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b'If Strong Towns is not Sprawl Repair, then what is it?\\nThis question was posed to use on Twitter. Strong Towns Founder and President, Chuck Marohn, answers it in this monologue podcast.\\nSprawl Repair, sometimes also called Suburban Retrofit, is a concept that Marohn describes as \\u201cbrilliant, but silly.\\u201d The brilliant part is a recognition that it takes real genius to adapt these incredibly difficult sites. Taking suburban homes, big box stores, and office parks \\u2013 places that are not designed to be renovated \\u2013 and renovating them for a productive takes tons of creativity.\\nThe Sprawl Repair Manual by Galina Tachieva and Retrofitting Suburbia by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson are examples of the brilliant.\\nThese concepts are brilliant, yes, but also silly, because while they may work in a handful of places where the desire and the economics come together, these strategies don\\u2019t scale to the broad swath of America that is financially insolvent, to the millions of homes that are in neighborhoods designed to decline.\\nSilly is the belief \\u2014 widely held among some advocates \\u2014 that sprawl repair / suburban retrofit represents a real solution, that they can be something more than a boutique approach for niche places. Marohn contends that they are brilliant at being that unique solution, but they are not up to the bigger challenges of fixing our broken development pattern, which is the problem Strong Towns is trying to solve.\\nThis podcast delves into that problem \\u2013 what really is sprawl and what are the underlying forces at work \\u2013 then proposes a unique set of Strong Towns approaches, some of which include Sprawl Repair, but some which go far beyond it.'