Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Our content manager, John Pattison, began doing bird photography at the start of lockdown. It was a way to learn more about his place, to learn more about birds and wildlife, and extra motivation to stay active outside. From the beginning, John’s been hoping to photograph an owl. He got his first one—a short-eared owl—just after sunset on Wednesday.
This was a fun week at Strong Towns. On Monday, we got to publish a podcast we were all really proud of: Chuck’s conversation with Rep. Jake Auchincloss and Rep. Mike Gallagher. The congressmen are, respectively, a Democrat from Massachusetts and a Republican from Wisconsin, but they’re both longtime Strong Towns readers. (Both also serve on the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee.) The discussion was smart and collegial and constructive. The federal government can play a role in building stronger, more financially resilient towns and cities, and we’re grateful for the leadership Reps. Auchincloss and Gallagher are bringing to Congress.
It was also fun to see more nominations come in for the sixth annual Strongest Town contest, which kicks off Monday, March 15. The application window is closing—nominations are due this Sunday, March 7 at 11 p.m. Central—so if you were planning on nominating your town, now’s the time to do it!
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Lauren: At Strong Towns, we are currently in the process of hiring a copy editor/designer. You can read about our hiring process—in which we don’t ask for a resume, or even an applicant’s name, until nearly the end—in a recent tweet thread by the organization founder, Charles Marohn. Five Strong Towns staffers reviewed the first round of this application process, which included more than 100 applicants, who each answered nine questions. I read 290 pages of answers (size 14 type). And then I read this Fast Company story by Robert Coombs about how, recognizing that most companies employ bots to screen applications before they ever reach a human, he created a bot to submit thousands of job applications and resumes for him. I gotta say, it intensified my appreciation for the Strong Towns approach to hiring.
Rachel: Our friend Josh McCarty at Urban3 clued me into Slab City a few months ago and then I saw this recent article in Governing and had to share it. Slab City is an off-grid, unplanned community of squatters who have taken up residence in the desert of southern California. What happens when a town crops up out of nothing (well ok, a former abandoned Marine Corps base) and how does it come to life? The photos in this article really speak for themselves.
Chuck: In my book, I described the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and the parade of politicians and media that parrot their recommendations, as an ”infrastructure cult” suffering under the mistaken (and self-serving) belief that, to fix our nation’s failing infrastructure, all we need is the courage to spend more money. Well, ASCE is priming the infrastructure spending pump with their latest report and, of course, the coverage—even from the paper of record—reads more like a press release than news. Thankfully, more and more people (including members of Congress) are catching on to the fact that how productively we use our infrastructure is way more important than how much we spend on it, and in productivity we have a long way to go. If your paper wants to run the ASCE press release, push them to give Strong Towns a call for a counter narrative.
Linda: This article in the Washington Post was a nostalgic trip back to my hometown. My family moved to the newly formed planned community Columbia, Maryland in the summer of 1968. I grew up in the neighborhood of Faulkner Ridge, in the Village of Wilde Lake, and I graduated from that open-concept high school before it was torn down and replaced by something more traditional.
We were pioneers in founder James Rouse’s visionary city, where the focus was on enhancing residents’ quality of life. Rouse “saw the new community in terms of human values, rather than merely economics and engineering,” and sought to “not only eliminate the inconveniences of then-current subdivision design, but also eliminate racial, religious and class segregation.” Columbia in those early days felt truly special—innovative, experimental and optimistic. Not all of those lofty goals have been fully or consistently realized, but it’s clear that over 50 years later the spirit and heart of the city that Rouse envisioned as a “garden for growing people” endures. Columbia routinely ranks among CNN Money’s top 10 places to live in the US, placing 5th in 2020.
Daniel: I’ve done a ton of thinking over the past few years about how people know what they claim to know. Given the growing epistemic gaps between Americans of different political persuasions—where we can’t even find agreement on baseline facts—this question is urgent and important. I think the analysis linked here, from a piece called “Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole,” gets two crucial things right. One, information warfare is really attention warfare. We have access to far more information (both accurate and false/misleading) than we could ever process, and so the only way any of us really acquire new beliefs is by filtering severely, through sources we know we trust or by slotting new facts into narratives we already find coherent. Two, this means that a naive belief in the power of critical thinking—the idea that simply by exposing ourselves to lots of competing claims, we’ll be able to sort out truth from propaganda—is only going to do us more harm than good. Sometimes you’re better off just not going down that rabbit hole.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Linda Bracken, Revanth Chada, Sarah Huffman, Susan Judkins, Marcia Martin, Sharon McDonald, Maurizio Mondello, Mark Roberts, Ray Smith, Kyle Talbott, and Tim Zahner
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!
Cover image of Slab City via Wikimedia Commons.
