Conferences, Urban Proxima in Portuguese, YIMBY<>Strong Towns, and Developments in Urbanism

Odds and Ends 25.08.2025

Event Season for Wonks

Ok, so this is more like event season for things I’m personally going to attend. I’ll be at the Abundance Conference in D.C. in September as well as the Progress Conference later in October.

I’ll be at both in my capacity as YIMBY Action National Board Chair, but if you’re around and want to chat technology or anything urbanism related more broadly, absolutely come say hi.

Urban Proxima: Brazilian Edition

Caos Planejado, the smartest publication on urbanism in Brazil, has started republishing Urban Proxima posts for their Portuguese-speaking audience.

To date, they’ve put up two pieces with more on the way through the end of the year.

• Favela Xpress: reconectando comunidades ao comércio

• Transformando cidades em dados

So, if you or someone you love prefers their urbanism in pt, check em out and consider adding the site to your RSS feed.¹

Strong Towns x YIMBY: Posting Our Way to an Understanding

Strong Towns is an American urbanist group dedicated to building stronger communities. Their portfolio of issues is a bit wider than YIMBY’s, with concerns including infrastructure development and fiscal sustainability. On housing, they overlap YIMBYs about 95% of the time, but because the internet is for disagreement, that leftover 5% is what usually comes up online.

If you happen to like deep in the weeds intra-urbanist drama civil discourse, you may enjoy the conversation to date:

In an episode of The Strong Towns Podcast, founder Chuck Marohn criticized YIMBYs for supposedly believing that legalizing housing is the only thing that matters with respect to addressing the housing crisis in the U.S.

That didn’t strike me as correct, so in defense of YIMBY intellectual honor, I took to Notes.

Chuck followed up in the thread, responding:

And although we left it there on the question of what YIMBYs believe, the discourse was just getting started.