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This is a collection of resources that have been useful to local leaders seeking to follow the ideals of Strong Towns.

also see The Ultimate Strong Towns Reading List

Fundamentals

• Death and Life of Great American Cities, a classic book by Jane Jacobs

• New Urbanism 101 - a video playlist by Congress for the New Urbanism

Strong Towns Core Campaigns

To accelerate change, Strong Towns is focusing efforts on the following five priority campaigns.

Incremental Housing

Watch to learn:

• Five Dense “Missing Middle” Neighbourhoods in Montreal

• How Breaking Rules Could Create Better Apartments

• Why North America Can't Build Nice Apartments (because of one rule)

• The REAL Problem with "Luxury Housing"

• This was supposed to fix the housing crisis… (re: duplex/triplex/cottage/ADU reform)

Related reading:

• Characteristics of Missing Middle Housing

• Minneapolis Land Use Reforms Offer a Blueprint for Housing Affordability | The Pew Charitable Trusts

• A Critical Review of "Sick City: Disease, Race, Inequality and Urban Land" | Planetizen Blogs

Allied organizations:

• The Center for Building in North America researches and promotes improvements to building codes to improve the accessibility, livability, safety, and economic viability of buildings.

• Larch Lab is a "think-and-do tank"

Safe and Productive Streets

Watch to learn:

• Why Bad Street Design is Both Costly and Deadly

• How to Fix America's Worst Streets

• Jeff Speck: The walkable city

• Do Your Buses Get Stuck in Traffic? Traffic solutions & the Downs-Thomson Paradox

Related Reading

• When Driving is Not an Option, a book by Anna Zivarts

• Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, a book by Charles Marohn, Jr.

• Human Transit, a book by Jarrett Walker

• Street Fight, a book by Jeanette Sadik-Khan

• Walkable City and Walkable City Rules, books by Jeff Speck 

End Parking Mandates & Subsidies

Related reading:

• Paved Paradise, by Henry Grabar (an easy read)

• The High Cost of Free Parking, by Donald Shoup (a long read)

End Highway Expansion

Watch to learn:

• How Highways Wreccked American Cities (Vox)

• How Highways Make Cities Worse (Vox)

• Why American Cities are Removing Their Highways

• Why Does the US Destroy its Cities for Highways?

Related reading:

• 5 Reasons Why We Should End Highway Expansion, a Strong Towns article

Transparent Local Accounting

Watch to learn:

• It's Time To Rethink How We Measure Cities. We Can't Afford Not To.

• Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math [ST07]

Related reading:

• Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity [1], a book by Charles Marohn

• Tax Shift, a short book (free PDF) from the Sightline Institute

• Progress and Poverty, a classic book by Henry George (primarily on the virtues of shifting toward a land value tax)

Related Concepts & Co-benefits

City Planning, Emergence, and Economics

• Order without Design, a book by Alain Bertaud

• Cities for People, a book by Jan Gehl

• Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, a book by Jorge Almazán

Social Sustainability

Watch to learn:

• We Built Isolating Places. Can We Get Out?

Related reading:

• Happy City, a book by Charles Montgomery

• Soft City, a book by David Sim

Environmental Sustainability

Watch to learn:

• Urban Policies & Sustainability [AP Human Geography Unit 6 Topic 8]

• Understand the energy efficiency and environmental impact of taller, more-compact cities compared with shorter, more-sprawling cities (Britannica)

Related reading:

• Understanding the Role of New Housing in Reducing Climate Pollution - Terner Center

• The Role of Housing in Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation | HUD USER

[1] also noted on The Ultimate Strong Towns Reading List

Practices

These resources that help us most effectively implement the ideals described in the resources above.

Incremental Change

• The Spirit of Kaizen, a book by Robert Mauer, Ph.D., contrasts describes Kaizen as the practice of continuous improvement, and contrasts it against conventional business "innovation", is described as sudden radical change. Even more interesting, it dug into the human psychology behind why the incremental/continuous approach is more reliably successful and palatable with the public. (Other books about Kaizen might also be useful.)

Systems Thinking

• Thinking in Systems, a book by Donella Meadows, is a great primer on the concept of systems thinking. The last chapter on Leverage Points is particularly important for understanding how to most effectively influence complex systems. Also see The Donella Meadows Project, which continues her legacy of teaching people about systems thinking, including the Academy for Systems Change.

• Systems Thinking for Social Change, a book by Dabid Peter Stroh, offers insights on how to apply systems thinking to nurture a variety of social changes.

• How To Solve Homelessness is a suite of online resources by Andrew Hening that help you learn how systems thinking can be applied to the specific challenge of homelessness and the broader housing shortage. It offers an online course as well as a print book, e-book, or audiobook.

Messaging

• Supercommunicators, a book by Charles Duhigg, helps us understand how to listen and communicate with people to more effectively navigate their 

• Strong Towns Guest Writers Style Guide is a reference for how Strong Towns articles should be written. It covers guidelines for submitting articles to the Strong Towns content team, the voice and tone of Strong Towns content, and the terms we use and how we use them.