[PHOTO] A cottage at the Beaches

It's a long-standing matter of occasional controversy whether the Toronto neighbourhood located immediately east of Leslieville is called "the beach" or "the Beaches". Regardless, at the end of our Thursday tramp along Queen Street East Erin and I came into this neighbourhood where we saw this decidedly unusual house, a post-Second World War home that is quite . . . colourful. And alive.

Cozy and colourful
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

With the reeds and the Tibetan prayer flags and the orange of the picket fence and bridge slats and fence tips and pumpkin contrasting so brightly with the painted-purple metal fences and guardrails, how can you look away?

The front yard's pond
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

This, the pond visible to the left of the footbridge, looks to be quite ecologically authentic. Towards the bottom you can see at least four goldfish happily swimming about.

[META] Call it my blogroll's "big bang" expansion

Over the weekend, I realized that my blogroll and bloggish readings are limited. Current affairs and Toronto affairs and whatnot are all well and good, but where, I wondered, were the blogs that reflected my academic interests? Certainly my degree subjects--English, Anthropology, History--continue to influence my reading, my thinking, my writing. Why, then, were they missing? A furious search proceeded.

You won't find any blogs related to literature, on account of my continuing ambivalence towards the field's fundamentals, also because I don't know where to go apart from The Valve and its imposing heft. History blogs, too, are lacking; maybe I should have searched for historiography blogs instead. The blogs you see listed below, and on the side, all relate to one or another social sciences. They look promising, at least.

• A BCer in Toronto is Jeff Jedras' perspective on his adopted town.


• Amitai Etzioni Notes is, appropriate enough, the blog of social scientist Amitai Etzioni.


• Anthropology.net is a group blog tackling anthropology, perhaps with an emphasis on physical anthropology.


• Electropublication is an interesting-looking blog on the sociology of the Internet.


• Eszter's Blog is the blog of researcher and Crooked Timber poster Eszter Hargittai.


• W.W. Norton Book's group blog Everyday Sociology Blog covers an entertainingly wide area of topics.


• Rob Pitingolo's Extraordinary Observations has his takes on society, cities, and more.


• Global Sociology is what its title says it is.


• landscape+urbanism takes a look at, well, the possible interactions between cities and their physical environments.


• Patti Anklam's Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness is a blog concentrating on social networks and organizational structures.


• Purse Lip, Square Jaw is Anne Galloway's take on physicality and ideational culture.


• Savage Minds is another prestigious group blog.


• Daniel Little at Understanding Society takes a look at the deep structures of the world and its civilizations.


• Une heure de peine..." is French sociologist Denis Colombi's blog, where he explores the interactions between sociological theory and the contemporary world.

[LINK] "Detroit: Urban Laboratory and the New American Frontier"

I'm not altogether sure why Detroit, as in (for instance) this article by Aaron Renn at New Geography is being taken as, well, an urban laboratory and new American frontier, apart from the desolation that keeps coming across--perhaps falsely--in the city's media depiction. The grim mood of Americans taking the credit crisis and perhaps high structural employment might also play a role in the perception of Detroit as the future of the American city.

The troubles of Detroit are well-publicized. Its economy is in free fall, people are streaming for the exits, it has the worst racial polarization and city-suburb divide in America, its government is feckless and corrupt (though I should hasten to add that new Mayor Bing seems like a basically good guy and we ought to give him a chance), and its civic boosters, even ones that are extremely knowledgeable, refuse to acknowledge the depth of the problems, instead ginning up stats and anecdotes to prove all is not so bad.

But as with Youngstown, one thing this massive failure has made possible is ability to come up with radical ideas for the city, and potentially to even implement some of them. Places like Flint and Youngstown might be attracting new ideas and moving forward, but it is big cities that inspire the big, audacious dreams. And that is Detroit. Its size, scale, and powerful brand image are attracting not just the region’s but the world’s attention. It may just be that some of the most important urban innovations in 21st century America end up coming not from Portland or New York, but places like Youngstown and, yes, Detroit.

Renn makes the argument that the sheer scale of the collapse in Detroit--territorial, economic, governmental--makes the city a unique testbed for radical change.

Can you imagine a two-story beehive in Chicago? In many cities where strong city government still functions effectively, citizens are tied down by an array of regulations and permits that are actually enforced in most cases. Much of the South Side of Chicago has Detroit like characteristics, but the techniques of renewal in Detroit won’t work because they are likely against code and would be shut down the minute someone complained. Just as one quick example, my corner ice cream stand dared to put out a few chairs for patrons to sit on while enjoying a frozen treat on a hot day. The city cited them for not having a license. So they took them away and put up a “bring your own chair” sign. The city then cited them for that too. You can’t do anything in Chicago without a Byzantine array of licenses, permits, and inspections.

In central Indianapolis, which is in desperate need of investment, where the city can’t fill the potholes in the street, etc., the minute a few yuppies buy houses in an area and fix them up, they immediately petition for a historic district, a request that has never been refused, ensuring that anyone who ever wants to do anything will be forced to run a costly and grueling gauntlet of variances, permits, hearings, etc. Only the most determined are willing to put up with that.

In most cities, municipal government can’t stop drug dealing and violence, but it can keep people with creative ideas out. Not in Detroit. In Detroit, if you want to do something, you just go do it. Maybe someone will eventually get around to shutting you down, or maybe not. It’s a sort of anarchy in a good way as well as a bad one. Perhaps that overstates the case. You can’t do anything, but it is certainly easier to make things happen there than in most places because the hand of government weighs less heavily.

Go, read.

[LINK] "Historicist: Life in Wartime"

This Saturday just past at Torontoist, Kevin Plummer wrote an interesting article about what things were like in Toronto and for Torontonians during the Second World War.

On September 10, 1939, Prime Minister Mackenzie King officially declared war on Germany. Toronto was impacted by the war almost immediately. Drawn by patriotism, adventure-seeking, or just the lure of a job after nearly a decade of the Great Depression, thousands of young Torontonians spilled into recruiting stations and from there into manning depots. In Bill McNeil's Voices of a War Remembered (Doubleday Canada Limited, 1991), Torontonian Ella Trow recalled how every family was touched by the Second World War. "My brothers and my husband went into the services," she wrote, "and most of my friends were in the same boat."

By the fall of 1942, Mike Filey wrote in his Sun column of March 25, 2001, military vehicles were as common a sight on city streets as servicemen in uniforms. Training exercises and mock battles were staged in Riverdale and Eglinton parks. From boats moored in Humber Bay, an attacking Canadian force stormed entrenched "enemy" positions on Sunnyside Beach. Blackouts were expected, if infrequent, training exercises. On a set day but at a surprise time air-raid sirens would blare, signalling for the lights to go out in a four-hundred-square-mile area from Bronte to Highland Creek, preparing locals for the possibility of an attack on North American soil. In May 1942, a blackout drill, Filey recounts, was given added drama because a German POW, recently escaped from a camp in Bowmanville, was thought to be "prowling the darkened city streets." The Star reported that police were called when a transient taking shelter in a Brampton barn was thought to be the prisoner.

Civilian life was thrown into turmoil as well, as industrial manufacturing converted to wartime industries and ramped up production, providing new employment opportunities for women. In some ways the city's transformation brought citizens closer together as a community, cooperating on fundraising drives and other initiatives. Some people, however, saw fault in the transformation. "I don't believe that the Toronto I grew up in," Trow wrote, "existed at all once the war started. In my mind, the changes were not for the good." The massive influx of industrial workers and their families created a housing shortage and, to Trow, the people on the now-crowded streets grew less considerate. For better or worse, the Second World War altered the patterns of daily life for almost all Torontonians.

Everything from sex and romance to to home economics to popular culture was transformed. Go, read.

[LINK] Mayor George Smitherman?

Back in September I reported on the open secret that George Smitherman, provincial parliamentarian from the Liberal Party and deputy premier, was strongly considering running for the position of Mayor of Toronto.

He's come out.

After months of speculation, George Smitherman is making the move to municipal politics.

Ontario’s Deputy Premier and Energy Minister confirmed in an interview Sunday that he is leaving Dalton McGuinty’s cabinet to run for Toronto’s mayoralty in November, 2010.

“I’ve been thinking about it for a long, long time,” George Smitherman said. “In my mind, in my heart, I’m settled on doing it.”

The downtown Toronto MPP informed Mr. McGuinty Sunday of his resignation, and will make an announcement Monday. He will be replaced as energy minister by Gerry Phillips, who held that job in 2007-08, but the government will not name a new deputy premier.

[. . .]

“I’m putting a lot on the line,” Mr. Smitherman acknowledged yesterday. “But it feels so right to me, because I have every confidence about the outcome.”

To try to achieve that outcome, he will vow to bring the same force of personality to municipal politics that he has to Ontario’s legislature. While pledging to make job creation a centrepiece of his platform, he suggested it is his experience – more than specific policies – that will give him the edge.

“Anybody can come up with a platform,” he said. “But who has a track record of determination to actually see things through? I think that is a strength of my candidacy; I’m a person who has a track record of transformational action.”

“So many people have said to me, ‘the mayor has no power,’ ” Mr. Smitherman said. “In a certain sense, my candidacy is to challenge that.”

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On the fall of the Berlin Wall, let the world have simple fun

,I quite like this Spiegel Online article.

This November, two kilometers worth of gigantic dominos will be erected between Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz along a portion of the strip that once separated East and West Berlin. In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dominos will be set tumbling and the barrier will collapse in roughly half an hour's time.

"We want to knock over the Wall once again," Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit said at an opening ceremony for the project last week.

The 43-kilometer Berlin Wall -- the most famous symbol of the Cold War and of divided Germany -- fell on Nov. 9, 1989, after having stood for nearly three decades. The domino project, which is headed by the Berlin group Kulturprojekte, hopes to inspire reflection on that day by toppling 1,000 eight-foot tall Styrofoam slabs.

Each of the dominos will be individually decorated, most by young Berlin residents. Part of the project's aim is "to encourage young people to reflect on what the fall of the Wall meant," Wowereit said.

Roughly 20 of the dominos will also be sent abroad to be decorated in other parts of the world where aggressive divisions and separating walls have left an impact. "It's important that we not only bring Germany to the world but that we also bring the world to Germany," Michael Jeismann of the Berlin office of Germany's federal cultural foundation Goethe Institut, which developed the foreign component of the domino project, told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Any number of my friends have commented on how they experienced it, on how the saw the Wall and how they saw the Wall fall and how they felt about that. I was only nine at the time, but I was impressed by the euphoria. I don't have to remind you that I own some chunks of concrete accredited as chunks from the Berlin Wall.

Close-up 1
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

I think that the biggest sensation that beset the world in those halcyon days. I'm a big fan of 1980s music, as people who've seen my music video posts on Facebook can say, and one thing that has always stuck out for me is the sheer number of nuclear catastrophe-themed songs: "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes", "99 Luftballons", "Forever Young". That wasn't the only way the fear of Cold War-themed nuclear gigadeath was in popular culture. Take Threads and its perhaps optimistic depiction of life in a post-apocalyptic United Kingdom; take Hackett's fictional Third World War histories; take the obnoxious heavy metal song in Star Trek IV that claimed the only thing left for us to decide was "how many megatons"; take the desperate protests of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and its European peers during the early 1980s' missile deployments; WarGames that saw Matthew Broderick race to try to prevent the reliable artifical intelligence the generals put in place of unrealiable men from starting a nuclear war. And then, take the TTAPS study of 1983, the only that confirmed that just as Mars cooled during its planet-wide dust storms, so would Earth because terribly, unliveably, chill.

Comes Gorbachev, and there's hope that the future won't be as bleak. Comes November 1989, and things just can't be as horrible as they were. It's worth noting that the first thing Berliners did after bringing the Wall down was have a huge days-long party.

We're safe now. There's problems in the region, sure, eastern Europe hasn't fared nearly as well as one might like and entire generations have been left adrift. There's still nothing like that existential fear, little that I can remember and nothing that younger generations can remember. The world has its rivalries and it has its problems, but it's a normal world safe from the fear that one year everyone could die. Ours, after all, is a world that's relaxed, so relaxed that we can take a geography that marked the sternest border of the sternest ideological conflict ever and make it a game of dominos while others smile at the idea, at least a little bit.

[LINK] On the Africans of Guangzhou

Le Figaro has reported on the surprisingly large community of African migrants attracted to the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, in what's just part of the growing interaction between China and Africa. A translation of part of Arnaud de la Grange's article "À Canton, les bonnes affaires des immigrés de la «petite Afrique»" ("At Canton, the good businessmen of "'Little Africa'") is below.

In Guangzhou, the workshop of the world's, "Mr. Africa" is Emma Ojukwu, who has naturally emerged as the main intermediary between the largest community of African countries and local authorities since he is the patron of the Nigerian Association of China, the most numerous African nationality most represented. And also because the networks in the administration and the Chinese police, as are many other Africans, including Francophones, came knocking at his door when trouble comes tip his nose.

According to Emma Ojukwu, there are bnetween Nigerians are 3 000 or 4 000 around Guangzhou, and more than 7 000 throughout China. Some estimates are much higher. His phones constantly ring. Here, he is helping a fellow whose visa has expired and no longer has a single yuan in his pocket. There, he has an appointment with the Criminal Department to settle a difficult case. "Of course, there are problems among the African population," he said. "If one African arrested for drug trafficking, it gives us a bad image. "

The diaspora, in English and French, is doing quite well for itself, with booming trade and tens of thousands of migrants.

China Daily, Danwei, and various other sources go into greater detail.