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

by Charles L. Marohn Jr.

Our modern development pattern – a continental-scale social experiment – was established during a period of unprecedented abundance after World War II. We were not only the sole economic superpower that wasn’t devastated by war; the biggest players in the world were indebted to us. We held the global reserve currency, we had the greatest amount of easily accessible oil and coal resources, and we had a generation of motivated young people culturally unified by shared hardship and common enemies. All the systems that launched this massive experiment, from the new financing mechanisms to the highway and infrastructure programs, were developed at a unique period of time when we could dream big and accomplish anything. For a moment, our vision was not constrained by our reach. For complex systems, an abundance of resources destroys the need for adaptation. It renders the complex merely complicated. This effect is described by Neil Johnson in his book Simply Complexity: Why is competition for limited resources so important in real-world systems? The answer is simple. In real-world situations where there is no competition, it matters little what decisions people actually make. In other words, if there is an over-supply of desirable resources, then it doesn’t matter very much what we decide to do since we will still have enough of everything we need, and more. In such situations, we could each go around acting in whatever way we wanted, either cleverly or stupidly, and yet still e...