Chuck Marohn wants cities to grow in ways they can afford.

Through Strong Towns, the Minnesota civil engineer and land use planner has spent years teaching people to look at development through a longer lens. A new road, subdivision, or commercial project may bring growth today. It also creates infrastructure and services a community will have to support for decades.

That simple accounting question has grown into a much broader way of thinking about cities.

Chuck writes about streets, housing, transportation, public finance, development, and the everyday decisions that shape a community over time. He helped popularize the term “stroad” for the wide, high-speed commercial corridors that try to function as both streets and roads and do neither particularly well.

At the center of his work is an incremental approach to building places. Pay attention to where people struggle. Make a small investment. Learn from it. Keep going. It gives communities a way to improve without betting everything on a single project or prediction.

Chuck has carried these ideas through books including Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, and Escaping the Housing Trap, co-written with Daniel Herriges. He also hosts the Strong Towns Podcast and continues to write regularly about the choices facing American cities and towns.

Strong Towns has grown around those ideas into a member-powered movement of people working to make their own communities stronger.

Chuck has spent years giving people a language for seeing the obligations hidden inside the places we build.

And a way to start doing something about them.