Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Are you looking for a primer on some of the concepts that inform the Strong Towns approach? Well, look no further, because this week our senior editor, Daniel Herriges, has outlined them for you in one, comprehensive place: “12 Ideas That Embody How Strong Towns Advocates Think.“ It’s a great resource for anyone, whether they’re brand new to the movement, or a longtime supporter.
In other news, the Strong Towns team will be out next week for our staff retreat, so our content schedule is going to be a bit lighter than usual. Never fear, though, because we’ve still got some interesting stuff lined up for you: We’ll be sharing articles written by the five finalists who applied for our Lifestyle Columnist position! We’ll be releasing those over the course of the week, and at the very end on Friday, you’ll get to read an article from the writer whom we’ve decided to hire for the position. Stay tuned!
Comment of the Week:
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Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
(Source: Urban Cycling Institute.)
Jay: It’s easy to feel defeated as an active transportation advocate with hundreds of billions of dollars of auto-centered highway expansion staring me down in North America. So, when I need inspiration, I turn to my neighbors across the pond. I often land in the territory of the “Cycling Professor,” Marco Te Brömmelstroet (Twitter / LinkedIn) and his Urban Cycling Institute pages. Marco makes sure to let you know when a Minister of Parliament in New Zealand rides her bike to the hospital to give birth, or how to make lots of kilometers of guerilla bike lanes by borrowing one of those automated highway traffic cone installer trucks. He’s got a great eye for captivating video, though he hasn’t yet joined Strong Towns in the land of TikTok.
(Source: Flickr.)
Grace: The town of Helper, Utah, is on my mind this week; I’ll be headed to its incredible annual Christmas light parade this Saturday night. Helper is a historic mining town just under two hours south of Salt Lake City, named after the “helper” engines used to push trains up steep canyon inclines. Within the past decade, the town has been building local investment and making “small bets” to redefine the town from a dwindling opioid hotspot to a vibrant arts hub—artists buying and restoring historic 19th-century buildings downtown, construction of a new riverside walking trail, a local business owner donating flower boxes for the whole of Main Street. Every time I visit Helper, I find an energetic community of motivated, creative people who are wholeheartedly invested in the town. The best part is that the town’s history and identity hasn’t been buried or forgotten; it’s being celebrated in a new way, and gives multigenerational residents and newcomers alike the opportunity to elevate and appreciate the town’s past, while shaping its future.
Chuck: Those of you that have been here a while know that I hated the Opportunity Zone concept, and not from some partisan standpoint, but because the idea of flooding poor neighborhoods with Wall Street capital as both of their paths to salvation is anathema to a Strong Towns approach. To borrow Chris Arnade’s term, it is the ultimate front row play—we can get rich by helping others, and feel good about ourselves in the process. If they could throw in UBI and free college funded by marijuana taxes, they’d have the front row policy trifecta (just be sure and bring that SALT deduction back). A PBS report that Opportunity Zones were “exploited by investors” limits the outrage to a pseudo class envy argument. The outrage should extend much further than that (and, in the back row, it does).
Shina: I often get posts about the video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons in my Instagram feed, and following a major recent update to the game, I've been seeing a lot of impressive town designs. For those who don't know, a large element of Animal Crossing gameplay is about building your own community on an island, using various items and tools. If you've played it yourself, you'll know that it's not easy to create scenes this beautiful—partly because the actual work of building is deliberately slow, by video game standards. (It's, dare I say, even a bit incremental?) But it's also challenging because the game gives you zero pointers on how you should go about designing a town. It's completely left up to the player's discretion—you could level it all and consign your cute animal villagers to living in a barren wasteland, if you wanted. So, the fact that players again and again create these thoughtful urban spaces is, to me, an unexpected example of how people intuitively understand the concept of "delight per acre."
(Source: Flickr.)
Daniel: The question of how to make small-scale development more viable in thousands of neighborhoods that need a little TLC is a huge one, and there were a lot of aspects of it that I didn’t really get to touch on in my October series on the subject, Unleash the Swarm. One of them is the current dire and historic shortage of workers in the skilled trades, including plumbers, carpenters, and electricians. R. John Anderson has written the piece I didn’t write, far better than I could have written it. Anderson explains the roots of the shortage and the ways it can create cascading headaches for small developers, driving up the cost of projects (and thus of needed housing and business space) for reasons that aren’t always obvious. Essential reading if you want to understand a key part of why nobody’s doing anything with that vacant lot down the street from you.
John: About a year after I came on staff at Strong Towns, a job candidate asked me to describe what I liked best about working for Strong Towns. I named three things. The first two were predictable, and 100% sincere; the third more surprising but no less true. First, I love my colleagues. I get to work everyday with brilliant, creative, conscientious, and just genuinely good people. Second, I’m passionate about the mission. I get to work everyday in support of a cause, a movement I believe in.
My third answer went something like this: “I get to be immersed in Strong Towns, an experience I would describe as...effervescent.” Effervescent, not in the sense of bubbly and lighthearted, but as with a ferment of ideas, new concepts, fresh metaphors, deep conversations, and inspiring, often subversive stories of people putting the Strong Towns approach into action where they live. And I don’t just experience this when I’m talking with other staff or working on our content, but when I talk with our brilliant Strong Towns members and advocates on the phone, in person, or over email.
I remembered this effervescent exchange when I read my colleague Daniel’s article, “12 Ideas That Embody How Strong Towns Advocates Think.” (It was like dropping a Mentos into a Coke bottle.) Daniel writes that something which sets Strong Towns apart from our peer organizations is that we focus not on what to think about cities and towns, but how to think about them. To that end, we repeatedly refer to “touchstone concepts that help underlie the Strong Towns view.” Daniel summarizes 12 of those concepts. Most of them—including antifragility, the Lindy Effect, and Overton Window, and “Cataclysmic Money”—I’d never encountered before I started reading Strong Towns. Many have changed how I think not just about building cities, but about diverse other aspects of life and the world.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: John Andrews, Pete Braun, Laurie Buckley, Tara Calabrese, Bridget Callaghan, Michael Casey, Marie Chabotte, William Dussault, Spencer Early, Donald Edmonds, Dominic Endicott, Karen Fink, Pierre Henrichon, Loren Hersh, Chitra Kumar, Bryce LeBrun, Carolyn McCrery, Harrison Moore, Matthew Morgan, William Pietrzak, Shannon Pitts, Arya Pourtabatabaie, Katie Roberts, Michael Runestad, Mark Rusciano, Anne Scheck, Luke Slindee, Karen Smallwood, Tyler Tindall, Kelly Trott, Ashley Watson, Mike West, David Williams, and Steven Zittergruen.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!