Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup

 

This week, Strong Towns welcomed Edward Erfurt as our new director of community action. Edward will be mobilizing the movement for action through the Community Action Labs, as well as contributing to the Strong Towns Academy, the Crash Analysis Studio, and other endeavors we are undertaking. He’ll also be a regular columnist for us. Check out his article from this morning on how the Strong-Towns-famous (or infamous?) Taco John’s site could be vastly improved, in a few easy-to-understand steps—with pictures!

 
 

Comment of the Week:

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Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:

(Source: FujiLove Magazine.)

Daniel: I’m sure there are at least a few public-transit geeks in our audience for whom this is old news, but I recently learned about the Tashkent metro, and wow: This photo gallery of subway stations in Uzbekistan’s capital city is something to behold. The first subway system in Central Asia, it was built by the Soviets in the 1970s, and prominent Uzbek artists took part in designing a series of utterly unique and beautiful stations. I won’t try to claim the origin story here checks many Strong Towns boxes—it’s a case of central planners with a big pot of money to spend deciding to build something striking. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t warm my heart as a transit user, or make me wish I could travel every day through spaces like this.

Lauren: Watch Better Call Saul. Don’t let Breaking Bad turn you off of this awesome prequel starring Bob Odinkirk. This series has some of the best relationship writing I’ve ever seen, getting at the complexity of disastrous chemistry and tainted brotherhood. It’s got one of the best “strong female characters” you’ll see on TV in Kim Wexler, who really shows you what goes into appearing perfectly composed under pressure. And, as a Strong Towns person, you might enjoy how the set designers enhance the storyline by being painfully honest about what auto-centric development can feel like at its worst. Pay attention to how much of the story takes place in a car, on the way to somewhere far away. Get rattled by the big, “luxury” apartment complexes on the suburban fringes, and how the establishing shots frame them in a way that enhances the isolation.

Shina: A friend shared this tweet with me recently, knowing I'd get a kick out of it. I wish I could explore more World Bollard Association™ posts, but, alas, I don't have a Twitter account. If you're in the same boat, then never fear: You can still get your bollard fix through our post, "One Billion Bollards," which I nominated as one of my top five favorite articles of 2021.

(Source: Wired.)

Norm: I miss the rain. We’ve had a half-inch of rain since July in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is less than 10% of what we would normally expect. I’ve almost forgotten the atmospheric river event that took place last November, washing out bridges and flooding entire communities. When it rains, we fear it will be too much for us to handle. When it doesn’t, we fear the fires and the alteration of our native flora and fauna. 

I want to share this article in Wired with you because it is a solid introduction to the question of what to do about water scarcity and water overabundance in our cities. 

“Southern California will see more intense storms, except they’ll come less frequently. That means big dumps of water will become more valuable—and if the city [of Los Angeles] can find a way to capture them, they can alleviate its dependence on water imported from Northern California and the Colorado River.”

This requires a change of paradigm in the planning and engineering profession. I found it encouraging to read that “urban planners are increasingly thinking of cities less as rain jackets—designed to whisk water away as fast as possible before it has a chance to accumulate—and more as sponges.” But local residents can do something about this, too: Install rain barrels to capture rainwater and carve out rain gardens in yards. Now, where’s my shovel? I had best start digging before the rain comes.

John: I’ve thought a lot over the last week about William Shatner’s description of his experience traveling into space. Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk in the original Star Trek crew, boarded Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket and boldly went where only about 600 people have been before. But Shatner’s experience wasn’t at all what he expected. “My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral,” he writes in his new memoir. “I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses…but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold…all I saw was death.” After stepping back onto earth, a tearful Shatner said to Bezos, “I hope I never recover from this.” 

This experience is common enough among those who have made the uncommon journey into space that it has been given a name: the Overview Effect. Astronaut Sally Ride remembered the Earth’s atmosphere being like a royal blue line traced in crayon along the Earth’s horizon; astronaut Scott Kelly compared it to a contact lens over someone’s eye. Alan Shepherd, the first American in space, remembers being on the moon and looking up into the black and seeing “another planet — planet Earth…it makes it look beautiful, it makes it look lonely, it makes it look fragile.” 

The challenge for those of us who will never travel into space is to still develop a similar awareness of the Earth’s interconnectedness, its beauty, its dearness. If we can’t go up, we must go down. (The Underview Effect?) Farmer and writer Wendell Berry describes the downward journey this way: “And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.”

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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Thomas Burger, Kathleen Callahan, Raul Cuza, Catherine Davis, Nathan Dietzenbach, Joe Donohoe, Mary Farr, Landon Genovese, Yvonne Griffin, Melissa Kostelecky, Micah Maliskas, Sean McCann, Brenton McComsey, Brandon Montoya, Brandon Nepute, John Page, Jaemun Park, Leslie Payne, Kevin Schriver, Richard Sturm, Natanael von Euler, Bruce D Wagner, and Lindsey Wheeler.

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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!

 
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