Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
This week at Strong Towns, our new member advocate, Norm Van Eeden Petersman, joined Program Director Rachel Quednau on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast to talk about the work he’s done in his community in Delta, British Columbia, to make it a stronger place. Check it out, and contact Norm (norm@strongtowns.org) to share your story about applying Strong Towns insights in your community! Norm would also love to chat if you’ve got questions about membership in the Strong Towns movement.
By the way, our event calendar for autumn is ramping up! See if Strong Towns is coming to your area and make sure to sign up for our email list (if you're not already) to get alerts on future events in your region.
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Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
(Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
Lauren: I walk my neighborhood a few times a week. It’s great to have had a few years to develop a relationship with this place, to deepen my knowledge of it with every stroll. This year I noticed a very special tree just a few steps from my own front door—a mature American chestnut, at least 60 feet tall, one of a nearly extinct species. My husband immediately started babbling about its history and dreaming about propagating more of them. If you want to learn more about this species, yourself, you can read about it here. When I told my neighbor there was one on his property, he pointed out another, even bigger one behind his house! I hope this inspires you to look for new surprises in your own neighborhood in the coming weeks.
Morfydd Clark as Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
John: I remember having a recurring thought when I was reading George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, and then again when I was watching the TV adaptation Game of Thrones: “Violence begets violence begets violence begets violence.” Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed both versions of the story, but binging first the books and then the show left me depressed. The world Martin created is cynical, power-mad, and soaked in blood—but that doesn’t mean it’s not realistic. In a recent essay in The Dispatch, David French compared Martin’s series to a mirror of modern sensibilities. “Perhaps the true rule of the game of thrones isn’t ‘Win or die,’” he wrote, “but rather ‘Win and die.’ The quest for power, unmoored from virtue, is the doom of us all.”
French contrasts Martin’s ethos with that of an earlier master of fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkien. Having fought in World War I and lived through the rise and fall of Hitler, Tolkien was suspicious of power. He also didn’t believe that honorable ends can be achieved through dishonorable means. French writes, “One cannot truly defeat the enemy with the enemy’s tools… The raw quest for power will corrupt all it touches.” This summer, big-budget TV prequels debuted from the lands of Westeros and Middle-earth. Millions of Americans, including me, will watch both. But I’m with David French when he says America needs to remember Tolkien again. Why? “Because we’re mired in Westeros, playing the game of thrones. When you hear words like ‘fight fire with fire,’ or ‘make them play by their own rules,’ or ‘punch back twice as hard,’ or ‘wield power to reward friends and punish enemies,’ you’re hearing an ethos that declares, ‘win or die.’”
(Source: Unsplash.)
Norm: Andres Duany told King Charles III (who at the time was still Prince Charles) that, “Kings are remembered for what they build.” Those words serve to underscore the importance of what the prince, now king, has done with the development of the community of Poundbury, in the UK. He has been building a village on his royal estate on lands which had been largely untouched by development for many generations. The village now stands as a landmark in its own right and serves as one way to measure the king’s impact in years to come.
A contrasting action of removal and erasure of landmarks has been unfolding in southeast Saskatchewan. Robert Andjelic, the new king of Canada’s fertile prairies in terms of land ownership, has been swiftly creating an empire of land holdings. He optimizes each new parcel for the requirements of modern farming. He has already spent $25 million to wipe away fence lines, brush, hedgerows, shelter belts, and old farm buildings. An erasure of natural refuges and vestiges of prior generations’ labor has occurred within the span of a few years.
I can’t help but wonder what is lost when a rural region loses its own landmarks. My bus stop growing up was next to “the old ladies’ house,” a rundown home lived in by two elderly sisters, and I could tell you what country road we were on by spotting certain barns, sheds, trees, and watering holes. Is it just nostalgia that makes me wish those things were still there as landmarks and stores of memory? Will anyone else remember where the Rogaslky sisters lived?
The two kings of Canada are creating very different places for different ends. I only wish that King Robert’s bulldozers would leave a little more of the past behind. After all, as Wendell Berry reminds us:
A human community, then, if it is to last long, must exert a sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in place. Practically speaking, human society has no work more important than this. Once we have acknowledged this principle, we can only be alarmed at the extent to which it has been ignored. For though our present society does generate a centripetal force of great power, this is not a local force, but one centered almost exclusively in our great commercial and industrial cities, which have drawn irresistibly into themselves both the products of the countryside and the people and talents of the country communities.
Jay: Along with millions of baseball fans, I’m carefully following Albert Pujols (“pooh-holse”) as he plays his last season in Major League Baseball. It is a big deal for baseball fans because Pujols is only three home runs away from an almost insurmountable mark of 700, which only three players before him have reached. Even if you don’t care one lick about baseball, you’ve heard of two of them: Babe Ruth and Willie Mays. Pujols hit number 697 on Sunday night and folks are losing their mind about it in the baseball world. As of this writing, he has less than 20 games to reach the milestone.
He’s one of the greatest players to ever live, but the 42-year-old guy that young players now call “Grandpa” has done way more off the field. Through the Pujols Family Foundation, he has used his wealth and fame to help thousands of people: immigrants like himself from the Dominican Republic, families in poverty and those who experience Down syndrome. Pujols became dedicated to the lifelong mission of inclusion and access for those with Down syndrome when he met his wife, Diedre, and her daughter Isabella. The world could use a few more people like Albert Pujols.
Daniel: In The Atlantic, Jerusalem Demsas examines the phenomenon of “Black flight” from urban neighborhoods—a counterpart to the much more discussed “white flight” to suburbia that rapidly accelerated in the post-World War II era. Demsas does a nice job of picking apart the often-contradictory outlines and implications of this phenomenon, with a focus not just on what it means for Black Americans to integrate into suburbs that were lily-white as recently as three or four decades ago, but on what it means for the neighborhoods they leave behind. Gentrification gets a lot of attention in the media—in part because national journalists are disproportionately likely to live in the handful of cities experiencing a lot of it—but far more often, the neighborhoods losing Black residents are those stuck in a spiral of disinvestment and disadvantage, where virtually the only ones remaining are the truly poor. It’s clear that American cities need a vision for the bottom-up revitalization of these places, not just a path for those with the means to exit them.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Natasha Brand, Ryan Davian, Tanner Dorman, Taylor Hoefler, John Hornblower, Andrea Hutchinson, Alexander Iannello, Grey Johnson, Dylan Katz, Joseph Kelly, Jesús Loría, Judy Norinsky, Kobe Riddle, Clarke Taylor, Jay Williams, and David Wogen.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!