[PHOTO] Crane over Yonge, Yonge and Eglinton

This crane was fully extended, stretching northwest from the great pit on the northeast corner of Yonge and Eglinton, over Yonge Street and above the sidewalk. I have questions about how safe this was, but it was eyecatching.

[LINK] "CBC to sell all property across Canada"

Metronews shared this terrible news. Why is this being done? Getting rid of the property of the CBC is a good way to keep the CBC from being a content-generator in its own right. I quite hope this will be stopped, immediately, after the elections trigger a change in government.

On the same day Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau pledged to reverse $115 million worth of cuts to the CBC, the national broadcaster unveiled its plan to sell off all of its buildings.

The Canadian Media Guild said CBC announced at a staff town hall today that it will be “selling all its property across the country, including major production facilities in Montreal and Toronto.”

Ian Morrison, spokesperson for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, had not yet heard about the announcement when reached by Torstar News Service Tuesday evening.

“It’s news to me,” he said, adding the broadcaster’s decision to sell real estate assets was akin to “burning the furniture to heat the home.”

Not only will this saddle the CBC with the need to pay rent forever, Morrison added, but the timing couldn’t be worse.

“This is a period of time when a government only makes caretaker decisions,” Morrison said. “It is widely understood during a general election you don’t do controversial things.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Parkdale Community Groups Confront Gentrification"

Torontoist's Samira Mohyeddin notes how the inevitable, post-Queen Street West, gentrification of Parkdale is driving out the poor who have long made this neighbourhood their home.

Almost 100 Parkdale residents, community members and activists crammed into the Parkdale Activity and Recreation Centre last night at 1499 Queen Street West in order to discuss the proliferation of evictions and rent increases caused by gentrification-driven displacement.

The forum allowed residents of the community to exchange their personal stories of housing insecurity and to offer ideas as to how the community can put an end to further rent increases and illegal evictions.

The Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust (PNLT), a community-controlled non-profit organization of residents and local agencies, was one of the organizing committees of the forum. The PNLT is trying to acquire and manage land in the community to ensure the availability of secure and affordable housing.

According to Joshua Barndt, Project Co-ordinator for PNLT, development increased by 126 per cent between 1996 and 2006. During that time, rent values increased by 93 per cent, and more than 45 affordable homes and rooming houses were lost in North Parkdale. Barndt also noted that 90 per cent of Parkdale residents are renters, with 40 per cent either low-income residents or living on social assistance.

Some of the stories are heartrending.

[PHOTO] "Selfie-crazed tourists prevent sea turtles from nesting in Costa Rica"

Photographers like this give us all a bad name. From the CBC's Lauren O'Neill:

If you're thinking of taking a few days to do some ecotourism in Costa Rica during your next vacation down south, the country's government has a message for you: Please be respectful.

Officials from the Costa Rican Ministry of Environment and Energy have been speaking out in recent weeks against snap-happy visitors who they say are interfering with the nesting habits of a vulnerable sea turtle species by attempting to take selfies with them.

According to San José-based newspaper The Tico Times, hundreds of tourists swarmed a seven-kilometre stretch of Ostional Beach on Costa Rica's Pacific coast earlier this month to watch a large group of olive ridley sea turtles come ashore and lay their eggs.

[. . .]

Since the population of olive ridleys continues to decline (there are 50 per cent fewer of these turtles than there were in the 1960s,) conservation officials take any sort of interference with their ability to reproduce seriously.

Mobs of tourists who stomp around, try to take selfies with, and even pick up nesting olive ridley sea turtles are one such type of interference.

The Environment Ministry's workers union reported in a Sept. 8 post on its Facebook page that "hundreds of tourists stood in the way of the turtles" during one of their most recent mass nesting sessions, prompting many turtles to leave the beach without laying any eggs.

[URBAN NOTE] "Affordable housing and the future of London as a creative city"

Our Democracy hosts an essay by one George Context arguing that the increasing unaffordability of housing makes London increasingly inaccessible for artists and other creative types. This argument, I note, is applicable to other world cities.

The question of how to mitigate, let alone solve, the problem of London’s cost-of-breathing crisis, sorry, cost-of-living crisis seems inescapable, like a perverse and all too real Millennium Prize Problem. It appears as though we have bound so far down an economic cul-de-sac, justified on the quasi-religious neo-classical truths of supply and demand and global competition, that advertising a £450,000 one bedroom flat as ‘ideal for first time buyers or as a pied-à-terre’ is apparently perfectly acceptable. The problems this plight presents are real and well discussed – homelessness, families evicted by unscrupulous buy-to-let landlords (who are perhaps second only to investment bankers in the UKs Most Despised Persons list), and overcrowding. What estate agents gleefully herald as ‘gentrification’, the newly elected Labour leader evocatively decries as ‘ethnic cleansing’. However, I want to consider this housing crisis from an alternative perspective, one informed as much by my career as a musician as it is by my academic desire to understand the operation, and consequences of, contemporary creative markets in urban contexts. I want to question the cultural ramifications of this housing crisis; the artistic implications of a farcical situation whereby, for example, Help to Buy is required by magic-circle lawyers - as per a great friend of mine recently. In short, what does the housing crisis mean for art, and for the future of London as a creative city?

Jeremy Corbyn’s recent election as leader of the Labour Party has, for the first time for many young voters, made the ideological distinctions between the two leading parties in Britain reassuringly apparent. When one strips away the policy detail and the White Papers and the Select Committee’s and the noise of political detail, the most salient opposition lies in conflicting perspectives about the dreaded, Marx-tainted ‘C’ word; capitalism. Osborne’s neo-liberal belief that markets, supply and demand and competition, are corrective, self-rectifying and have a morality of their own – don’t worry about the subjugation of the cost of labour globally, lets remove tax credits under the auspices of ‘if you don’t earn enough money, get another job’ - versus Corbyn and McDonnell’s interventionism. Nowhere is this ideology more apparent than in the sphere of housing. Labour’s pre-election ‘solutions’ involved ‘use it or lost it’ powers being given to councils, ensuring new homes would be advertised to UK citizens first, and rent controls in the private sector, and whilst Corbyn has not outlined his policy suggestions as yet, his commitment to council house building is well-known. The flagship Conservative policy however was not to challenge a failing marketplace, but to invest ever greater faith in that marketplace by selling off council housing stock under their ‘Right to Buy’ scheme; a perverse, free-marketeers Escherian Penrose stairs whereby the marketplace engenders a crisis, and simultaneously the solution. Friedman himself would applaud. The bottom line is, faith in the market is great for business; Foxton’s share price opened over 10% up the day after the general election buoyed by a confidence that prices would continue to rise. In this context however, as house prices in London continue their dizzying spiral, what will happen as those who struggle to earn large salaries become priced out of the city?

The rich don’t create culture. Grayson Perry nailed it. And people will, at some point say, ‘you know what, it’s not worth me breaking my neck to pay 2/3’s of my meagre salary to live in a dystopian, industrial wilderness 45 minutes from London’ and just leave. The question is, what will remain from this nihilistic apathy amongst artists, whether they be the graduate Pips who have left their parochial forges to follow a costly dream, or the native Londoners giving up on living in their home town, both of whom are having their ambition undermined by an inability to scale an insurmountable financial mountain? We will be left with some neo-Parisian fiscal apartheid with a door policy to make Mahiki look like Woodstock. As I drive down City road between Angel and Old Street and see these Manhattan-style glass-fronted cathedrals to international capital, with ‘One beds starting at £800,000’, my thoughts are often ‘I don’t want to be neighbours with anyone who can pay that’. If urban spaces cease to be creative spaces, with the time and freedom to be expressive, and to both build and pull-apart culture, then what do they become?

Some may say 'so what' if artists are priced out? The logic of the supply and demand of housing is almost beautiful in its simplicity – demand is high as everyone wants to live in London, and supply is low. Simples. Besides, the economic use-value of some bloke splattering paint on a wall in Shoreditch, or rapping about Norwich from a flat in Hammersmith (humble plug there), is at best negligible and at worst unquantifiable. However, this entire attitude is, I think, the crux of this current problem.

We live in an age where cultural expression is an economic inconvenience; a use-value-free indulgence. The UK Film Council doesn’t even exist anymore. This utilitarian idea that everything needs to be ‘useful’ is utterly tiresome. University is an exemplary contemporary illustration of this. I spent nine years at University and I never spent a single day there thinking about a ‘job’ or how I could ‘use’ a degree. But maybe this was a generational fortuity - the year I went was the year before ‘top-up’ fees were introduced, and so while I paid nothing, the next-year people paid over £3,000. And of course now, sickeningly, £9,000. For this money, students expect ‘something’. I don’t blame the students one bit. I’ve deviated, but the two parts of this argument are aligned. Use-value, and money, and supply and demand are all well and good, but the market distorts, and almost everyone in the UK implicitly acknowledges this. After all, we say ‘there’s no place for the market in the NHS’ - we don’t really know why we think this, but we know this to be true. Yet, when it comes to housing in London, the market appears to be being trusted by the Tories, the ring masters of a circus propped up by an aging electorate; a teacher I once knew quite casually told me ‘I’d vote for Hitler if it meant house prices would continue to rise’.

[URBAN NOTE] "Is Puebla like Bogotá? The geography of drug trafficking in Mexico"

Fernando Montiel Tiscareño at Open Democracy describes how the Mexican city of Puebla now, like the Colombia city of Bogotá two decades ago, is being transformed by the money and the violence associated with the drug trade.

Some time ago, a Colombian citizen pointed out something to me: “Puebla is like Bogotá thirty years ago”. How is that? I asked him. “Just like Puebla today, thirty years ago Bogotá was full of investments and investors, housing developments and luxury cars, and only later did we realize that it was drug trafficking”. This conversation took place seven years ago.

My conversation partner knew what he was talking about. He knew what it was like to live with the multiple facets and time frames of violence: first come opulence, growth, development, and a rich, full, cosmopolitan life; then, decadence and hell. A family member of his had been blackmailed; another had suffered a kidnapping attempt. In the end, he and his relatives abandoned all hope, and left the country. This is how they came to Puebla.

“They need a place to live. It’s not so hard to understand”. This is not my Colombian friend any more, but a sturdy man who speaks naturally about the subject. He is an expert, a life-long security professional. He measures his words: “If the border is where the business is, in Tamaulipas, in Mexico City, and now in Veracruz, they’re not going to live there. They need a different, quiet place, such as Puebla”, he says with a wicked smile on his face.

But not everyone thinks the same. Whatever my Colombian friend would have said and the security professional would admit, is now being refuted by an automobile dealer: “That’s not the reason. What is happening is that they’re coming here from the southeast to buy cars, because there’s nothing over there. I’m talking about Veracruz, Campeche, Yucatán, Chiapas, Oaxaca”. It sounds logical.

But is it really so unbearable to wait for a couple of extra hours to bring a Ferrari from Avenida Masarik in Polanco (an affluent district in Mexico City) that it is worth opening up a dealership in Puebla? Those who come from a wealthy lineage do know their peers. And knowing one of them, it is relatively easy to access information on the others. They are not many, not all of them are buying ultra luxury cars, and when they do so, they are not buying many units. So, if they are not the buyers, who is?

[LINK] "This Tower Purifies a Million Cubic Feet of Air an Hour"

Wired's Liz Stinson notes the actual deployment in the Netherlands of what fans of science fiction would call an atmosphere processor.

There’s a massive vacuum cleaner in the middle of a Rotterdam park and it’s sucking all the smog out of the air. A decent portion of it, anyway. And it isn’t a vacuum, exactly. It looks nothing like a Dyson or a Hoover. It’s probably more accurate to describe it as the world’s largest air purifier.

The Smog Free Tower, as it’s called, is a collaboration between Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde, Delft Technology University researcher Bob Ursem, and European Nano Solutions, a green tech company in the Netherlands. The metal tower, nearly 23 feet tall, can purify up to 1 million cubic feet of air every hour. To put that in perspective, the Smog Free Tower would need just 10 hours to purify enough air to fill Madison Square Garden. “When this baby is up and running for the day you can clean a small neighborhood,” says Roosegaarde.

It does this by ionizing airborne smog particles. Particles smaller than 10 micrometers in diameter (about the width of a cotton fiber) are tiny enough to inhale and can be harmful to the heart and lungs. Ursem, who has been researching ionization since the early 2000s, says a radial ventilation system at the top of the tower (powered by wind energy) draws in dirty air, which enters a chamber where particles smaller than 15 micrometers are given a positive charge. Like iron shavings drawn to a magnet, the the positively charged particles attach themselves to a grounded counter electrode in the chamber. The clean air is then expelled through vents in the lower part of the tower, surrounding the structure in a bubble of clean air. Ursem notes that this process doesn’t produce ozone, like many other ionic air purifiers, because the particles are charged with positive voltage rather than a negative.

“The proposed technology, while not new, would need to be well demonstrated on a large scale in a highly polluted urban area,” says Eileen McCauley, a manager in the California Air Resources Board’s research division. She adds that there are concerns around efficacy and logistics like how often something like this would need to be cleaned. But Ursem himself has used the same technique in hospital purification systems, parking garages, and along roadsides. Still the tower is by far the biggest and prettiest application of his technology.

[LINK] "Canadian newspaper tries radical experiment with iTunes-style micropayments"

CBC News' Don Pittis reports on this experiment by the Winnipeg Free Press.

Despite its name, regular readers of the Winnipeg Free Press can no longer see articles for free.

Paywalls are nothing new in the world of online newspapers, but this summer, the "Freep," as it is affectionately known, introduced a method of charging for online "print" media that everyone thought was dead: micropayments.

After a free trial period of one month, anyone interested in reading the Free Press has two choices. As with other papers, readers can buy a subscription at the standard rates.

Or, they can do something regular daily newspaper readers have never been able to do before. They can pay a one-time fee for the individual article they want to read.

"There are all these readers out there who want to read what we have," says Free Press publisher Bob Cox.

"You go to Amazon, you buy one at a time. You go to the Apple iTunes store, you buy one at a time. This is the method people use online for purchasing things."

[LINK] On recovering unique grape variants and developing their wines

Andrea Vogt at The Telegraph wrote an interesting article syndicated to the National Post about the efforts of scientists to preserve endangered grape populations.

High on a windswept hillside on the Sicilian island of Pantelleria, vineyard workers are carefully harvesting a variety of Zibibbo grapes from vines at risk of extinction.

Also known as Muscat of Alexandria, because it is thought to have originated in the Egyptian city, the grape is used to make Passito wines, some of Italy’s most prized dessert wines.

For the past five years, scientists have been searching remote outposts across the Mediterranean basin for endangered strains of this ancient vine, carefully removing vines from overgrown estates and remote mountain tops in Spain, Italy, Greece and France and cultivating them on test plots on Pantelleria.

This month, the first fruits of their labour are being harvested from 2,117 vines scattered across the remote volcanic island, where the grape cultivation techniques used to produce Passito were inscribed last year on Unesco’s world heritage list.

“These biotypes are at risk of disappearing across the Mediterranean, but we believe that with careful cultivation, their genetic patrimony can help us enhance existing and new Zibibbo wines,” said the project’s lead scientist Attilo Scienza, professor of viticulture at the University of Milan.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• blogTO notes that the Toronto Eaton Centre is set to be subtly renamed.


• Centauri Dreams notes the absence of evidence for extragalactic supercivilizations.


• The Dragon's Gaze observes a new observatory that should be able to detect Earth-like worlds around red dwarfs and links to a paper describing how dwarf planets can heat Kuiper belts.


• The Dragon's Tales notes evidence suggesting the solar system could have ejected a gas giant, notes Canada is on the verge of buying French Mistrals, and looks at a blockade of Crimea by Crimean Tatars and right-wing Ukrainian nationalists.


• Language Hat links to John McWhorter's history of Aramaic.


• Language Log looks at the controversy in South Korea on using Chinese characters in education.


• Languages of the World looks at how different languages address god.


• The Planetary Society Blog notes the current state of our knowledge and planning for Uranus and Neptune.


• pollotenchegg maps language identity in early Soviet Ukraine.


• The Power and the Money speculates as to why Russia is in Syria, and comes up with little that is reassuring.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes statistics on Muslim pilgrimages to Mecca.


• Spacing Toronto suggests that an answer to the Gardiner East can be found in the rail corridor.


• Window on Eurasia looks at the Russian deployment in Syria, speculates about future intentions in Central Asia and actual issues with Belarus, and suggests a turn to China will not help Asian Russia.


• Zero Geogrpahy maps the generation of academic knowledge.

[DM] "On Joe Daniel, Syrian refugees, Eurabia, and the Canadian elections"

I have a brief post at Demography Matters noting the dip of Toronto MP Joe Daniel into Eurabian conspiracy theories. At least, I conclude, the embrace of nativist and xenophobic myths by immigrants shows that integration is working. (Ha ha.)