Strong Towns National Gathering

As I wrote about in my review of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, I’ve been involved with Strong Towns and have been friends with Chuck for many years. This year, Strong Towns held a National Gathering in Charlotte, NC in conjunction with the Congress for the New Urbanism. It was an inspiring gathering.

What this National Gathering showed, more than anything, was how transformed Strong Towns has become over the past decade as both an organization and a movement. A decade ago, Strong Towns was run off of the charisma of Chuck. When Strong Towns put on a smaller group, Chuck was the center of attention. I expected that Chuck would be absolutely mobbed at the National Gathering, but that wasn’t the case at all.

There were five hundred people from all over the country that attended the National Gathering, and they were largely here for the ideas and the broader community of like-minded people. It did not feel like we were all here to see just one person, or that one person was even the center of attention. Over the past five years, Strong Towns has raised the voices of many people and really expanded beyond Chuck. The movement has moved beyond just Chuck, and in many ways the community doesn’t need him anymore, he has just become another member of the community.

And community was really the common thread throughout much of the Gathering. I came to Strong Towns a decade ago largely because of the focus on community, especially Gracen Johnson’s early contributions to the Strong Towns blog. One of the popular sessions during the Gathering was about creating an ecosystem of townmakers in our local communities. This session really focused on creating small groups of small developers all working in the same community who can help support one another as they learn how to be developers.

On a completely different track, there was a great session by M. Nolan Gray that distilled Arbitrary Lines down to a 45 minute talk. While he had many great points, listening to his talk as a planning commissioner, what resonated with me the most was a statement that cities micromanage private property to mitigate impacts between neighbors, but they let the public realm go to shit. Looking around Southern California, this was something that was immediately apparent once it’s pointed out, and drove home the point that zoning reform is necessary, but not sufficient by itself.

Coming out of that session, Rick Cole was able to introduce me to Nolan, and we had a very interesting and productive conversation about housing production in California. This is the most powerful type of outcome of the Gathering, connecting people who can inspire and collaborate. This is the fundamental action of community building, connecting people so they’re better off from the connection than they would be without it. This is why Strong Towns has grown and become a community focused organization instead of just being focused on Chuck. I joined Strong Towns because I was seeking community, and the National Gathering was a great opportunity to bring community together. I look forward to them hosting it again next year.