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, Miriel got a delivery of 25 lbs of fresh peaches so naturally she had to make this fabulous-looking peach tart. We’re all jealous.
This week was a rough one for some members of the Strong Towns team—mainly Chuck Marohn, who unfortunately broke his foot in several places climbing out of a boat last weekend. He reports the boat ride was fun, but he’s been mostly out of commission, stuck on his couch this week. Send some good vibes in his direction.
Other colleagues have been taking some time for much needed rest and vacation over the last several days. But we also snuck in an incredible webcast featuring our friends at the Incremental Development Alliance: Gracen Johnson, Monte Anderson and five inspiring small-scale developers from across the continent who shared their experiences incrementally improving their neighborhoods. You can watch that webcast here. If you know of a skilled speaker/leader who you’d like to see on a future Strong Towns webcast, let us know.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Daniel: This open letter published by Harper’s Magazine—and signed by a huge number of public intellectuals who run the gamut of ideology, age, profession, race and gender—has been the talk of the Internet this week. The thing that strikes me is that nearly all of the debate is about the subtext and/or presumed motivations of the people who signed it, and virtually none of it is about the content of the letter. Increasingly, this feels like the mode of so much of our political conversation—focused on who is a good or bad or trustworthy person rather than on the content of their words—and it is toxic to our ability to develop mutual understanding with those who don’t see the world like we do.
There is a lot to say about the letter that I won’t say here, and I certainly don’t co-sign all of it, but these words cut through the noise for me: as a society, we should resist “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.” I’m proud of Strong Towns for doing our part to avoid those tendencies.
Miriel: My link for this week is a little different: instead of an article, I want to share a video and an accompanying tweet. In the video, which is well worth a minute of your time, public health expert and London School of Economics Professor Clare Wenham gives a live interview on the BBC while simultaneously parenting her young daughter. The commentary that brought the video into my Twitter feed, from Derek Johnson: “I am 100% here for the collapse of the professional persona and I hope we never go back.” I mentioned this video during a Zoom call with my Strong Towns colleague John Pattison, in the course of which his young daughter came to ask about playing in the sprinkler and my preschooler interrupted me in search of nail polish.
I am 100% here for the collapse of the professional persona and hope we never go back. https://t.co/NSPAd4bhDu
— Derek Johnson (@derekjGZ) July 1, 2020
There are many challenges to working from home with small children underfoot, as so many of us find ourselves doing during COVID-induced lockdown. But I, like Johnson, appreciate the opportunity it affords us to erode the need to perform childlessness that has for so long been a convention of American professional life. As we think through how to bring all our institutions through this pandemic and out the other wide, let’s design systems and policies that actually work for the people who use them.
Rachel: This essay from one of my favorite lifestyle blogs, Cup of Jo, is a short but sweet exploration of how we’re all feeling about the places we live right now. I’ve got friends in their 20s who have moved back in with parents for an indeterminate amount of time. I’ve got friends who are slowing down or speeding up their plans to get married, have kids, buy a house and other huge life decisions. I know people who are desperately craving a yard after years of loving the small urban apartment lifestyle. And others just want to be closer to family at a time when everything in the world feels tenuous. I don’t usually read the comment section on blogs but the comments on this essay helped me tune into how so many people across the country (and the world) are seriously reevaluating where and how they live.
Lauren: The subsumption of our everyday interests and actions into political categories is driving wedges between people who might otherwise have much in common. This Reason piece by J.D. Tuccille addresses this issue. His commentary gave me an opportunity to reflect on my own part in assuming preferences because they’re part of a political package, and in making assumptions about others’ political affiliations based on their nonpolitical preferences.
John: Normally, we use this space to focus on articles we were talking about beyond Strong Towns. But I want to break that rule (just this once?) and mention my colleague Lauren’s Thursday article on the critical role local farmers are playing in helping communities overcome profoundly disrupted global food supply lines.
The article reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from the farmer Joel Salatin. Salatin is the self-described "Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic-farmer” featured in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore's Dilemma. Salatin’s quote went something like this: "Regulations are a poor substitute for relationships." He was talking about the importance of knowing where our food comes from, who grew it, and how it got to our table. The reason we need to have so many regulations is because we are disconnected from where our food comes from. If we actually knew the farmers growing our food, could go to the farm (as Lauren describes) and see how the food is being grown, how the animals are being treated—maybe we wouldn't need as many regulations. This also strikes me as a very Strong Towns approach—Actual Relationships > Abstract Regulations—that can be applied to more than just food.
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Finally, from Alexa and all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: David Bainbridge, Rena Brown, Kevin Davis, Nancy Davis, Joy Fan, Kelly First, John Fonseca, Cathy Forbes, Robert Goodall, Tony Hauser, Nathan Hodges, Ashleigh Loa, Melinda MacLaren, Cameron Mattis, Michael McGrath, Josephine Moore, Alex Morgia, Julie O'Dwyer, Stephen O'Farrell, Paul Porter, Joshua Prusik, Hawes Spencer, Sarah E Wilkie, Kim Zentz, and Dalia Zygas.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments or continue the conversation in the Strong Towns Community.