Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
A beautiful but devastating shot by John of the ice-logged trees around his house this week.
It’s been a challenging week for one member of the Strong Towns team—John—who went without power for days in the midst of an ice storm in Oregon. John said: “Seven people and one dog in one house. No power, no showers, and no laundry for going on six days. This could be the start of a reality show. ‘Survivor: Silverton.’...”
Luckily his power and internet finally came back on Thursday. We know that so many people across the country are also experiencing dangerous weather and power outages, and we’re keeping them in our thoughts.
This week, we’ve also started receiving applications for our annual Strongest Town contest. It might seem weird to be highlighting successful cities during a time when everything feels like it’s falling apart. What city could claim to be truly “strong” during a global pandemic that has deeply harmed our economies, public health, schools and so much more?
But we think it’s more important than ever to talk about the towns that are doing their best during this challenging period. This contest is meant to highlight communities that have set themselves up for financial stability, that have the building blocks in place to make it through the hard times. If that’s your town, please apply for the Strongest Town contest today.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Lauren: While I was watching this video about a prominent corporate art style, I was thinking a lot about architectural styles I’m not particularly fond of. Big, modular, boxy apartment buildings. Standardized suburban houses. However, my colleague Daniel Herriges reminds me in this recent article (and in discussions I value) that our aesthetic preferences are our own, and not nearly as important to building strong communities as are practices that encourage resilience.
So I might have certain feelings or reactions to stone facade requirements and lawns, apartments constructed of navy and rust-red metal boxes, and brightly colored characters with disproportionate limbs. But grousing about that stuff won’t do much but make me look curmudgeonly and alienate people who like those things. My energy is better spent advocating for the underlying values those aesthetic preferences represent: small-scale development and the patronage of local businesses, when possible, over corporations—things that make for strong places.
Rachel: Something we’re all particularly committed to at Strong Towns is sharing our message widely—getting this approach of bottom-up, locally based financial resilient out into the world. So it’s exciting to have the chance to publish an article on a major site that’s probably full of people who have never heard of Strong Towns, but are a ripe audience for our message. Earlier this week, I had a piece published at Apartment Therapy (an interior design website) about missing middle housing and what our friend Dan Parolek is calling “middle neighborhoods.” Yes, that’s a shameless plug, but it’s all in the name of spreading the Strong Towns mission. Please let me know what you think of the article.
Daniel: This essay from a few years ago, “Against Short-Termism,” only came to my attention this week, as a link from something more recent I was reading. However, it’s one of the most lucid explanations I’ve seen of the problem the author calls “short-termism” or “quarterly capitalism” in the private sector: an obsession with near-term results in the form of quarterly earnings or shareholder returns, to the point that it drives companies to make decisions that actually harm the long-term resilience of the business. This is an easy problem to decry and a wickedly hard one to solve, and I appreciate that the author delves into actual policy remedies that would fix some of the bad incentives exacerbating this problem.
The public sector, not really discussed here, has its own epidemic of short-termism—as evidenced in the failure of nearly all cities to account for the true long-term costs associated with maintaining the infrastructure and level of services they’ve committed to. The world of government is long overdue for a reckoning with its own perverse incentives, and how we might structure things differently to push our cities to behave like strong towns.
Chuck: Every couple of years, the distance between Earth and Mars is small enough that the launching of probes, satellites, and rovers from Earth is cost effective. This is the week the latest NASA rover is scheduled to land on Mars (in fact, it will have already happened by the time you read this). On July 4, 1997, the Mars Sojourner rover landed and sent back photos which I took time out from my Independence Day celebration to watch. I was giddy, but I remember someone in my group literally said, “what’s the big deal?” as he left the room. Maybe someday seeing photos from the freaking surface of Mars will not be a big deal, but I am astounded and inspired by this video.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Jonathon Alsop, John Bassett, Denise Breder, Andrea Cervone, Nicole Crutchfield, John Esler, Cindy Flores, Sean Goonan, Emily Hane, Merideth Hildreth, Melinda Kuth, Cynthia Medina-Carson, Mike Mito, Anne Morrison, Michael Natelli, Sam Nuzbrokh, Randy Pye, and Olivia Uyizeye.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!
Cover image via Wikimedia Commons.
