Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Get your cameras ready: #BlackFridayParking is here! This is a nationwide event drawing attention to the harmful nature of minimum parking requirements.
Every year on Black Friday, one of the biggest shopping days of the year, people all across North America snap photos of the (hardly full) parking lots in their communities and share them on social media to demonstrate how unnecessary these massive lots are.
Join in, and be sure to tag us with #BlackFridayParking!
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
Lauren: My colleague Norm turned me onto this CBC story featuring Jason Slaughter, the creator behind Not Just Bikes. It also references Urban3 (and shouts out Strong Towns). The piece’s title theme is to discuss the intersection of planning and climate stability, but also highlights causes more central to the Strong Towns mission. “To balance the books, Canadian cities make like Europe where going car-free is easy,” reads the subhead. This financial element is so important, such a powerful tool in spreading the Strong Towns approach across cultural categories. And it’s working.
Daniel: Do kids need to be exposed to risk in order to gain confidence and coordination? Science says yes, according to this piece in The Conversation, and so does a delightful new “risky” playground in Melbourne, Australia, which doubles as an offbeat public art piece. The carefully cultivated appearance of broken-ness—assemblages of irregular boulders, monkey bars that bend and warp at wonky angles—masks the meticulous care that went into its construction. The playground is designed to force kids to evaluate risk and make careful decisions in order to navigate its terrain successfully. The author is careful to note the distinction between risk—the possibility of a fall or injury due to factors (like an uneven platform) that are clearly visible to the user of the space and can be successfully maneuvered around—versus hazard, the possibility of catastrophic injury due to dangers that are not obvious to the user. Playgrounds should never be hazardous, but they should be a little bit risky.
I grew up with the utterly boring, cookie-cutter playgrounds of the 1990s, the result of the predictable overreaction of manufacturers to the threat of litigation and liability. Child me desperately would have wanted to play on something more like this. Adult me still does—let’s be honest—but also recognizes a wisdom here that echoes Nassim Taleb’s insight that antifragility is only cultivated through subjecting something to repeated small stressors. Put more plainly, if you never fall down and skin your knees, you never learn how to pick yourself back up.
Shina: When I was a kid, Tamora Pierce's The Circle of Magic and The Circle Opens series were my favorite books. Recently, I decided to go back and reread them, to get a little hit of nostalgia—and was impressed as always with Pierce's ability to present dark and challenging themes in a way that's still accessible for a younger audience. In particular, The Circle of Magic's fourth installment, Briar's Book, is about a fictional plague that devastates the city in which the main characters live. As you might imagine, in a post-2020 world, the story feels all the more real now than it did when I was a child. Not only does it deal with the subjects of mass fear, quarantine, and death, but also how people pull together during times of crisis. Additionally, I love that, even when the world around them is in chaos and bad things happen that are outside of their control, the very young protagonists of the series maintain a sense of agency—an empowering message for young readers. If you have a preteen who likes to read, I'd recommend Tamora Pierce's books in general, and if I myself had a child who was impacted by the COVID pandemic, I'd encourage them to pick up Briar's Book.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement, who joined us in the hundreds during last week’s member drive!
Your support helps us provide tools, resources, and community to people who are building strong towns across the country.
What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!