Please join presenter Adam Follington, for a one-hour deep dive into his popular 2024 conference presentation, Strong Towns, and conference Convenor and member of the Sustainability Interest Group Shami Shearer who will introduce Adam and facilitate a Q&A session at the end.

This presentation will introduce the philosophy of "Strong Towns", an increasingly popular non-political movement, aimed at encouraging more sustainable urban development and answer some of the key questions facing our society today:

Why are our cities slowly going broke?
Why do we have a housing crisis?
Why are we so car-dependent?

About the webinar

Strong Towns argues that recent city growth has been a great "suburban experiment", driven by the rise of the motorcar and exacerbated by perverse financial incentives and strict zoning laws. This had led us into a form of suburban development which is placing a tremendous strain on city finances, as they must maintain their ever increasing (and slowly deteriorating) infrastructure. Most councils are under severe financial pressure and contemplating large rate increases.

Some of the things we will cover in this presentation are:

How cities grew sustainably and sensibly for centuries
Why the motorcar and the rise of suburbs changed this and led to a great ”suburban experiment”
How this experiment is fuelled by perverse financial incentives – the “growth Ponzi scheme”
Why this is slowly sending our councils and cities broke
How it leads to multiple other issues including the housing crisis and congestion
Re-thinking the purpose of streets – from a transport medium to a tax-raising mechanism
The difference between streets and roads and the danger of ‘stroads’

These problems can be remedied however it requires new ways of thinking and challenging the existing perverse incentives and norms. It won’t be easy, and the solutions will be controversial.

It also suggests a very practical and pragmatic way to approach some of today’s major issues, which can often feel overwhelming and somewhat nebulous (e.g. climate change, intergenerational equity, housing, insurance climate risk mitigation). Strong Towns shows that these issues have partly arisen because we have simply ‘forgotten the basics’ and broken the financial links between a city’s costs and revenues.

At its heart, Strong Towns is also a belief in common-sense long-term financial management. For that reason, it lends itself well to actuarial analysis. We will explore how actuaries could play a useful role in this area.

More about our presenter

Adam Follington leads Quantium's New Zealand operations, where he partners with clients to implement and optimise analytical and actuarial solutions. He also serves as Appointed Actuary to two New Zealand insurers, providing strategic actuarial advice across their operations.

Contact the host of NZSA | Conference presentation webinar: Strong Towns