. He's also the author of a new book, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It.

In this interview with Chuck Marohn, Florida discusses the backlash to one of his most famous books, The Rise of the Creative Class, and the growth in inequality and economic segregation in American cities, which he cites as a much bigger problem than gentrification. Florida also shares his reaction to the presidential election and his thoughts about the future of the suburbs.

Chuck and Rachel discuss upcoming events in Brainerd, MN and Asheville, NC, and recap the recent CNU25 in Seattle.

Mentioned in this podcast:

• Event in Brainerd, MN
• Event in Asheville, NC
• The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire by Stephen Kinzer
• "Poverty, Partisanship and the Land Tax" (3 videos)
• This week's open slackchat with Chuck will be at 1pm CT on Wednesday (May 10). More info here.

Jarrett Walker is a transit planning consultant and the author of a book, Human Transit: How clearer thinking about public transit can enrich our communities and our lives. He also writes a blog called Human Transit. In this conversation with Chuck Marohn, Walker considers, "What is the problem for which transit is the solution?" and "What does it mean for transit to work well?"

Mentioned in this podcast:

• Human Transit: How clearer thinking about public transit can enrich our communities and our lives by Jarrett Walker
• The Human Transit Blog
• "The Transit Ridership Recipe" by Jarrett Walker

This week, Kea Wilson and Chuck Marohn began a conversation about the merits and pitfalls of Amazon with dueling articles (read Chuck's piece here and Kea's piece here). Today, we're sharing a podcast conversation in which these two Strong Towns staff members explain their differing perspectives on Amazon's place within a Strong Town. Is Amazon helpful or harmful to authors? Does Amazon support or discourage small businesses? Most importantly, does Amazon help towns become stronger or less strong?

Rachel Quednau interviews Matt Tyrnauer and Robert Hammond, directors of a new movie called Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, which is coming out this week (April 21) in select theaters and on demand. In this conversation, they discuss the power of Jacobs' message, her role as a non-professional female urban activist, and their goals for the film.