[URBAN NOTE] A Good Bike on Dupont Street, Toronto

What is this bike spray-painted neon orange doing at Dupont and Gladstone?



It's public art. The genesis of the "Good Bike Project" was detailed by the Toronto Star's Nikki Thomas back in June.

Imagine if Toronto’s orphaned bikes were adopted by artists and transformed from rusting metal shells into eye-popping sidewalk sculptures.

That’s what Caroline Macfarlane envisioned last week when she reclaimed an old Raleigh that had been locked up and abandoned outside the OCADU Student Gallery on a grey stretch of Dundas St. W. for years.

“It would be great to make it a city-wide art project,” said Macfarlane, who helps runs the gallery.

The City of Toronto doesn’t agree.

Two days after Macfarlane, 25, finished sanding, priming and spray painting the bike a glowing shade of neon orange — carefully taping the bike ring first to avoid damaging public property — the city slapped it with a removal notice. She was on her way to plant flowers in the bike’s basket when she found it.

Transportation Services says they need to keep the bike rings clear for use by other cyclists. But the area’s councillor, Adam Vaughan, thinks it’s a matter of clearing away something else.

“It’s this war on creativity that’s underway,” said Vaughan, referring to Mayor Rob Ford’s campaign against graffiti.

Somewhat surprisingly to many, the City of Toronto relented, the mayor--known for what can be described as a skepticism about biking--going so far as to launch the Good Bike Project city-wide.

The Dupont/Gladstone bike appeared a couple of weeks ago. I love it: neon is so rare on my street.

[URBAN NOTE] Negligence or breakage? More on the One Bedford glass fall

Responding at Facebook to my post describing the fall of a panel of glass from the 32nd story of a condo tower near the St. George subway station, Ben--an experienced contractor--had a lot to say. Yes, it's disquieting.

There are two basic designs of glass parapet railing. The more common has slots in extruded aluminum top and bottom rails, with the glass fitting in the slots. The less common has one of various fittings, generally in stainless steel, securing the glass to the posts, such as here:

http://products.constructi​on.com/Manufacturer/Innova​tive-Structural-Glass--Inc​--NST28064/products/Fittin​gs-NST15689-p

But it appears to be the first type here. If so, the most probably errors that would result in a panel coming loose are:
1) The panel was improperly fitted in the rails. This would have been very easy to notice.
2) The glass was slightly undersized, allowing not enough "bite" for the slots in the rails to hold it. If this was the case, the situation is very dangerous, because the odds are that the same condition exists throughout the building.

Here's one I've used on several projects:

http://www.kanescreens.com​/images/cad/Chesterfield_S​ystem_Full_Image.GIF

You can see it's got the "slotted rails". If it's built correctly, it is impossible for that event to occur.

[. . .]

I was thinking "how did the system fail?" but there is another possibility- that the railings were damaged by abuse. Deliberately jumping on the bottom rail (or otherwise beating on it) could loosen it to the point where the glass panel slips loose. Whatever the case, an experienced forensic civil engineer should be able to quickly tell which actually caused the failure.

One more thing! The glass in railing systems like this is supposed to be tempered. Tempered glass fragments into tiny bits when broken. It should be possible, from evidence, to determine whether the glass was broken at the balcony, and fell as a rain of little bits, or fell as a unit and broke on impact. The former would be consistent with abuse at the balcony, the latter with faulty construction or manufacture.

I wasn't close, but it seemed from the brooms that people were using to sweep the sidewalk that it may have fallen as such a rain of little bits.

[URBAN NOTE] On Toronto's potential French quarter

There was recently news of a push to get the city to officially recognize a "French Quarter" in Toronto on the pattern of Toronto's other ethnic neighbourhoods.

A number of francophone groups in Toronto want to see a section of Carlton Street between Yonge and Parliament streets designated as the city’s French quarter.

From Little India in the east end to Little Italy in the west, Toronto is famous for its neighbourhoods, and Rolande Smith said francophones want a section of the city to call their own.

Smith is the president of Toronto's French History Society. She made her comments standing in front of Sacré-Coeur church on Sherbourne Street.

Built in the 1930s, it's the first French church in the city, and in the future it could be in the middle of Toronto's own French quarter.

“That would anchor us,” Smith told CBC News. “That'd be an anchor for a lot of activities that are scattered here and there, and give the impression that there's really nothing in French.”

[. . .]

According to the last census, more than 50,000 Torontonians identified themselves as francophones.

I've blogged in the past about Franco-Ontarians. Broadly speaking, the population--while very sizable, even numbering in the tens of thousands in the Ontarian provincial capital--is substantially hit by assimilation.

Ontario's Franco-Ontarian community, amounting to perhaps a half-million people or 5% of the province's population, is the largest Francophone population in Canada outside of Québec, larger even than New Brunswick's Acadians. Unlike the Acadians of that Atlantic Canadian province, who mainly live in compact territories where they form a majority population and have a strong group identity, however, Franco-Ontarians represent a diverse group, including long-settled French Canadian populations in northern and eastern Ontario and large populations of more recent immigrants from around the Francophone world, and form minority populations almost everywhere. Partly as a result, language shift to English among Franco-Ontarians is quite high; in the northern Ontario city of Sudbury, where Francophones make up 28% of the total population and can claim access to a broad variety of governmental, educational and even media resources, the shift to English remains quite high, with only 64% of the current generation of Francophones passing on their language to their children. Even Vanier, a long-established Francophone community in Ottawa that has served as something of a cultural centre, is increasingly Anglophone.

Toronto's Francophone population does stand out, not least because it's probably growing. The important thing to note is that unlike the traditional Franco-Ontarian community that's the product of French Canadian migration west across the Ottawa River from Québec, Toronto's Francophone population is heterogenous, product of immigration from across the Francophone world--Europe, Africa, the Caribbean--as well as across Canada. I hear a reasonable amount of French spoken on Toronto's streets, but most of the people doing the speaking are of an immigrant background.

Most urban Francophone enclaves in English Canada, like Ottawa's Vanier and Winnipeg's Saint-Boniface, are pre-existing communities engulfed by an expanding city. Toronto's French neighbourhood would stand out in beign a creation de novo. To, such a French Quarter would stand out as unique among Toronto's ethnic neighbourhoods in that whereas the community was created by immigration from a single country or region--Portugal, Italy, South Asia--Toronto's French Quarter would represent Francophones from potentially dozens of different countries.

Can this project work? I think so. As noted above, there is a critical mass of Francophone institutions and--more importantly--people in that neighbourhood and arguably in Toronto as a whole, a geographic focus for Canada's other official language community in its largest city makes sense, and there definitely seems to be a desire by people from across Toronto's diverse Francophone community to create the neighbourhood. Why not?

[BRIEF NOTE] On what it means to have an Acadian national holiday

The Acadians on my Facebook friends list have reminded me that today the 15th of August is the Fête nationale de l'Acadie, the Acadian national holiday selected by the first national convention of the Acadians in the New Brunswick community of Memramcook back in 1881, picking the day of the Assumption of Mary so as to honour the virgin mother of Christ who is the patron saint of the traditionally very Roman Catholic Acadians.

Besides being a holiday of note, the 15th of August is important because it is doubly proof of Acadians' self-identified peoplehood, not only as a people full stop but as a people distinct from the much larger French Canadian community (now Québécois, Franco-Ontarians, and others) descended from the Canadiens of New France. Acadians, as English Wikipedia notes, made it clear that the then-two centuries of separate existence were set to continue.

Abbot Marcel-François Richard, who favored August 15, is believed to have had an influence on the decision with the speech he gave at the convention. His arguments were:

... In fact, it seems to me that a people who, for over a century of hardships and persecutions, was able to preserve its religion, language, customs and autonomy, must have acquired enough importance to affirm its existence in a solemn way; and this could not be accomplished better than by being able to celebrate its own national holiday... Allow me, at this time, to point out a few of the motives that will encourage you to choose Our Lady of Assumption as National Acadian Day instead of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste. Since Canadians have chosen Saint-Jean-Baptiste as their patron, it seems to me that unless you wish to mistake our nationality with theirs, it is crucial that Acadians choose a particular holiday. It is important to stress that we are not descendants of Canada, but of France. Consequently, I see no reason why we should adopt the Saint-Jean-Baptiste as our national holiday... We must choose a holiday that reminds us of our origin. I am even going to go as far as to affirm that the Assumption has always been, and must always remain, National Acadian Day, since Acadians are descendants of the French race. Louis XIII vowed to give his empire to the Blessed Virgin and he wanted the Assumption to be the kingdom's national holiday. However, not long afterwards, he sent colonists to take over Acadia. They did, however, have to bring the customs of their homeland along, and if unfortunate circumstances prevented them from celebrating their national holiday in a regular manner, it is true that the national devotion of the Acadians is their devotion to Mary.

So did Acadians decide that Acadia would continue to exist, a nation without a state of any kind. (The Parti acadien of the 1970s that hoped to create an Acadian province of Francophone northern and northeastern New Brunswick never took off.) So does it exist today.

[H&F] "How every detail counts in large amounts"

(Crossposted.)

http://historyandfutility.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/how-every-detail-counts-in-large-amounts/

I owe my co-blogger Jussi Jalonen thanks for the superb job placing last month's massacres in Norway in the context of an increasingly unhinged and conspiracy-minded ideology, Internet-based but spreading, whose protagonists claim that Muslim are taking over Europe (at least) through their superfecundity as enabled by traitorous multiculturalists. I couldn't write the essay; I'm even now trying to avoid despair over the issue.

Everything I've written here about information it's predicated on the beliefs that preserving information matter and that preserving as much detail as possible matters. Yes, that's in part an emotional reaction of mine to my own personal circumstances, but it's something that works very well for me from the perspective of scholarship. Detail does matter; everything counts.

My 2004 post on the non-existence of Eurabia was a product of my idle curiosity and my desire to seek some distraction from graduate school. Later, as I became more aware of what Eurabia was starting to do, I became more concerned, more strident. Breivik's massacre was the sort of thing that I'd expected to eventually happen; I felt guilty, frustrated, despairing that this had happened. If the mass of details describing reality don't register, what's the point of any of it?

Jussi's approach is best. Friend of the blog Jim Belshaw helped with this comment he posted at A Bit More Detail in response to my Eurabia-themed question wondering how you reach people who believe in unfounded things. Selected elements are below.

2. You can’t change people’s minds by direct attack on their views. You have to come at it indirectly.
3. Don’t deal in universals. Eurabia and Muslims have become universals, labels to which other things are attached. Each time you use them as universals, you carry other people’s labels with them. At a purely personal level I try to avoid the use of the world Muslim unless I am speaking about a faith with all its varieties.
4. Recognise diversity. Within Europe each country, and sometimes parts of countries, are different. Australia is different again.
5. Attack intolerance, but do not attack the validity of views on which that intolerance may draw. Precisely, recognise them and address them independently as different issues. Avoid culture wars. Don’t confuse issues.

Thanks, Jim, for the reminder. The details will reappear, here and elsewhere. It'd be an honour if you'd join us all here at History and Futility for the ride.