Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity

by Charles L. Marohn Jr.

The “reservoirs untapped by imagination” are everywhere in our cities. In fact, for the typical American city, the amount of underutilized space is mind-numbing. Most Americans don’t experience it because they interface with human habitat through the windshield of an automobile. The empty space is difficult to perceive when speeding past at 15 to 30 times the speed our ancestors would have experienced. Get out and walk, however, and the number and size of the gaps are overwhelming. All that space – the space between buildings, all the buffers and ditches, all the parking lots and redundant access roads – represents nonperforming assets costing the community enormous sums of money while producing next to nothing in return.