Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
This week kicked off with a big announcement: the newest Strong Towns book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town, is coming out in September and you can preorder your copy today. There are lots of ways to get involved in learning about and sharing this message of more financially resilient transportation systems, including bringing Charles Marohn to your town during our book tour, taking our Strong Towns Academy course “Aligning Transportation with a Strong Towns Approach,” and signing up for our book update email list. Join us in advocating for transportation systems that don’t bankrupt our cities but instead make them prosperous places for all.
On that note, we also put together a handy printable compilation of last week’s five-part series on infrastructure investments and the American Jobs Plan. We hope it’s a helpful resource to pass on to your mayor or city councilmember as they contemplate local decisions that will affect the future of your community.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
Linda: Last week I mentioned Tim Harford’s podcast, Cautionary Tales. This week, I’ve been listening to his book, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics. One of Harford’s Rules is to “Ponder Your Personal Experience” in order to anticipate and understand biases when interpreting data. In describing the power of images and experience in bringing life to numbers, he mentions the website Dollar Street, a research and data project led by Anna Rosling Rönnlund at Gapminder, explained by Rosling Rönnlund in this TED Talk.
Dollar Street uses “photos as data so people can see for themselves what life looks like on different income levels…[in] many, many homes all over the world.” I’m fascinated not just by the content, but by the organization of the material. The drop-down boxes and slide bar at the top of the screen allow you to filter by subject (from families and homes down to beds and toilets), place (from world to continent to country), and income range.
Visiting the families and homes on Dollar Street makes “everyday life on different income levels understandable” in a way that statistics and charts alone never will, and demonstrates that, globally, the truest common denominator in our daily lives is not where we live, but our level of income.
Image via Solutions Journalism Exchange.
Rachel: One of my favorite corners of the internet is the Solutions Journalism Exchange, a central hub of articles about solutions, success stories and approaches to address the world’s problems—not just lamenting them (like most news today). The Exchange recently shared this article about accessible playgrounds that work for kids who use wheelchairs or have other mobility challenges. They’re not so different from typical playgrounds and not much harder or more expensive to construct, but some basic tweaks open up a world of possibility and play for all children. Anyone who’s designing public space should be thinking about all potential users, knowing that adjustments which make transportation and interaction easier for a person using a wheelchair are going to make the space better for everyone, too.
Chuck: Lots of news out of my home state of Minnesota lately—much of it challenging for those of us who live here—but one thing that may have been overlooked this week was the passing of Walter Mondale. I knew Mondale as Jimmy Carter’s vice president and the guy who lost by a landslide to Ronald Reagan (although he won Minnesota) as well as the guy who filled in, when asked, for the late Paul Wellstone when the latter died in a plane crash during the final weeks of the 2002 senate race. I am too young to have participated in the first two, and I voted for Norm Coleman over Mondale in the 2002 senate race, but I nonetheless always felt like Mondale’s thoughtfulness and decency represented the best of our state. I’m sorry to see him pass but admire a long life, well-lived.
Shina: Winter Storm Uri hit Texas hard earlier this year, and the fallout from it can still be seen in the many dead plants that have yet to be cleaned up (the area where I live has whole graveyards of them). For my own part, I've always had a black thumb. I don't know the first thing about horticulture, so I've been wondering whether or not our local greenery will bounce back. As it turns out, there may still be hope for some of them, though this article from my alma mater outlines just how much our biodiversity was affected by the frosty weather. Thankfully, other residents at my apartment are helping prompt the return of spring by cultivating some truly stunning porch gardens, making up a bit for all the vegetation we've lost. Their efforts inspired me to do some botanical doodles—maybe I'll exchange them with my neighbors in return for gardening tips?
Lauren: This video about “when cancer isn’t Cancer” was a really interesting watch from my week. Dr. Rohin Francis of Medlife Crisis (whose bio asks “How do you even know I’m a doctor?”) explores how advances in detection technology can lead people to seek medical intervention—sometimes damaging—for irregularities that may have never caused symptoms if left alone. This has also led to some misleading statistics regarding “survival rates,” he claims.
Daniel: I’m stepping out of the box this week and sharing a Twitter thread as my favorite read of the week. Michael Manville is an urban planning professor at UCLA and one of the leading lights of planning academia. Here, he takes the California chapter of the American Planning Association to task for opposing a bill that would remove mandatory parking requirements on new development. The thing I found especially valuable here is that Manville shines a light on the Rube Goldberg machine that is so much of city planning: the APA doesn’t oppose the bill because it supports parking mandates, but because it thinks the mandates might be a useful bargaining chip to get developers to do other things cities want, like build affordable housing. This, writes Manville, is “pretextual zoning, [which] like all pretextual rulemaking, is bad. Pretextual zoning makes zoning less transparent, and erodes people’s confidence in it.” I agree. Our cities and towns will be stronger under zoning laws that are good-faith, straightforward attempts to legislate in the public interest. Requiring building owners to build and maintain parking they might not want or need is not that.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Michael Lasfetto, Craig Rapp, Madeleine "Mickey" Brown, Jeremy Ceballos, Matt Trollinger, Stephen Benson, Liam O'Neil, Chris Cross, and Thomas Eckert.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!