[PHOTO] Walking the Green Line, Toronto

The title of the Jane's Walk "Walk the Green Line: Infrastructures of Park Space" refers to the Green Line, a proposal to transform the chain of parkettes and green hydro corridors stretching southeast from Earlscourt Park almost to Dupont into a single linear park. Walk leaders Hon Lu and Netami Stuart did a great job of explaining the nature of the project, the challenges of park design in an era of environmental and political sensitivity, and the history of the neighbourhoods we went through.

Earlscourt Park can be quite beautiful.



Following the hydro towers as we were, we obviously could not escape them. I was glad, since I'm also fond of their artificial metallic beauty.



The Green Line proposal was explained by a report that the walk leaders were kind enough to hand around.



For whatever reason, there were plenty of dogwood trees planted in the corridor, blooming as if for us.



We were a good-sized crowd.



This odd ground-level footbridge, we were told, was built to minimize the contact of people with contaminated land. In old industrial neighbourhoods like western Davenport, the costs of environmental remediation can be significant.



On the east side of Dufferin, opposite Chandos Park, lies this narrow path between hydro transformers. The Green Line narrows here.



The far side of this path broadens out into a grassy space that looks suspiciously park-like.



This willow, swollen with age, towers over the Bristol Avenue Parkette.

[OBSCURA] The Surrealist Map of the World, 1929

I first encountered this map via a passing reference in Splendid Isolation: Art of Easter Island, an exhibition catalogue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that noted the import of Easter Island's traditional art for surrealists.



The distortions of this map are huge. The archipelagos of the Pacific are hugely enlarged and located at the centre of the world, while the Queen Charlotte Islands blockade the northwestern coast of North America, Africa and India are shrunken, and Paris clings to the western coast of a Europe dominated by Germany and Austria-Hungary. (The map, I should note, was published well after the First World War.) The genesis of the map was explored by Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps.

[T]he title of this work is Surrealist Map of the World. It first appeared in 1929 in a special issue of ‘Variétés’, a Belgian magazine, dedicated to surrealism – an art form remembered for its absurdity, but less for its political views.

In discussing this map in her excellent book You Are Here, Katharine Harmon quotes a Surrealist manifesto from 1925:

“Even more than patriotism – which is a quite commonplace sort of hysteria, though emptier and shorter-lived than most – we are disgusted by the idea of belonging to a country at all, which is the most bestial and least philosophic of the concepts to which we are all subjected.. Wherever Western civilization is dominant, all human contact has disappeared, except contact from which money can be made – payment in hard cash.”

At Jacket2, Dee Morris and Stephen Voyce go into detail about the genesis of the map.

By the early 1920s, many of the Dadaists had moved on from their former centers of activity in Zurich, New York, Berlin, and elsewhere, while Paris had once again become a hotbed of artistic activity. The Surrealist Map of the World first appeared in a special issue of the Belgian periodical Variétés in 1929. “Le Surréalisme en 1929” featured works by René Crevel, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, and André Breton alongside Belgian writers and artists Paul Nougé, E. L. T. Mesens, and others.

Denis Wood suggests that Éluard likely made the map. In 1924 he had toured Southeast Asia and parts of Indochina, where he encountered appalling colonial violence committed by Dutch and French powers. Wood explains that “Éluard had recorded his route on a map, Les Cinq Parties du Monde, Planisphère, Comprenant toutes les Possessions Coloniales, a classic of the era that displayed, on a Mercator projection, English colonial possessions in yellow, French in pink, Dutch in orange, Italian in mauve, and so on” (199). If Wood is correct that maps “blossom in the springtime of the State” (15), then the counter-map’s first appearance in the early 20th-century avant-gardes announces an unequivocally anti-colonial project.

A short piece by Sigmund Freud, entitled “L’Humour,” offers an especially fitting introduction to the Surrealists’ hallucinatory redux of the Mercator projection. Humor, we are told, “is not resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies not only the triumph of the ego but also of the pleasure principle, which is able here to assert itself against the unkindness of the real circumstances” (163). The passage illustrates why an entry on humor should launch a “petite contribution au dossier de certains intellectuels a tendances revolutionnaires” (Variétés, Table of Contents). For humor renders absurd what the map purports to offer as an unproblematic representation of the real.

If the Surrealist map is a subjective projection (anticipating memory maps like Jake Barton’s City of Memory and Tim Roeskens’s Videomappings: Aida, Palestine), then one should dutifully recall that, of course, any 3D projection of a sphere onto a 2D plane distorts scale, shape, and other essential metric properties of maps. For instance, many variants of the Mercator projection make it seem that Europe is approximately the size of South America or that Greenland approaches the size of Africa. (In actuality, South America is twice the size of Europe, while Africa is more than ten times Greenland’s size. Interested readers might compare the Mercator’s use in nautical exploration to the Peters projection of land distribution for a clearer picture of things.) If maps are arguments, then there are certainly many of them. One reporter for the Geography periodical Directions Magazine complains: “Mercator projections present a surrealistic view of the world that makes them inappropriate choices for use in classrooms”!

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• The Dragon's Gaze notes an observation of bright star HD 76582 that may have turned up indirect evidence of planets.


• The Dragon's Tales notes a study claiming that climate change will trigger large-scale migrations.


• Joe. My. God. notes controversy in North Carolina over the demand for a rapid repeal of HB2.


• Language Log shares a paper taking an Aristotlean approach to trolling.


• The Map Room Blog shares the first global topographic map of Mercury.


• Marginal Revolution notes that Donald Trump voters are relatively well off.


• Personal Reflections touches on the decline of Sydney's last Chinese market gardens.


• Savage Minds makes the case for boycotting Israel academic institutions on the grounds of their collaboration with the denial of education to Palestinians.


• Window on Eurasia notes that Russia's cults of victories are used to justify almost anything.


• Arnold Zwicky looks at the interesting gay graphic novel Shirtlifter.

[NEWS] Some Monday links

• Bloomberg notes two former British intelligence chiefs saying that the United Kingdom is safer within the European Union than without, wonders if Saudi Arabia will be able to accept the economic shocks involved in transitioning away from oil, suggests South Australia could profit hugely from storing nuclear waste, and shares one journalist's experiences inside North Korea.


• Via The Dragon's Tales, I came across this Gizmag article reporting on a Dutch family living in a greenhouse.


• The Inter Press Service notes controversies surrounding transnational humanitarianism.


• The National Post wonders what non-endorsements of Trump by prominent members of the Republican Party will do to this institution.


• Open Democracy writes about the ongoing revolution in gender relations in the Syrian Kurdish enclave of Rojava.


• Wired reports on Sweden's ongoing transition away from cash to a completely digital economy.

[URBAN NOTE] On the planned redesign of the Galleria Mall at Dufferin and Dupont

I will have a photoblog performance tomorrow morning, including various of the photos I took on the Galleria Mall Jane's Walk yesterday. I quite enjoyed this walk, and also considered myself informed about the future of the neighbourhood. blogTO shared, from Stefan Novakovic at Urban Toronto, a description of the proposed redevelopment of the area. The below view is from the perspective of an observer at Dufferin and Dupont.

Despite numerous pronouncements of the end of the Galleria Mall when the property was sold to developers Freed and ELAD Canada last August, not much has changed at the site in the interim. The plan was never to buy the shopping centre and tear it down the next day.

On the contrary, the redevelopment process always figured to be a slow one given the size and complexity of site. The first public consultation was held in January before a second session this past week. In this time, a few priorities and some very early renderings have taken shape.

First posted by Urban Toronto, the artist concept drawings of the redevelopment don't show the actual designs for the mall's replacement, but serve to help imagine what revitalization might look like. What's important to note here is the presence of woonerfs, outdoor public space, a revamped Wallace-Emerson Park and Community Centre, and the scale of the residential buildings.

It goes without saying this would be a huge transformation. Thoughts, Torontonians and others?

[URBAN NOTE] "Reflecting on My Immigration to Toronto, Through Film"

Moroccan-born Torontonian describes how Natasha, about a Russian Jewish immigrant family in Toronto, speaks to her experiences of assimilation and personal transformation.

I met the Bermans more than 10 years ago in a fiction-writing workshop. It was my first semester at Concordia University in Montreal, and I was always overdressed for those early fall days—evidence that not too long ago, I was accustomed to living under an African sun. Halfway through the semester, as an example of ethnic literature, my professor introduced our class to the short story collection Natasha and Other Stories. The writer, David Bezmozgis, was a rising young Canadian author, and the collection was his first successful published book (it was nominated for the Governor General’s Award, and went on to win the Toronto Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for First Book—it became a bestseller).

In the collection, the Bermans—husband and wife Roman and Bella and their son Mark—move to Toronto in 1980 from Latvia, then still an entity of the Soviet Union, to begin their lives as Canadian immigrants. They experiment with the English language, with the North American way of doing business (Roman struggles as a massage therapist, taking on odd temporary jobs he was not trained for), with love in the suburbs in a home they can eventually afford to purchase. They move forward balancing a deeply entrenched Russian identity with the expectations of integration—often with awkward and uncomfortable results.

Although the seven stories that live in Natasha and Other Stories revolve around their specific immigration and assimilation experience as a Jewish Russian family, I—a Muslim Arab from Morocco—connected with the earnest aspirations of its characters. I felt a warm sense of belonging, a sudden surge of hope. With the Bermans, I was less alone.

[. . .]

Having been “Americanized” during my pre-university years at the Rabat American School in Morocco did nothing to prepare me for the cultural dislocation I experienced when I first came to Canada. It was an illumination to my silly ignorance to discover that Canadians are actually not at all like Americans, and that moving to another country is not at all like travelling.

Growing up in Morocco, I was a conflicted teenager: I was naturally extroverted, but would often turn down social gatherings in favour of reading books from abroad in my room. Looking back now, I understand that I was an artist at heart awkwardly looking to forge an identity in the arts while aunts, uncles, and friends of the family would insist I get up at weddings and belly-dance like the rest of the women (I still don’t know how to belly-dance). I decided to forge a career in the world of words in an English-speaking country. My late father was thrilled that I wanted more than to find a good Moroccan husband.

The things you learn.

[URBAN NOTE] "Huskies and Hoops": Torontoist on Toronto's first basketball team

Torontoist reposted a 2010 essay by Jamie Bradburn looking at how Toronto very briefly had its own basketball team just after the Second World War.

Given that basketball was invented by a native of the Great White North, perhaps the fates were at work when the first game of the league that would become the National Basketball Association was played in Toronto on November 1, 1946. That distinction would be one of the few highlights of the short existence of the Toronto Huskies. Poor personnel decisions, a problematic star attraction, and lousy gate receipts all proceeded to sink big-time basketball before it could establish itself in Toronto.

Toronto seemed like an odd choice to set up a pro franchise. While amateur games were found in city schoolyards, the passion and infrastructure for college hoops was nowhere near the growing popularity the sport saw in the United States. What Toronto possessed was a large arena, Maple Leaf Gardens, which belonged to the Arena Managers Association of America (AMAA). The association, which included all NHL rinks except the Montreal Forum and a healthy chunk of venues for American Hockey League teams, was approached by promoters looking for suitable arenas to launch a basketball league that would cover more large cities than existing pro leagues. While both the American Basketball League and the National Basketball League saw their business perk up after World War II, their powerhouse franchises were located in metropolises like Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Oshkosh, Wisconsin. It was hoped that the Basketball Association of America (BAA) would draw crowds on nights where the usual hockey tenants were off the ice.

For a star attraction, the Huskies signed “Big” Ed Sadowski to the fattest contract in the league—$10,000. Sadowski had been a collegiate star for Seton Hall nearly a decade earlier and, if the choice had been up to him, he would have preferred to play near his alma mater and home in New Jersey for the New York Knicks after a few seasons in the Midwest in the NBL. When Knicks coach Neil Cohalan decided to go with a young squad, Sadowski pinned his hopes on receiving a call from the Boston Celtics, where his college coach Honey Russell was in charge. The phone never rang, so he settled for Toronto’s offer, which also included coaching duties. According to Charley Rosen’s chronicle of the first season of the BAA, The First Tip-Off, Sadowski figured coaching would be a breeze: “All he had to do was make substitutions, tell everyone to pass him the ball, and chew their asses whenever they lost.”

Huskies business director Lew Hayman gave Sadowski free reign over personnel decisions, which led the playing coach to recruit a lineup consisting mostly of Seton Hall alumni who lived near him. He was obliged to sign some Canadian talent to keep local fans happy, so six players were given tryouts to compete for two spots. The winners were two players from Windsor, Hank Biasatti (a star at Assumption University, the forerunner to the University of Windsor) and Gino Sovran (who had played sparingly for the University of Detroit).

[URBAN NOTE] On "What Toronto Might Look Like in 2050"

blogTO's Derek Flack had a nice post imagining the sorts of ways Toronto might develop by 2050, setting down some basic parameters about things needing to be done.

TRANSIT
Aside from projects already on the books (e.g. the Spadina extension, Eglinton Crosstown, Finch West LRT, Sheppard East LRT, and whatever replaces the Scarborough RT), Toronto really needs to expand its rapid transit network. The three most likely additions by 2050 are a Downtown/Yonge Relief Line, Waterfront LRT, and some version of John Tory's SmartTrack.

POPULATION
Yes, there will be a lot more people here in 2050. Toronto's population could reach 4 million people, while the GTA will be pushing towards 10 million. It's no joke when urban planners speak of the need to address transit and infrastructure needs now as the trends show almost alarming rates of growth in the absence of appropriate sustainability measures.

Toronto 2050DEVELOPMENT
The city will continue to become more dense, but the most stark visible change will surely be the development of major areas like the Lower Don and Port Lands. 300 metre towers will be common around busy transit hubs, and condos will finally push into Parkdale. The once-quiet stretch of Dupont will be a major residential corridor just as south Etobicoke's population will spike with a new LRT.

COMPLETE STREETS
Those interested in urban planning should keep very close tabs on Eglinton Avenue right now. LRT construction has given rise to the Eglinton Connects project, which is a major effort towards rethinking the design of our streets. Expect our streets to focus more and more on pedestrians and cyclists over the next few decades as development intensifies.

Toronto 2050THE GARDINER
Will this thing still be standing in 2050? I'll go out on a limb and say that a future mayor is smart enough to see the potential in tearing it down and pursuing further development east along the city's waterfront. It will take a bold vision, but should this concrete relic still define our lakefront in 35 years?

This is a good approach, the only good way to approach futurology sensibly. It's just also important to note that, sometimes, people will not do the things that need to be done. The stagnation dominating Toronto's transit system over the past two decades despite a growing need for efficient mass transit comes to mind. Sometimes, people are less rational than you'd expect, and can derail things efficiently.

[URBAN NOTE] "These unbuilt streets almost changed Toronto entirely"

In a well-illustrated post, blogTO's Derek Flack goes through a listing of various street projects that never went through. It's terribly tempting to imagine any number of alternate histories. What if there was a Vimy Circle, or a Spadina Expressway? How would the city look now?

Toronto has a robust archive of scrapped projects that would have dramatically changed the city, from abandoned transit lines to soaring skyscrapers. Some of the most intriguing entries in our unbuilt legacy, however, are streets and highways.

The road grid in this city is far less static than one might imagine, even if some of the most grandiose ideas for changing it were ultimately shelved.

Perhaps the most dramatic of these plans was for Vimy Circle, a roundabout that would have been located at the intersection of University and Richmond. At the centre of this grand circle city planners envisioned a war memorial and public space.

In fact, Vimy Circle was one of a number of plans in 1929 to alter the Toronto road map in a major way. Planners at the time complained that the city was "not providing any open spaces, or the beautifying in any considered way of the downtown business area."

Cambrai AvenueAs such, another grand thoroughfare was proposed under the name Cambrai Avenue. Plans for a street here went back a while, but construction of new buildings in the early 1920s thwarted the route of what was then known as Federal Avenue.

[ISL] On how the end of the Prince Edward Island ban on abortion shows the decline of the old PEI

On the 25th of March, when abortion on Prince Edward Island was still a contentious essay, the Everyday Sociology Blog featured an essay by social scientist Teresa Irene Gonzales. In "Spatial Inequity and Access to Abortion", Gonzales noted how some American state governments tried to regulate abortion out of existence indirectly, by cutting down the number of abortion clinics as much as possible and forcing women seeking abortion to travel great distances, ideally prohibitive distances.

Abortion and women's access to abortion are often contested issues within the United States. A recent poll by Pew Research found that 51% of Americans think that abortions should be legal in all or most cases. Yet, 49% of Americans polled think having an abortion is morally wrong. How does this difference in legality and morality impact legal decisions?

Have you heard about the Texas abortion regulations case? In 2013, the Texas solicitor general passed an omnibus abortion bill (HB2) that places additional restrictions on abortion providers. Regulations include requiring doctors to obtain hospital admitting privileges within 30 miles from the clinic where they perform abortions, and requiring abortion clinics to be retrofitted to comply with building regulations that would make them ambulatory surgical centers.

The impact of these bills on women's health has been immediate. Since the passing of HB2, 900,000 women now live farther than 150 miles from an abortion provider and 750,000 live farther than 200 miles; 11 of 33 abortion clinics closed; and wait times have increased. In addition, according to researchers at the Texas Policy Evaluation Project (TxPEP), the number of physicians who provide abortions across the state fell from 48 to 28.

The restriction of a woman's right to access either reproductive health and/or abortion care exacerbates issues of spatial inequality and isolation. In Texas, women are faced with potentially long travel times, barriers to finding a culturally competent doctor and/or a doctor that speaks the patient's language, and increased costs (time off work, transportation, childcare, healthcare and prescriptions) to accessing reproductive healthcare. This is particularly onerous for impoverished women, women of color, immigrant women, and those who reside in more rural areas.

This fits exactly the historic policy of Prince Edward Island re: abortion, as I described in February in "#heywade, @iamkarats, Anne of Green Gables, and the future of Prince Edward Island". Starting in 1982, religious conservatives prevented abortions from occurring in the province's health facilities, requiring women seeking abortion to leave the province. As Prince Edward Island is, in fact, an island, this imposes significant costs indeed. That Island women seeking abortions also had to get referrals was another hurdle imposed.



This ban was famously been rescinded on the 31st, just a few days after Gonzalez' article was published. That this happened is in no small part because of a brilliant public relations campaign that used the image of Anne Shirley, of Green Gables fame to mobilize opinion against the ban. That the Island also faced an impending lawsuit, as noted in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, doubtless played into things.

[Premier Wade MacLauchlan] noted that the government was unlikely to win the lawsuit launched by Abortion Access Now PEI Inc. That suit contended that the government’s policy contravened the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and that its purpose “is to advance a particular conception of morality and to restrict access to abortion as a socially undesirable or immoral practice.” The pro-choice group filed a notice of litigation in January that required a response from the government within 90 days.

The government’s decision to provide abortions on PEI will do more than ensure timely and safe access to this health service; it will reduce the stigma associated with abortion on the island, says Ann Wheatley, cochair of Abortion Access Now PEI. “The policy of the government not to allow abortions to be performed in the province has for the past 30 years conveyed a message that there was something wrong, even sinister, about the procedure. It had the effect of stigmatizing abortion, and causing women to feel ashamed and fearful.”

No abortions have been performed in PEI since 1982. They are offered out of province at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a referral from a PEI physician, or at the Moncton Hospital in New Brunswick, where no referral is necessary. The latter option is relatively new. MacLauchlan made arrangements with the Moncton facility shortly after he was elected in May 2015. Women do not have to pay for the cost of out-of-province abortion services, but they must pay for their own travel, accommodation and other related expenses.

It made the news in Britain's The Guardian, and it made a proportionally bigger splash in The Guardian of Charlottetown. The news coverage in the latter has been particularly interesting to read, as pro-abortion Islanders celebrate and anti-abortion Islanders mourn. I'm in the former camp, as it happens. I'm particularly interested in how the abortion services will apparently be folded into a new women's reproductive health centre, one that will also provide more pre- and post-natal care for pregnant women, one that might integrate midwives into the service, and so on. Women's health, and reproductive health, are now specific priorities of the provincial health system.

I'm personally inclined to see the decline of old Prince Edward Island and its integration into a new modernized world. Premier Wade MacLauchlan is openly gay; the Island's economy is kept afloat by tourists' money, primary industries continuing their long slide; immigration is playing an increasingly important role in the province's population; cultural urbanization is proceeding apace. The old Prince Edward Island, self-consciously conservative and traditional and homogeneous and quietly repressive is almost dead. In its place is a new Island where old norms and the old exceptionalism are increasingly irrelevant. The Island is becoming a place not very different from the rest of Canada.

For a variety of reasons, including personal reasons, I think this a good thing. Doubtless others--including others on the Island--disagree. I wonder what sort of political dynamic this cultural shift will drive in the decades ahead.