Curbside Chat companion booklet now available from Strong Towns; they’re coming to Northfield in November

Strong Towns 

Strong Towns is a Minnesota-based non-profit that advocates "for changes in our pattern of development and a complete understanding of the full costs of our methods of growth." Their mission is "to support a model for growth that allows America’s towns to become financially strong and resilient."

They’ve been invited to bring their Curbside Chat program to Northfield on November 29. I don’t yet have the details on time/place.

Earlier this week they published a Curbside Chat Companion Booklet:

Curbside Chat Cover

This booklet is a companion to our Curbside Chat program. The Chat presentation itself contains so much information—information that challenges the very core of our collective beliefs on growth and development—that it was overwhelming to many participants.

Our hope is this companion booklet will be an additional resource which people can go back to again and again to absorb, at their own pace, the enormity of the change that is upon us. We urge you to share it with others.

Northfield City Councilor Betsey Buckheit attended a Curbside Chat in Richfield this summer (her blog posts about it are here, here and here) and helped with some editing of the companion booklet.

In preparation for their Nov. 29 visit to Northfield, I thought it might be interesting to engage in some online discussion of the Strong Towns approach to development and how it relates to Northfield.

In the meantime, keep up with Strong Towns via their blog, Facebook page, Twitter, podcast, email list.

3 Comments

  1. Megan Tsui said:

    Darn it! I was really looking forward to the chat. Can we invite them back?

    November 28, 2011
  2. kiffi summa said:

    The council chambers virtually emptied, except for the “usual suspects” after the Strong Towns presentation.

    It was very direct and enlightening, the sort of POLICY discussion that some Councilors, Buckheit and Zweifel come to mind, have been urging for two years or more.

    It was also devastating in light of the hundreds of thousands of $$ that have already been spent on the ‘EDA’s folly’, the 530 Acre annexation.

    If it is so important to follow the EDA’s economic development plan, the TIP plan of 2006, then why did the EDA push for such a large number of Acres, over the plan’s much lower number of Acres… was it 100, 0r thereabouts?

    November 30, 2011

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