Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Talking strategy with the Urban3 team.
This week, our 2021 summer intern, Sarah Davis, and Strong Towns Program Director Rachel Quednau went to Asheville, North Carolina, to meet up with our friends on the Urban3 team. They had a great time strategically planning how Strong Towns and Urban3 can continue partnering to help communities around the country #DoTheMath on their development pattern, and move toward becoming more economically resilient. Afterward, they got to take a "funky" bus tour around Asheville and explore the city a bit. Thanks for having us over, Urban3!
We also got to spotlight Lockport, Illinois, this week, in celebration of the city's victory in this year's Strongest Town contest. We hope that reading about Lockport's efforts in addressing its struggles—especially in the wake of the COVID pandemic—will be both instructive and inspiring to advocates in other communities across the country.
Now, without further ado, let's get to the Friday Faves for this week!
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
Image via Unsplash.
John: A powerful metaphor contains tremendous latent energy, which when released can be used for good or ill. Metaphors bring people and ideas together. They can make the strange familiar. And they can help us see the familiar in new ways. Science fiction writer Orson Scott Card once said that metaphors have a way of holding “the most truth in the least space.” Metaphors reveal, they can also obscure.
There’s a new essay collection I want to read called A City Is Not a Computer. It’s by Shannon Mattern, a columnist for Places Journal. Creating metaphors for cities comes almost as naturally to people as creating cities themselves. A recent Wired magazine article about the book gives some examples: “A city is a machine, a city is an animal, a city is an ecosystem.” (We’ve used that last one ourselves.) But the really dangerous one to Mattern is to equate cities with computers. “A lot of more computational and data-driven ways of thinking about cities give a false sense of omniscience,” she says.
Image via Flickr.
Daniel: This piece on “Secret Congress” by Simon Balezon and Matthew Yglesias is a month and a half old, but I hadn’t seen it until now. The idea is that, while we’ve all heard that the legislative branch is hopelessly deadlocked, polarized, and dysfunctional, the reality is more subtle: Congress tends to deadlock on issues that get a lot of media attention and are understood as highly partisan. Meanwhile, they plug away passing substantive legislation on issues that get very little public attention, largely because they’re not coded as neatly aligning with one party’s agenda. Not all of that legislation is necessarily good or bad, but some of it delivers real help to real people. I’m struck by the notion that when politics is a vicious tug of war between ideological factions, the highest-impact thing you can do is to “pull the rope sideways.” I think some version of that is what we’re trying to do at Strong Towns, though we don’t engage much with “politics,” in a narrow sense.
Image via Unsplash.
Michelle: A friend of mine just launched a new book and tea subscription service targeted at those who enjoy the Young Adult genre. I think it’s a really great idea and I can’t help but think of a teenager snuggling down with their new novel and tea that was shipped to them. Winter is just around the corner… What could be better?
Image via WikiCommons.
Shina: This is a story I haven't thought about in years: that one time Austin tried to build a really bad dam. In the 1890s, some wealthy individuals in banking and real estate sought to generate a "boom" in Austin's population by creating a bunch of new jobs…via a dam. So, the city went $1.4 million into debt (which I believe would be somewhere around $40 million today, but don't quote me on that) in order to build this big new piece of infrastructure—only for it to end up bursting just a few years later in 1900. The resulting flood killed dozens of people, destroyed homes, and left surviving residents without basic utilities. Hindsight's 20/20, but this one did seem like an obvious tragedy in the making, since the dam was deemed unsound early on in its construction. I try not to insist that people must "learn from history," but there is something to be said here about learning from disastrous mega-projects of the past.
Image via Flickr.
Lauren: Addison Del Mastro, a frequent contributor to Strong Towns, wrote this short piece on his favorite way to cook corned beef on his Substack, and it was a treat to read. It’s also a treat to eat—I grew up on roasted (not boiled or crocked) corned beef. It’s my favorite food. Take note of Del Mastro’s cabbage-cooking technique, too. Doesn’t that sound AMAZING? I’m literally drooling.
Image via Unsplash.
Rachel: Here’s another inspiring, scrappy, bottom-up story from Memphis (definitely not the first time we’ve talked about what a strong town Memphis is). This article from Christian Century covers a church-based bicycle cooperative that has been helping Memphians access affordable bikes and learn bike maintenance skills for many years. The bike shop, Revolutions, and its supporters have also been involved with efforts to help make Memphis a more bike-friendly city through practices like adding bike lanes. As Abby and I talked about during an Upzoned episode a few weeks ago, houses of worship often have considerable land and building space that sits empty most of the week. It’s heartening to see churches use their space to its fullest, whether through providing housing or a community bike shop.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Michael Makar, Mani Kamali Sarvestani, Russ Stephenson, Jenna Sandoe, Frank Ploof, Matt Stone, Maria Morgan-Butcher, Patrick Morton, Rylund Johnson, Chigo Uzoigwe, and Liz Benneian.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!