Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
This week, Chuck (with support from our Community Builder, John Pattison) got to participate in a Strong Towns first: a Reddit AMA. To say it drew a lot of participants is an understatement: As of right now, there are over 800 comments on the post, and the questions people were asking were fantastic. We wish Chuck could have gotten around to all of them, but hopefully we’ll be able to share some highlights with you soon. It was a lot of fun, and we want to extend a warm thanks to everyone who participated.
In other news, the first Local-Motive session is coming up in just a few weeks—do you have your tickets yet? If not, grab them now to reserve your spot on this tour of 10 exciting one-hour sessions, all designed to equip you with the tools you need to take action and set your community on a path toward resilience and success!
Comment of the Week:
This comment came from the article “Renderings vs. Reality: A Roundup of 2021s Most Egregious Development Illustrations.” Check it out here to join in on the discussion!
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
(Source: Unsplash.)
Michelle: I studied music in college and follow the university’s piano tuner on Instagram. Weird story, I know. But if you have a love of wholesome music humor please check out Loren’s IG.
(Source: Habitat for Humanity.)
Linda: “Habitat for Humanity is 3-D-printing houses. The first one is in Virginia” is a headline that caught my attention. The project, a collaboration between Habitat for Humanity and Alquist 3D, was described by the new homeowner as like “watching toothpaste getting squeezed from a tube.” It took about 28 hours to build the walls of the 1200-square-foot home, using a large-scale, “tube-shaped printer nozzle that traveled along a circuit to lay down 167 one-inch layers of concrete.” The 3-D-printed house cost 15 percent less, and took a month less time to complete, than a wooden home. “Our goal,” says Alquist 3D founder Zack Mannheimer, “is to help solve the housing crisis in America.”
(Source: Unsplash.)
Daniel: As we’ve written many times at Strong Towns, the federal conversation about infrastructure funding tends to completely miss the point. Both Congress and the media that cover Congress obsess over dollar amounts—$100 billion here, $200 billion there—while paying scant attention to far more important questions of what gets funded and why, and whether federal money ultimately supports productive local investments. This piece in Governing is very illuminating about why the answer to that last question is so often, “No.” A lot of the available money from the latest infrastructure bill will take the form of competitive grant programs, which tend to favor slick, polished project proposals from well-funded planning teams in major metropolitan areas. Left out are smaller cities, poorer cities, rural areas, and any number of high-returning projects that would actually meet dire needs in places without the institutional capacity to put the funding together. The whole system is a recipe for dysfunction.
(Source: Flickr.)
Chuck: I spent the last four months of 2021 on a book tour and ran into the scenario explored in this article, where the wage-earning help serving the attendees are masked and the hosts, guests, and other elites are not. The commentary is less about public health than it is about class, privilege, and—ultimately—a sense of hypocrisy and injustice. Masking is already one of the more divisive policies in a divided world, but I think this will be one of the more enduring symbols that comes out of the pandemic. That’s unfortunate in so many ways.
(Source: Public Square.)
Jay: When the planes flew into the towers in NYC 20 years ago, one of the unexpected consequences which touched the whole world—even me in Fairbanks, Alaska—was the sudden absence of commercial air traffic. That silence lasted days. Similarly, during the peak of the pandemic, air traffic and road traffic in North America was reduced dramatically, enough to bring an eerie, but delightful, calm to our cities. I actually dream in vivid color of urban highways disappearing, like I’ll wake up one morning and the massive, roaring interstate a few blocks away is gone and there is a strange, delightful silence similar to a worldwide pandemic or international airspace closure.
So our friends at the Congress for New Urbanism sure have my number with this piece by Dhiru Thadani in CNU’s Public Square. I came for the elevated highway teardowns and infrastructure burials, including placing lids on top of freeway tombs, but I stayed for the amazing, stylized artwork by the author. Thadani, an architect, is a charter member of CNU. There is something in his stylized illustrations that is particularly effective in showing the street spaces in white negative space, suggesting to me the public space could be something else besides a car hellscape.
I live in a streetcar suburb in the first ring outside of Hartford, Connecticut, which was particularly devastated by the urban freeway building Thadani laments in this article. We couldn't have done much worse with this once-elegant city. I’ll dream of better times for Hartford and hold onto Thadani’s renderings in the meantime.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Catherine Baker, Natalia Daraselia, Stephanie Davis, Graham Downey, Barbara Dylla, Jane Fogal, Petra Hofmann, Rachel Holloway, Eric Jenkins-Sahlin, Christian Opp, Carolyn Oppenheim, Margaret Parker, Aileen Rivera, Lauren Sage, Madeleine Stout, Lior Trestman, Lynne Twedt, Forrest Vodden, Nathanael Williams, and Katherine Wyrosdick.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!