Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Our content manager’s daughters are absolutely smitten with their new housemate. He likes them too.
It’s been another exciting week in our Strongest Town contest. This week’s submissions featured photos of the eight competing towns, plus commentaries from Strong Towns members discussing the strengths and weaknesses of each community. Now we’re down to the Final Four towns. Come back next week to review the entries from these four communities and vote to help us determine which is the Strongest Town in America!
The other big highlight of the past few days was our final Local-Motive event. We rounded off a 10 week tour with a fantastic session called “You’re Not Alone: How to Find Kindred Spirits and Jumpstart the Strong Towns Conversation Where You Live.” All 10 tour stops are available in perpetuity on our Academy, where they’re accompanied by related resources, a discussion section and a handy printable “action guide.” Check out the Local-Motive tour here.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Lauren: Since the publication of James and Karla Murray’s 2009 book of photos of New York City’s storefronts, more than 85% of the mom-and-pop shops they featured have permanently closed. Read about their project to document one of the things that makes urban spaces special, and view a few shots from their two coffee table books, in this story from Common Edge.
Chuck: I’ve become somewhat notorious as a critic of the diverging diamond interchange due to a video I did almost a decade ago. As this solution looking for a problem has spread across the country, I continue to be tipped off to the discussions, especially when engineers claim that it is some kind of pedestrian-friendly, environmental utopia. This week, our friend Jeff Speck felt my pain when engineers in Massachusetts proposed one in a suburb of Boston. Sorry, Jeff, but the propensity to over-engineer is both a red-state and a blue-state phenomenon.
Rachel: This article about reparations in the Chicago suburb of Evanston caught our whole team’s attention this week. Reparations for slavery are a complex and multifaceted issue—one that has left many communities throwing up their hands and saying it simply can’t be done. Evanston is stepping up and taking concrete action to start making reparations a reality. One piece of that is funding for home repairs and down payments for Black residents who, themselves or their ancestors, “lived in the city between 1919 and 1969 or if they can show they suffered housing discrimination due to the city’s policies.” It’s a small step but this has to start somewhere. Last year, we published an essay by Charles Marohn about an approach to reparations which focuses on housing as a core path toward repairing the damage done by racist practices like redlining. We hope to see more cities take up the charge.
Linda: I was fascinated by this interview of Dr. Angus Fletcher on Brené Brown’s Unlocking Us podcast, which led me to his article in Smithsonian Magazine, “Eight of Literature’s Most Powerful Inventions—and the Neuroscience Behind How They Work.” (The article is a summary and preview of his most recent book, Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature.)
A professor of “story science” with dual degrees in neuroscience and literature, Fletcher explores the idea of literature as “an invention for making us happier and healthier.” With examples ranging from Greek tragedy to Tina Fey, Fletcher combines history, literature and neuroscience to explain why our most common and enduring literary devices are so effective, and how different narratives have been proven to stimulate different areas of our brains, affecting our attitudes, beliefs and behavior. Stories not only educate and entertain, they also have the power to “boost courage, love, empathy, creativity, hope, and curiosity,” and “alleviate grief, loneliness, anxiety, and even trauma.”
Daniel: Berkeley, California was the first city to implement single-family residential zoning (that is, a ban on all types of homes other than single-family houses), back in 1916 in its Elmwood neighborhood. This year, Berkeley’s city council voted unanimously to end single-family zoning citywide. Many advocates of the move (including council members) cited a pervasive pattern of racial and socioeconomic segregation between Berkeley’s wealthy east and poorer west sides, reinforced by zoning that makes the ability to afford Northern California home prices the bar to entry to live in the city’s toniest ZIP codes.
This piece in Grist is an engaging history of the relationship between segregation and zoning in Berkeley, framed around the life story of Dorothy Walker, who struggled to find a home with her Japanese husband in 1950, and who has lived long enough to fight for and see this latest change come to fruition.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Kirstin Anderson, Bryce Boddie, Amber Clark, Brendan Clarke, Brian England, Susan Gregory, Patricia Helck, Kate Herzog, George Homewood, Gregory Howland, Joshua Jacobs, Mary Jones, Kristin Kidd, Gary O’Brien, Judith G. Pappenfus, Benjamin Requet, Thomas Rhoden, Ken Riley, Glenn Silas, Susan Silberberg, Gary Simon, Russ Soyring, James Theobald, David Wallach, William Neher, Alan Williams, Will Wohler
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!
Cover image via Spencer Imbrock on Unsplash.