Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
We recently introduced you to Sarah Davis, who is doing a shared internship this summer with Strong Towns and our friends at Urban3. Sarah is beginning to write for us. Last week, she wrote a great article on how residents in northeast Kansas City took the initiative to slow cars in their neighborhood. Then on Wednesday of this week, she wrote another great piece (the first in a new series) about the hidden problems with “tax neighborhoods.” Check out both articles, if you haven’t already.
Many Strong Towns staffers are keeping tabs on the Olympics. Like a lot of folks, some of us have favorite Olympic events to watch. Christa’s favorite is swimming, and Shina likes archery and pole vaulting. Rachel and John share a favorite: gymnastics. And the opening ceremony is must-see TV for Sarah, Rachel, and several others. Linda also shared this beautiful piece of editing—a commercial, yes, but also a moving tribute to the Olympic Games and their host country. Do you have a must-see Olympic event? If so, let us know what it is in the comments below.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
Image via Thank You Walt Disney.
Sarah: In my third year of urban planning studio at UMKC, the class was assigned a project that required us to walk around an area of the city and observe the public realm. This was the first time I learned about the Walt Disney studio building, right in the heart of Kansas City, MO. To my shock, the building was all boarded up and looked more or less abandoned; the group I was in agreed it was a shame that the space wasn't still in use. I recently saw a post on social media about the updated plan for the Laugh-O-Gram film studio building, and I am really excited about the design! The plan includes a welcome center, flex studio, animation museum, and a co-working space. It is great to see development like this happening in an area of my city that has seen a lot of disinvestment over the years.
Image via Unsplash.
Alexa: Have you ever thought you found a link to something really interesting or important, but when you click the link you’re led to the dreaded 404 Error page? Although the advent of the internet has been an incredible boon to cooperation, innovation, and so much more, it concerns me that so much of the world’s collective knowledge is housed in such an ephemeral state. What will happen when, as my father says, “the lights go off”? Where will all that knowledge go? Or in 100 years when technology has advanced enough that we can no longer access the older, outdated forms of the internet that we know today, what will happen? Do you currently have a way to read a floppy disk?
Image via WikiCommons.
Chuck: I have a book coming out in a few weeks that is essentially an assault on expertise. Confessions of a Recovering Engineer gets deep into the beliefs and practices of transportation professionals and how their accumulated wisdom—their expertise—is dated and needs to be replaced. Left to their own devices, this reform would never happen. Engineers are largely trusted and, where they are not, are shielded from serious critique by their status as experts. So, what should be done? If elected officials are not able to chart a new path, sometimes against the will of industry insiders, who can? This article from NPR politicizes something that we are struggling with as a society: What is the role of experts and how do we reform systems resistant to change? NPR has it wrong in this piece, but a mostly unanimous Supreme Court is, fortunately, doing a better job supporting reform movements like ours.
Image via Unsplash.
John: I have lived in intentional community for the last three-and-a-half years, and for six out of the last eight. By living in community I mean that my family—my wife, two daughters, and I—live with another family. “We share everything but the bedroom,” my wife jokes, when new acquaintances look at us side-eyed. Well, maybe not everything: most of our personal finances are separate from our housemates’ (though we did buy a house together last year). Yet the Pattisons and Neveses really have committed to sharing much of our lives together. As we navigate parenthood, careers, health, faith—oh, and a global pandemic—we’re there for each other. We call our house The Burrow. (Something our families have in common besides a mortgage is our mutual love for the Harry Potter series.)
Co-housing isn’t for everyone. But it’s for more people than you’d think. While life at The Burrow is different from the communal living described in this recent New Yorker article, we were drawn to it for the same reasons. Those reasons are both practical—not least the cost of buying a home within the orbit of Portland, Oregon—and social: an antidote to, if not a witness against, the isolation and alienation of contemporary culture. It’s personal, too. Living in community makes me a better husband, father, neighbor, and human being.
Image via Unsplash.
Linda: I don’t think I’m alone in my ambivalent feelings towards the Olympic games currently underway in Tokyo. I long ago tired of the nationalistic focus on medal counts and the unrealistic expectations and pressures placed on individual athletes. And I believe the ongoing trepidation over COVID, and the absence of spectators, casts a legitimate shadow over the events.
But I did enjoy this recent BBC article about the World Flags project. Though not officially connected to the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, the World Flags project is a “group of Japanese artists hoping to help people embrace both the Olympic spirit and Japanese culture by reimagining flags of competing countries as samurai characters.” They want to create an interactive, entertaining story in which the anthropomorphized flag samurai from each country cooperate and play an active role. The World Flags project aims to educate people on the history and culture of countries around the world, and on Japanese samurai traditions and artforms of manga and anime.
Image via Unsplash.
Daniel: This piece by Annie Lowrey is a thorough, and thoroughly maddening, exploration of America’s “time tax”: the jungle of confusing red tape that one must hack through to participate in, well, virtually any of the functions of government. All of us have experienced some version of the “time tax,” whether attempting to qualify for unemployment insurance, apply for student financial aid, or do anything at all at the DMV. This bureaucratic workload, outsourced to citizens, has immense but hard-to-quantify real costs—not just in lost time and frustration, but in people frequently being shut out of benefits for which they are, in fact, eligible. Lowrey explores the reasons the “time tax” has become so persistent and severe, from the middleman industries it sustains (hey there, tax preparers) to ideological notions about the need to means-test social welfare programs. People of any political stripe will find things to agree with here, things to ponder, and things to make you want to go grab a pitchfork.
Image via KING 5.
Lauren: “I Eat Trucks.” A group of residents in Kirkland, Washington, pitched in to plaster a banner with these words onto a low-clearance, 80-year-old bridge that truckers strike with their cabs, sometimes multiple times in a week. Signs are posted leading up to the bridge to warn drivers of the danger, and the crossing is even labelled “TruckBane” and “Kirkland’s Truck-Eating Bridge” on Google Maps. But for some reason, hundreds of drivers have still sent their cabs into it. Neighbors decided not to wait for approval or a dozen discussions with the city council; they applied the Strong Towns approach to investment by identifying the problem, doing the next smallest thing that could help, and doing it right away. Perhaps their efforts won’t solve the problem entirely, but locals say it has already staved off some destruction as they’ve seen truckers turn around upon seeing the sign.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Thomas Dufour, Laura Davis, Sean Corcoran, Joshua Moga, Monique Priestley, Nate Benz, Derek Billingsley, David Ihnen, David Adams, Noah Holmes Foster, James Ruocco, Keith Boyea, William McMutuary, Karl Becker, Michael Santos, and Ryan Hemmer.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!