Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup

This week here at Strong Towns, we're welcoming our 2021 summer intern to the team: Sarah Davis! As in previous years, we're partnering with our colleagues at the data analytics firm Urban3 in order to make this internship possible, and we're thrilled to have the opportunity to work with Sarah. You can read more about her here, and keep an eye out for her writing, which we'll be sharing every Wednesday. (Sign up for our email list if you don't want to miss out on the latest content!)

Also, a reminder that on Wednesday (July 21) at 12 p.m. Eastern, we'll be hosting a free webcast about an urban highway expansion that is threatening to cut right through the heart of Shreveport, Louisiana. In the webcast, you’ll hear from local experts who are leading the charge against this harmful highway project, in a discussion hosted by Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn. Learn more and register here.

And without further ado, let’s get to the Friday Faves.

Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:

Image via Unsplash.

Chuck: We all know that it is easier to make your second million than your first, but current economic policy—including an ultra-low interest rate environment—is dramatically accelerating the wealth gap. If your stock holdings go up 10% a year (with the federal reserve ensuring they never go down) and you can borrow at negative effective interest rates, then the wealthy can just borrow money, live large, and watch their net worth go up, all while paying no taxes. Oh well, at least inflation is transitory.

Image via Unsplash.

Lauren: As I was working on some materials for the launch of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town, I stumbled upon this video by Grist that explains the 85th percentile speed and its implications for street and road design. It’s straightforward, easy-to-understand, and very sharable, so hopefully it can be a useful resource for you Strong Towns advocates.

Visby, Sweden, which served as a source of inspiration for Miyazaki’s team. Image via WikiCommons.

Shina: Kiki's Delivery Service has a special place in my heart. I would always watch it as a kid whenever I was too sick to go to school, so it invokes feelings of comfort and care for me, like a warm bowl of chicken noodle soup. Even now in adulthood, I always put it on when I'm feeling under the weather. So, for any other Kiki fans who were as excited as I was about the piece we published this week on Hayao Miyazaki's urbanism, here's a little bonus interview I'd like to share. In it, Miyazaki talks about his inspiration behind the city of Koriko, and the research process his team went through in designing it.

Image via Unsplash.

Rachel: I’m always awed by a story in which humans essentially let nature do what it was meant to do, with beneficial outcomes for everyone. This week, I came across a Civil Eats article about the symbiotic relationship between grazing animals and wildfire protection. In California and South Dakota, farmers and researchers have teamed up to develop a tool that connects ranchers who need grazing land for their cattle, goats, and sheep with landowners in wildfire-prone areas. The animals eat up shrubs and grasses that could fuel future fires, getting nutrition for themselves and keeping surrounding properties safe.

Image via Unsplash.

Daniel: This blog post, “Cities Don’t Think,” calls out a bad habit of many of us who write about, think about, or study cities for a living: anthropomorphizing them by making statements like “City X wants ____” or “City Y has chosen to ____.” I would extend the author’s caution to related ideas like “the community” or “the public,” where there is similarly no simple answer as to who or what we actually mean by those words, which describe a collective that doesn’t, in reality, act with a single intention or consensus.

I’ve caught myself doing this before, and I’ll take this post as a useful reminder to take care not to. It’s not merely that it’s bad writing; the real problem here is that it’s a habit that encourages lazy thinking. Essentializing in this way makes it easy to engage in motivated reasoning, affirming for yourself the things you already believed while failing to acknowledge the complexity and contradictions inherent in planning or making public policy.

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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Mary Jane Canose, Walter Chatham, Adam Herrmann, Kenneth Robertson, Benevity, Erica Lasley, and Kyle Boyd.

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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!