Your Voice at Strong Towns: A Weekly Roundup
Each week, the Strong Towns team puts together some highlights of the great community you have built alongside us. You are doing amazing work, and it really shows in the discussions you’re having on our social media platforms, Community Site, and in your own place. Check out what others like you are doing to make their cities resilient, and join in on the conversation.
This week, 20 people became sustaining members of the Strong Towns Movement!
Welcome to Richard Collins, Kelley Brown, Bob Worrell, Tammy Cobb, John Ellis, Bob Spencer, David Utzschneider, Maggie Sedoff, Robert Graveline, Page Remmers, Helen Herman, Toni Hobbs, Priya Patel, Jerold Nugent, Stef Morrill, Tara Lowe, Amanda Kochirka, Willard Kitchen, Lezlie King, and Richard Collins. Thank you for your support, and the work you are doing to make your communities resilient and prosperous!
Member Tom Hawkins inspired our Community Site to share the ways they have seen historic churches repurposed.
Our Community Site users told us about Fremont Abby in Seattle, WA, Parish Properties in Ottowa, Canada, the Whitneyville Cultural Commons in Hamden, CT, and a few other great examples of how community members can preserve the beautiful architecture and special character of their former churches. Get in on the conversation here.
Read more about the ways people have re-used these special spaces on our Community Site.
Karl Fundenberger, our Member of the Week, told us about Topeka, Kansas
We’re going to celebrate one of our members each week in this section of the roundup and on our Community Site. This week, we asked Karl Fundenberger to tell us about the place where he lives, what he loves about it, and what could be done to make it even better.
Boswell Square Park, Topeka, Kansas
Q. Tell us about your "Third Place."
A. Boswell Square Park is our favorite gathering place, right in the middle of Topeka's College Hill neighborhood. College Hill is an original town neighborhood with modest houses and small yards, just north of Washburn University and a few blocks south of the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library. The park is the perfect gathering space for picnics, parades, summer birthday parties, or just having fun on the swings. We run into neighborhood friends here every week, and invariably, the discussions lead to talk of improvements to the park and to the neighborhood. Should we add lighting to the gazebo? Should we have some more natural play features, like big rocks and hills? It's a place that we all love and cherish, and that we want to share and preserve for the future.
Karl Fundenberger, Strong Towns Member of the Week
Q. What makes your city truly special?
A. Topeka, for all its talk of being a city, is truly a small town. It is easy to get to know people here, easy to start new projects here, and you're never more than one or two degrees of separation from the mayor, or the president of the university, or the public school board, or the CEO of a large local corporation.
Q. If you could snap your fingers and change one thing about your place to make it better, what would it be?
A. I wish we had never run an interstate highway through the middle of our downtown. The highway project, along with some other so-called 'urban renewal,' scattered the city's black business district, bulldozed irreplaceable classic buildings, and put a significant divide between the eastern and western parts of Topeka. If we had never sent the highway through downtown, we would have another 36 acres of active land in the core of the city, all contributing to our property tax base and creating more economic strength. The value of the highway seems evident, but it's very difficult to measure actual dollars coming to Topeka as a result of its existence. We're now poised to work with KDOT to rebuild this section of highway "for the next 50 years," but at a local cost of $20 million, and a state cost of something like $400 million. This is completely unsustainable infrastructure.
Join Karl by joining the Strong Towns Movement as a Sustaining Member today!
Cyclists and Drivers alike got excited on Facebook when we shared Daniel Herriges’ story about John Forester’s “vehicular cycling” approach to road sharing.
We got more than 200 comments on this share—some of which were a bit harsh, but many of which provided useful insight into why cyclists make the decisions they do. We hope that people came out of it with a better understanding of one another. To see the many links to studies about biking infrastructure and bike-involved accidents our community shared on the thread, check out the Facebook Post.
We might have phrased it differently ourselves…
But the sign was pretty funny!