How to Fix American Cities

It sometimes feels like our cities are broken: soulless and sprawling, full of concrete and cars, loud and dirty and devoid of community. Just hard to live in. That’s a problem Strong Towns is trying to fix—the nonprofit believes American cities were badly made and is fighting for “cities of all sizes to be safe, livable, and inviting”—and last month, it invited a friend of The Free Press, Chris Arnade, to be the keynote speaker at its 2025 National Gathering, in Providence, Rhode Island.

Chris has been to a lot of cities. He spent a decade walking around parts of America most tourists avoid. Now, every few weeks or so, he flies from his home in New York to a different one—Milan, Buenos Aires, Bangkok, Los Angeles, Tashkent (that’s in Uzbekistan). When he arrives, he spends his days walking around all the unremarkable neighborhoods where ordinary people actually live, until he understands what makes the city tick. Then he writes about it on his Substack.

In his speech, he distilled everything he’s seen and heard and felt during his travels into what he describes as “my larval attempt to try and build a ‘grand unified theory’ of urban planning.” He’s aware that might “sound pedantic, trivial, and boring,” but the truth, as he reminds us, is that “how we choose to live is as fundamental a question as exists.”
—Freya Sanders

“Anyone who cannot form a community with others, or who does not need to because he is self-sufficient, is no part of a city-state; he is either a beast or a god.” —Aristotle

Everything I’ve done in the last 15 years has taught me this: There is no such thing as a human without a community, and all cities are a reflection of that.

I came to this conclusion during my decade talking to Americans. What I’ve seen over my last four years walking the world—from one of my first walks in Vietnam to a more recent one in Lombardy, Italy—has supported it, and provided me with evidence for a stronger version, which is this: Human despair is no longer primarily a result of economic destitution; rather, it is due to a lack of functional and healthy communities, and the current challenge for most of the world’s political class is understanding that.

Everyone, rich or otherwise, needs to feel they belong to something greater than themselves, like rivers flowing toward a sea. If they don’t have access to healthy communities, they will find unhealthy ones. I learned this from speaking to addicts across America: When traditional forms of community erode—family, faith, place, and yes, bowling leagues—people will gravitate toward drug traps, bars, and gangs, like water running to the lowest point.

While I don’t want to open Pandora’s box regarding the Covid era, it did provide us with a real-time example of what happens when people are denied community. My theory, which I’ve been suggesting since the lockdowns began, is that the spike in crime, protests, and other antisocial behavior in the months and years immediately following was a manifestation of the despair that comes when humans are wrenched apart; a national and sometimes global display of the pent-up, simmering anger that comes with isolation.

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