Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Last week, the Strong Towns team met in Minneapolis for a Twins game—and to plan the next steps for the Strong Towns movement, of course! We spent a lot of time discussing the five campaigns we outlined in our new Strategic Plan, and planning new content that we’ll be releasing for each campaign. Stay tuned, because we’ve got some great new projects lined up!
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Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
Norm’s son and his actual Opa biking through the streets of Ladner after school.
Norm: My son calls me Opa Fiets sometimes and I think it’s a splendid nickname! After all, I have always been old for my age and one of my prized possessions is my Dutch-style upright bike. I love how it makes cycling around town safer and more enjoyable. It feels invigorating to cruise through town with a straight back, good posture, and great, 270-degree sightlines. If you’ve only ever biked on a road bike or a mountain bike on the quiet streets in your town or city, you’ve missed out on the delights that can be yours with an upright bike! Brent Toderian’s 2014 article on the topic and this video by Not Just Bikes are two great resources to help convince you to try it out for yourself!
(Source: Nashville Scene.)
Rachel: This story comes courtesy of our friends at Urban3, who we’re partnering with in our ongoing Just Accounting initiative to explore the property tax assessment system in American communities, which usually offloads the tax burden from neighborhoods with larger, more expensive properties (yet comparatively low financial productivity) to neighborhoods with greater financial productivity but with smaller, cheaper homes. Another penalty that often hits lower-income property owners harder is code violations.
This article from the Nashville Scene documents the myriad violations that can target low-income residents, resulting in expensive fines and even the possibility of jail time or losing their home. Whereas a wealthier property owner may have strollers, lawn mowers, or other items sitting in their yard and never get penalized, the article tracks a number of residents in poorer neighborhoods who have been reported numerous times for things as modest as a shovel leaning against the side of a house, a few extra cars parked in a driveway or some cushions sitting on a porch. When it was published a few weeks ago, the Nashville Scene article set off a wave of responses from residents and the city, and resulted in a follow-up article that offers additional perspectives and nuance about the situation. Codes have their purpose and no one wants to live next door to a dump, but the inequities in who is getting reported and fined—often those with the least ability to pay those fines—are worth noting. Is this playing out in your city, too?
Lauren: Every detail of The Young Pope is careful and deliberate. If you choose to pick it up, I’ll warn you that it’s not family friendly, but nonetheless it’s an interesting exploration of tradition, truth, and beauty. Textile nerds will enjoy the costuming in particular—so much is tied up in the clergy’s robes. It’s been my binge of choice these past few weeks in part because it’s full of interesting contrasts and contradictions, thematically and visually. Here’s a longer review, if you’re not quite sold either way.
(Source: Words Build Cities.)
Jay: Strong Towns writer Jamie Littlefield has written a prompt book to help us reimagine places using Dall-E-2, a free open source app for doing simplified Photoshop-style mockups of urban design ideas. Her site has all the details.
Did I mention it’s free?
Shina: We've got several fans of Studio Ghibli movies here at Strong Towns, myself included. They may be animations, but they're certainly not just for kids, and there's a lot of real-world inspiration to be gleaned from the artistry of these films—as writer Matthew Robare pointed out to us last year in his article, "Miyazaki's Urbanism." If you enjoyed that piece, or if you're just a Ghibli fan in general, then check out the YouTube channel Studson Studio, where the host crafts stunning miniatures of Studio Ghibli buildings (along with buildings from other franchises). Start out with his recreation of the bathhouse from Spirited Away as a taster, and then when you're really ready to commit, go watch the hour-long video where he creates Howl's moving castle out of recycled materials and garbage!
John: From time to time my wife will ask me to listen to a podcast so she and I can talk about it together. It happened again a couple weeks ago when she shared an episode of The Ezra Klein Podcast called “The Mid-Century Media Theorists Who Saw What Was Coming.” Klein interviews Sean Illing, coauthor of the new book The Paradox of Democracy. Drawing on the work of media theorists Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan, Illing walks us through history to show how different revolutions in media shaped and often upended societies. The thing about all these technologies, he says, is that they’re not inherently good or bad; they’re just disruptive in unpredictable ways. “Sometimes you get the Arab Spring and sometimes you get Pizzagate.” Illing says you can think about the internet as a kind of “global nervous system. … [We] are being confronted by the anxieties and the outrages everywhere all the time, and we can’t do anything about it, and the algorithms are pushing all the terrible sh—— in front of our faces all the time, that breeds fatigue and cynicism and probably despair.” Illing says we’re still in a “weird convergent space” with the internet, and says it feels like we are being pummeled from every direction. “Things are changing so fast I just don’t think there’s enough time to gain our footing.”
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Amber Blaylock, Zachary Britt, Ethan Chan, Matthew Chapman, Walter Davis, Bradley Dick, Benjamin Dickinson, William Evans, Talon Fogal, Sandra Freeman, Chris Grgich, Karen Guzman-Newton, Nicholas Johnson, Robert Leutwyler, Sean Love, Trang Mai, Jason Petty, William Santos, Braden Schmidt, Kathleen Shannon, Jennifer Smith-Brock, Benjamin Stangle, Collin Sventy, Dave Tripp, Krishna Venugopal, and Liam Wingerd.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!