Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Next week is Member Week, where we celebrate our members and everything that they do for this movement. We’re also taking this opportunity to roll out some new content that we’ve been working on behind the scenes for a while now. We don’t want to spoil too much, but here’s a couple of teasers:
First off, get excited to hear about five new campaigns we’re rolling out as part of our updated strategic plan, helping you to take action in your communities. Secondly, follow us on TikTok for some new videos and a special interactive challenge!
Comment of the Week:
This comment came from our LinkedIn page. Join the conversation here!
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
(Source: The Solutions Journalism Exchange.)
Rachel: We know that better street design can make our streets safer by encouraging drivers to travel more slowly and get in fewer fatal car crashes. But this article also talks about how street design can decrease violence. The same steps we take to slow down cars (expanding curbs, narrowing lanes, planting trees, creating more life and activity on the street) also helped lower gun violence and crime in a Portland neighborhood, thanks to the persistent activism of a local resident and business owner, Nadine Salama. By showing passersby that this was a community full of people who cared about their place—not a vacant area where crime would go unnoticed—the neighborhood has found its way to a safer future. I may try to get Salama on a future episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast so we can learn more!
(Source: Simon Weckert.)
Shina: As with most stories on the internet, I'm hearing about this one way after the fact, but I thought I'd share anyway for my fellows out there who are chronically late to the party. An artist in Berlin, Simon Weckert, realized that he could trick Google Maps into thinking there was a massive gridlock on an empty street...by carting around 99 cell phones in a little red wagon. Because of this, any oncoming cars would have been rerouted to other streets, to avoid the supposed "traffic jam." Is this a potential tactic for getting fast-moving cars off of your neighborhood street? I'm not saying you should try it, but...if you do, let me know how it goes.
(Source: Big Think.)
Daniel: We all like to—and are generally taught to—imagine ourselves as rational actors, weighing our circumstances and evaluating evidence to arrive at a course of action. The more disconcerting reality, says behavioral scientist Nick Chater, is that “we are fictional characters of our own creation.” Most of our decisions are made on a much more unconscious, intuitive, associative level, and any logical explanation for “why” we did what we did is more likely to be an after-the-fact rationalization. Humans are experts at such story spinning, after all: it’s how our brains make order out of chaos. I enjoyed this short piece, which mines similar territory to ideas we’ve been exploring at Strong Towns for years: Namely, that if you’re in the business of persuasion (and we are), it’s essential to understand how people actually make decisions.
John: My guilty pleasure podcast recently has been Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World. I think of it as a mash-up of The X-Files—the sci-fi series featuring two FBI agents who investigate unexplained phenomenon—and Father Brown, G.K. Chesterton’s iconic priest-slash-amateur-detective. Host Jimmy Akin is a Catholic theologian. In Mysterious World, he examines unusual, paranormal, and extraterrestrial reports through the dual lenses of reason and faith. A great entry point to the podcast is this episode on “The Green Children of Woolpit.” In the 12th century, two children with green skin appeared suddenly in the village of Woolpit, England. They didn’t speak the language and refused to eat anything except raw beans. Akin looks at original sources and examines other evidence to present a plausible explanation. A more recent episode is about folks who have claimed to find UFO wreckage. Akin keeps an admirably open mind while following the trail of evidence wherever it may lead. Even for a non-Catholic like me, the podcast is just a ton of fun.
(Source: Common Edge.)
Chuck: The incremental developer John Anderson is a wealth of information and advice, especially on his Facebook feed, where he has devoted a lot of time to helping and encouraging people to take the step to become developers in their community. Common Edge talked him into rewriting one of his recent Facebook posts and expanding it into a full article on how private equity is impacting housing markets. There are some novel insights here, especially how this injection of capital is actually freezing markets today in ways that hurt affordability, while it also seems likely to keep them locked in place in the future. Brilliant insights, as always, from John.
—
Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Matthew Anderson, Tanner Clark, Robin Graham, Lysistrata "Lyssa" Hall, Justin Hummel, David Mcminoway, Gregg Reese, Jay Renew, Scott Sanderson, Nathan Smith, Zoe Stein, K. W., Brian Weil, Jacob Wise, and Joshua Worsham.
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!