Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Next week is Member Week, where we celebrate our members and everything that they do for this movement. We’re going to have a lot of special content and podcasts coming out for you over the course of the week, so stay tuned!
And, hey, if you want to be one of those people we’re celebrating, then why not become a Strong Towns member today? You’ll be joining thousands of others in this bottom-up revolution to make our places stronger and more resilient!
Comment of the Week:
This comment came from a discussion on our article, “MoDOT Is Proud of Their Highways. Missourians, Not So Much.” Join the conversation here!
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
(Source: The Guardian.)
Edward: At the ULI Fall Meeting in Dallas, a panel presented a new trend of adding multifamily housing to revitalize retail centers.
“One of the reasons we’re adding residential to our retail assets is really because it might be the best use of space,” said Abbey Oklak, a planner and architect who is director of multifamily development for Kimco, a Jericho, New York-based real estate investment trust that owns and operates open-air, grocery-anchored shopping centers, mostly in first-ring suburbs of major metropolitan markets. “Maybe a big box [store] has gone vacant, and there’s not a retailer to come back in.”
I completely agree with the author and the presenters that this is a win-win for both the community and the developer. Too many of these retail centers are, in fact, not a center to anything, and they require a car as a bar of entry to access these shops. These single-use developments are fragile and quickly become victim to the next shiny development down the highway.
This type of redevelopment is best described as suburban retrofit, where single-use commercial areas are redeveloped to include a mix of uses. I have worked on several of these types of projects, where older shopping centers are redeveloped with new housing, instead of new retail. The development and design of this type of infill can be a complex redevelopment project, as described in this article. However, these types of projects are a step in the right direction.
John: Earlier this week, I sent this three-minute video to the rest of the Strong Towns staff in Slack and said, “Am I the last Strong Towns person to know about this old Simpsons clip?!” My colleague Michelle responded simply: “Yes.” Well, I’m sharing it here, too. Just in case.
In “Marge vs. the Monorail,” the town of Springfield gets a windfall of money. When the citizens come together to talk about what to do with the funds, Marge Simpson convinces the town to use the money to repair Main Street. “It may sound boring at first,” she says. Just then, a huckster named Lyle Lanley (think Harold Hill from The Music Man) barges into the meeting. Lanley does an actual song and dance to convince everyone—everyone but Marge, that is—to build a monorail, instead. This episode, which first aired in 1993, will play like an inside joke to Strong Towns advocates who can spot the problems: the allure of megaprojects and transportation boondoggles, public engagement that’s worse than worthless, the way cities race each other to the bottom (“Ah, it’s not for you,” Lanley says, “it’s more of a…Shelbyville idea.”), basic maintenance’s image problems, and the important difference between transit-oriented development and development-oriented transit. I won’t tell you how it ends—I watched the whole episode, you know, for research—but Marge does get a glimpse of Springfield’s future if it continues down its current track. Will Springfield learn its lesson? Will we?
(Source: Unsplash.)
Norm: Make room for the mess. That’s a great piece of parenting advice and a concept that also strikes me as a critical aspect of the Strong Towns approach. It’s captured in the idea that places should focus on many small bets instead of placing too much emphasis on any single transformative big bet. Thanks to the folks on the Mockingbird podcast, I enjoyed this article in The Atlantic called, “What Moneyball-for-Everything Has Done to American Culture.”
Derek Thompson explains that baseball feels like it has been degraded by the perfection of baseball tactics through analytics. In his words, “I think what happened is that baseball was colonized by math and got solved like an equation.” The article touches on the rise of the perfected movie blockbuster, optimized pop song, before concluding with this brilliant summary:
Cultural Moneyballism, in this light, sacrifices exuberance for the sake of formulaic symmetry. It sacrifices diversity for the sake of familiarity. It solves finite games at the expense of infinite games. Its genius dulls the rough edges of entertainment. I think that’s worth caring about. It is definitely worth asking the question: In a world that will only become more influenced by mathematical intelligence, can we ruin culture through our attempts to perfect it?
I thought of the problem of moneyball for developments in connection with the complaints about the dullness of many forms of contemporary housing in North America. It reminded me of Daniel Herriges’s article, “Our Self-Imposed Scarcity of Nice Places,” where he explains that “it's precisely because 98% of the North American built environment is so blah that the 2% of places that are really well-designed environments quickly get bid up by the rich and become inaccessible to the rest of us. The solution to this isn't to stop creating such places, but to create vastly more of them.” Just remember to make room for a bit of messiness and less-than-perfect places!
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Alexander Black, Coleman Brown, Jacqueline Danos, Jeromy Darling, Maija Gray, Ashton Jensen, Kyle Johnson, Santiago Maass, Doug Mirams, Andrew Nelson, Grant Olsen, Will Pflaum, Didacus Jeff J Ramos, Asher Schroader, Mandee Seeley, and Dawn Sonntag.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!