75 min listen
What Makes For a "Strong Town"? (w/ Allison Lirish Dean)
FromCurrent Affairs
ratings:
Length:
43 minutes
Released:
Mar 29, 2024
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Allison Lirish Dean is a journalist and urban planner in North Carolina. She is the author of a recent piece for the Current Affairs print edition (and now available online) critiquing the "Strong Towns" organization. Strong Towns is highly critical of suburban sprawl and many of its suggestions for improving our cities and towns are sensible. But Allison argues that in its disdain for "government" and its rejection of important progressive notions of fairness, Strong Towns ultimately aims up pushing an approach to planning that will maintain existing unjust inequalities. Allison's critique has implications beyond this particular organization, though. It also illuminates the different possible approaches to thinking about how to make better places, and Allison articulates a clear progressive agenda for planning. If, like me, you’re a progressive and distressed about the state of our cities, you will like a lot of what Strong Towns has to say. But its approach is ultimately undergirded by a right-wing ideology that does little to alter the political status quo and further naturalizes austerity and infrastructure inequality: communities get what they deserve based on their ability to build wealth through entrepreneurship, not what they need from a system that prioritizes human rights and the delivery of universal public goods. — Allison Lirish Dean
Released:
Mar 29, 2024
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
#7: Pink Slips, Blue Lakes, Red Takes: The Current Affairs panel discuss whether demanding that opponents be fired is good strategy, hear a dispatch from Nathan about the Abdul for Governor campaign, and each share their most conservative opinions. by Current Affairs