[PHOTO] Roses going off the bloom

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly wonders who we should trust.


• Centauri Dreams notes the discovery of Kepler-138b, a Mars-sized exoplanet orbiting a red dwarf star.


• Cody Delistraty considers whether language influences morality.


• Geocurrents' Martin Lewis shares different scenarios for the breakup of Nigeria.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the oppression of women workers.


• Marginal Revolution argues that there is a skills shortage in the American economy and is in favour of the TPP trade agreement.


• Steve Munro shares plans for TTC improvement.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes how Russia's neighbours see it as a greater or lesser threat.


• Torontoist and Transit Toronto react to the extension of cell service into the subways.


• Window on Eurasia notes how Ukrainian Baptists in the Donbas resist Russian influence and argues that Russian militarization will ultimately hurt Russians.

[URBAN NOTE] "Cyclist killed in Toronto accident lived for the outdoors"

The Toronto Star's Marco Chown was one author of several profiling the life of Toronto cyclist Adam Excell, killed in a road accident on the 13th of June.

Adam Excell’s grey Chevy sat unused most days. Even in the blowing snow or pelting rain, the outdoor enthusiast would suit up and walk or bike so he could steal a few extra moments under the sky.

When Halifax was hit with a record blizzard last winter, he pulled on his yellow hooded jacket, strapped on a pair of goggles and snowboarded down historic Citadel Hill.

“He lived for that kind of thing,” said lifelong friend Kevin Reid. “The world was his playground, with limitless new sights to see and adventures to have … You could just see the happiness radiating from him.”

The 26-year-old was on his bike Saturday night, heading home from his latest camping trip in Pennsylvania, when he was struck and killed in a hit-and-run at the intersection of Avenue Rd. and Davenport Rd.

Despite being an adventurer, Excell was not a risk taker, say those who knew him best. He was wearing a helmet and had lights on at the time of the accident.

[URBAN NOTE] "The fertile poverty of Toronto’s first immigrant neighbourhood"

Brian Bethune's review in MacLean's of the new book edited by John Lorinc, The Ward: The Life and Loss of Toronto's First Immigrant Neighbourhood, really makes me want to read it. How many people know that, where City Hall stands now, an entirely different neighbourhood once existed?

To arrive in Toronto, and to arrive poor, in the decades before the Great War—when the city’s population ballooned from 56,000 in 1871 to 376,000 in 1911—almost always meant arriving in St. John’s ward. Stretching over a large chunk of what is now Toronto’s central core—between Queen and College Streets, Yonge and University—the ward had always housed many of the city’s first outsiders: Catholic Irish and black Canadians. Now they were joined by new waves of non-traditional immigrants: Jews, other eastern Europeans, Italians and Chinese.

The 50-odd short pieces in The Ward—a mixed collection of memoir, archival research and micro-history—bring it back to vivid, impressionistic life. Crammed into cheap lodgings, subject to an appalling sanitation system and often desperately poor, the inhabitants were nonetheless remarkably entrepreneurial. All kinds of businesses flourished in the neighbourhood, legal and illegal: The ward was ground zero for bootlegging during Ontario’s flirtation with prohibition from 1916 to 1927. Contributors to The Ward explore the rag trade, the sex trade, Chinese laundries and paper boys. The outspoken former city councillor Howard Moscoe provides “My Grandmother the Bootlegger”; gallerist Stephen Bulger writes on Arthur Goss, Toronto’s first official photographer—in an era where there was such a thing—whose photos became source material for Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. There are entries on the Eaton’s strike of 1912, the drive to eradicate tuberculosis, and monumental avenues never constructed. Writers pore over old maps and try to reimagine what once was.

[URBAN NOTE] "For Cities, Big-Box Stores Are Becoming Even More of a Terrible Deal"

A Mike on Facebook pointed me to this opinion piece by one Olivia LaVecchia, writing for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, argues that big-box stores in American cities are bad deals for their communities. They can evade taxes, and so lead to underfunding of vital services, very effectively.

Figuring out the value of a property can be a complicated business. In Michigan, town and county assessors typically use a property’s construction costs, minus depreciation, as a primary metric to determine its fair market value; taxable value is half that amount. Property owners sometimes prefer, instead, to use the sale prices of comparable properties. This was the approach that Lowe’s took—with a catch. Lowe’s looked at the definition of the word “comparable,” and decided to stretch it. It said that, because big-box stores are designed to be functionally obsolescent, that comparable stores are those that have been closed and are sitting empty—the “dark stores” behind this method’s name.

“Unlike many other commercial properties,” the assessor hired by Lowe’s argued in court, “free standing ‘big-box’ stores like the subject [property] are not constructed for the purpose of thereafter selling or leasing the property in the marketplace.”

It’s an established part of the big-box retail model that the boxes themselves be custom-built, cheaply constructed, and disposable. If retailers decide that they need a bigger space, it’s cheaper for them to leave the old one behind and build a new one. When Walmart, for instance, opened its wave of new, twice-the-size Supercenters across the country in 2007, it left hundreds of vacant stores behind it. This means that new, successful stores like the Marquette Lowe’s are rarely the locations that are up for sale, and that when big-box stores do come on the market, it’s because they’ve already failed or been abandoned by the retailer that built them. In other words, Lowe’s was saying, it had built a property that, despite generating roughly $30 million in annual sales for the company, had very little value, and because of that, it should get a break in its property taxes.

Lowe’s went a step further. The properties that it offered up for comparison were properties that had been affected by another big-box retail tactic: deed restrictions. When big-box retailers are ready to move on to a new location, they often place these restrictions on the properties they leave behind. Designed to ensure that whoever buys the property won’t become a competitor, these restrictions limit how the store can be used, down to lists of specific items that the new occupant is banned from selling. In effect, they prevent most other retailers from moving into spaces designed specifically for retail, and so depress the values of these properties even further.

[LINK] "Do Animals Laugh? Tickle Experiments Suggest They Do"

Liz Langley's National Geographic article takes a look at the experimental evidence that a wide variety of non-human animals, from chimpanzees to rats, laugh.

In 2009 Marina Davila Ross, a psychologist at the U.K.'s University of Portsmouth, conducted experiments in which she tickled infant and juvenile primates—such as orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees. The apes responded by laughing—technically called "tickle-induced vocalizations."

Ross, who studies the evolution of laughter, suggests we inherited our own ability to laugh from humans and great apes' last common ancestor, which lived 10 to 16 million years ago.

Now her latest study, published this week in PLOS ONE, goes a step further, showing that chimpanzees display "laugh faces"—smiling, with teeth bared—with or without actual laughter.

This indicates "that chimpanzees can communicate in more explicit and thus versatile ways" than we thought, she says. It's similar to how people may smile silently, while talking, or while laughing—each of which conveys a separate emotion.

[LINK] "‘Je Suis Favela’ – Bringing Brazilian Books to the French"

At the Inter Press Service, A.D. Mackenzie has a fascinating article describing the workings of Éditions Anacaona, a French publishing house specializing in the publication of Brazilian works of literature from the favelas.

Educated as a translator of technical texts, Paris-born [Paula] Anacaona, 37, became a literary translator and publisher by chance. On holiday in Rio de Janeiro in 2003, she happened to start chatting with a woman who revealed she was a writer and who promised to send her a book.

Back in Paris, Anacaona received the book two months later and “loved it”, as she told IPS in an interview. She translated the work, written by Heloneida Studart and later called Le Cantique de Meméia, and managed to get a Canadian company to publish it.

Studart, who died in 2007, was also an essayist, journalist and women’s rights activist, and the book caught the attention of French-speaking readers in several countries.

Other writers got in touch, and Anacaona found herself becoming a literary translator. But by sending out the works to publishing companies, she was also taking on the role of agent, a time-consuming task.

“With all that was involved, I thought why not publish the books myself?” she recalls. She set up Éditions Anacaona in 2009 and decided to focus initially on literature from and about the ghetto or favela in Brazil, because “no one else was doing it.”

[URBAN NOTE] "In push to modernize, Rwandan capital struggles to house its population"

Jonathan W. Rosen at Al Jazeera America looks at the various contentious, costly, and often mutually contradictory plans to modernize Rwanda's capital of Kigali.

At the edge of the Rwandan capital, on a hillside formerly packed with small houses made of compressed earth, Wang Zenkhun pours over a map of what will soon be the East African country’s largest residential development.

Wang, an employee of the state-owned China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, serves as site manager for the project. He oversees approximately 100 Chinese and 2,500 Rwandan workers, who toil in the sun on the 80-acre site outside his office. Known as Vision City and financed by the Rwanda Social Security Board, or RSSB, the country’s pension body, the project will begin with an initial phase of 504 units, due to be completed next year. It will eventually scale up to 4,500 homes. In line with Kigali’s ambitious master plan, which seeks to transform the city of 1.3 million into a “center of urban excellence,” the site’s developers promise a community “tempered with a tinge of elegance and subtle nobility” that will be a “reference point for contemporary Rwandan living.” In addition to the houses, there will be restaurants, hotels, offices, schools, a sports complex and a Wi-Fi-connected town center. It’s all part of a citywide mixed-use strategy meant to decentralize key business and recreational activities and minimize road congestion.

For Kigali residents, who, like most urban Africans, face a dire shortage of quality housing, it all sounds great. There’s just one nagging detail. According to RSSB, the most affordable Phase 1 Vision City units, two-bedroom apartments, will cost 124 million Rwandan francs ($172,000), more than 100 times the city’s median annual household income. The most expensive — five-bedroom luxury villas with exteriors of marble and granite — will run close to 320 million francs.

[. . .]

Vision City is only one of several forthcoming Kigali housing developments, some of which, officials say, will deliver more affordable units. But the project is emblematic of a conundrum facing cities across sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s most rapidly urbanizing region. Buoyed by a decade-and-a-half of robust economic growth, Africa’s cities are home today to unprecedented concentrations of wealth. They’re also seeing endless streams of impoverished rural migrants, typically young people in search of jobs who see no viable future in the small-scale farming of their parents’ generation. These dual phenomena have led to striking degrees of inequality. According to the United Nations Human Settlements Program, U.N. Habitat, Africa’s urban areas are now collectively the most unequal in the world, having surpassed the cities of Latin America sometime in the century’s first decade.

Nowhere is this widening gap more visible than in Africa’s radically divergent standards of housing. While upscale developments, which are more attractive to investors, have sprouted on all corners of the continent, governments across the region have largely failed to spur development of modern formal housing that’s accessible to ordinary urban residents. Today, according to U.N. figures, 62 percent of Africa’s urban population lives in slums. These are typically tightly packed, haphazardly planned settlements that do not adhere to basic building standards nor allow for proper sanitation. Cities with a high prevalence of informal, single-story houses generally face extensive public-health challenges and lack the population density needed to become cost-effective hubs of manufacturing, therefore hindering job creation. Although housing policies seldom top government or donor agendas, economists say they’ll play an increasingly critical role as Africa moves toward becoming an urban-majority continent, which the U.N. projects will occur by 2040. Paul Collier, the development economist and director of Oxford University’s Center for the Study of African Economies, has even called housing the “single most important factor in Africa’s economic development.”

[MUSIC] The Pretenders, "Don't Get Me Wrong"

The Pretenders' 1986 transatlantic hit "Don't Get Me Wrong" is one of that select number of songs that make me smile reflexively whenever I think of it. I've fond memories of the Pretenders, whose debut album is one of the first ones I heard on vinyl, sitting in the listening lounge at UPEI's Robertson Library looking for escape. I could scarcely have had better guides.

"Pretenders - Don't Get Me Wrong" (Watch on YouTube)

This song that marked the Pretenders' return to the charts after all manner of troubles, it's a jangly melodic pop song that, with Chrissie Hynde's supple vocals, wittily tells the story of someone giddily in love.

Don't get me wrong
If I'm looking kind of dazzled
I see neon lights
Whenever you walk by

Don't get me wrong
If you say hello and I take a ride
Upon a sea where the mystic moon
Is playing havoc with the tide
Don't get me wrong

The tongue-twisting wordplay alone could get me.

(The The Avengers-themed music video is great, too.)

[DM] "Notes on the emergent western Balkan route of migrants"

At Demography Matters I have a post up noting the emergent western Balkans route for unauthorized migrants.