CityLab Daily: 'Transit-Oriented Teens' Are Coming to Save Your City
Also: Mapping the threat of a 2020 Census disaster, and the spaces that can ease childhood trauma.
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What We’re Following
Where’s the money? There’s something very odd going on in Pelahatchie, Mississippi. Nine months after Ryshonda Harper Beechem took office as the first African-American mayor of the small town, the Board of Aldermen has decided to cut her pay 75 percent, from $1,000 a month to $250 a month, without prior notice, according to the Clarion-Ledger. The vote comes alongside budget cuts for the shrinking town, and board members voted to cut their own pay, too. But other interferences in Beechem’s ability to act as mayor have many residents and observers wondering if there’s a racial dimension to these actions in the majority-white town.
Toys for NUMTOTs: Maybe you’re a lonely nerd who loves city planning and transit policy, and no one else laughs at your jokes about zoning. Luckily, there’s a place you can go where everybody knows your train. It’s the 62,000-strong Facebook group called New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens, and CityLab’s Laura Bliss has the story of how some college students’ Robert Moses memes turned into “the premier social-media watering hole” for young urban planning wonks.
More on CityLab
Greetings, Earthlings
Typically, satellite images of Earth are flat, which makes for pretty boring photos of cities. But Planet Labs has a Medium post demonstrating how their constellation of satellites get a glance of Earth from another angle. It has beautiful results for natural vertical features like mountains, but it also means seeing urban landscapes, especially with skyscrapers, with a new sense of wonder. The story features eight cities from all over the world—from Houston, Texas, to Osaka, Japan, to São Paulo, Brazil.
What We’re Reading
How Memphis gave up on Dr. King’s dream (New York Times)
The four days in 1968 that reshaped D.C. (Washington Post)
Why are New York taxi drivers killing themselves? (Wired)
What a nuclear bomb would do to your neighborhood, visualized (Fast Company)
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