Strong Towns Is Jane Jacobs in Action

Illinois is short roughly 130,000 homes today and needs about 240,000 more by 2030. The state can’t change mortgage rates or material costs, so Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois is targeting something else: the rules that make homes hard to build. He walks through the Build Initia ...  Show more

A trip to Italy left Chuck surprised by how ordinary Catholic life felt in a country filled with churches. A later visit to Hasidic Brooklyn stayed with him for a different reason: families living under intense physical constraints, yet ordering their lives around faith and commu ...  Show more

The first episode in a two-part series on Jane Jacobs, a profoundly influential writer, thinker and campaigner on issues of urbanism, whose magnum opus 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' (1961) forms the backbone of our discussion. In it, Jacobs lays out an idealised v ...  Show more

Our second episode on Jane Jacobs' canonical work, 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities'. In this second half we further discuss her vision for the ideal city, based on her experiences in Greenwich Village in the 1950s. We focus on her ideas around 'unslumming', her alter ...  Show more

Welcome home, y’all! We are back with episode 4 of the Native Land Pod, co-hosted by Andrew Gillum, Angela Rye, and Tiffany Cross.  They kick off the conversation with an exploration of Sanctuary City policies, dissecting the economic realities and social responsibilities at play ...  Show more

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Why we need to write about difficult topics. Four American towns trying to save themselves. The structural processes behind poverty. A discussion of the book The Fight to Save the Town. Today’s book is: The Fi ...  Show more