John,

Not long ago, I was listening to an opening keynote address at a conference about how to make our cities better. I go to a lot of these kinds of things. But this time, one commonly-repeated phrase stuck out at me:

“Doing this work isn’t sexy.”

Huh, that was weird, I thought. This particular keynote was about reducing traffic fatalities on our streets. Why was anyone talking about sex?

Before that morning, I never even noticed that the word “sexy” was such a large part of the average urbanist’s vocabulary. Then suddenly, it seemed like everyone I met was talking about "sexy" skyscrapers. "Unsexy" road maintenance projects. The "super-sexy" new Tesla design.

Once you start noticing "sexy" in our conversations about how to build better places, you can't stop noticing it. And once you grasp what a problem this particular word is, you may never want to say it again.

I wrote an essay about why I'm not using the word "sexy" anymore—and what it means for my Strong Towns advocacy.

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Give it a read and let me know: are you ready to start calling "unsexy" projects what they actually are: the most vital things we can do to make our places strong?



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