Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
We canât stop watching this recent video from ATTN:, which features Strong Towns Founder and President Chuck Marohn, and explains why so many Americans die in car crashes compared to other countries. Itâs already gained over 100k views on Facebook, and nearly 20k views on Twitter. Give it a watch, and share with your friends!
In other news, the Confessions Book Tour is heading to quite a few places in November, including Oregon, California, Arizona, and Connecticut. Check out our events page to see where we'll be headed to next, and sign up for our email list to get updates on the tour! And of course, if you haven't done so already, we highly recommend reading Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, so you know what all the fuss is about. You can order it from your favorite book seller hereâit's also available in audio format for those who prefer to listen to their books!
Comment of the Week:
This comment came from a thread on our Facebook page about tactical urbanism. Check it out here to join in on the discussion!
Hereâs what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
Lauren: A friend sent me this video describing a theory of intelligence that is based not on behaviors or character traits, but on the outcomes a person is able to achieve. I appreciate this approach to defining intelligence, because it bypasses many of the biases people hold regarding personality, philosophy, and education level that can really muck things up. I think often of this video where a group of individuals rank one another based on perceived intelligence, and then take an IQ test to compare their predictions. Very scientific, I know. Many of them predicted their comparative intelligence based on factors such as modesty, ethnicity, open-mindedness, and professional qualifications/certifications. Some of my own biases (ones I did not expect to hold) were revealed when my attempt at ranking the participants was, by the metric of IQ, incorrect. Discussions about intelligence admittedly have an âuppityâ vibe. But careful consideration of how we define and identify intelligence seems an important effort in this time, when we look to experts and pundits to steer our personal and political decisions, and also when those of us in the Strong Towns movement challenge the systems created by experts and pundits and seek inspiration from leaders in unexpected places.
Daniel: I devoured Frank Herbertâs Dune series as a teenager, and was enthralled by Herbertâs exhaustive world-building and determination to tell a story about the forces that shape whole societies, and the pivot points that seem to send history down one path versus another. So naturally, I was excited to watch the latest film adaptation of the first book last weekend (and thoroughly enjoyed it). That said, I do appreciate a critique I stumbled upon from Rebecca Solnit, one of my favorite essayists and social commentators, about the ways in which Dune, especially on screen, veers into being the kind of story Hollywood and our culture are far more comfortable with: the story of a powerful, messianic lone hero who transforms the world through sheer force. (Herbertâs original novel is itself critical of such notions, in ways that donât really come through on film, at least in this first installment.) Solnit took the occasion to repost on Facebook a 2019 essay of hers on the fallacy of heroism. She wrote then: âPositive social change results mostly from connecting more deeply to the people around you than rising above them, from coordinated rather than solo action⌠âUnhappy the land that needs heroesâ is a line of Bertold Brechtâs Iâve gone to dozens of times, but now Iâm more inclined to think, pity the land that thinks it needs a hero, or doesnât know it has lots and what they look like.â
Image via Flickr.
Rachel: I was struck by this article in Greater Greater Washington about a father who took it upon himself to study the safety of an intersection near his houseâone where his four-year-old son was hit by a driver while crossing the street. Even just a thirty-minute study during rush hour told him how few drivers were yielding to pedestrians and cyclists. He also took a very simple step toward temporarily making the street safer: putting a sign right in the middle of the crosswalk telling people to slow down. Of course, this man shouldnât have to be doing research and signage on his own; his local leaders should have stepped up to make a change to the street immediately following the crash that harmed his son. Luckily, at Strong Towns, we know that simple design changes like narrowing lanes and bumping out curbs can make a huge difference when it comes to safer streets. So what are our cities waiting for?
Shina: Whenever I need to take a step back from politics, or any other contemporary, worldly problem, one of the things I like to do is read or watch things about outer space. One website I ran across years ago in pursuit of space content was Symphony of Science, run by musician and filmmaker John D. Boswell. It featured fun, feel-good music videos about various science topicsâbut didn't upload very often, and eventually fell off my radar.
This past weekend, however, my boyfriend was browsing through YouTube and found this video depicting a theoretical timelapse of the entire known universe. I was delighted to see that it was made by Boswell, and that the production quality had improved significantly, compared to his older work. The video is a couple of years old at this point, but still worth a watch (many of you have probably already seen it, considering that it has over 11 million views).
Thinking about the cosmos on this scale and Earth's tiny, fragile place within it can be therapeutic, for the perspective it provides on our many societal squabbles and grievances. While there may well be life elsewhere out there, all we know for certain is that, as of right now, we only have each other. As Carl Sagan so famously put it, "it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the [planet Earth], the only home we've ever known."
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Vincent Baudoin, Luchia Brown, Hayes Dent, William Gustafson, Jonathan McInerney, Dustin Moore, Eugene Ogden, Susan Parker, Christina Platt, Paul Podbielski, and David Stone.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!