[PHOTO] End of the line, Neville Park, Queen Street

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto’s Mayor returns to Pride Festival"

The Toronto Star's Michael Robinson reports on a long-overdue event.

For the first time in five years, Toronto’s Mayor will be showing some pride.

When asked on Sunday his thoughts on why his appearance at the festival is newsworthy, Tory’s answer was clear and abrupt: “It shouldn’t be.”

“(Pride) is one of the biggest celebrations in our community, period,” he said during a phone interview Sunday. “We are celebrating what I think is at the essence of what makes Toronto a great city: how we live together.”

“And the leader of this city, if you believe as I do, if your core values as a person as mayor are consistent with that notion of embracing and respecting everybody . . . you should be there.”

Pride Toronto co-chair Aaron GlynWilliams referred to Tory’s commitment to participate in the week-long festival as “the start of a new relationship between, not just this festival and the Mayor’s office, but the broader LGBTQ community.”

[LINK] "Why Stephen Harper’s ‘trade’ deals are losing their cachet"

Thomas Walkom argued last Friday, drawing on a new book, that Canadian free-trade initiatives are failing because of the origins of free-trade agreements with exploitative arrangements. I don't agree with the argument, but I think it merits rebuttals.

The already-signed Canada-European Union pact, known as CETA, has hit a buzz saw in Europe. The as yet unfinished Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would link Canada to 11 other nations, including Japan and the United States, faces stiff headwinds in Washington.

A new book by lawyer and Osgoode Hall professor Gus Van Harten helps explain why.

Van Harten’s book is not about either the European or the Pacific pacts. Sold Down the Yangtze is about another deal — the 2014 Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement that Canada’s Conservative government quietly signed with China.

But Van Harten’s analysis of this deal casts some light on why other countries are beginning to question the free-trade orthodoxy that Canada so blithely accepts.

[LINK] "Why the Saudis Are Going Solar"

Jeffrey Ball at The Atlantic explores the push by Saudi Arabia to become a solar energy superpower, driven by the desire to continue to have an exportable oil surplus.

Prince Turki bin Saud bin Mohammad Al Saud belongs to the family that rules Saudi Arabia. He wears a white thawb and ghutra, the traditional robe and headdress of Arab men, and he has a cavernous office hung with portraits of three Saudi royals. When I visited him in Riyadh this spring, a waiter poured tea and subordinates took notes as Turki spoke. Everything about the man seemed to suggest Western notions of a complacent functionary in a complacent, oil-rich kingdom.

But Turki doesn’t fit the stereotype, and neither does his country. Quietly, the prince is helping Saudi Arabia—the quintessential petrostate—prepare to make what could be one of the world’s biggest investments in solar power.

Near Riyadh, the government is preparing to build a commercial-scale solar-panel factory. On the Persian Gulf coast, another factory is about to begin producing large quantities of polysilicon, a material used to make solar cells. And next year, the two state-owned companies that control the energy sector—Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company, and the Saudi Electricity Company, the kingdom’s main power producer—plan to jointly break ground on about 10 solar projects around the country.

[. . .]

Such talk sounds revolutionary in Saudi Arabia, for decades a poster child for fossil-fuel waste. The government sells gasoline to consumers for about 50 cents a gallon and electricity for as little as 1 cent a kilowatt-hour, a fraction of the lowest prices in the United States. As a result, the highways buzz with Cadillacs, Lincolns, and monster SUVs; few buildings have insulation; and people keep their home air conditioners running—often at temperatures that require sweaters—even when they go on vacation.

Saudi Arabia produces much of its electricity by burning oil, a practice that most countries abandoned long ago, reasoning that they could use coal and natural gas instead and save oil for transportation, an application for which there is no mainstream alternative. Most of Saudi Arabia’s power plants are colossally inefficient, as are its air conditioners, which consumed 70 percent of the kingdom’s electricity in 2013. Although the kingdom has just 30 million people, it is the world’s sixth-largest consumer of oil.

Now, Saudi rulers say, things must change. Their motivation isn’t concern about global warming; the last thing they want is an end to the fossil-fuel era. Quite the contrary: they see investing in solar energy as a way to remain a global oil power.

[URBAN NOTE] "Berlin Banking Billions Spent on Arts Yield Tourist Riches"

Bloomberg's Dalia Fahmy looks at how Berlin is coming to specaliaze in tourism, for the sake of the city's economy.

Berlin is spending billions of euros to renovate old museums, build new ones and snatch celebrity talent in a bid to upgrade the city’s cultural lineup and satisfy visitors flooding the German capital.

“Berlin lives from tourism, and tourists come here largely for culture,” said Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which manages most of the city’s museums. “Today, London is more dynamic but Berlin has more potential.”

Projects under way include a complete renovation of one of the city’s three opera houses and a new museum of modern art. The former royal palace is being rebuilt and will house exhibits run by Neil MacGregor, the current British Museum director and media host lured away by the city this year.

There’s a lot at stake because in the absence of major industries -- Berlin lost Deutsche Bank AG and Siemens AG after World War II -- tourism is one of the city’s biggest businesses. The German capital attracted 12 million visitors in 2014 who spent 10 billion euros ($11.3 billion), contributing a full 8 percent of economic activity, according to Berlin government data. The city says those coming for the museums, performances of the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Simon Rattle and other cultural activities spend more than any group.

“Cultural tourism is an important economic factor for our city,” said Tim Renner, Berlin’s cultural affairs secretary. “That’s why we’re exerting a big effort to make the cultural offerings even more attractive for international visitors.”

[LINK] "Ancient Romanian jawbone sheds light on Neanderthal interbreeding"

The Globe and Mail hosts Will Dunham's Reuters article reporting that an ancient Homo sapiens skeleton in Romania has substantial Neanderthal ancestry. That this skeleton does not belong to a population that left descendants in contemporary Europe is also noteworthy, IMHO.

You may not know it, but you probably have some Neanderthal in you. For people around the world, except sub-Saharan Africans, about 1 to 3 percent of their DNA comes from Neanderthals, our close cousins who disappeared roughly 39,000 years ago.

Scientists said on Monday a jawbone unearthed in Romania, of a man who lived about 40,000 years ago, boasts the most Neanderthal ancestry ever seen in a member of our species.

[. . .]

“We show that one of the very first modern humans that is known from Europe had a Neanderthal ancestor just four to six generations back in his family tree,” said geneticist Svante Pääbo of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

“He carries more Neanderthal DNA than any other present-day or ancient modern human seen to date.”

Harvard Medical School geneticist David Reich said 6 to 9 percent of this individual’s genome derived from a Neanderthal ancestor.

[LINK] "Slavery’s afterlife in the Euro-Mediterranean basin"

Tryon P. Woods and P. Khalil Saucier look, at Open Democracy, on the legacies of slavery and racism on migration in the Mediterranean basis.

The tragic weekend of April 18-19, 2015, in which over 700 so-called African ‘migrants’ or ‘refugees’ perished less than 130 miles from the Italian island of Lampedusa, with another 400 Africans stranded in the Mediterranean desperately awaiting rescue, repeated with violent clarity the terms of black death and suffering which continue to underwrite the modern world and the European project in particular. Lampedusa, as one of the southernmost outposts of ‘Fortress Europe,’ has buried scores and scores of Africans in recent years—this most recent spectacle will probably be eclipsed by the next one by the time this essay goes to print—as part of Europe’s ongoing confrontation with the world it created through African enslavement and colonial subjection for over five centuries.

Our intervention into the debate on Europe’s border policies addresses from the vantage of black political praxis the historical specter of slavery haunting current events. Calls for action on the Mediterranean crisis frequently mobilize the discourse of slavery in various ways, but never in the way most pertinent to our contemporary situation. The most ethical assessment of the Mediterranean crisis is not in the terms of what Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and many others call the ‘new’ or ‘modern-day’ slave trade, but rather in terms of racial slavery’s constitutive and consolidating role in the formation and functioning of Europe and modern society itself. The Mediterranean Basin has been an ongoing crisis for black people for the better part of the past and present millenniums. At issue, then, is a more accurate understanding of what slavery was in order to grasp what it is today. We suggest, following the leading edge of black thought, that today’s scene in the Mediterranean reveals slavery’s afterlife.

One mark of slavery’s afterlife is the manner in which black suffering and death in the Mediterranean sustains and resuscitates European democratic society. Case in point is ‘The Charter of Lampedusa,’ a document produced by activists in response to the fatal shipwreck of October 2013. The ‘Charter’ deploys accessible black bodies in order to illustrate the tension between good and bad Europeanness in much the same way that antiracist protests throughout Europe have affixed images of dead black bodies adrift to their placards of choice. Thus, rather than the problem of antiblackness, the ‘Charter’ formulates the issue at hand as an excess of Europeanness and militarism, as the barbarity of EU border controls. It becomes a means of elaborating a positive European identity, an antiracist cosmopolitan identity ostensibly attuned to all human suffering, but in reality primarily concerned to save Europe from itself, for Europeans. In this instance, black struggle becomes a medium for psychic transformation: in death, the Lampedusa victims enable Europeans to re-emerge as civilized, which is to say enlightened, subjects.

One recent Italian commentator compared the public stripping and high-pressure hose washing of African detainees on Lampedusa to the Italian immigrant experience on Ellis Island at the turn of the twentieth century: “although not nearly as demeaning as what the refugees in Lampedusa undergo on a regular basis, we were humiliated by, and decried, the primitive physical examinations intended to discover which infectious diseases we were carrying. Only, at the time, it was easier to be outraged as we were the victims.” This effort to identify with the captive African turns in on itself because rather than feel what it means to be left to drown within sight of the European coast, over and over again, the Italian commentator instead begins to feel for himself, or for his national kin. The analogy falters across the abyss of slavery, for that is where black people were permanently imprisoned while Italians were momentarily detained at Ellis Island. In short, the antiracist is the policeman: in the attempt to counteract the indifference of European society to the immigrant’s suffering, the putative white body of the EU assumes the position of the captive black body in order to make the suffering in the Euro-Mediterranean Sea visible, legible, and coherent.

More there.

[URBAN NOTE] "Housing affordability improves, but not Toronto and Vancouver, RBC says"

The CBC reports

A report by RBC Economics says housing affordability continued to decline in Toronto and Vancouver, while conditions for homebuyers improved in Alberta during the first quarter of the year as lower oil prices caused the real estate market to soften.

RBC says mortgage rate cuts improved the affordability of homes in many Canadian housing markets where prices didn't accelerate too rapidly.

That offset rapid price growth in Toronto and Vancouver, leaving national affordability levels relatively flat.

RBC says demand in softer markets such as Montreal and Ottawa began to pick up.

The report in question can be viewed here.

[URBAN NOTE] Henry Grabar of Slate on the San Francisco rent crisis

Slate hosts this plausible-sounding argument.

In the Bay Area, the cities that have shut their doors to housing are the suburban municipalities that contain most of the region’s population. “The smaller communities, in my opinion, need to step up, and I don’t see that happening,” San Francisco planning director John Rahaim says. “There’s such a huge demand in general and that can’t be met just by the big three cities.”

Nor should it be. Once upon a time, a forward-thinking planner might have conceived of the region as three high-density nodes of housing and jobs, in San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland, with quiet bedroom communities strung like beads along commuter rail lines and highways.

But that vision has long since been dashed by the Bay’s unusually sprawling geography of employment. Of the 1.75 million jobs within 35 miles of downtown San Francisco, only 45 percent are within 10 miles. That’s 12 percentage points lower than average for a big U.S. city. Adding new housing only in the big three cities, then, will only exacerbate the region’s transportation woes.

To some extent, job sprawl in the Bay has the same causes as elsewhere. Manufacturers sought cheap land and highway access. Pulled by emigrating executives, white-collar work shifted to campuses and office parks. Retail and services followed consumers down the highway.

In this part of the country, though, this phenomenon played out with special intensity because of Proposition 13, the 1978 ballot referendum that froze California’s property tax rates. David Dowall, a professor of regional planning at the University of California–Berkeley, was one of the first to observe how the law skewed small-town zoning priorities. “Caught in a fiscal squeeze,” he wrote in 1982, “many towns have stepped up efforts to increase their tax base by attracting more commercial, office, and light industrial development. While attempting to attract economic development, most communities have not concomitantly adjusted their zoning to provide housing for additional employees. Consequently, new employees, particularly those migrating to the region, find it extremely difficult to acquire affordable housing.”

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• The Big Picture shares photos from the International Day of Yoga, on the 21st.


• blogTO notes that the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art has moved from West Queen West to the Junction.


• Centauri Dreams considers Titan.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that the Messinian salinity crisis may not have led to the end of the Mediterranean entirely, and looks at evidence for Venus' active volcanoes.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at Rhodesia in the white supremacist imagination and considers ways to engage, or not, with white racism.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw notes the discussion on developing northern Australia.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer does not understand why the Eurozone is so reluctant to set up a more viable deal with Greece.


• Transit Toronto notes federal government support for regional mass transit in the GTA.


• Window on Eurasia notes Russian hostility towards a Karelian youth movement.