Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Happy New Year from the Strong Towns team! This week has been an exciting start to 2022, as we’ve got a ton of new projects that we’ve been dying to roll out. First off, this year’s Local-Motive Tour is just around the corner: February 3–March 31! These 10, one-hour online sessions are designed to equip you with the tools you need to take action and set your community on a path toward resilience and success. You don’t want to miss out on this, so get your tickets now!
Secondly, we rolled out two brand-new series this week: the first column from our Neighborhood Storyteller, Karla Theilen, and the first chapter of a new fictional serial, High Value. New installments of both will be released weekly throughout the year—stay tuned for more.
Lastly, we welcomed our team’s new Content Manager, Jay Stange, this week with not one, but two excellent articles he wrote about the Hartford Land Bank and what he’s cleverly called the “desire paths” of zoning. We think you’re going to really enjoy both of these pieces, so put them on your to-read list if you haven’t already.
Whoo! Alright, that was a lot, but without further ado, let’s get to 2022’s first Friday Faves:
Comment of the Week:
This comment came from this week’s column by Strong Towns Neighborhood Storyteller Karla Theilen. We love hearing from people who are taking action in their communities!
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
(Source: SaraZaske.com.)
Rachel: I’ve been on a wonderful book-reading kick since Thanksgiving and one of my recent faves has been Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children, by Sara Zaske. My family is German and I just visited my brother in Berlin a couple months ago, where I got to see these “self-reliant children” taking the subway and riding their bikes to school. The book is part memoir, part history lesson, discussing the political and historical factors that have led many Germans to raise their kids with autonomy and responsibility, compared with the more helicopter, over-scheduled lifestyle of kids in the U.S. And of course, urban design plays a big role here, too. German children have the ability to go to the park by themselves or walk with their siblings to the grocery store because parks and grocery stores and all the needs of daily life are built within safe walking distance in neighborhoods, with streets oriented for people (even the littlest people), not cars. There’s also some very interesting commentary on how much culture influences the way we view childrearing practices like, for example, sending kids to daycare vs. a parent staying home with the children.
(Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
Lauren: If you could be a giant, or you could be the size of a pinky nail, which would you choose? G.K. Chesterton makes the case for choosing the latter in this short, fantastical essay-story. Besides being truly lovely, and besides giving me a different way to look at my life, this piece is yet another lens from which to consider the Strong Towns movement. It’s easy to make ourselves large, and concern ourselves greatly with what’s going on across nations and the world. But if we live and focus smaller, if we direct our energy locally, perhaps we can take greater joy from our environment, and do greater things within it.
Jay: Here is Adam Ruins Everything’s version of a bedtime story we at Strong Towns love to tell—how the automobile took over the streets. Adam Conover’s version is called “Why Jaywalking is a Crime.” It was posted in the comments for an article this week in The Drive called “An Argument Against 'Stroads,' the Worst Kind of Street.” The Drive piece looks analytically at Strong Towns’ approach to rebuilding stroads, with liberal mentions of our friends at Not Just Bikes and their work covering Strong Towns concepts.
I’m not an expert on Adam Ruins Everything episodes, but Conover is smart and funny and I’m glad to see this story presented in this context. I’m particularly interested in the section of the video where he discusses how the name “Jay” was chosen in the term, jaywalking. I’ve had the name all my life and never knew a jay is a “dirty hillbilly,” according to Adam’s research. Just so you know, I’m a proud dirty hillbilly from Alaska. And Adam’s piece is very funny—and informative on many levels. Enjoy!
(Source: Epsilon Theory.)
Chuck: I’m a huge fan of Ben Hunt and the Epsilon Theory website. Their work is in cultural narratives, with a particular focus on how the stories we tell ourselves—and the way we construct our narratives—impacts financial markets. This is really the only way to understand markets today, which are all narrative (they are certainly not about fundamentals or even technicals). Quite often, though, the Epsilon Theory analysis of narratives intersects with the most controversial and divisive topics we are struggling with as a society, including critical race theory, the 2020 election, and COVID-19. If you’re finding our cultural discourse on any of these topics to be frustrating, or worse, take the time to read this article. I found it enlightening, calming, and generous in all the ways I struggle.
(Source: Gimlet.)
John: I’m not especially active on Twitter, but something I’m learning is that Twitter isn’t one big Conversation (as I might have described it a few years ago) but rather lots of smaller, overlapping conversations. From my colleagues I hear about Urbanist Twitter. From a podcast I listen to, I hear about Conservative Legal Twitter. Some photographers I follow talk about NFTs on Crypto Twitter and Landscape Photography Twitter. As far as I can tell these groups cohere through genuine network connections—people are following each other, talking to and about one another, and about the interest they share—with a helpful boost from the Twitter algorithm. This isn’t a sophisticated analysis, yet I mention it because I find two things fascinating. One is that such Insert-Your-Modifier-Here Twitter conversations are cohesive enough that even outsiders can observe certain trends and disruptions. The second is that when some outsiders to these conversations are invited inside, they can feel a genuine sense of community and purpose.
On my wife’s recommendation, I recently listened to an episode of the tech podcast Reply All. The podcast describes how Florida Political Twitter has been “roiled” over suspicions that the governor’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw, was using Twitter bots to attack political opponents. Why did folks suspect bots? In part because the army of accounts on Pushaw’s side seemed too large, too passionate, and too well coordinated to be human. Yet Pushaw denied using bots. And, sure enough, Reply All host Emmanuel Dzotsi was able to track down a couple of the Twitter users who turned out not to be computer programs, but rather a woman named Caroline and an 18-year-old high schooler from New York named Samuel.
Setting aside the obvious lesson—don’t assume people who disagree with you are brainless automatons—what struck me was the degree to which these Twitter users’ allegiance was not only political but personal. Pushaw helped Samuel with an article he was writing. When Caroline’s mother passed away the Florida press secretary wrote her a note of condolences. In other words, Caroline and Samuel not only feel like they are doing something important; they’re doing it for and alongside someone who understands them. Dzotsi says, “I think Christina [Pushaw]is someone with a very specific skill, a skill that any natural politician has: she has this knack of noticing people who otherwise aren’t visible to the rest of us on Twitter.”
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Tyler Adkins, Ross Bassett, Kathleen Belanger, Grant Bloom, Mathew Boban, Michael Cairl, Gary Davis, Nicole Fox, Arkojit Ghosh, Marshall Hampson, Orville Lindquist, Bruce MacGregor, Joseph Marck, Eva Markiewicz, Hyejong Marshall, Stephen O’Shea, Sara Joy Proppe, Joseph Reagle, Jace Reynolds, Kevin Somdahl-Sands, Richard Vandenburgh, Jessica Wilson, and Eleanor (Ginger) Wireman.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!