Maggie Tate and her husband moved into Chattanooga’s Cameron Harbor last year because they were looking for a more walkable, urban place to live.
With family in the area and their youngest going off to college, Tate said they were looking for a more “dense” environment with walking trails and plenty of activities that they wouldn’t have to drive 45 minutes to get to from the suburbs, like at their previous home in Austin, Texas.
Chuck Marohn from Strong Towns, a Minnesota-based nonprofit focused on small, incremental development in communities, was the speaker at the CIVIQ quarterly lecture series at the Camp House this month. About 125 people attended the event organized by the Chattanooga Design Studio. This past February, the Design Studio released a study on the development of South Broad Street.“When we were reimagining the second chapter of our life, there were things like that on our list,” she said.
Tate was one of the nearly 125 locals who turned out to the Chattanooga Design Studio’s quarterly lecture series, CIVIQ, last week, which featured Chuck Marohn, engineer and founder of the national media nonprofit Strong Towns.
A native Minnesotan, Marohn is a former city engineer and planner who said he grew “disillusioned” with the way cities were investing in development. He started Strong Towns in response as a way to encourage incremental growth in communities nationwide that would allow them to become more self-sufficient and resilient.