Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
This week, we’ve been discussing our lawsuit against the Minnesota board of engineering licensure, and the importance of fighting for the rights of engineers to speak out about matters concerning public welfare. Learn more here about the lawsuit and what you can do to support Strong Towns’ pursuit of justice.
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Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
Lauren: I’m a regular listener to Jack Spirko’s The Survival Podcast, which focuses on building the lifestyle you want to live in a way that you can maintain under changing circumstances. Spirko’s musings (or scoldings, however you’d categorize them) about building personal resilience and applying permaculture ethos to one’s home have a significant overlap with Strong Towns insights about building resilient communities through obsessive accounting and iterative design. Chuck Marohn was on as a guest last week to talk about building strong towns; if you’ve got a survival- or prepping-minded friend whom you want to introduce to your movement, this might be the perfect link to get them started.
Daniel: Like every parent of a toddler these days, I love Bluey, the Australian animated series about a good-natured family of anthropomorphic blue heeler dogs that has become a runaway worldwide hit. This piece in Slate eloquently explains how a show for toddlers low key became “the best show about parenting on TV.” Bluey’s secret—one of them, at least—is that it allows the parents to be fleshed-out characters in their own right, and even delivers some of its storylines from their perspective. And the writers understand that, far from being alienating to the show’s young audience, this is appealing to them: After all, if there’s anything kids do, it’s obsessively watch the adults in their life for little glimpses into their world. As an adult viewer, I appreciate how the show captures not just the zany magic of childhood play, but the work that adults do to create that space for their kids.
Jay: When I was a kid in the 1970s, we worshiped Evel Knievel, the daredevil who jumped cars on his motorcycle in his stars-and-stripes leather onesie. Robert Craig "Evel" Knievel broke almost every bone in his body in his career and one kid emulated him in my neighborhood with crazy jumps he built for his Schwinn “Spider” Stingray bike. These days, kids still play hard and there is that viral reel about kids “doing dangerous things carefully…the only way they truly learn.”
I’ve also seen lots of helicopter parenting in the past 10 years and as a parent, I get it. We never want our kids to get hurt. But my instinct is that we as parents have become too protective. Now there is more data to describe it. There is a trend in children’s play activities to bring managed risk back into the design of playgrounds. The idea is that our children can develop safer, more adventurous mindsets by incorporating risk assessment skills in their play activities to ultimately make them safer. Researchers and authors, including Tim R. Gill, who’s been at it for 30 years, contend that when our kids develop risk assessment skills, it ultimately keeps them safer. Dr. Amanda Gummer has started Playful World, a LinkedIn group to track articles around these ideas, particularly in street and city design. You don’t have to be a parent to know cities designed for children are safer, more productive, and more fun for everyone.
(Source: Unsplash.)
Norm: What can stop a bulldozer? Ordinarily, not very much. I have a vivid memory, as a 5-year-old, of racing through our old farmhouse to collect the outlet plates that we were going to reuse for our new home that would be built on that spot. Our neighbor’s bulldozer had pulled up and was idling outside. My perception was that I had to rush or else the bulldozer would topple the house with me still inside. Fighting off panic, I finished my task and got out of there just in time. Shortly after, my dad gave the all clear and the bulldozer pushed over our house. In a matter of thirty minutes, a home became a pile of rubble. It was stunning. That image comes to mind whenever I think about the experiences of highway fighters from past generations who saw the bulldozers and wreckers coming for their communities and valiantly tried to save or salvage what was theirs. This piece in The Guardian tells the backstory behind Vancouver’s clash over competing visions of how the city should develop and whose interests should be served. It turned out that the bulldozers could be stopped. Visit Vancouver and you’ll be glad they were.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Chance Bellflower, Casey Brown, Denise Brush, Susan Cameron, Andrew Cavanaugh, Michael Forsyth, Aleksandr Gorokhov, Adam Greenfield, Maria Carolina Lopez, Theodore Lorts, Ian Morris, Susan Mowers, Brayan Pena Valencia, Adam Plaver, Matthew Serrone, Catherine Sheehan, Steven Spurgeon, Aleida Suarez, Patrice Turbide, and Andy Wells-Bean.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!