Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Each week, the Strong Towns team shares their favorite links—the things that made us think in new ways, delve deeper into the Strong Towns mission, or even just smile.
This week, the team was amused to receive an email requesting ant traps: “Chuck, We could benefit from some ant traps down here in Room 3. The ants are taking over!” Turns out the sender got the “Chuck”s in his address book confused. But if we had a nickel for every time someone mislabeled or confused this organization, we’d be able to take the whole team out to lunch. Whether we’re incorrectly called “Small Towns” or “Smart Towns,” we’ve made our peace with the fact that some people might not get the name right—just so long as they’re working to advance the Strong Towns mission, we don’t really care…
In more serious news though, this week was a classic example of the way Strong Towns advocates are taking action all over the continent and the world. On Tuesday, we hosted a webcast featuring local leaders from Illinois, Pennsylvania and Arkansas which was attended by people from at least 20 different states and provinces. Then on Wednesday, Chuck participated in a panel hosted by a group based in Trinidad and Tobago. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the fantastic conversations happening between people across North America on the Strong Towns Community site… We’re glad this message is spreading far and wide.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Chuck: I’ve been bewildered with our ongoing cultural debate on mask-wearing. I continue to believe, as I said two months ago, that the quickest and most certain way for us to get our Main Street economies back up and running is to all wear masks when we’re in public. And we can do this ourselves—we don’t need to be mandated by some centralized force to take this logical step. Why did COVID-19 need to happen in an election year, when Americans—hypocrites or reactionaries, seemingly all of us—are extra primed to see everything through partisan extremes? Nassim Taleb is a clarifying lens, and in this piece he gives six, rational, non-partisan insights on why we should all be wearing masks right now.
Rachel: If your front lawn is just a pruned sheet of grass, you’re missing out on so many better uses for it—like becoming the neighborhood’s playground. True, it might not be the best time to unite a bunch of different children and their germs in your yard, but this article from Curbed entitled, “I never thought I’d feel at home in my neighborhood—until we got The Slide” (part of a series on neighbors and neighborhoods), made me smile. If you’re blessed with a front yard, there are so many more productive things you can do with it besides just watching the grass grow: plant a vegetable garden, put up a table and chairs and enjoy your meals on the lawn, install a slide and some play equipment…The list goes on.
John: We’ve published a number of articles over the years about the absolute devastation wrought when freeways are run through urban neighborhoods. Just this week, Daniel wrote a great article about the impact of highway construction in Kansas City, which displaced thousands of households. Very often, the neighborhoods chosen are those which are home to communities of color—and this was disproportionately true in Kansas City as well.
Los Angeles has its own long history of segregationist highway-building, as this recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times describes. The writer, Matthew Fleischer, puts it this way: “Our freeway system is one of the most noxious monuments to racism and segregation in the country.” All around the U.S., monuments and statues are coming down. This piece makes a point I think worth discussing: if we’re tearing down racist monuments, why not remove the urban freeways that were justified with racism, perpetuate it, and continue to negatively impact communities today?
Lauren: I don’t think art needs to be protected or preserved. I think it needs to be used. Upon their placement, Confederate memorials were used to celebrate the actions and values of their likenesses. Today, with their removal and destruction, they are being used to protest systems of power that overlook and disenfranchise people. This piece from the Atlantic makes an interesting suggestion to reconcile the use of art with the values of the community that surrounds it: placing a statute of limitations on public memorials and adopting a practice of regular public review. Ideally, such an approach would allow communities to replace or modify monuments that no longer serve their values, imbuing them with new meaning when necessary. I wonder, however, if our current procedures for creating and maintaining public spaces weren’t a failed attempt at just that. We have to do better.
Daniel: A good measure of actual systemic risk can often be had by looking at what the people with skin in the game are doing to protect themselves. I found this article interesting in two ways. One, as a reminder that we tend to overestimate the importance of government policy both in driving societal change and in impeding it. There’s good reason to think it’s not any government edict that is going to relocate people out of places at risk of being underwater in a century: it's the mortgage and insurance industries that'll force change first.
Two: I see an analogy here that extends beyond climate change to apply to many aspects of America’s suburban experiment. Namely, a massive infusion of debt financing can prop up all sorts of living or working arrangements for a while that, for one reason or another, will not remain viable long into the future. When such arrangements come to an end, the adjustment is usually sudden and jarring.
—
Finally, from Alexa and all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Richard Bauman, Jack Boyles, Lynnette Brown, Christian Elliott, Ari Feinsmith, Joe Hill, Beth King, David Munn & Linda Luksan, and Michael Mullin.
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 or continue the conversation in the Strong Towns Community.