We’re done building infrastructure. The idea that any city in North America will, in the future, have appreciably more roads or streets, more sidewalks and curbs, more pipes or pumps or valves or meters, is absurd. Some may add a bit here or there, but for the most part we’re done. What we’ve built is what we’ve got. That’s it.

In fact, I suspect that many cities will have less infrastructure in a decade than they do now. Two decades from now, I suspect contraction of infrastructure will be a common and shared experience across our cities.

This means that the task of city-building must shift dramatically, from building more to making better use of what we already have. For over seven decades, we’ve culturally viewed expansion as our pathway to success. Now we must develop strategies for thickening up our places, for going back and wringing more return out of the trillions in existing investment.

An Obsession with Maintenance

In my book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, I outline how local governments must use two complementary – but very different – approaches for making capital investments: maintenance and little bets.

The cornerstone of a Strong Towns approach is an obsession with basic maintenance. Maintenance programs today largely work in a fix-it-and-forget-it paradigm, where local governments defer maintenance until something completely falls apart, then use the large-project mentality to make comprehensive fixes under the guise of not having to worry about it for another three+ decades. It’s the “city as vinyl siding” approach.

As I wrote in June:

We build a lot of stuff, all of it built to a finished state. That stuff then sits and rots—perhaps with some nominal maintenance from time to time—until it falls apart, at which point we put together a huge project to replace it with something new built to a finished state.

Places with an obsession for maintenance do not let things fall apart before they are fixed. They seal cracks, they pluck weeds, they change light bulbs, and they generally keep things near top condition. They purposefully dedicate the time and resources to maintaining what they have above all other pursuits, especially prioritized over any effort that would expand their systems.

And if your community is obsessive with maintenance, they won’t really have much time for grand transformations. This makes the humble pursuit of little bets critical for an overall thickening strategy.

Using Humble Observation to Identify Little Bets

Improving the financial productivity of our neighborhoods – thickening up our places – will not be done at scale. There is no series of large projects, no massive centralized initiative, that will bring this outcome about. Making better use of what we have already built is a hyper-local undertaking, one done at the block level.