Charles Marohn, an engineer, planner, and the author of Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, will lecture on community sustainability. The event is free, RSVP required.
By Matt Skoufalos | October 13, 2019
Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn. Credit: Strong Towns.
What are the principles of a strong town?
How do municipalities founded more than 150 years ago plan for a resilient future?
What can developed communities do to ensure that no resident is left behind amid historic cultural, economic, and environmental changes?
These are the types of questions with which professional planner and engineer Charles Marohn has grappled throughout his career, most notably since establishing the nonprofit public policy group, Strong Towns.
The Minnesota native, whose talks center on governmental policies that inspire “productive growth” rather than pursue short-term gains, has gathered those ideas in a book: Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity.
And on Thursday, November 7, Marohn will visit Haddon Township for a public discussion in support of that work.
The event will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the township municipal building. It’s open to the public, but registration is required.
Haddon Township Commissioner Ryan Linhart, who led the effort to bring Marohn to town, said he’s excited to host the discussion.
“I think it’s important to start the conversation about the community somewhere,” Linhart said. “It’s not just about where people live, but how we take care of where we live, and how we build a community around what we take care of.”
Attendees can expect the conversation to cover a lot about planning and policy models that include success stories from other communities across America. Strong Towns bills the event as a discussion about “what can active citizens, local officials, and ordinary people do today to make their cities more sustainable, more people-oriented, and more prosperous.”
“It gets into the minutiae of running a town, taking care of the infrastructure that we have, and growing rationally, at a scale that can accommodate people,” Linhart said.
Ryan Linhart. Credit: Ryan Linhart.
“When you focus a town on the core needs of a community, you’re going to create that positive feedback loop,” he said.
The event also will include a question-and-answer session, during which Linhart hopes Marohn will lend some insights about how Haddon Township and its neighbors can work to create long-term resiliency in their communities.
He views the event as a local conversation-starter, and potentially a jumping-off point about how to make things more sustainable going forward.
“It’s about inclusion, really,” Linhart said.
“We look at the future of opportunities, and what works for everybody,” he said.
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