The article below was not merely our most-read Strong Towns post of 2019. It was our most-read post by almost a factor of 5. Of course, that’s the nature of online publishing: you don’t ever know what is going to find viral reach and popularity until it happens. But it’s also true that this post—and more importantly, the meme it centers around and explains, created by our good friend Wes Craiglow back in 2015—does something that is absolutely at the core of what we’re trying to accomplish with Strong Towns.

A few years into the Strong Towns project, it was clear to us that if we only spoke to, or consulted with, professionals—planners, city administrators, civil engineers, and so forth—we would never produce the kind of vast, systemic change we need in how America’s cities and towns are built. We needed a groundswell of cultural change: a mass movement that could lead a bottom-up revolution.

Creating this groundswell means helping people who aren’t planners or engineers or architects realize that, nonetheless, they too are experts in the built environment. That means you too. All of us have our own kind of expertise, because we experience and have to navigate that environment every day.

We’ve all had the experience of driving slowly and cautiously down a street because the environment feels a bit unpredictable or the space feels constrained. We’ve also all had the experience of, despite our better judgment, catching ourselves zooming down a wide open street that feels like you could land a 747 on it. We don’t need to be taught to understand that street design affects our willingness to behave in risky ways—and consequently not just our own safety but the safety of every other person we encounter while we’re behind the wheel. We all understand this, from our own experience.

And yet we often need to be freed to realize that we understand it. And to stand up to the credentialed experts whose claim to authority—”Trust us, it meets the standard”—buttresses business-as-usual practices that have given us an America in which cars kill as many people each year as firearms… yet are not treated as remotely the same level of public health emergency.

What Craiglow’s meme does is take a simple but vital insight about how our world is designed, and how that design affects all of us, and packages it in a highly visual and immediate way that is accessible to nearly anyone. It teaches you to see your city. Once you’ve seen it, you start to see it everywhere you go.

And then, once you can’t unsee it, our hope is that you go out, in your own place, with your own unique talents and expertise, and you demand better. And you create better. Whether it’s streets that naturally #SlowTheCars without the need for constant and costly speed-limit enforcement, or neighborhoods that allow people to bootstrap their way to a bit of wealth, you are the ones who are going to demand it. You are the bottom-up revolution. –Strong Towns staff.