Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Strong Towns Copy Editor Shina Shayesteh took a birthday trip to Natural Bridge Caverns near San Antonio this weekend. The caverns feature some truly spectacular formations—highly recommended to anyone trying to escape the Texas heat!
This week here at Strong Towns, we released a multipart series on American alleyways, and the promise they show as sites for incremental infill development. Our team and author Thomas Dougherty have been collaborating on this project for some time, and we're so excited to finally be sharing it! You can read part one of the series here. We've also created an e-book that you can download here for free. It includes a ton of bonus content that was not released on the website, so we highly encourage you to check it out!
In other news, we'll be hosting the webcast "#NoNewRoads: A Better Choice for Austin" next week on Wednesday, August 25, at 12:00 p.m. Eastern. Texas's Department of Transportation wants to add four new lanes to I-35, a highway that is already infamous in Austin for its myriad problems. In the webcast, you'll hear about an alternative plan for I-35 proposed by local advocates and planners, who will also share data that proves the folly of the DoT’s highway project, as well as advice for anyone facing similar issues in their own place. You can register for the webcast here for free.
And without further ado, let's take a look at the Friday Faves.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
Daniel: My atypical “Friday Fave” this week is a Twitter thread from Jeremy Levine, a University of Michigan sociologist who wrote one of my favorite essays of last year, and a book, Constructing Community, that is on my reading list as soon as I can find the time. The thrust of Levine’s recent work is that the notion of “the community” in any particular place is an illusion that papers over often profound internal differences in motivations, incentives, desires, beliefs, and power. There is, in reality, often no singular community will or consensus to be discovered, and the sooner planners abandon their pursuit of it, the better.
In this thread, Levine provides interesting and telling anecdotes about times when the story one participant wanted to tell about a local political process failed to match the reality of what other participants actually wanted. Crucially, he observes that seasoned on-the-ground organizers can be just as guilty of this kind of shortsightedness as bureaucratic nonprofits and private developers.
An ab anbar (water reservoir) with double domes and windcatchers (openings near the top of the towers) in the central desert city of Yazd, Iran. Image source.
Shina: I've talked before here about qanats, the ancient irrigation systems found throughout the middle east. This week, I ran across this article about badgirs ("wind catchers"), a likewise ancient air-conditioning system that functioned in tandem with qanats—and still functions to this day in older Iranian cities. The badgir’s tower channels wind downward, where it is cooled by the subterranean waters of adjacent qanats, before dispersing the air back up into the building that the badgir is attached to. (That's a pretty dumbed-down explanation of what is, in reality, a much more complex feat of architecture, but you get the idea.) The article ties this historical discussion to one closer to modern-day concerns: that is, finding more ecological, sustainable means of cooling our homes in a world that is getting rapidly hotter. Could wind catchers in some places be a viable alternative to using fossil-fuel-powered air conditioning?
Image via Unsplash.
Sarah: I join a lot of random Facebook groups to find interesting things to do around my city, laugh at memes, and learn new things! I recently found this group, “View from my window,” and I just love the simplicity of it all. It’s an interesting way to look into other people's lives from around the world. We often get very used to our own context; for example, I live in the Midwest, so I don’t see things like mountains and the ocean every day, or even a super complex urban environment. This group gives you a chance to peek into someone else's built environment, and daydream and imagine yourself there! As a Midwesterner, I love the chance to look at beautiful ocean photos on my news feed; it certainly is a positive experience scrolling through this group.
Rachel: It feels like we’re stuck in a never-ending cycle of infrastructure bill conversations. As Chuck Marohn wrote earlier this year all of these proposals—whether from the Republicans or the Democrats—are far from a Strong Towns approach to transportation funding. That’s why I appreciated that our friends at Transportation for America did not mince words in a recent statement about the latest infrastructure bill developments. Beth Osborne, Director of Transportation for America, says, “With this deal, the Senate is largely doubling down on a dinosaur of a federal transportation program that’s produced a massive repair backlog we are no closer to addressing, roads that are killing a historic number of vulnerable travelers each year, little opportunity to reach work or essential services if a family doesn’t have multiple cars, and the continued inability for local governments to have a say over what projects are built in their communities.” Real change and accountability isn’t going to come from the federal government. It’s going to come from the bottom up.
John: James Rebanks’s first book, The Shepherd’s Life, was a beautifully written account of how Rebanks entered into the work his family and their neighbors have been doing for centuries—raising sheep in England’s Lake District. He has a new book just released in the U.S.: Pastoral Song. I haven’t read it yet, but I was delighted to see this interview between Rebanks and Grace Olmstead (a member of the Strong Towns Advisory Board) in Front Porch Republic. They talk about the inseparable health of the land and the human community, about the local food movement, and much more. Strong Towns advocates might be especially interested to read about why Jane Jacobs is a hero to Rebanks—“She basically realised that the big bold modernist thinking hadn’t really been thought through properly. It created places that were less good to live in for real people.”—and the parallels with farming.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Faylene Otto, Tom Abeles, Rick Hawksley, Jeremy Schmall, Brian Casabal, Ruth Sine, Larry Weldon, Ryan Strauchon, Sarah Stands, Leah Michaels, Rachel Herbener, and Luke Nelson.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!