The Top 3 Strong Towns Articles and Podcasts from 2022: Shina's Picks
Another year down! To everyone reading this, I hope you’re having a wonderful holiday season (and Yalda mobarak, for anyone out there who’s also celebrating). As per tradition, the Strong Towns staff is wrapping up 2022 by sharing our favorite content from this past year. I’ll be giving you my list today, but you can also check out what articles and other media my colleagues Norm, Lauren, and Daniel picked in their posts—and stay tuned for John Pattison’s list tomorrow.
I feel I’m cheating with my picks this year, as they all came from outside blogs and were republished here at Strong Towns (in other words, they’re not “native” Strong Towns content). I tried to come up with a clever justification for why I chose them, anyway, but I don’t have one…other than that they are just really good articles, and are worth reading regardless of where they originated from. And I’m pleased we got to share them on our site, with our readers.
1. “The One Ring,” by Michel Durand-Wood
The symbolism that humans imbue objects with has always been fascinating to me, especially when those objects are clothing or jewelry—items to be worn on the body and displayed as a part of one’s personage. That said, I never expected anything like that to be relevant to the Strong Towns mission.
Enter Michel Durand-Wood’s “The One Ring.”
If you’re living as far south in the U.S. as I am, you might be unfamiliar with the Canadian tradition of granting an iron ring to graduating engineers, during a ceremony in which they swear an oath to remember their responsibility to society. Contrast that with the design decisions engineers make which cause people to die every day on our roads, and you’ve got a fascinating study in how a profession’s code of ethics doesn’t align at all with its actual practices. Come for the thought-provoking subject matter, stay for Durand-Wood’s characteristic wit and sense of humor.
(Source: Rebecca/Flickr.)
2. “Monopoly Hotels and Missing Middle Housing,” by Johnny Sanphillippo
Johnny Sanphillippo is up there with Durand-Wood as one of my favorite writers from whom we get to republish content. Each of his pieces is a wild ride, and I’m never sure where it’s going to end up—but he never fails to stick the landing. “Monopoly Hotels and Missing Middle Housing” is no exception to this rule. This piece starts off with a seemingly innocuous complaint (“There are no apartment buildings in Monopoly!”) and goes into a deep dive on the history of America’s missing-middle housing, and how society and terminology have changed over the past hundred years. By the end of it, you won’t look at hotels the same way again—and, yes, you’ll also learn something about Monopoly, as well.
(Source: Addison Del Mastro.)
3. “Inside Eden Center: What a Strip Mall Can Be,” by Addison Del Mastro
I’ll be honest: I’m not a big fan of strip malls. There’s a couple of local ones I’ll go to as hangout spots on the odd night or weekend, but in general, I find them to be terribly ugly. Why can’t we just have nice things? Well, as Addison Del Mastro is so good at reminding us, sometimes you can find nice things even in unexpected places. This is an important lesson for anyone aiming to make changes in their own city or town, because none of us can wave a wand and expect our places to transform into beautiful, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods overnight. It’s going to take some time and a lot of small steps—and Eden Center is a demonstration of what one of those small steps could look like.
Public art can do more than add personality and beauty to a space — it can change the way people behave, bring the community together and avoid the resistance other changes to city policy face. It’s time to stop overlooking this powerful and accessible tool and start making our towns stronger, one bucket of paint at a time.