Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Did you catch this new video by our friend Jason, creator of the Not Just Bikes channel on YouTube? It’s an explainer episode all about stroads—those pesky street-road hybrids that bring dangerous fast-moving traffic into our neighborhoods and decrease our financial prosperity and resilience. This would be a great video to share with a friend to get them thinking about the problems with our current transportation model—and understanding some solutions. Next step: Preorder our forthcoming book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town.
In other news, this week we shared a free resource guiding you through four steps you can take to make your local food system stronger. Let us know if these tools are helpful or what we can do to make them a better resource for you. You are the Strong Towns movement and we’re here to support you in your work to make your community more economically resilient.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
Image via Unsplash.
Daniel: A new study out of British Columbia confirms that indigenous people curated the landscape around them in highly sophisticated ways, deliberately planting clusters of edible and useful trees and shrubs to make foraging more efficient. The way we know? Those “forest gardens” can still be found today, more than 150 years later! They weren’t recognized earlier by non-indigenous settlers because they’re not legible to Western conceptions of agriculture, which tends to involve manicured order and monocropping—but this seems instead to have been an approach designed to maintain a highly resilient biodiversity resistant to invasion by other species.
Time and again, where we find ways of doing things that have endured over many generations, we find enormous wisdom and built-in resilience. The same is true in its own way when we look at cities as human habitat, too.
Rachel: This written interview features three restaurant owners whose businesses are located right near where George Floyd was killed. I grew up in Minneapolis and my parents and plenty of friends still live there, so I’ve been hearing about the ongoing tension and aftermath of that event in the city from them. But to hear it from three people who are directly on the ground was especially valuable. These business owners are honest and real in the way they talk about the nuances of this moment in history and in Minneapolis.
Image via Unsplash.
John: In this short essay in Orion, novelist Jeff VanderMeer, author of The Southern Reach trilogy, reflects on a moment from his childhood in Peru in which he had a sudden, powerful and perhaps even mystical encounter with two hummingbirds. Eight-years-old, suffering from acute asthma, and laying in a hotel room bed next to an oxygen tank, VanderMeer suddenly saw the hummingbirds—“iridescent flames, feathered in red and gold and black and emerald”—hovering outside the hotel window. “Oblivious to me,” he writes, “they hovered like tiny deities, alien yet intimate, for twenty or thirty seconds, even if in memory the time stretches and stretches. I could not look away.” That brief encounter impacted his fiction and changed how he views the world; it also helped him endure the hardships of youth.
Shina: Recently I was chatting with our content manager, John Pattison, and mentioned to him that I love Russian poetry and literature. In turn, he recommended I check out A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders. It's a collection of short stories by some of the great Russian writers (Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol), which Saunders uses when teaching his MFA students at Syracuse University. Through A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Saunders invites us to sit in on his classes.
The stories are great on their own, of course; there's a reason these writers are so well-known! At a point during Tolstoy's "Master and Man," I realized that I myself was getting chills and feeling isolated just from reading his depiction of a blizzard. It's been a while since I was that immersed in a story. But it's Saunders’ commentary that makes this book worth checking out: there's so much subtle beauty and so many lessons (not just about writing, but about human beings and life, itself) wrapped up in these tales that I wouldn't have noticed if not for Saunders’ expert insights.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Cole Felske, Wende Oyloe, Sarah Moyer-Cale, Kara Marshall, Daniel Woods, Rabih Abi-Hanna, Paul & Becky Woods, Wes Oldt, Cody Kimmel, Marcus Hammonds, Kathleen McConnell, Parker Olson, Scott Graves, Audrey Wennink, Will Kotch, Will Simons, Milton Ospina, Evan Lewis, Matthew Rogers, and Zachary Maclam.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!