Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
This week, we welcomed Norm Van Eeden Petersman to the Strong Towns team, as our new Member Advocate! Norm has been a Strong Towns member himself since 2018, and we think he’s the perfect fit for this role. If you haven’t already, join the movement and become a Strong Towns member, too, so that Norm can help support you as you work toward making your place stronger and more resilient.
In other news, the Strong Towns team will be meeting in Minneapolis next week for a staff retreat. Because of this, we’ll have a lighter publishing schedule than usual—but when we get back, it’ll be with new ideas for bringing you better resources and growing the movement!
Comment of the Week:
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Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
(Source: Oro Editions.)
Daniel: Tokyo is the most fascinating place I’ve ever spent time in. While in college, I went there for three weeks for a seminar course on its development post-1945. The Japanese capital is renowned for its cleanliness, high-tech allure, and efficient transit. But turn off the bustling sidewalk of a busy boulevard into one of Tokyo’s thousands of tiny alleys, and you discover a different and far more significant side of the megacity. Tokyo is a place where entrepreneurship thrives at the smallest scales: tiny little bars, restaurants, and shops carved into “microspaces,” often simply the ground floor of someone’s home. There’s a sense of absolute serendipity you get on a walk around a Tokyo neighborhood: Any narrow, winding street might lead you to a Shinto shrine, a playground, or a hole-in-the-wall tempura shop where “mom and pop” are literally behind the counter making your food.
This piece in Bloomberg is a preview of a new book, Emergent Tokyo by Jorge Almazan and Joe McReynolds, and it’s one I can’t wait to read. The authors argue that Tokyo is a place, not of chaos, but of remarkable emergent—that is, bottom-up and unplanned—order. A Strong Towns advocate might put it another way: Tokyo’s back alleys are the culmination of the traditional development pattern in a modern context.
Shina: Have you ever watched a piece of artwork being restored? It's a painstaking, high-stakes process, and yet Julian Baumgartner, at the YouTube channel Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration, makes it seem so soothing. His videos not only educate viewers on the science and art of preserving artwork, but they also inspire an emotion that's hard to describe. Maybe it comes from the great care that Baumgartner employs in his work—a gentleness that, for me, always recalls the lines from Don McLean's "Vincent": "Weathered faces lined in pain / Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand."
The particular video I'd like to share from Baumgartner's channel is a recent one, in which he introduces his apprentice, Kit, as they restore a Baroque painting with extensive damage. Watching Baumgartner work alone was already a moving experience, but now we also get to see the knowledge of a master craftsman being passed on to a younger student. It's a beautiful thing, to know that when Kit moves on to her own studio someday, some of the world's most precious cultural keepsakes are going to be in good—and equally loving—hands.
Norm: The beaver was recognized, with royal assent, as Canada’s national animal in 1975 because it is “a symbol of the sovereignty of Canada.” Only recently have I begun to recognize that our national animal is also a remarkable water engineer with lessons to teach us. This video, by an Oregonian filmmaker, does a fine job explaining this and showing us how we can learn from natural systems. I’m intrigued by the field of biomimicry (nature-inspired innovation), because it requires careful observation of systems that are easily overlooked. A parallel exists between learning water management from beavers and learning about development patterns in resilient communities from our human ancestors.
The arid landscapes of northeast Washington that I drove through a few weeks ago made me wonder what new life the beaver might bring to these dusty regions. As the video illustrates, imagine what would happen if beaver populations rebounded and they began their work of renewing the capillaries, creek beds, and streams that capture, store, and distribute water after the snow melts and the rains stop. Meanwhile, my experience of the arid, auto-oriented landscape of Airway Heights, Washington, and other towns in the region that we passed through made me wonder what renewal will look like as we revive the age-old practice of creating people-oriented places.
(Source: Unsplash.)
John: Reading this review of The Right to Repair: Reclaiming the Things We Own, I thought of all the time and money I’ve spent over the years at Apple’s Genius Bar, of the routine maintenance I pay my mechanic to do that my grandfather’s generation would have done in their driveways, and the hacks I’ve looked up on YouTube to circumnavigate costly authorized repairs. I thought, too, of the many items I’ve just tossed in the trash because they were too expensive or too inconvenient to pay someone to fix. According to the book’s author, Aaron Perzanowski, as well the reviewer, Donald Fox, producers impede repair in at least three ways: product design, making it significantly cheaper to replace something rather than repair it, and intellectual property law. This perpetuates a throwaway culture that is costly not to our wallets but to our communities and to nature. Strong Towns advocates who rightly celebrate the power of maintenance will resonate with this review. I did.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Alaa Alaeddin, Andrew Austin, Robert Baer, Gerald Blessey, Michael Clarno, Oren Cohen, Nicholas DeBartolo, Matthew DiLoreto, R. E., John Greenslade, Robbie Grieco, Samyak Harsh, Aaron Hatlevoll, Jaden Hollingshead, Ben Hyde, Sullivan Israel, Marcin Jasiukowicz, Kristi Johnson, Rebekah Kornblum, Rob Leduc, Kim Littleton, Anastasia Lukyanova, Fahim Mahmood, James H Maiewski, Sally Nutt, Tadhg Pearson, Kristen Perez, Anna Salvesen, Paul Spoelhof, Lee Trucks, Colvin VanDommelen, Alexander Wainwright, Robbie Wichterman, and Chris Wyatt.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!