In 2010, Charles Marohn (B.A. ’95, M.U.R.P. ’02) sat down and wrote a tongue-in-cheek script for an eight-minute animated video based on frustrating conversations he’d been having with civil engineers working on city projects. He aggregated them into one dialogue, plugged it into a now-defunct software program called Xtranormal, and uploaded the video to YouTube. It portrayed a robotic conversation between two teddy bears. The video, which he called “Conversation with an Engineer,” was meant to be funny, but it also rang true—as evidenced in the hundreds of comments.

“We have to widen the road because we’re going to have growth, and we’re going to have growth because we’re widening the road,” Marohn recalls engineers saying to him. “It just became this insanity. When I clicked ‘publish,’ it just blew up.”

The video is still on YouTube, published under Strong Towns, the nonprofit that Marohn founded the prior year to advocate for policy change around how cities and towns are built. Today, there are 6,500 Strong Towns members around the world and more than 300 groups pushing for change in their own communities. Strong Towns challenges the post-World War II idea that growth should always be the goal and focuses instead on sustainability, fiscal solvency, and healthy communities.

While Marohn says the movement has grown well beyond him, he has emerged as a thought leader among engineers, architects, and city leaders. He sees his work today as “part engineer and planner, part economist, part philosopher, and part social worker,” recognizing that a street-widening project may seem simple on the surface, but is actually deeply emotional.

In his 20s, the Brainerd native did what many young engineers do: He obtained his professional license and got to work in the private sector. Marohn was eager to prove himself, and confident in his training and his worldview. But over time, he says, he became less clear on why he was doing what he was doing.

“I was never a good engineer because I asked too many questions,” Marohn says. “But I always felt like the best engineers that I worked with were the ones who could see a bigger picture.”

The bigger picture began to emerge for Marohn about five years into his career. He describes it as a midlife crisis that hit at age 26. Marohn was sent to the tiny town of Remer in northern Minnesota to fix a sewage problem. The pipe repair would cost about $300,000, which the town didn’t have. Marohn worked with Remer officials to craft a much bigger project that met state and federal scoring guidelines. He helped procure $2.6 million to address the city’s needs.

In gratitude, the town designated a “Chuck Marohn Day.” But soon after, it dawned on Marohn that he hadn’t really fixed the problem. He’d created a bigger financial problem for the city in the future, when it would inevitably need to make repairs to the more expensive pipe. He wanted to spend more time thinking about civic solutions.

Marohn returned to the University of Minnesota to earn a master’s degree in urban planning. He describes the experience as the other side of the coin in terms of city building. Marohn recalls one class about transportation and land use jointly taught by urban planning Professor Karen Chapple and civil engineering Professor David Levinson.

“Transportation and land use are so deeply connected, but these are two strains of thought that don’t really talk to each other and coordinate with each other. They don’t have a common language,” Marohn explains. “It was fascinating to watch these two smart professors challenge each other in real time in front of you.”

It’s no wonder the debate-style class resonated with Marohn. Though he started out in technical engineering work, he’s always been an opinionated and prolific writer. In addition to years of weekly blog posts for Strong Towns, he has authored three books: Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town, and Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis.

Some of Marohn’s blog posts caught the attention of Mike McGinn, former mayor of Seattle and now executive director of America Walks, a nonprofit that trains and educates people on the value of walkability. McGinn joined the cause for walkability as a solution to combat the climate crisis.

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