Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup

It’s been a big week for the Kansas City Royals here at Strong Towns! On Wednesday we featured an article by our content manager and resident KC Royals superfan, John Pattison, discussing whether or not Kansas City taxpayers should have to pay for a new stadium in downtown—and what the question means for the city as a whole, from the Strong Towns perspective.

Give it a read, and then after that you can check out John’s and Strong Towns Program Director Rachel Quednau’s guest appearances on the Upzoned podcast this week, where they also discuss the KC Royals stadium. It’s sure to put you in the mood to watch some baseball (though maybe not to support the construction of big new stadiums in downtown neighborhoods).

Now without further ado, let’s get to the Friday Faves!

Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:

Image via Unsplash.

John: Consider the porch. Architect Charlie Hailey does. In this short meditation—an excerpt from a new book on the subject—Hailey ruminates on the porch as studio, as stage, and as liminal space. “Porches invite nature in,” he writes. By coincidence, the morning I read this essay I stood on my front porch and listened as three great horned owls called back and forth to each other across our neighborhood. They are new to the area, and I hope they stay.

Hailey also considers the porch as the “original social media” that has taken on new significance during a time of social distance. (There is apparently a resurgence of new porch construction.) “In the past year, many of us stepped out to the edges of our houses not just to gather up deliveries, but to breathe fresh air, watch neighbors, and maybe even talk to them. … Close enough for conversation but far enough for safety, front porches brought people together as if air-conditioning had never been invented.”

Image via Unsplash.

Lauren: Access to healthy food should not be reliant on huge, tightly coupled systems with centralized power structures. This piece from Civil Eats reveals the growing fragility of the sources most people get their protein from, and how distant we are from those sources. If there’s something one can do to take a step closer to the source of their food—by buying regional products, shopping at independent stores, finding a butcher shop, growing lettuce in your apartment, or forming relationships with the people who are part of your local food network—now is a good time to get to work on that.

Image via Unsplash.

Chuck: This is an old piece from Ruben Anderson that he re-shared this week. Those of you that were here in the early days know Ruben and the major influence he had on the Strong Towns movement through his prodding and affirmations in the comment threads. The final line in this short and thoughtful piece describes the cognitive feedback loops of true conservative thought, but they are written by one of the more progressive-minded people I know. That’s a powerful insight.

Chris Arnade.

Rachel: Chris Arnade just came out with an email newsletter and I am already a fan. Arnade is a writer and photographer who we’ve featured several times at Strong Towns, including a few podcast interviews. His observations, especially about what he calls “back row America” (the working poor, rural residents, the people often left behind by mainstream American discourse and policy), are poignant and real. His free newsletter has one entry so far, in which he walks 45 miles around three towns in Massachusetts. He writes, “Walking forces you to slow down and talk to the people living there. You get to see beyond the bleh, and watch the endless string of tiny dramas that make up a city, and most people’s lives. Doing that you see three different cities, each a variation of a community trying to cope with a quickly changing world that doesn’t value what they value.”

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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: George Hunt, Sean-Michael Kelly, Curtis Russell, Logan Nagel, Virginia Carnahan, Kathryn Keller, Cooper Frost, Eli Smith, Jason Cook, Jonathan Boyd, Clifford Coulter, Bjorn Sorensen, and Houston Watson.

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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!