Talks at Google
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2021–2022
54:31 · 141K views · Nov 27, 2019
Charles Marohn of Strong Towns presents, in a Talks at Google session, the ideas from his book on why many North American towns struggle financially despite decades of growth. He argues for incremental, bottom-up city building as a path to local prosperity.
HN commenters link it in housing and urbanism threads as a clear explanation of unsustainable car-oriented development and fragile systems.
5 comments from Hacker News
>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: this video
If you like this topic I recommend this talk: this video It has a great explanation of the difference between complex and complicated, and the fragility of our systems compared to nature's ones.
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
Urban Design and police has become a kafkaesque mess. It has become near impossible to summon the political will to actually build something livable. Developments generally lean towards familiar and easy, instead of building anything interesting. Tragically, in many parts of the world, one of 3 types of plans fall in the easy+familiar domain. You have the grossly inefficient suburbs of the US, lifeless concrete planned cities of communist fame and wild-best of haphazard urban densification as seen in Indian cities like Bangalore. What's even worse, is that the average consumer is woefully under-equipped to recognize problems with this system until it is too late. It isn't until their kids start growing up that they realize how dead the suburb feels, and how the car dependence relegates one of the parents to a soccer mom nanny. Why it takes 2 hours to get to anywhere in Bangalore or why the incredibly dense concrete jungle feels spiritually dead despite how hard you try to fix it. Years of brainwashing towards the American dream and a tall condo with a view, really do not help consumers make informed decisions either. Not like contractors do user-studies anyways, but still. Funny thing is, these problems are already solved in some capacity. City has been studied to death for millennia. It is no wonder that people in modern 1st world countries, pay good money to spend 1 week in European cities that have been "preserved" as they were. I am not even advocating for some replica of
According to this talk [0] the reason is that the newly established car industry encouraged a massively unsustainable development pattern that eventually led to the bankruptcy of the city and since its the first city to be built with this pattern it was also the first to fail. Lots of other cities are suffering the same fate. New low density development at the edge of town at the expense of the self sustaining downtown core and then at some point the maintenance costs exceed the tax income and you get a city wide decline. [0] this video