Let’s take them at their word. What would the opposite of the Strong Towns approach look like? Could it really be that bad for community finances?

Enter Gwinnett County, Georgia. Roughly thirty miles Northeast of Atlanta, is the home of Waffle House HQ and the rap group Migos. It has also been one of the fastest growing areas in the country over the last forty years. What twenty years ago was a sleepy bedroom community of Atlanta has since doubled in size, all under a paradigm of minimal planning oversight.

Imagine a nice small town of 20,000 people. Now imagine building one of these towns every year for forty years. Now imagine that none of these are really cohesive, self-contained towns at all—instead, they're fragments of a place spread out across 400 expansive square miles, with a service here, a store there, and no unified sense of community whatsoever. That typifies the pattern of development spreading across the periphery of almost all of our cities. Gwinnett County makes a particularly good example of what not to do because it’s not just limited to a single municipality. Instead, what happened in Gwinnnett County is what inevitably happens when the Suburban Experiment takes over an entire county.

In a recent video conversation (above), Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn talked to Josh McCarty, Chief Analytics Researcher of Urban3, to discuss this troubling trend. If you have the time, it’s worth watching the whole video to see Josh’s eye-popping data visualizations and to hear the nuances of Chuck’s arguments and anecdotes. If you don’t, here are some of the main topics discussed: