Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup

 

Have you ever thought about attending something like your local city council meeting, to bring the Strong Towns approach to your community, only to be held back by a fear of public speaking? It’s a common challenge for people to face, and it can make the prospect of putting yourself out there really frightening.

Strong Towns member Jennifer Gaughran has also faced that fear, and learned to overcome it through attending Toastmasters club meetings. This week, she wrote about how she’s bringing together what she’s learned to create the Strong Towns Toastmasters Club, which will help empower you to become a better, more confident advocate for your community. Read more about it here, and attend the first club meeting at 8:00 p.m. CT on Thursday, June 2, 2022!

 
 

Comment of the Week:

This comment came from a discussion on our article, “The Magic of Legacy Shops Comes Back to Life in Buffalo.” Join the conversation here!

 
 

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

(Source: John Pattison.)

John: Two years ago, I surprised myself by picking up a camera and falling in love with nature photography. Before that I’d never been especially outdoorsy—I like the Inside Things. My teenage daughter once told me that my preferred aesthetic is something called “dark academia.” I don’t know what that means, but she says it comes with books and candlelight, dramatic weather, and cozy furniture, so I’ll take it. But photography—landscapes and wildlife (mostly birds), as well as some macrophotography—has me paying attention to nature as never before. 

Something I’ve come to understand is how few undeveloped places there are near me. There are little islands of wildness here in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, but they are few in number and increasingly isolated from one another. (The loss of wilderness is one of the consequences of the suburban development pattern, but not one we’ve talked about much on this site.) This week, I re-read Wallace Stegner’s famous “Wilderness Letter.” Written more than 60 years ago, it is strikingly, disappointingly relevant: “Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment…The reminder and the reassurance that [the wilderness] is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.” You can read Stegner’s full letter here, or catch an excerpt in this lovely video.

Jay: It wasn’t so long ago that my kids were young enough to really dig Peppa Pig, the British kid comedy which also sneaks in parent humor, like the Bullwinkle and Rocky show did when I was little. Peppa is a pretty smart cookie and so is Elon Musk, so the newest cycling and walking commissioner appointed in the UK’s West Midlands region, Adam Tranter, asked on his Twitter feed why Musk can’t understand induced demand. Peppa gets it right away in this clip from the show highlighted by Tranter.

(Source: Unsplash.)

Daniel: I’ve never been a huge customer of ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, but there was definitely a period in my wife’s and my pre-parenthood life when we made semi-frequent use of these apps to do things like head downtown for a night out without worrying about parking or sobriety, or get one of us home when the other had the car. In our car-dependent city where we’ve made the choice to be a one-car household, it felt like a game-changer in terms of mobility and flexibility. And the price—at the time about $6 one way to downtown, versus $1.25 per person for a slow bus that runs once an hour—felt distinctly too good to be true.

Of course, it was too good to be true, as Henry Grabar at Slate lays out in an excellent article called “The Decade of Cheap Rides is Over”: these companies spent years losing staggering amounts of money in “an enormous, investor-fueled subsidy of America’s ride-hailing habit.” The apps are still with us, but the low fares are not. What is also still with us, though, are all the distortions that this costly experiment introduced into the transportation landscape: falling ridership and faltering political support for public transit, increased congestion, and the failure of car-sharing companies that might, in fact, have presented a more viable alternative business model. Ultimately, we just may have lost years of momentum toward evolving our cities to actually be less car-dependent—regardless of whose car it is. Grabar has written not just an interesting postmortem but a vital cautionary tale about going all in, societally, on the next big, supposedly-transformative innovation.

(Source: Unsplash.)

Rachel: This isn’t a fun read but it is an insightful one: from National Affairs, an essay called “Protecting Children from Social Media.” Reflecting on my own childhood in the 90s (with one household TV that only got a handful of local channels) and comparing it to the childhoods I see of kids around me today (with phones constantly in hand and laptops close by, too), I’m deeply troubled by how insidious and dominant social media is in their lives. Chris Griswold writes: “For hours every day, millions of American children enter the virtual care of a Silicon Valley interested in monetizing them.” I don’t know if I have much faith in the author’s concluding suggestions, but I will try to stay hopeful that we can find a better approach to social media than we currently have. Thanks to Anthony Barr’s brilliant substack, Thinking Aloud, for this link.

Tayana: Today I took a walk in a beautiful neighborhood in Barcelona, where there is a famous palace/art museum called Palau Nacional de Montjuïc / Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. As I walked toward it, coffee in hand before starting work, I remembered how while I was growing up in the suburbs in the U.S., I used to think that cities with places like this were somewhere you could only visit on vacation for a couple weeks a year. In my mind, beautiful countries were the stuff of luxury trips you could only afford if you were rich, or something you’d only see in movies or read about in books. I was shocked to realize, when I moved here for a research project several years ago, that people actually live in these places.

Sure, I theoretically understood this before, but to come face to face with this reality was moving and changed my worldview. I realized firsthand that normal people like you and me can and do live in beautiful, magical towns and cities year-round. And not because they are rich (I was a broke student for much of the time), but because in many places, it’s normal to strive to build beautiful, human-centered cities. It brings people joy and a sense of pride, it embodies values and culture in physical form, and it enhances our life experience in various ways. As I move forward with my work in the field of urbanism, my goal is not to encourage more people to move to these places (or to build castles), but rather to encourage people to make more places that are beautiful, interesting, exciting, fun to live in, unique and beloved.

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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Charlie Birch, Justin Feasel, Andrew Greenawalt, Eric Guenther, Terry Mark, Chris Milner, and Natalie Sheard.

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!

 
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