“Why did they put that road there?” “Who thought this development was a good idea?” “Why don’t we have more nice restaurants in my area?”
These are probably questions we’ve all thought at some point or another. City planning affects all of us, and oftentimes its consequences last generations. It’s important, then, to understand what bearing our Catholic faith has on the matter. It may also be helpful to consider in particular how one Catholic—Charles “Chuck” Marohn, the founder and president of an organization called Strong Towns—has drawn upon his faith in approaching the issue.
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church doesn’t have a lot to say explicitly about city-building. What it does lay down, however, is principles that can be applied. These include, among other things, the need to consider solidarity (194-195), stability (482), and justice (201) in how we organize human community.
Perhaps unexpectedly, the most applicable principle is one you’ve probably heard of: subsidiarity (419-420). The Catechism defines subsidiarity as the idea that “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good” (1883). We can reasonably conclude from this that city planning should be an intimately local process.
That brings us to Chuck Marohn and Strong Towns. Strong Towns defines itself as an organization seeking to analyze “the failures of the post-war North American development pattern while giving citizens the knowledge and tools to start making our places better today.” With that comes a clear four-step process:
- Humbly observe where people in the community struggle.
- Ask the question: What is the next smallest thing we can do right now to address that struggle?
- Do that thing. Do it right now.
- Repeat.
There are some profound implications that flow from this simple process.
One is that, since embarking on what Marohn calls “the Suburban Experiment,” we’ve been going about city-building all wrong in North America. Instead of incremental little “bets” (local investments) by many actors, we have increasingly consolidated all development decisions into the hands of massive corporate players who build all at once, “to a finished state.” These artificial environments are then “frozen in amber,” so to speak, by zoning law, thus ensuring that they have very little potential to grow or change over time. It’s not hard to see why we have a housing shortage in this country.
The Suburban Experiment leads in the commercial sphere to that ubiquitous feature of our current landscape, the “stroad” (a word coined by Marohn). A stroad is a street-road hybrid that does justice to neither. Consider: a street is a human-scaled, active platform for living, working, worshiping, shopping, and dining. In other words, it’s a place for living. Think Main Street. A road is a high-speed connection between places. Think an interstate highway. Stroads, with their numerous curb cuts, parking lots, businesses, drive-throughs, and deadly high speeds, try to do the functions of both, but they result instead in crippling traffic (and traffic accidents); wasteful sprawl; and unimaginative, alienating places. And to top it all off, this development pattern doesn’t even generate enough tax flow to sustain itself!
The message of Strong Towns dovetails with Catholic social teaching in some important ways. Most obvious is the promotion of subsidiarity, which Marohn talks about explicitly (195-198). Everything in our national politics and economic system is trending toward larger picture, top-down control. Strong Towns is therefore a pointed wake-up call to Catholics to take our own tradition seriously and challenge this divisive trend. You should be more concerned about the state of your town’s sidewalks than the latest outrage-grabber in the national headlines. You should be more familiar with your local councilman’s legislative initiatives than with the president’s. I’m not saying these bigger things don’t matter—just that subsidiarity should cause our deepest emotional investment to be closer to home.
One potential source of friction, especially in these uncertain times, is the temptation to adopt a “head for the hills” mindset. It’s tempting to believe that a stockpile of imperishable food and ammunition in some remote location is the ultimate safeguard against disaster. If you live in an established neighborhood, perhaps you’re anxiously looking forward to the day when you can escape to some isolated rural area. Strong Towns offers a different perspective: in a time of societal breakdown, it will probably be strong communities and social bonds that will allow you to weather the storm. Unless you live on a truly self-sufficient farm, your best bet lies in the skill and resource sharing that only physically proximate communities can provide.
Strong Towns is one of the few bright spots in our current fraught political landscape. Marohn is a self-described conservative, but his movement is made up of people from across the political spectrum (maybe a majority of them progressives). Strong Towns steadfastly refuses to be pigeonholed into any of the current culture war “camps” on offer today. Catholics can (and probably should) be Strong Towns advocates, fiercely attached to the health and success of their local communities. Paradoxically, it may be just the corrective course our national politics needs.