A few things to know this week: November 1, 2019
Happy Friday, friends!
Every week, we round up some of the things we read, listened to, or watched that really caught our attention — plus anything that we wrote or recorded ourselves. Here are just a few things we think you should know this week:
This week's things to know:
Check out the latest episode of our Go Cultivate! podcast:
Are We Doing This Right? – Placemaking Edition (Part 1)
Placemaking is one of those ubiquitous urbanist buzzwords. We discuss what is actually means, what it came about as a response to, and why it might look different depending on the location.
And now, here’s a selection of worthwhile reads from the week:
1. Shreveport's Highway Emperors’ New Clothes
This is a really well-written piece about the continued folly of urban highway expansion in Shreveport. Despite overwhelming evidence that seven decades worth of highway-driven outward expansion has left Shreveport impoverished and hollowed out, the “growth” myth still won’t die. Kim Mitchell and AllendaleStrong are among those willing to point out that Shreveport's "Highway Emperors” aren’t wearing any clothes at all and never have been. (This is explicitly not a Shreveport-specific problem; the foundational myth only gained its power as city, state, and federal leaders all consented to the urban highway frenzy without questioning the naked foolishness of it all.) – Jordan
2. Homeward Bound: The Road to Affordable Housing
This new report from the National League of Cities has some great stats, recommendations, and policy implications for encouraging affordable housing. While it mostly focuses on federal policy, there is also a section devoted to what cities can do at the local level. It's an easy read, and it touches on some of the topics we have recently discussed within our Community Cultivators online network—like ADUs and homelessness. This would also be a great resource for elected/appointed officials since it connects the dots between government action and its unanticipated consequences. – AJ
3. The Toxic Bubble of Technical Debt Threatening America
Local, state, and public utility agencies across the country have rapidly growing infrastructure liabilities that continue to go unfunded by taxpayers and corporate boards. This article makes the case that extreme weather events are and will continue to expose the myriad of problems associated with deferring these maintenance costs for the last several decades. – Kevin
4. Colorful street transformations coming to 10 U.S. cities
There has been some talk about public art and street painting in the world of transportation lately, featuring claims that colorful designs are dangerous because they grab the driver’s attention. (We’d argue that anything that encourages a driver to voluntarily slow down is a feature rather than a bug.) This piece outlines one initiative that aims to put out 10 street murals in 10 US cities as a part of the Asphalt Art Initiative. This program—which "will award 10 small or mid-sized cities with grants of up to $25,000 to create colorful murals on streets, intersections, and crosswalks, or vertical surfaces of transportation infrastructure like utility boxes, traffic barriers, and highway underpasses"—will track the safety and economic and civic impact of the projects. – Ryan
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In many cases, the answer to a problem does not need to be a new, expensive, overengineered solution. As resource constraints become more pressing in the years ahead, communities will need what this article calls "socially responsible engineers." I like to describe these folks as engineers who can use their technical knowledge and problem solving skills to improve quality of life for a broader group of people within the existing built environment with resources a city has available. That's what our engineering crew here at Verdunity does. I'd love to have more engineers join us in embracing socially responsible engineering, so it's great to see universities emphasizing this. – Kevin
6. Why it's important for your city to be unequal
This provocatively-titled piece from City Observatory reminds us that context is so important. While it is necessary to understand income inequality in our cities, we cannot go about it the same way we do with a much larger national geography. Joe Cortright argues that this skews or even reverses the results. He points out that even folks like Richard Florida and his CityLab colleagues have missed the mark. This piece might change the way you read all these analyses that are so common in the world of thinking about cities. – AJ
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Hey, friends in local government:
Have thoughts on any of the links above? Think we missed something essential? We’re discussing these topics and more over on our brand-new online community, exclusively for local government employees.* Sign up for the Community Cultivators Network and join the discussion!
* The network is currently only for those wonderful folks out there who work in local government. If you’re not currently working for a city, town, or county, we still love you (and are sure many of you would add value to the community), but we want to keep our commitment to making this a community focused specifically on our friends working in local government. Thanks for understanding!
