Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
What a difference some cleansing rain makes. After weeks of toxic air from nearby wildfires, rain finally moved into Oregon’s Willamette Valley. These photos were taken two days apart by John Pattison, our Content Manager.
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.
This week, we got to share the Strong Towns message in some really exciting venues. First, Chuck spoke at the CNU Florida: Virtual Summit, presenting on our Local Leader’s Toolkit (get your free copy here). Next, John Reuter (Strong Towns senior fellow and board member) spoke virtually and led a workshop for a group of advocates for age-friendly communities in partnership with AARP Florida and the Miami-Dade Age-Friendly Initiative.
Then on Wednesday, Chuck had the chance to share the Strong Towns message at the Creating Communities Conference in the United Kingdom. Of course, this event was also virtual (Chuck was disappointed not to get to be there in person, what a trip that would’ve been!) but the energy and power of the message were no less felt. Finally, today Chuck gives an online presentation for the Maryland Planning Commissioners Association. Come hell or high water, this pandemic will not stop us from communicating Strong Towns’ message of incremental, bottom-up action and financial resilience. If you’re interested in hosting your own Strong Towns event, get in touch with us today.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Alexa: I stumbled upon this article in the New Yorker that explores incrementalism in the world of medicine. We often talk about incrementalism in the context of how cities and towns are developed, but I had never really thought about it in the context of healthcare. As humans, we’re so wired to want that instant gratification, that it is hard to see the benefits to long-term maintenance. This article explores just how true that is in medicine as well as in town-building. The author writes that, “Success, therefore, is not about the episodic, momentary victories, though they do play a role. It is about the longer view of incremental steps that produce sustained progress.” In order for us to start prioritizing maintenance—whether in our buildings or our bodies—we need to redefine what success looks like.
Lauren: On Monday, I was wringing my hands about how our morning article would go over. Within it, Chuck discusses a local strategy for investing in disinvested neighborhoods using opportunities and incentives that are often extended to large investors. Instead of wasting resources on big businesses that will take more than they give to a city, this approach would immediately, measurably uplift entire communities. Pretty much normal Strong Towns stuff. So why was I so nervous about it? The title is “The Local Case for Reparations.” I was worried about the reactions we’d receive. This piece is challenging to people with all kinds of views on reparations for slavery. It changed the way I think about the issue. Maybe it will do the same for you.
John: Co-founded by Wes Jackson, The Land Institute is a groundbreaking research organization in Salina, Kansas developing a model for farming that takes nature as its measure—perennials and complex polycultures—rather than the hyper-efficient (and merely complicated) industrialized approach: annuals and monocultures. Though I grew up on the periphery of The Land Institute, I had no idea how important Wes Jackson’s writing would become to me. In particular, his short book, Becoming Native to This Place, is one I return to again and again. He writes, “Although we have told one another on bumper stickers and at environmental conferences that we must ‘think globally and act locally,’ we tend to drift toward mega-solutions.” In reality, he says, the “majority of solutions to both global and local problems must take place at the level of the expanded tribe, what civilization calls community.”
I was delighted to learn recently that Wes Jackson is sitting down with journalist Robert Jensen for a new podcast. In the first episode, Jackson, age 84, talks about his teachers—parents, neighbors, professors, and friends (including Wendell Berry and the poet Gary Snyder)—the lessons to be learned by studying the native tallgrass prairies, and what is lost when farmland is converted to a new subdivision.
Rachel: This week, I came across a lovely and meaningful essay in the Oxford American about being Jewish in the South. My family has Jewish roots and I grew up surrounded by Jewish tradition so the community, practices and experience of Judaism has always interested me deeply. This essay is about complicating a narrative that may assume Jewish communities only thrive in big cities or certain regions. The author tells the story of Jewish life in the South, continuing to prosper and find resilience, even in the face of challenge and antisemitism:
Small-town Southern Jewish communities are dead or dying. So goes the popular narrative. It’s a story my dad has claimed as his own, watching through his increasingly infrequent visits as the Jews of Martinsville dispersed when the town lost its textile and furniture factories, as Jew stores—as he calls them—gave way to strip malls, and his generation went off to college and never came back. It’s a story I’ve only known secondhand. My parents raised me within the folds of Atlanta Jewish life, where I came of age surrounded by Jews whose families had also come from small towns across the region. Jews with Delta drawls and Tennessee twangs and Lowcountry lilts—my mom’s side of the family hails from Charleston, South Carolina—who frequent the kosher Kroger in Toco Hills and bake the most tender brisket I’ve ever tasted...
Chuck: We are getting towards the end of a very strange baseball season and my favorite team, the Minnesota Twins, will be in the playoffs for the second year in a row. With social isolation still in effect, our family has developed a routine that includes my oldest daughter and I watching games together, which has been beautiful time spent but also subjected me visually to how bad some of the umpiring has been. (I generally listen to, not watch, the games.) As described in this article, one of our players—to put it politely—took exception and brought to the fore the broader issue of umpire unions protecting—some say enabling—bad umpiring.
As someone who has been enthusiastically supportive of workers unions but far less so of professional unions and deeply skeptical of public employee unions, I’ve lately seen some interesting political realignment on the issue of unions in general. We now have progressives using traditionally Republican talking points to question the police unions and conservatives aligning with what are traditionally Democrat arguments (at least here in the Iron Range union country) to support the expansion of unions. The ironic thing is that, for baseball at least, the most likely outcome isn’t reform but robot umpires. Maybe a warning to us all. Next week’s Friday Faves will be put together by an AI algorithm.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Derek Adams, Richard Barton, Rebecca Bryant, James Burzynski, Christian Gass, Viola R Goodwin, Wendy Grey, John Husk, Patricia Joiner, Brian LaBorde, Buck Lawrence, Jeff McCoy, and Sheleita Miller.
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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.