Making a Difference: The Art of Noticing and Addressing Urban Challenges

Photo by Boxed Water Is Better on Unsplash

I walk around my city a lot. I bike around my city a lot. I don’t just use these modes of transportation as sport but as transport (I do a lot of recreational running as well). The habit I’ve started to get into when I’m out is to ask myself the following questions, What about this experience of walking/biking/ or running is less than ideal? What about this situation could be improved? What could I do to improve this by the next time I’m coming through here?

Here are a few things I’ve done that have made a difference in these areas. The first is when walking towards our city’s junior high there is a spot where the tree branches hang low and get in my face and are just a nuisance to walk and bike through. I dealt with this for years thinking this sucks but, oh well, that’s just the way things go. After switching my mentality towards the questions above I decided to go and cut the low-hanging branches down. I set the cut branches off to the side and kept going. It was something simple but it made the walk that much better. What’s more, I’ve noticed that the branches were cut even further back by someone else later in the year. This act has encouraged others to take action as well.

Another story is about walking to our local church building. We don’t live far maybe .15 to .2 miles away from the building but we’re one of the only families to walk to church. Everyone else, even those closer to the building, still drives. I asked myself why. Though I’m sure this isn’t the only factor, the questions that I asked myself indicated there could be improvements to the experience of walking to church.

The first was that you had to cross a street that while not a thoroughfare is busier than I’d feel comfortable letting my kids walk alone. There’s no crosswalk nearby. There’s also a park nearby that suffers the same fate. I started calling the city asking for a crosswalk. It took a lot of persistence I called at least once a month, but eventually, they made a curb cut on the park side and painted a crosswalk on the road. They even put up signs for the crosswalk. Is the road magically all better? No. Is the pedestrian experience better? Yes. Do more people walk to church? A bit. This means a few more people got out of their cars than would have otherwise driven. Over time Im betting on that making a difference.

The Strong Towns Approach

At the end of the article I’ll share a list of some ideas you can do to start making change in your city but I’ll share first that I found that the questions I asked myself turned out to be already codified in another way. Strong Towns is an organization built to help cities be better versions of themselves and they have the following questions listed:

1. Humbly observe where people in the community struggle.
2. Ask the question: What is the next smallest thing we can do right now to address that struggle?
3. Do that thing. Do it right now.
4. Repeat.

This is their format to keep improving. Change doesn't have big and I would highly encourage reading the breakdown of this process on their site. I, for one, am excited to keep improving my city one step at a time.

Ideas for what that next smallest step could be.

Most, if not all, of these ideas I would like to write about more in the future and will update this list when I have the article written. I've also done or am doing most of these things and have seen the impact.

1. Walk with your kids to school (don’t drive them) or let them walk with friends.
2. Use reusable bags at the grocery store.
3. Talk to or Message a city councilor about removing parking minimums. I was strangely scared to talk to my local representatives but after doing it once, I found they were very approachable. I continue to talk to them now.
4. If you own a house with a lawn strip, consider making your lawn strip a haven for pollinators.
5. Get an e-bike, not an electric car.
6. If you can purchase a convection stove top instead of a methane one, do it.
7. Look around and observe how car-centric your surroundings are.
8. Jaywalk (I know some might consider it counter to what I said earlier about building crosswalks) but people own the streets, not cars.
9. Don't use the drive-thru at a restaurant. Go inside.
10. Bring shears on walks with you and cut back anything that's on the sidewalk.
11. Extension of #3 but talk to your city councilors about zoning, biking infrastructure, idling, and non-market housing. If you are not informed about these then there are an awesome number of books and googling these will inform you too.
12. Do some basic tactical urbanism in your area.
13. Don’t rake your leaves let as many of them stay

Thank you for reading