Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Our development associate, Alexa Mendieta, found this dog wandering the streets. Obviously starving, the dog was sweet and waited patiently for food.
This week, behind the scenes at Strong Towns, John attended a fascinating communications training, Chuck made a final push to finish all the lectures in our Academy course “Aligning Transportation with a Strong Towns Approach” (they’ll be edited and published very soon) and we hosted a wonderful group of attendees and an inspiring guest speaker in our latest Local-Motive Tour stop, “4 Steps Toward a More Resilient Local Food System.”
Oh, and Alexa rescued a dog.
Before we get to our links for the week, a reminder that Strongest Town Contest applications are due on Sunday, March 7. If you’ve been thinking about submitting your town, don’t wait! Apply now, or better yet, gather some fellow residents to work on an application together. We’re excited to feature 16 wonderful towns in the first round of the contest in just a couple weeks.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Rachel: Our friend Jason, who runs the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes, has been publishing a fantastic series of Strong Towns videos, which you should absolutely check out. (And we’ll be sharing more soon.) I was reviewing his archive, though, and found this fascinating short episode about how Amsterdam almost built a massive US-style highway system—and then (because people advocated against it) decided not to, leaving their historic streets and people-centered places intact. Jason shows what might have been destroyed if the highway had come through Amsterdam, and compares it to the destruction wrought by so many highways we did actually build through US cities. It’s depressing to watch, but a necessary education.
John: Here’s a warm story (literally, warm) out of winter storm-ravaged Texas. Chelsea Timmons, a delivery driver from Houston, got stuck in the icy driveway of a client in Austin. Unable to get the vehicle out of the driveway, and with no towing companies available to help, Chelsea ended up weathering the storm with the homeowners, husband and wife Doug Condon and Nina Richardson. Chelsea confessed to feeling early-on that being stranded with strangers sounded like the beginning of a horror movie…but over the next five or six days the strangers became friends.
Doug and Nina have five grown children, and, in a video interview I found, Doug said, “If one of our daughters were in a situation like Chelsea’s, I’d like to think that somebody would do the same.” I sent the article to my parents, texting: “This reminds me of something you would do.” For a while in my late teens and early twenties, I lived half a continent away from my parents. They trusted that other families were keeping an eye on me in Nebraska, giving me a place to go on holidays, making sure I ate more than just ramen noodles and microwave popcorn. In the meantime, my parents were doing the same for young people in California. God bless Chelsea, Doug, and Nina. God bless my parents. And God bless all good people who open up their hearts and homes to folks in need.
Daniel: These are a series of eye-opening profiles of small-scale landlords in New York and how the pandemic has affected them and strained their personal and financial situations. I find a lot of people I talk to don’t realize that the majority of rental homes in the United States are not in large apartment complexes: they’re either single-family houses or “missing middle” situations—2/3/4 plexes and small apartment buildings. The vast majority of those are owned by “mom and pop” landlords, not corporations, and who makes up that group is more diverse than you’d think, especially in a place like New York. These profiles are illustrative.
There’s a temptation to play the Sympathy Olympics and argue about who has it worse, or observe that at least landlords own a (generally) appreciating asset, unlike their tenants. What I take away from this, instead, is insight and food for thought about our interwoven destinies and how it reverberates through a community when some members are struggling.
Don’t read the comments on this one. Consider yourselves warned.
Chuck: Do a Google search for ”innovators” and you will get lists of people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. Okay, that’s one kind of innovation, but I’m going to continue to put forward the notion that the greatest innovators in the world are poor people. Without spare resources to throw at every challenge, they have to hack their way through life. So, if you’re looking for innovation in electric cars, don’t look to Tesla—so boring—but instead check out these hackers in China who are putting together urban eclectic cars for as low as $600. Sure, they aren’t a status symbol with smooth contours and slick display panels, but if you’re looking for a way to get to work across town, this is exactly what we need. It’s amazing how much we think of as innovation becomes unnecessary when we operate urban life at neighborhood speeds.
Michelle: My husband is a model train hobbyist. And I enjoy hearing people’s stories. And we both love architecture, small town history, and stories of downtown incremental development. This video from Journey Atlanta has it ALL! It’s the story of Steven and Liz Nelson whose model train hobby ventured into Atlanta, Indiana…a small town with great bones but an inactive main street. That main street has steadily been activated to have a hobby shop, cafe, excursion railroad rides, and more. It’s a true Strong Towns story. I’m really looking forward to visiting here when we get out and about again.
Linda: A couple of weeks ago I read Derek Thompson’s article in The Atlantic, ”Superstar Cities Are in Trouble” Thompson reflects on how the pandemic has forced us in the past year to “leapfrog” our adoption and acceptance of remote work as a new norm, and offers four predictions on the impact this might have for the “future of the economy, the geography of opportunity, and the fate of innovation.” His predictions touch on themes familiar to Strong Towns:
The rise of the Supercommuter and migration of more affluent workers to the exurbs
The decline of coastal superstar cities, and, related,
The “Rise of the Rest” (discussed by Chuck and guest Richard Florida in this recent episode of the Strong Towns podcast)
The next Silicon Valley is nowhere/everywhere.
The main theme from Thompson’s article that has stuck with me, however, is the concept of the internet as a place, one that “re-creates many of the benefits of a city.” He suggests that this “city in the cloud essentially acts as a more accessible version of the city on the Earth.” I’ve been thinking a lot about this place where we all now spend so much of our time. This city is where I work, where I do most of my shopping, where I find entertainment, and often in the past year (though hopefully less often in the near future) where I socialize and interact with friends and family.
I’ve been pondering what it means to live in this “city in the cloud,” and whether we can apply Strong Towns principles to virtual public spaces. And so it seemed more than coincidental that the topic of this week’s episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Solvable, was ”Designing Digital Spaces That Bring Us Together.” The guest is Eli Pariser, co-director of the Civic Signals project, creators of New Public, “a place for thinkers, builders, designers and technologists” to “meet, share inspiration, and make better digital public spaces.” Their goal is to move “beyond the necessary critiques of our current online spaces and start thinking like digital urban planners about the spaces we want to inhabit in the future.”
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Christine Bamberger, Philip Bay, Tracey Britt, Cynthia Bru, Joshua Caron, Seung Ji, Carolyn Meier, John Norquist, Arnold Roquerre, Darci Schields, Jacob Smith, Kathleen Spillane, Bruce Weik, and Joe Williams.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!
Cover image via Thomas Grillmair on Unsplash.