Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Each week, the Strong Towns team shares their favorite links—the things that made us think in new ways, delve deeper into the Strong Towns mission, or even just smile.
Lauren’s lovely sunflowers started to bloom at her home in rural Wisconsin this week. Her puppy is a fan.
This week at Strong Towns, we shared a ton of stories about local food—how restaurants and their employees have been impacted by the pandemic, why growing your own food is an essential part of building a strong town, how a small Texas town is turning to native plants to help shore up their economy, and more. Find all our Food Week articles here.
We also hosted a fascinating, educational webcast on missing middle housing and how this traditional, adaptable form of housing can make a big impact on affordability in your town, featuring Daniel Parolek. Watch the video here.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Rachel: On a new-to-me news outlet, The 19th, I recently came across this in-depth story, reflecting on several generations of African American farmers in Mississippi, with a woman named Nettie Parker at its center. The essay delves into both the pain of reconnecting with this history, and also the empowerment that comes from tilling your land and growing your own food. Here’s a favorite quote:
One evening, standing in the yard near dusk—the mosquito hour—I asked [Nettie] how gardening and working the land could bring her so much joy when her introduction to such tasks was not born from a labor of love.
She told me gardening and church bring her a similar solace—where she can find quiet and “fully lose herself.” These days, when she’s not thinning greens, she passes hours on our family’s orange riding mower, which she’s coined her “Prayermobile.”
Lauren: A few weeks ago, I read a Curbed article about the history of the home office, and how this home design element might make a comeback as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. It won’t be the first time we’ve responded to an international health concern with architectural adjustments. When The Plague fell on Florence, Italy in the 1600s, a recent article in Food and Wine magazine explains that people built tiny, street-facing windows in their businesses, barely large enough for someone to hand a customer their wine order while avoiding physical contact. Some of the surviving windows have even made a comeback in recent months, although people are grabbing coffee and ice cream instead of wine.
John: I recently received in the mail my copy of the 2020 edition of The Berry Center Journal. The journal is an annual publication of The Berry Center, a Henry County, Kentucky-based nonprofit that advocates for farmers, rural communities, and healthy regional economies. The latest edition includes a transcript of a conversation between three men I admire: the writer Wendell Berry, the Amish farmer David Kline, and David’s son, Mike, host of the Back to the Roots podcast. Among other topics, Berry and the Klines discuss how farming at a more humane scale makes it possible to really love farming:
David: [Regular farmers] drive down the road, they see us [Amish farmers], they feel sorry for us, but they shouldn’t. We aren’t killing ourselves. We’re out there enjoying ourselves.
Wendell: But at your scale don’t the religious reasons and economic coincide frequently? If you get the scale right, you can afford to love your neighbor.
David: Oh yes.
Wendell: If you love your neighbor, you’ve got help.
Daniel: Rebecca Solnit is one of my favorite writers, in large part for her ability to expose what is hidden in plain sight. (We have discussed her before on Strong Towns specifically in the context of her book A Paradise Built in Hell, about how people build community from the bottom up in the aftermath of disasters.)
This piece in Lit Hub is steeped in the language and assumptions of left-wing social justice movements, and so your reaction to it will vary depending on to what extent you align with those views. I expect many of our readers will not share Solnit’s interpretation of the specific events she refers to. But I encourage every reader to take in and appreciate the call for humility at the center of the piece, in which Solnit reminds us that social change—no matter what kind—is a creative process involving hard work, not some sort of inevitable march of progress that grants us moral superiority to those who came before us or who are not steeped in our language and ideas:
[P]eople made these ideas, as surely as people made the buildings we live in and the roads we travel on. [....] At its best, at its most beautiful, this is a creative process. At its worst, it’s policing by those who are inside aimed at those who are not. Sometimes they’re not inside because they have not yet found the doorway or they hear condemnation rather than invitation issue from the doorstep. But people also forget that this is a historical process rather than ideas that have always been self-evident.
The kind of change Strong Towns seeks to produce is neither left or right-wing, but we are working to spread new ways of looking at old problems, and in that sense I think Solnit’s advice is pertinent, as well, to how to be an evangelist for the Strong Towns mission.
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Finally, from Alexa and all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement:
Olivia Barbee, Hendrik Bloem, Richard A Burg, Deby Dehn, Laura Dias, Zelleka Getahun, Anne Goldner, Leslie L. Coburn, Ryan Madis, Kay Moore, Linda Penniman, Jean Schwennesen, Kelly Smith, Andrew Vaccaro, and Van Williams.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments or continue the conversation in the Strong Towns Community.