Fix Your City
Common sense solutions for better cities
Cities are Key to Solving Our Greatest Challenges
Cities house 4 out of 5 people in North America and Europe. They are the source of 70% of carbon emissions. Cities are where most innovation and wealth creation happens.
But cities are struggling. They’re asked to do too much with too little money. Building and maintaining infrastructure is slowly draining our city coffers. Residents are often disengaged from civic matters.
Car-Centric Design Has Largely Failed …
Over the last 75 years in North America and elsewhere, we’ve over-focused on a model of city building based around cars. Low density. Single family homes. Freeways.
Car-centric design has largely been a failure.
Driving everywhere makes us unhealthy and unhappy. It congests our streets. Sprawl creates an environmental footprint that the planet cannot afford.
… While Choking Out Other Options
Low density housing is easiest to build. And taxpayers — often unknowingly — subsidise it.
If we’re not building out, we’re building up.
Sprawl or towers. Those are often our only choices.
We forget that there are other ways to build cities and provide sufficient housing.
Solutions Are All Around Us
There are better ways to build a city. And they are not a mystery.
Cities around the world are coming up with sensible solutions to the challenges of our time.
We are pulling together common sense solutions in 5 areas.
Housing. Climate. Transportation. Place Making. Governance.
We’ll condense these solutions into a clear agenda for change that everyone can master.
Do You Want to Fix Your City?
If you’ve read this far, you care about fixing your city.
If this message is not already coming straight into your inbox, add your email below and join us in defining straightforward and sensible solutions for making your city better.
I am curious about the potential for creating "mini-downtown" areas of denser, walkable, transit-connected neighbourhoods in sub-urban centres. This would allow people in the outer burbs have more walkable / bikeable neighbourhoods to access stores, services, entertainment, recreation, etc. I think that with post-pandemic patterns like working from home, we may need to bring the city out to the people, vs. expecting them to come downtown every day.
We need to adopt a "more hands on deck" approach to city-making. In other words, we need greater civic participation in projects that benefit communities so that citizens develop a sense of agency in achieving positive outcomes. The "fix it" narrative should instead adopt a new mantra: "let's try stuff" - together.