[CAT] Shakespeare, in bed

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• blogTO notes planned additions to the Eaton Centre.


• Centauri Dreams explores protocols for contact between our spacecraft and those of aliens.


• Discover's Dead Things notes the discovery of an archeological site almost 15 thousand years old off the coast of Florida.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes the roughness of Neptune's migration to its current orbit.


• The Dragon's Tales tries to explain the odd orbits of Kuiper Belt objects.


• Language Hat notes name changes in the early Soviet Union.


• Marginal Revolution reports on an abortive Soviet Internet.


• Towleroad notes new anti-gay legislation in Kyrgzystan.


• Understanding Society looks at a report on racism and riots from the 1960s.


• Window on Eurasia looks at a Russia strategist's defense of Russia's tactics versus NATO.

[NEWS] Some Saturday links

• Bloomberg notes that Alberta's oil camps are set to revive quickly and looks at Uruguay's venture onto global caviar markets.


• Bloomberg View argues that the US military buildup in Europe is unnecessary and talks about reducing urban inequality.


• CBC notes controversy over forcing women to wear high-heeled shoes and considers the import and scale of Russia's doping scandal.


• The Globe and Mail interviews prolific author James Patterson.


• MacLean's notes how the Parti Québécois' cycles of self-destruction hurt Québec's politics.


• The National Post reports of a FBI raid of an Orthodox school in New York's Kiryas Joel.


• Wired argues California's drought is likely permanent and notes the impending mass introduction of electronic paper.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Scarborough Bluffs are rarely seen — but there’s a plan to change that"

Marcus Gee's article in The Globe and Mail highlights the real problem with accessing the Scarborough Bluffs at all. I would add that accessibility is also an issue: In my trip last year to the Scarborough Bluffs, to actually get there I has to first transfer to a bus from the subway and then walk twenty minutes or so through suburbia.

The Scarborough Bluffs, now as then, are Toronto’s most striking physical feature, dramatic in a way no other part of our understated landscape can match.

As high as 90 metres, they rise from the water like cliffs in some places; in others they show deep ridges like the folds in a blanket; in others they soar to spires and pinnacles; in still others they are broken by wooded ravines and gullies.

Yet, most Torontonians never see them. It is hard to get a full view of the bluffs unless, as with Mrs. Simcoe, you go out into the lake by boat. The shore beneath them can be tricky to reach and the lands at the top hard to navigate.

They can be dangerous, too. Emergency services come out many times every year to rescue people who have been trapped on the slopes or at the base.

Conservation officials hope to change all that, making the Bluffs safer and easier to visit. They want to shore up dangerous bits, put in more trails and create habitat for wild animals and fish. A study is already under way, with a first set of options to be presented to the public next month.

It is an exciting project, a once-in-a-century chance to open up the whole of the Scarborough shore to a broader public. It is also a delicate one. Officials face the challenge of giving safe access to the Bluffs without destroying the wild quality that lend them their magic. Some people want them left alone altogether. Others want to see a continuous shoreline trail as you might have in an urban waterfront.

[URBAN NOTE] "What Busking Teaches Us About Building A Better Streetscape"

Fatima Syed's Torontoist article makes the proper case for not expelling the buskers from Yonge and Dundas.

Imagine, for a minute, Yonge and Dundas without any buskers. No jazz bands playing Maroon 5 outside the Cineplex. No Spiderman jumping from one lamp pole to the next. No chalk drawings on the pavement. No gold statue mime standing still to hip hop music.

The streets would be less alive without this art, and one of Toronto’s busiest and most animated intersections would look and feel a whole lot more grey.

Buskers, in all of their weird, talented, and sometimes annoying glory, are a defining characteristic of any major urban centre, and provide an expression of the city’s character. Losing them would mean losing part of who we are as a city.

Yet, on April 28, Kristyn Wong-Tam (Ward 27, Toronto Centre-Rosedale) tried to make those entertainers disappear from her ward when she tabled a motion to implement a moratorium on busking at two corners of Yonge and Dundas. City Council rejected the proposal in a 15-15 tie.

The outcome was welcomed by many Torontonians. Busking doesn’t just enrich the urban landscape—it also provides a platform for the arts. Had Wong-Tam’s motion passed, street performers would lose a major source of income, as Yonge and Dundas is one of the busiest public spaces in the city.

[URBAN NOTE] "An Ode to Bar Volo, Closing this September"

Torontoist's Robin LeBlanc celebrates Bar Volo, a great Italian beer bar on Yonge north of Wellesley set to be displaced in September for condo construction.

I was saddened at first to hear that the little hip beer bar at 587 Yonge Street was closing down. Bar Volo was the first craft beer bar I ever went to. A group of friends and I would head down there, order random bottles of beers that sounded good to us, and share them around the table. The staff encouraged this (as I look back on it, rather expensive) method of discovery, and were nothing short of welcoming.

In recent years, I’ve often darkened their door to have one or two pints, and just last week my father and I sat on the patio, talking about our weekend over glasses of Burdock West Coast Pilsner.

It’s hard to believe that in less than a year, that location will be rubble, making way for a rather sterile-looking condo whose character and warmth will never match what was once there.

Earlier this week, award-winning beer writer Ben Johnson confirmed that Bar Volo, the much-loved and respected craft beer bar that has been operating on the corner of Yonge and Dundonald Streets for more than 28 years, will be closing its doors in six months.

The beautiful old building that houses Bar Volo and its neighbours is slated to be torn down to make way for — what else — condos. Last month, Cresford Developments — the company behind Vox on Yonge and Wellesley, Clover on Yonge, and Casa III in Yorkville — received approval by City Council for the development of a 44-storey tower, which will include more than 528 residential units and 232 parking spaces.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Don Mills Safety Village taught kids to drive"

Chris Bateman at Spacing Toronto details an unusual effort in the 1960s to try to get young Torontonians accustomed to the rules of the road.

Plans for the Don Mills Safety Village were revealed to the public in February, 1963. A $5,000 model town was to be built in the parking lot of the Don Mills shopping centre. It would include miniature plywood buildings, realistic streets with functioning traffic lights, and little battery-powered cars.

When it opened a few months later, the village consisted of five streets, two houses, eight stores, a service station, bank, schoolhouse, and church. The electric cars were replaced with pedal-powered alternatives, perhaps as a cost saving measure, but no expense was spared on the design of the roads.

The 780 square metre site—touted as the only one of its kind in the country—had functioning crosswalks, stop signs, and almost 200 metres of painted yellow and white roadway.

“No one expects a child to understand all the intricacies of traffic problems,” said Inspector Charles Pearsall from the Metropolitan Police traffic safety bureau. “But the age they learn to walk is the age they should be getting acquainted with the basic safety rules.”

Kids were taught how to understand basic crossing signals and react in potentially dangerous circumstances. If a ball rolled into the street, for example, officers told the youngsters not to run out after it. The curriculum also included advice on how to safely wait for and board the school bus.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto Botanical Gardens is a metropolis of plants, animals and insects"

Why did I not know of the Toronto Botanical Gardens before now? Thanks to Shawn Micallef in the Toronto Star for alerting me to the existence of the place.

Trinity Bellwoods Park has its famous white squirrel, making rare appearances shared delightedly on social media, a kind of urban badge one achieves in downtown Toronto. However, the Toronto Botanical Gardens (TBG) in North York may have the city’s friendliest squirrel, who stands on his hind legs with his hands clasped together, plaintively looking you in the eye.

“Go away, Freddie,” says Paul Zammit, sighing. “People have been feeding him.”

Zammit is the director of horticulture at the TBG, and as he surveys the site he points out squirrels, hawks, ground hogs and mouselike voles that make their home among the 3,600 different kinds of plants he cares for.

“Gardens are opportunity,” says Zammit, wandering between planting beds, naming off dozens of different kinds. “A garden isn’t just esthetic, there’s an opportunity to educate.”

Bees are one way to educate. On site there is both a “bee hotel” and collection of hives they call a pollinator garden. Zammit explains many bees don’t sting, nor do many produce honey, but they are integral to the garden’s biodiversity. Apart from Zammit, there is only one full time and one seasonal gardener to take care of all of this, but 40 volunteer gardeners also pitch in.

[URBAN NOTE] "Why it's time for Canada to get on board with Eurovision"

The Toronto Star's Karen Fricker makes the case for Canada to sign up for the Eurovision Song Contest. If Australia did, why not?

It’s one of the most successful live TV entertainment programs in the world, which this year will reach an estimated 200 million viewers. Europeans have been love-hating it for six decades, Australia’s got skin in the game and for the first time this year it’s being screened live in the U.S.A., featuring a live performance by Justin Timberlake.

It’s time for Canada to get on board with the Eurovision Song Contest.

Founded in 1956, Eurovision is an annual competition to choose the best pop song in Europe and the granddaddy of all TV song contest formats. What makes it unique is that it’s a contest of nations, with broadcasters from participating countries sending along three-minute original pop songs.

[. . .]

Knowledge of the contest thus far in Canada is limited, despite the fact Céline Dion won in 1988 (artists don’t need to hail from the country for which they perform, so she won for Switzerland, singing “Ne Partez Pas Sans Moi”).

[. . .]

“There tends to be a definitive concentration of interest in the contest within specific communities in Toronto, primarily European immigrants and the LGBTQ community,” says Slavisa Mijatovic, a Bosnia and Herzegovina-born fan who wrote his MA thesis at York University about the ways in which migrants engage with Eurovision.

Watching the contest and cheering for the home country allows migrants to keep in touch with roots and traditions, while allowing gay spectators to engage with LGBTQ communities around the world, “which are getting more and more interconnected,” Mijatovic observes.

[URBAN NOTE] "Jane Jacobs was wrong"

Last weekend was all about Jane Jacobs--the Jane at Home exhibit, the Jane's Walks. This weekend, I'm linking to Noel Maurer's criticism of Jacobs' thought over at The Power and the Money. It is thorough.

Jacobs was truthy. She made claims about social cohesion coming from architecture for which she had no evidence. She refused to acknowledge that the pathologies of American cities in the 1960s were due to racism, not construction. She blasted entirely functional and pleasant “towers in the park” buildings but ignored the way well-intentioned traffic engineers were making suburbs unnecessarily unpleasant.

There's nothing wrong with towers in a park, Poppa!

In fact, you can see how much bullshit she wrote from her defenders. Here is an essay Randy linked to called “Was Jane Jacobs right?” The dude manages to contradict himself. First, he claims that Torontonian neighborhoods have gentrified and become full of retail monocultures because of too much construction. Well, that is the purest form of bullshit: as Randy has documented, rising rents are creating such monocultures in old neighborhoods. Then he confuses typology for hypothesis testing, by showing us that dense districts in Milan are more dense. (No, really. That is what he shows.)

In a normal world, I might like Jane Jacobs. I am by no means ideologically averse to regulations that drive up housing costs. (Frex, requiring first-floor retail on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn.) She was right about highway building. (I like that Moses built stuff; I am less convinced that he built the right stuff, although really do wish the Cross-Brooklyn existed.) She was certainly right about most urban planning of the time, and her arguments apply to modern suburban planning quite well.

But we do not live in a normal world. We live in a world where Jacobite (Jacobin?) ideology means that everyone thinks it is entirely okay that the law protects cute streets like mine from the scourge of high rises. (Calling Eric Moore!) Hell, from the scourge of triple-deckers.

This isn't actually our block, but tear it down anyway!

We live in a world where people can pretend that filtering does not exist. (The link goes to a study of the California housing market. Theory here.) And while the worst problems are in fact in the suburbs, where I suspect Jacobs would be fine with replacing quarter-acre plots with “missing middle” construction, the fact that we have decided to preserve our older neighborhoods in amber is creating just as many problems.

("Was Jane Jacobs Right?" is here. Other links are in the blog post.)

What I've long found to be Jacobs' greatest weakness, as a thinker, is a relative lack of detail. There are analyses, but no numbers, just bold extrapolations, jumps into the beyond, failures of imagination. This is the central problem I found with her The Question of Separatism, which has a convincing analysis of the problems of marginality for Québec, acknowledges that an independent Québec may not break through and would in fact incur new costs with sovereignty-association, but recommends a break for it anyway. With cities, even Jane at Home noted that Jacobs did not imagine the possibility that the drift to the suburbs could be reversed.

Thoughts?