THE SMARTEST GROWTH IS EMERGENT GROWTH.

The Strong Towns site has been a useful source of information on urban form.  The aspect of their approach that most appeals to me is that its participants are able to make some of the same points more technocratic observers of the built environment, such as the smart growth advocates, make, without the implicit scolding of apostates or explicit appeals to authority that too often make their way into the technocratic stuff.

Now Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn has distilled the main Strong Towns points into two books, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity and Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town.  Book Reviews N^o. 12 and 13 (continuing to work off a backlog by combining posts) will be brief, and commend both works as summarizing the main points of the Strong Towns arguments, as Mr Marohn and other contributors have developed over the past decade.

Strong Towns collects the main features of a strong town (which is to say, one that emerges and has a physical and institutional infrastructure capable of adapting) under ten categories: human habitat, incremental growth, an infinite game, the infrastructure cult, growth or stability, rational responses, productive places, making strong investments, place-oriented government, and an intentional life.  Although the categories seem otherworldly in places, the logic is this: using the technocratic tools of zoning and land-use planning, and banking on continued economic growth, sometimes comes undone.

The cookie-cutter aspect of suburban development, however, is itself an emerged phenomenon. Yes, any subdivision is predictably homogeneous these days, and any major crossroad, whether in New Hampshire or New Mexico, looks a lot like any other major crossroad. But the idea of a small number of similar houses began with Levittown, the McDonald's idea began with one California drive-in that bought a lot of milk-shake makers, and Best Western Motels simply offered comparable accommodations among a number of otherwise independent motelliers, long before Holiday Inn or Red Roof Inn came up with standard designs.

Perhaps the installed bases of standardized housing or standardized food or standardized lodging bring with them impediments to further improvement. On the other hand, aren't the downwardly mobile crossroads and suburbs saddled with earlier iterations of what looked like standard practice?

Budget-strapped mayors, city managers, and selectmen, though, might have an easier time keeping their cities and towns solvent, if they put more faith in emergence and toss away the planning manuals, and that if so, the kindergarteners might discover the kid next door long before they meet at school.

Confessions is an elaboration of the Tragic Vision, right from the beginning, the story of a youngster in Springfield, Massachusetts, run down on the way out of the downtown library because the high street is configured like a stroad rather than a boulevard, and in the city center, where there are lots of buildings with lots of doors and lots of reasons for people to cross the street, only the street gives drivers visual clues more like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway than a high street, and there are few crosswalks, and kids get run down.

He concludes with an appeal to his fellow civil engineers: stop making like the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz, stop quoting the design manuals as if they were Inscribed by the Hand of God on granite tablets, and listen to the pedestrians, the cyclists, the shop keepers, rather than taking the view that they Represent Science.  Yes, that's primarily directed at city engineers: it would behoove public health officials to similarly pay attention.

(Cross-posted to Fifty Book Challenge.)