[CAT] Shakespeare, warmed by charging battery

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• The Dragon's Gaze links to the discovery paper for HD 133139Ab, the planet orbiting three stars.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on the model of a winged aerobot to explore Titan.


• Language Log examines the Sinicization of non-Chinese names of ethnic minorities in China.


• Marginal Revolution highlights speculation that American servicemen come from psychologically worse environments these days than in previous years.


• Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money takes issue with the idea that a non-revolutionary British North America would have had a better constitution.


• The Volokh Conspiracy considers the legalities of the Dallas robot bomb.

[URBAN NOTE] "Urban farming returning Detroit to its roots, but not without challenges"

Dave LeBlanc's special in The Globe and Mail looks at the state of urban agriculture in Detroit. Can it truly be a lasting phenomenon?

It’s a patch of land that contained 12 houses in its heyday.

Five years ago, it contained nothing.

Today, after four years of urban farming, the southwest corner of Custer and Brush Streets in Detroit’s North End neighbourhood has become a literal cornucopia. In the past two years, it’s pumped out 400,000 pounds of produce that has fed 2,000 households within two square miles. It has provided valuable volunteer experience for 8,000 local residents who have collectively put in 80,000 hours, which have been valued at $1.8-million (U.S.).

Tyson Gersh, 26, a University of Michigan student and co-founder of the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative (MUFI) in 2011, estimates that about $2-million has also arrived in the form of new investment as abandoned houses are purchased nearby, which are then renovated and filled with tenants. And all of these new eyes, whether on the faces of volunteer farmers or new residents, create a safer place to live.

Yet, offers Mr. Gersh, “I believe that the current [city] administration sees urban agriculture as nothing more than a transitional land use; I don’t think they see it as having any long-term relevance to the city that we think they should have.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Why Are They Tearing Up Moscow?"

Bloomberg's Leonid Ragozin looks at the politics behind the reconstruction of Moscow.

Ilya Bogdanov evacuated his family from their cozy apartment in the heart of Moscow after spending two summers with clouds of dust and roaring construction machinery. For the rest of the warm weather, they will stay on the Baltic seaside in Latvia.

"We need a respite from urban improvement," the 44-year-old insurance analyst deadpanned.

Moscow is undergoing a massive reconstruction, amid an economic crisis caused by the slump in oil prices and Western sanctions imposed after Russian's incursions on Ukraine. The city was last subject to such a major revamp under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the 1960s, said Grigory Revzin, an urban development expert and a champion of the project even before Moscow hired his architecture firm.

Sidewalks are being widened and primped on all the major streets of the city center, with about 50 streets in reconstruction each summer. Beyond the center, more than 70 new metro stations are being built, at a cost of roughly $15 billion. Two additional circle lines, which connect the radial lines that cross in the city center as in London and Berlin, will complement the existing one, built in the 1950s.

In the past four years, the authorities have made over Moscow’s numerous parks and gentrified old industrial areas, turning them into slick hipster haunts that swarm with galleries, designer shops, startup offices, and co-working spaces for freelancers. They have considerably reduced traffic chaos by introducing paid parking across the city. Separately, a reconstruction of all major soccer stadiums in Moscow is under way for the World Football Cup to be hosted by Russia in 2018.

[URBAN NOTE] "Race and real estate: how hot Chinese money is making Vancouver unlivable"

The Guardian's Tyler Stiem writes about the particular, and perhaps insoluble, problems of expensive real estate in Vancouver.

“Here’s one,” says Melissa Fong. She’s browsing online real estate listings in a cafe near Vancouver’s City Hall. Behind her, the mountains of the North Shore – the view that launched a thousand bidding wars – rise through mist. “Three-bedroom townhouse, 1,400 sq ft, C$1.5m (£800,000). You could start a family in a place like this. Way, way out of my price range, though.”

Fong moves on, scrolling through half a dozen homes, each smaller than the last, until she arrives at a tiny, 500 sq ft condominium on the east side of the city. “Unassuming” would be a generous way to describe how it looks from the photos, which, tellingly, are all exterior shots. “You could live there if you only had one kid, right?” she says with a grim smile.

An urban planning researcher, Fong divides her time between Vancouver, where her elderly parents live, and Toronto, where she’s finishing a doctorate. She grew up in Vancouver, has deep roots in the city, and plans to settle here with her husband, a home renovator. But she has looked on with a mixture of frustration and horror as the cost of housing in Canada’s famously liveable city rise beyond the means of young professionals like her.

“When you think it can’t get any worse, it does. So you keep adjusting your expectations, you know?”

Over the past year, the price of a single family house in Vancouver increased by an incredible 30%, to an average of $1.4m. It’s just the latest, most dramatic jump in an already dramatic long-term trend that has turned the beautiful but unassuming Canadian city into one of the world’s least affordable, with a housing price-to-income ratio of 10.8. That’s third after Hong Kong and Sydney, and well ahead of London, which ranks eighth at 8.5.

[URBAN NOTE] "Unlike New York, Vancouver lacks the incomes to match the housing frenzy"

The Globe and Mail's Kerry Gold suggests that relatively low incomes in British Columbia are at least as much of a problem for real estate buyers as high prices.

When Tanya Marquardt lived in Vancouver, she shared a tiny one-room apartment in Gastown with a hot plate and a futon couch she’d roll out every night for her bed.

The rent was a few hundred dollars a month. That same place, she says, now rents for $1,100 a month. That typical price hike gives her pause when she considers returning home to Vancouver, which, she says, she might have to do if Republican candidate Donald Trump is elected president.

But she knows too that transitioning back to Vancouver might not be a wise career choice. The former Vancouverite is now living in Brooklyn, where she lives with her partner in an apartment that costs them $2,700 (U.S.) a month, including utilities. She teaches at Hunter College when she’s not working as a playwright or writing her book.

The artist has found success since her move to New York City six years ago, enough so that she and her partner have saved to purchase a home. They could afford a one-bedroom condo where they live, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for around $900,000, she figures. Her American money would buy them a nice condo in Vancouver, too. Although health care is a major advantage, she questions whether she’d make much of a living as an artist if she returned.

“I think about it,” she says. “But I worry I wouldn’t get work if I came back. I also think my work has changed. I don’t know if there’s an audience there for it.”

It’s become routine for political leaders and members of the real estate industry to cite Vancouver’s stature as a “world-class city” as one of the reasons for the region’s affordability crisis; all big, popular cities endure it. B.C. Housing Minister Rich Coleman has said that, compared to “other major cities worldwide,” Vancouver is “pretty reasonable.”

[URBAN NOTE] "The Toronto developer, the Iranian fugitive and the bitter condo feud"

Laurent Bastien's article in The Globe and Mail makes for compelling reading indeed. What scandal!

Five years ago, Sam Mizrahi, one of Toronto’s most ambitious real estate developers, found himself in a basement in the city’s Bridle Path neighbourhood. It was there, he says, he began to fear for his safety.

In a span of just a few hours, one of the main financial backers of two of his luxury condominium projects, Mahmoud Khavari, had become one of Iran’s most wanted men, having left his position as the chairman of the country’s largest bank and fled to Canada amid a corruption scandal.

With Iran demanding Mr. Khavari’s immediate return, Mr. Mizrahi feared being caught in the crossfire of a potentially violent international dispute as they debated the future of their business partnership inside the former banker’s Toronto home.

The agreement worked out in that basement in the hours that followed the frantic flight to Canada has become the subject of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit before the Ontario Superior Court, and led to a feud between Mr. Mizrahi and the Khavari family of near-Shakespearian proportion, involving alleged death threats, international intrigue and some of the city’s hottest real estate.

The Khavaris, who dispute the threats of violence, are seeking at least $35-million in damages from their former business partner, arguing that they were denied a stake in two Yorkville properties in which they invested money, along with three others that include the massive, 80-storey One Bloor tower, the crown jewel of Mr. Mizrahi’s condominium empire.

[URBAN NOTE] Chris Selley on the ravines of Toronto

Chris Selley's National Post article is authentically quite interesting.

Toronto’s ravines “are the shared subconscious of the municipality,” Robert Fulford once argued in the National Post. It’s a lovely turn of phrase. These improbable green tears in the skin of the city are where a few of the rivers and streams Toronto co-opted and buried still get to announce their presence, however briefly, which in turn reminds us how we got here. With money and hard work and ingenuity, we built this place up from a wilderness into a great metropolis, mercilessly erasing and starting over — and too often forgetting — as we went.

Yet “remnants of wilderness have been left behind,” as Anne Michaels wrote in Fugitive Pieces. “Through these great sunken gardens you can traverse the city beneath the streets, look up to the floating neighbourhoods, houses built in the treetops.” They are rarely visually spectacular or even, to the average citizen, particularly interesting beyond their very existence as quiet forests in an unlikely place. They are islands of urban tranquility of a type that few cities can offer.

Toronto makes excellent use of the upper Don Valley, our biggest “ravine.” Like much of this city, Thorncliffe Park is socially and commercially vibrant but esthetically rather bleak. Yet residents are minutes away from acres of lush river valley parkland, and on weekends it teems with multi-generation families from myriad backgrounds loving life.

We seem far less sure what to do with the ravines proper: Moore Park Ravine, for example, which runs from the east side of Mount Pleasant Cemetery to the Brickworks; Rosedale Ravine, which runs from the west side of the cemetery, across Mount Pleasant Road and then into the valley; and Cedarvale and Nordheimer ravines, which take you from near Eglinton West station all the way down to Poplar Plains Road.

Even the official paths are haphazardly pavement, gravel and mud. Signposting is all but non-existent: identical-looking paths diverge without notice; stairs offer egress to parts unknown; this week I accidentally found myself on the east side of Rosedale Ravine, scrambling north toward the cemetery.

[FORUM] What problems are facing your city?

Today's batch of [URBAN NOTE] links were concerned mainly with the problems of growth. how can growth be best managed for the benefit of everyone living there? I'm inclined to say that, for Toronto at least, this is the key issue underlying everything else (effective politics, good rapid transit, affordable housing).

What do you think? What's going on in your city?

Discuss.