Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a big fan of the Strong Towns movement, a supporter of Urban 3, and an admirer of the Incremental Development Alliance. These three overlapping groups describe how centuries of trial and error all over the world produced remarkably fine grained durable self sustaining communities.

They also explain why our post World War II development pattern is proving to be a fatally flawed insolvent and unstable experiment. And they show us how we can get back to a steady footing again with a return to traditional communities. But there’s a problem… As a society we’re too emotionally invested in the strip mall and cul-de-sac landscape we’ve built. We can’t imagine what anything else would look like. People immediately panic and envision communist style high rise concrete towers and impoverished ghettos. No one ever pictures a classic Norman Rockwell Main Street neighborhood –…