Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Are you interested in joining the awesome team we have here at Strong Towns? If so, you’ll want to check out the newest job listing we shared this week for a Development Associate position. This person will be leading our fundraising with major donors, grants, and foundations—if that sounds like something up your alley, then be sure to join the Q&A briefing we’re holding for applicants on Tuesday, September 28 at 2 p.m. Central!
In other news, our 2021 Summer Intern, Sarah Davis, will be wrapping up her time with us next week. She’s has been a joy to work with, and we’ll be doing a big send-off by interviewing her on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast and sharing one final article from her on Thursday. Thanks for your amazing work, Sarah, and best of luck in all your future endeavors!
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
Image via Flickr.
Alexa: The first time (and only) time I’ve ever seen a slime mold was a little over a year ago. I stepped out onto my back porch and saw an oozing mass of orange splattered next to the back steps onto the dirt. My roommate at that time was known for dumping grease near those steps, so I chalked it up to some strange food remnants (or even vomit) that had been left by him. It was only after it had disappeared a few hours later that I realized this was not the mundane remnants of some unidentified food, but a slow-moving slime mold that had chosen to briefly grace me with its presence.
This article in Orion Magazine explains so brilliantly what I have been struggling to put into words about humans and our proclivity to place ourselves at the top of the food chain. This article and the existence of slime molds demonstrate how conventional measures of “fitness” (as in “survival of the fittest”) are constrained by our humanness and inability to imagine life as anything other than human. If a single-celled slime mold with no brain can demonstrate likes and dislikes, navigate mazes, and, most importantly, enter into a sort of stasis through which it can weather any type of storm for as long as it needs until conditions are favorable, what chance do we have for remaining on “top of the food chain” for any longer than a blip in the cumulative span of life on earth?
Image via CGP Grey.
Lauren: It’s got sharks. It’s got anarchy. It’s got commentary on land use policy. This video tells the story of how an arts competition sparked a complex legal battle over canal usage rights in London. The competition is organized by “Antepavilion,” an arts complex that was founded to “expose and question the authoritarian workings of our planning culture.” Litigation resulting from the competition is part of the art of the venue. I really enjoyed this story, and I hope you do, too.
Image via Park(ing) Day.
Sarah: Happy Park(ing) Day everyone! I recently found out that Kansas City will be having their first Park(ing) day festival downtown this weekend! I love the idea of taking the streets back for the people, and what a better use than a park? The idea is you convert street parking spots into mini parks, filling it with things like yard games, arts and crafts, and, my favorite, food trucks!! I’m so excited to participate in Park(ing) day in KC this weekend!
Image via Unsplash.
Chuck: Baking season is fast approaching and, as anyone who loves to bake can tell you, having butter softened to the perfect temperature is the difference between good and great. This article in the Washington Post tells what to do if you haven’t planned ahead (if that’s you, shame), but in it I learned that the perfect temperature for that right amount of fluffiness to your cream is 65 degrees, maybe slightly higher. I pride myself on (in Taleb trial and error fashion) working without a thermometer, discovering the best process in my home to get this just right, putting the butter in a specific bowl in a specific place and at the right time. Now I recognize that, since my Minnesota home hovers at 65 degrees overnight in November and December, I was accidentally getting it right and all my deliberate process was likely nothing more than superstition. That’s okay—I’ll probably pass the process on to my kids as received wisdom because, why not.
Image via Unsplash.
Rachel: I’ve been feeling convicted, lately, about simplifying and cutting back on the materialism that rules Western society. (It’s partly a result of rereading this book by Erin Boyle.) So this article from our friends at Frontier Group was timely. It’s about the emphasis we place on “convenience” in our culture, and the harms caused when that’s our main priority—harms like high-speed roads that cut through our neighborhoods just so people can get to work 20 seconds faster, or big box stores that destroy local businesses just so people can get their toilet paper in large quantities at slightly cheaper prices. Convenience may be valuable, but I don’t think it should be a value, unto itself.
Image via Unsplash.
John: Katy Shackelford, an urban planner and Strong Towns member in St. Louis, recently shared a photo that contrasted the wide growth rings of a fast-growing tree with the tight rings of a slow-growing tree. The strength in that slow-growing wood, Shackelford commented, was a reminder of why the Strong Towns approach is an incremental one. I think she’s right.
I came across a similar analogy in a lovely book I’m reading called The Sound of Life’s Unspeakable Beauty, by Martin Schleske, one of the foremost violin makers in Germany. Schleske writes that luthiers of old found wood for their instruments by standing daily at the rapids of mountain rivers. Logs coming down the river crashed into one another and, as they did so, some began to vibrate. The luthiers called these logs the “singers'' and they were the ones used to make violins. Schleske also says violin makers covet wood from densely packed alpine forests. The soil at such altitudes is marginal, light is scarce, and the cold weather extreme. Yet, paradoxically, these are the factors that make the wood “sing,” especially compared to the fast-growing trees in the lowlands. “The hardship of meager soil lends them great strength,” Schleske writes. “In the substance lies the sound.”
So beware fast-track solutions and the rosy promises of supercharged growth. The slow and humble way of the Strong Towns approach takes time, patience, and discipline. But it will also make our communities stronger. And in time, we will sing.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Murray Lloyd, Ariel Levari, Nicholas Rasmussen, Alaina Pitt, Corey DiRutigliano, Martin Kretzmann, Martin Mollenhauer, Mark Thaler, Kevin Sullivan, Greg Patt, Kristine Cunningham, Amy Lang, Tyler O’Ferrell, Judy Zehr, Robert Markel, Scott Zeitler, Tom Saunders, Daniel Spiegel, Jill Lagan, Douglas Hausladen, Warren Melton, Jacopo Lenzi, Kurt Nordback, Daniel Birman, and Lance Gliser.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!