Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Yes, we’re still locked in the grip of winter, but now’s the time to start dreaming and planning for warmer weather. From Lauren Fisher: “Our seeds for spring are starting to arrive! In addition to what we’re buying, we have sunflowers, lettuce, tomato, squash, cucumber, and a few other varieties of seeds saved from last year. February is hard!! The waiting gets intense.”
We have one big announcement this week: Our sixth annual Strongest Town Contest officially kicked off on Monday! We’re accepting nominations for the towns and cities doing their best to grow more financially strong and resilient—and we want you to apply. Your town doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be focused on getting better and asking the right questions. Applications will be accepted through March 7. Then our team will pick the best 16 to compete in a bracket-style competition, based on your votes. Want to join in the fun? Submit your town today.
We’ve also been through two Local-Motive Tour stops so far and—wow—it’s been so wonderful to connect with advocates, spotlight experienced and inspirational guests, and offer concrete steps you can take into your community to make it stronger. There’s still space in our upcoming tour stops, or you can purchase a round-trip ticket and get full access to all the tour stop recordings and resources. We hope you’ll come along for the ride.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Daniel: I am always interested in reading well-grounded insights into the art and science of persuasion: what actually works, and what doesn’t. Most people have horrible instincts when it comes to how to change someone’s mind or even plant a small seed. We get too caught up in being right, and not nearly enough in empathizing with the other person’s mental state or understanding their motivations. And so we do what organizational psychologist Adam Grant calls “preach and prosecute:”
When we try to change a person’s mind, our first impulse is to preach about why we’re right and prosecute them for being wrong. Yet experiments show that preaching and prosecuting typically backfire—and what doesn’t sway people may strengthen their beliefs. Much as a vaccine inoculates the physical immune system against a virus, the act of resistance fortifies the psychological immune system. Refuting a point of view produces antibodies against future attempts at influence, making people more certain of their own opinions and more ready to rebut alternatives.
It’s impossible to be on social media and not witness (and probably partake in) countless examples of preaching and prosecuting. Pay attention the next time you catch yourself doing it, and ask how else you might have approached the interaction.
Lauren: Buy The New Right by Michael Malice from your local (regional? I’m sure they’ll ship it!) bookstore, not from Amazon. In a time where most journalism, by whichever excuse one finds most preferable, comprises talking to one or two “experts” and calling it good, Malice does it the golden-age way, actually associating with his subjects and getting to know them—in this case, his subjects being America’s far-right fringe. New developments since the book was published in 2019 make it all the more of an outrageous (and educational) read for anyone interested in deepening their understanding of how we ended up here, culturally and politically, in 2021.
Rachel: This history article tells the story of Nance Legins-Costley a relatively unknown (until recently) enslaved African American who fought for and eventually gained her freedom, with some help from Abraham Lincoln in Illinois. The story is worth learning about in itself, but also for this small yet tragic anecdote from the article that someone pointed out to us on Twitter:
Decades ago, her graveyard in Peoria was paved over with asphalt. Legins-Costley lies somewhere amid a muffler shop, union hall, auto garage and other commercial buildings, mostly forgotten by the march of progress, under a tombstone of asphalt.
Hundreds of years later, we are still disregarding and disrespecting this woman’s memory. The paving over of our cities has set us back in so many ways, and the loss of our collective history is one of them.
Mysterious miniature buildings have popped up on streets across Europe, built for mice by a secret organisation 🐭
— BBC World Service (@bbcworldservice) January 10, 2021
More videos from the World Service: https://t.co/N6gEyNR41c pic.twitter.com/VwDXPsIqTT
Michelle: We (Strong Towns) shared a recent podcast that my spouse was on earlier this week. I hope everyone finds it to be interesting, but when I listened to it, I was just reminded of how we work in similar fields. It makes me wonder what it is like to be in a relationship without that in common. Our children are already noticing where sidewalks need to be added to our community and their drawings look like town plans. I’m sure it’s because when we have family dinner and we talk about work they have a double dose of thoughts on strong towns!
Linda: This amusing video from BBC world services takes the Strong Towns principle of starting small to a whole new level.
A secret organization of artists, describing themselves as “a loosely connected network of mice and men” under the moniker AnonyMouse, are transforming cellar windows into miniature buildings in cities and towns across Europe. They “hope that people who see our work will consider that the street belongs to everyone, and changing that space is up to all of us,” and that folks “walk away with a feeling that there’s a little bit of everyday magic in the world.”
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Hani Azam, Buzz Bardsley, Christopher J. Brown, Joe Compian, Brock England, Brian Fuhr, Kelli Galloway, Paul Germain, Gregory Guertin, Jesse Ham, Karin Hilding, Esther Jasmann, Douglas Johnson, Kayla Mauldin, and Justin Taylor
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments.
Cover image via Wikimedia Commons.
