Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup

 

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

Edward: Ray Delahanty, better known as City Nerd on YouTube, shares a very frank discussion in this video about what a city planner is. He summarizes the job description and the tasks that a planner would tackle in a typical day, and does a great job laying it all out while providing his own unique perspective on the profession.

Festival goers at Ren in the Glen. (Source: Flickr.)

Lauren: My husband and I are regular attendees of Ren in the Glen, an annual Renaissance fair in Central Wisconsin. Since joining the Strong Towns community, I’ve had an extra appreciation for the townmaking principles that make these events so pleasant. They’re nice to walk in. Long-running projects change incrementally over years. They show great consideration to peoples’ needs—for shade, for rest, for restrooms—and they do so in ways that are natural and unobtrusive. For more discussion about how urbanism and Renaissance fairs intersect, enjoy this piece by CityLab.

John: The kids are taking back the streets. In this (unexpectedly moving) excerpt from NBC News, reporter Jacob Ward joins a “bike bus” in Portland, Oregon. Every Wednesday morning, what starts as a small trickle of kids riding their bikes to school soon becomes a mighty river hundreds of riders strong. At the head of the group is local elementary school teacher and coach Sam Balto. In a TikTok of the bike bus, which has racked up 7.3 million views, you can see neighbors lining the streets to cheer on the kids. Something I appreciated about Ward’s story is that he focused not so much on the environmental benefits of the bike bus (which are obvious) but on kids’ social and emotional well-being. Recent studies have found that the pandemic had a profound impact on kids’ mental health. There’s never been a more important time for children to be able to safely ride bikes with friends, and for adults to be out there with them, or cheering them on.

(Source: Flickr.)

Norm: My senses were tingling as I read this fantastic article about the ways that “regular pilgrimages to Disney World offer an alternative [to traditional religious practices]—complete with rituals, community gatherings, and musical performances.” As a pastor and person of faith, I am interested in things that David Zahl would describe as “replacement religion”—things which seek to satisfy a religious impulse “directed horizontally rather than vertically, at earthly rather than heavenly objects.”

Similarly, James K.A. Smith’s excellent series on cultural liturgies has helped me to explore the ways that we are habitually primed to look for places of greater meaning—whether in this world or in the world to come. I’ve been watching the Urban Design Principles course in the Strong Towns Academy, which places a lot of emphasis on the creation of meaningful places and the insights of Zahl and Smith have been on my mind throughout the course.

(Source: Governing.)

Rachel: This was a fascinating interview in Governing magazine with Boston’s chief of streets, who talked about how the city handled a month-long shutdown of its second-busiest rail line for maintenance. The main takeaway is that the city deployed a ton of alternative options for people (shuttle buses with designated lanes, more access to bikeshares, streets blocked off to cars, etc.) and then tweaked those, sometimes multiple times in a single day, to make sure they were working well for the tens of thousands of riders who used the Orange Line on a typical day.

As I read, I reflected on how many of the tactics the city of Boston employed could be used in smaller cities and towns to create more transportation options, chiefly by following the Strong Towns approach to public investment, observing where people struggle and addressing those struggles immediately—no rail line required. Here’s just one key quote from the article to illustrate this: “We had the Boston Police Department deployed at a number of critical intersections throughout the shutdown and they were an invaluable source of not only information but also suggestions for improvement. They would often spot very subtle things about how vehicles were sometimes coming into conflict and say, ‘I think we should try a line of cones here.’ Our attitude when we heard that stuff was, ‘Let’s try it.’ We’re not going to go through a month of engineering analysis. We’re going to do the thing that the person who’s got some eyes on the ground thinks may help. And we’re going to watch it and change it.”

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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Colleen Baker, Kirsten Christensen, Alexander Coan, Wesley d'Aquin, Tammy Dziadek, Jeremy Evans, Aaron Goidel, Mark Green, David Harding, Bryan Hromatko, Wade Johnston, Jack Lehman, Terri Lewis, Katharine Martin, Lydia McFee, Jesse Neufeld, Gail Ober, Peterq Pampusch, Sarah Patton, Jane Rice, Jon Ross, Raphael Sanchez, Lucas Thode, and Susan Wendt.

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

 
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