[PHOTO] Selfie against Royal Bank of Canada gold

The gold-tinted windows of the Royal Bank Plaza are irresistible for me.

[PHOTO] Classic Plastics at the Design Exchange

At the end of Doors Open yesterday, I made a quick swing by the Design Exchange on Bay Street. There, I ran into the free exhibit Classic Plastics, which has on display some of the most interesting plastic-made products of the mid-20th century and later.

"There's a great future in plastics," says Mr. McGuire to Benjamin Braddock in 1967's The Graduate. The plastic revolution – embraced after World War II as the new miracle material – began in the kitchen where it replaced metal shelves in refrigerators, was used for Formica countertops, and replaced wooden handles of electric irons and kettles. Plastic offered a dramatic new look to furnishings in the 1960s, and like aluminum and moulded plywood, it transformed design in the last half of the twentieth century and was influential in Canada's first wave of design.

Plastic became a key environmental issue in the 1970s, causing designers to move away from the material. Technology developed for the car industry paired with efforts to protect the environment, gave the material new life in the 1990s. New thermoplastics (a material, usually a plastic polymer, that becomes soft when heated and hard when cooled) can be reformed for greater strength and versatility, use less energy for processing, and are cleaner to produce. Recycling has made plastic acceptable, and improved moulding techniques initiated by computer aided design and lower tooling costs, introduced a new look for polypropylene – the same material Karim Rashid's Oh Chair for Umbra is made out of.

The Oh Chair is below.





It's difficult for me to imagine, from my early 21st century perspective, how revolutionary plastics would have been. Inexpensive and moldable, plastics were the perfect material for the consumer age. That they are linked to so much enduring pollution is a tragedy.



Though a small exhibit, Classic Plastics has a nice collection of diverse products made in plastic. I liked the quiet testimony of this coffee table covered with plastic-made products: albums, a telephone, a cup and saucer. I think the table itself is at least partly made of plastic.



At the end of my tour through the exhibit, I ran into a video monitor displaying the 1964 National Film Board documentary The Magic Molecule, displaying for us something of the wonder that mid-20th century people might have felt with a material that could be made to do anything.



The NFB has, happily for us, uploaded The Magic Molecule to YouTube. The moment I captured on film is visible at 1:06 in this nine-minute documentary.

"The Magic Molecule" (Watch on YouTube)

Classic Plastics will be on view until August.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO lists seven hidden beaches in the Toronto area.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes the discovery of a Solar twin, Inti 1.


• Joe. My. God. observes that this weekend was the time for Manhattanhenge in New York City.


• Language Hat reports on the 1950s travels of Nabokov and describes the effort to preserve the languages of the Arctic.


• The LRB Blog notes political protest in Madrid.


• Marginal Revolution worries about the premature deindustrialization of China and its effect on Chinese workers, and notes the dominance of the New York City subway system in American transit numbers.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw describes Homo sapiens sapiens tangled family history, Denisovans and Neanderthal and all.


• Towleroad notes an anti-gay Vatican official charged with seducing young men.


• Window on Eurasia notes the new Kalmyk republic mission in Moscow and describes the import of Russia's Ust-Luga port on the Baltic.

[NEWS] Some Monday links

• Bloomberg observes Iran's boycott of the hajj and Iranian hopes for relatively strong economic growth this year, looks at the impact of Middle Eastern economic decline on Thai hospitals, and notes the absence of IKEA from Ukraine.


• CBC notes retesting has revealed eight Russian athletes who used banned substances at the London Olympics.


• Foreign Policy looks at the human-caused Sidoarjo mud volcano in Indonesia.


• MacLean's notes a push in Montréal for a memorial to Irish immigrants killed by typhus.


• The National Post notes that Sun Life will stop treating pot users as smokers and start treating them as users of medicine.


• Open Democracy is critical of Iran's open-ended military objectives in Syria, given their human toll.


• Spiegel investigates Russia's support of the Euroskeptic AfD party.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto 18 plotter reflects on a decade in prison"

The Toronto Star's Michelle Shephard reports on one of the Toronto 18, who apparently has no access to any programs for terrorists on account of the lack of said. This is a problem, at least in a prison system based on rehabilitation.

Fahim Ahmad enters the room wearing his prison whites, glasses perched midway down his nose. He just left the kitchen, where he was making grilled cheese sandwiches for the lunch service.

Ahmad no longer looks like the 21-year-old who made headlines a decade ago as one of the leaders of the Toronto 18 terror plot. He’s bulkier, lost all his hair. He shows me his photo ID, taken during his first years spent at Quebec’s Special Handling Unit, which has the reputation as Canada’s toughest prison. “See, I had hair there. After the SHU, no hair.”

During his 2010 trial, the Crown described Ahmad as a “time bomb waiting to go off,” ranting about storming Parliament, taking politicians hostage and attacking nuclear stations. But he was also called a “fantasist,” whose big mouth was his only weapon of mass destruction.

Ahmad surprised with a guilty plea in May 2010 — nearly four years after his arrest and midway through his trial. Convicted of three terrorism charges, he was given a 16-year sentence and two-for-one credit for time spent in custody. At his sentencing hearing, the judge said he believed Ahmad had a good chance at rehabilitation.

But Ahmad has never participated in programs for inmates convicted of terrorism offences — because there are none.

[URBAN NOTE] "A Building of Her Own": Torontoist on Alexandra Biriukova

At Torontoist this weekend, Kaitlin Wainwright described the career in Toronto of Russian exile and architect Alexandra Biriukova.

Between 1920 and 1968, only 28 women went through the architecture program at the University of Toronto. The first women architects in Canada, among them Toronto’s Esther Marjorie Hill, were more likely to take up careers in historic preservation, public service, or home renovation, and less likely to receive large, private commissions. Prior to the Second World War, only five women had registered as architects in the province of Ontario. One of them was Alexandra Biriukova.

Biriukova was born in Russia in 1895. She came by her talents honestly: Her father, Dimitri Birukoff, was the chief civil engineer on the first trans-Siberian railway for the pre-revolutionary czarist government. As a child, she travelled east on the railway with her family as it inched closer to Vladivostok. Before they were exiled, as anti-Bolsheviks, Alexandra received a degree from the School of Architecture in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in 1914. Her family fled to Italy, where she completed graduate work at the Royal Superior School of Architecture in Rome. Alexandra arrived at Montreal with her sister, Yulia, in 1929. They had located another sister in Dalton (now Kawartha Lakes), and were soon living there.

Yulia, an internationally known painter, moved to Toronto the following year; her arrival was acclaimed by the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail, which were so proud to have a European artist call a city like Toronto her home. She quickly found work and her portraits were exhibited at local social clubs, where she was heralded as the guest of honour at tea parties.

When Alexandra Biriukova first arrived in Canada, she held no notion other than to practice architecture, as a professional. She wasted little time establishing her own business and building a network of the city’s leading artists and architects, in part because of her sister’s connections. Both women became close with members of the Group of Seven; Yulia’s first address in Toronto was 25 Severn, the Studio Building commissioned by Lawren Harris in 1913. The Biriukova sisters no doubt appealed to Harris’s interest in European modernism and transcendentalist philosophy.

[URBAN NOTE] "Ontario ombudsman tackles Brampton city hall"

San Grewal's report in the Toronto Star makes it sound as if Brampton is in a terrible mess. Given past years' of news reports, this is plausible.

Following years of scandal and a preliminary probe by Ontario’s ombudsman, Brampton city hall will be subjected to the first ever “systemic” investigation of a municipality by the province.

It will be a sweeping probe of the city’s administration, focusing on procurements, land deals and real estate transactions — the first of its kind since the province gave the ombudsman’s office broad powers to scrutinize municipalities, as of this past January.

But the probe will not involve a controversial $500-million downtown development deal that sparked the whole examination of procurement practices in the city, because that matter is before the courts in a $28.5-million lawsuit filed against the city.

Ombudsman Paul Dubé said Wednesday that, “During our review of information we obtained from informal inquiries, we determined that the issue of non-competitive procurements could potentially have systemic implications on the city.”

Mayor Linda Jeffrey, who led a council push for the investigation, said it is badly needed: “My goal here is not to be in a witch hunt.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Mississauga City Council Was Right to Reverse its Ban on Uber"

Torontoist's Erik McLaren makes a fervent case that Mississauga city council should not have tried to regulate Uber, on account that such was not within its purview. I'm skeptical of this: Regulating transit obviously is, and for good reason.

Toronto isn’t a hub of innovation. The venture capital community is famous for its stinginess, and we’re regressive when it comes to any disruptive technology. Fintech companies, for example, are having a hard time breaking in to Toronto, while their peers thrive in London and New York. There’s a reason we need to look to America to give us an imagined idea of our entrepreneurial spirit. That’s why we invent phrases like “Silicon Valley North,” so we can feel like we’re moving the right direction.

The problem is uniquely Canadian: we move too slow. In the modern economy, workers like cab drivers, who ideally work an eight-hour shift five days per week and take home enough money to make a solid living, will soon disappear. Canadian cities are at a crossroads where they can accept companies like Uber, the most divisive organization in the sharing economy today, or they can try their damnedest to ignore what consumers in their cities want, like Mississauga did.

But even the City of Mississauga has failed in this regard when it reversed its ban on Uber this week. It’s a sign of changing times: Canadian cities must accept the new norm that Uber brings, or face the consequence of irate citizens.

Mississauga councillors’ move to order Uber to cease operations in the city was done for ostensibly sound reasons. “I doubt the City of Mississauga is gonna sit down with someone who’s not willing to follow the rules at all,” said Mississauga Councillor George Carlson, who voted to ban Uber in April.

Uber, however, has been involved in the regulatory frameworks that have been established by Toronto, Edmonton, and Ottawa. While the company has pushed for its best interests—that is, to exist without regulation in cities like Mississauga—it is still playing by the rules.

[URBAN NOTE] Two links on the reaction to the Toronto marijuana dispensary raids

In "Pot convention buzzing over Toronto raids", the Toronto Star's Lisa Wright talks to attendees at a marijuana convention in Toronto who are upset and confused by the recent raids.

Toronto resident Vicki Trueman swears by cannabis oil to treat her chronic migraines and insomnia, as do some of her friends who suffer from seizures and depression.

Though she and her pals have doctors’ prescriptions to access the medicine legally, Trueman said she has no problem with people buying it for recreational use, particularly on the cusp of legalization in Canada.

And, echoing the overwhelming sentiment at the Lift Cannabis Expo Saturday, she said it’s “ridiculous” that Toronto police raided 43 pot dispensaries last Thursday, just two days before Canada’s biggest cannabis convention welcomed thousands of industry people from around the world.

“It makes me very angry. They’re trying to frighten and intimidate people who have run these businesses for years,” said Trueman, who cruised the booths at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on Saturday afternoon.

Ilya Strashun, who manned the Cannascribe booth to promote the company’s longtime medical marijuana prescription service, agreed the arrests and charges were unnecessary, given the federal Liberal government has pledged to make it legal as early as next spring.

CBC News, meanwhile, shares the reaction of a store owner, originally from British Columbia, taken aback by the raids.

Aamra Hallelujah thought it was a good time to open a marijuana dispensary in Toronto — that is until five officers busted open the door of her shop and placed her and one of her employees under arrest.

Hallelujah's storefront dispensary, Up Cafe, was among 43 such locations raided by Toronto Police on Thursday, when 90 people were arrested and slapped with a total of 186 charges. The raids also saw 269 kilograms of dried marijuana and a large quantity of cookies and other marijuana edibles seized.

It was a terrifying ordeal, Hallelujah said, especially because she now faces criminal charges for what she says is the first time.

"I've never even had a parking ticket," she told CBC News.

Hallelujah, who already has a dispensary in British Columbia, opened her Toronto location in March, not long after Justin Trudeau announced he was ready to move on legalizing the sale of marijuana. But as Canadians await the specifics of that legislation, Hallelujah said she was blindsided by the raids in this city.

[URBAN NOTE] "Regional Cities and the Curse of 'Glocality'"

In post #12 in an occasional series, In Medias Res' Russell Arben Fox considers what mid-sized American cities--in the Canadian context, I suppose places like Hamilton, Halifax, or Winnipeg--have to learn from each other, and what it means to be a successful city.

[T]he same metrics of success which Svaty called out in his commencement address were left essentially unexamined by Norman: rather, he simply stipulates that successful cities are growing cities, growing cities are those which imitate that which characterizes or that which is provided by the global cities at the top of the urban hierarchy, so therefore a study of urban areas which is limited in size needs to center itself upon those cities which have been able to globalize themselves on a local level. Should we contemplate the possibility that the experiences of such regional urban communities might give us a different way of talking about localism and globalism? Nah. Let's just look at everything Colorado Springs, CO, and Salem, OR have done right, and everything Wichita Falls, TX, and Duluth, MN, have done wrong.

This is no surprise to any of us who live in any of the latter category of cities, because it's hard to go a month without hearing of some new city commission or local service organization which is sending a group of people to study how Salt Lake City, UT, or Ann Arbor, MI, have done so well. We are constantly already doing the kind of comparisons which Norman built his book around (which makes it odd that in the end he concludes that "it is likely better to spend energy on dealing with local issues than on attempts to make a small place into something similar to a larger place that is viewed as more successful"--p. 139; perhaps Norman's next book could make that its thesis, because it certainly wasn't the implied message of this book). It's a consequence of living in a place larger than rural or micropolitan areas like Brookville, and reflects tendencies known to statisticians and social scientists the world over: once one enters into or achieves an environment which is suggestive of certain extensive possibilities, such possibilities become expected--and their absence becomes a source of embarrassment or derision. ("How can Wichita possibly be considered a serious city? We don't even have a Spaghetti Factory.") What I call mittelpolitan places are, as Norman corrected notes, not-insignificant population draws within their particular regions; the greater the mass of a place, the greater the likelihood it will become a regional subsidiary anchor for the service-oriented economy of the United States--education, banking, medical care, insurance, real estate, etc.--thus going through in miniature the same declines in manufacturing and relative increases in the "cosmopolitan" trappings of the global cities of the world (pp. 103, 112, 131). But such observations only entrench exactly the patterns of agglomeration which leave small and mid-sized cities ever more unable to compete, whether in terms economic development or retaining population: the kids who grow up in such places will only receive, again and again, the same implied message: the real action, the real opportunities, the real tests of success are to found in bigger places (and if they aren't to be found there, they'll be found in places bigger yet). No, if you're open to the possibility that the towns and cities of America which obviously benefit from--as well as struggle with, as we all do--the consequences of globalization might nonetheless have something to contribute as themselves, and not as places which, because of the historical accident which placed them in Montana or Kansas or Arkansas or Maine, can only ever aspire to imitate the global cities of the world, you need to think in different terms.

James Fallows, one of country's great (if not especially imaginative) journalists and essayists, sometimes seems to want to reach for such terms, but he can't quite find them either, perhaps because the presumptions of bigness are just too deep in his work history and outlook. For the past three years Fallows and his wife Deborah have been flying across the United States, visiting cities, looking into the hundreds of different ways, in his view, "a process of revival and reinvention" in underway. What they've written about is often inspiring; their observations about regional concentrations of talent, blue-collar resistance, city libraries, racial and civic assimilation, local arts movements, and more all give hope to those wanting to extricate our thinking about city life away from the global bias. Yet Fallows can't help (like David Brooks, with whom he shares more than a few similarities) but mourn hasn't yet responded to the transformations of globalization in a holistic, top-down way; he wishes President Bush had used the terrorist attacks of 9/11 the way Eisenhower used the "ten-terrifying 'Sputnik shock' of the late 1950s" to give us a moral equivalent of war moment, and push for "real national improvement." Fallows's "Eleven Signs a City Will Succeed" are entertaining, worth pondering, and probably often correct, but the fact that "big plans" and "research universities" are part of his perspective just goes to show that he, too, assumes that the best regional cities are those which can right-size the bigness associated with success, rather, perhaps, than those which can rethink success entirely.

Thought-provoking.

[META] Who reads A Bit More Detail?

Here's a meta question: Who actually reads this? People who don't normally comment here, and people who read this at sites I don't track--Livejournal, Dreamwidth, Twitter, RSS feeds, you name it--please comment.