We do a lot of writing here about the gold standard for urban design—walkable, human-scale places with a granular development pattern that encourages healthy evolution and adaptation over time. Lovable, resilient, and financially productive places.

But we get the need for pragmatism too: we live in a world where stuff is going to get built that doesn't pass every litmus test for great design. People get to choose what to do with their property, and developers are going to respond to what the market and financing will bear right now and what they believe their customers want right now.

In that real world, there's a need for some pragmatic lines in the sand: Okay, you can have your parking garage, but can you at least not build it like that?!

I hit up the Strong Towns Community site—our dedicated platform for Strong Towns members to meet each other and ask questions, offer advice and spark discussion—to crowd-source some ideas for a list of design features that should go the way of the dinosaur, lest the next generation be forced to cringe 25 years from now at our hard-to-reverse bad choices. And our brilliant members obliged with some good ones.

Some of these pertain to the public realm—the streets, the sidewalks, things the government itself ought to permanently stop doing. Some of them are about the private realm: things we might consider prohibiting developers from ever doing on their own land, because it harms and degrades the public realm when they do.

Either way, as a Strong Towns advocate, I'd be happy if I never saw another one of these urban design mistakes again in my city. How about you?