How Big Is an Incremental Step? Let's #DoTheMath, Strong Towns, Seth Zeren, January 20, 2022

In the Strong Towns community we emphasize the importance of building to the next increment of intensity, allowing places to organically thicken up over time, flexibly responding to the current needs of inhabitants. I generally agree with this approach and try to put it into practice in my work as a neighborhood real-estate developer. 

I like this overall approach/idea, both as a goal, and as a description of how the places we love actually came to be. But, as the headline asks, what exactly does it mean? Can you define or quantify it?

What follows are some examples and actual numbers. It’s a little wonky, but it’s good stuff. Check out the piece.

It’s All So … Premiocre, The Atlantic, Amanda Mull, April 2020

Amanda Mull has this interesting beat that focuses on consumerism, broadly understood, and it’s interesting stuff. “Premiocre” her contraction of “premium mediocre” (Mull writes that she came up with the contracted form on her own), a coinage by management consultant Venkatesh Rao.

When Rao mentioned “premium mediocre” to his wife, who was eating with him that day, she immediately got it. So did his Facebook friends and Twitter followers. “People had started noticing a pervasive pattern in everything from groceries to clothing, and entire styles of architecture in gentrifying neighborhoods,” he told me. Premium mediocrity, by his definition, is a fancy tile backsplash in an apartment’s tiny, nearly nonfunctional kitchen, or french fries doused in truffle oil, which contains no actual truffles. It’s Uber Pool, which makes the luxury of being chauffeured around town financially accessible, yet requires that you brush thighs with strangers sharing the back seat.

In other words, I guess, faux luxury: the gloss of luxury on so many products out there today. My own example is when, say, a potato chip bag is painted with a matted, low-key finish rather than a screaming shiny one. Same junk food.

It’s a fun but insightful read.

Hundreds of Planes Are Stranded in Russia. They May Never Be Recovered, New York Times, Niraj Chokshi, March 12, 2022

This piece is a neat view into an industry that we only really ever see as consumers. An aircraft repo man makes an appearance. But this bit is the most interesting:

While a few planes may have been recovered abroad before international flights were halted, they are of little use to their owners without the meticulous maintenance records that accompany every aircraft and are often stored by airlines themselves, experts said. And the longer a plane is stuck in Russia, the greater the concern that work on the jet’s body, engines and flight systems may not be logged, causing its value to plummet.

Cicero On Place, What Are Streets For, bnjd, July 12, 2022

Is there a way that a mass of people occupies an area where they are engaging in little or no activity? The modern day example is the traffic jam. The irony here is that there are people who are in transit who are not moving because too many people are occupying segments along the same road at the same time. Such a road fails because it leaves too many people doing nothing productive or desirable. Did Roman streets and plazas become so crowded that the masses became idle? Or were Roman streets crowded because they were full of people engaged in productive or desirable activity?

Neat piece looking back to Rome on questions of how we inhabit spaces and places together. Check it out.

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