[PHOTO] Looking towards the heart of it all, Confederation Centre of the Arts, Charlottetown

[PHOTO] CN Tower rising into mist

Last night, the CN Tower seemed as if it was fading into mist just short of the main deck.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• blogTO notes the growing concentration of chain stores on lower Ossington.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly describes her luck in interviewing a New York City firefighter.


• Citizen Science Salon reports on a citizen science game intended to fight against Alzheimer's.


• Language Hat starts from a report about unsold Welsh-language Scrabble games to talk about the wider position of the Welsh language.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money shares the astounding news leaked about Donald Trump's billion-dollar losses.


• Marginal Revolution links to a psychology paper examining the perception of atheists as narcissistic.


• Towleroad reports on the informative reality television series of the United States' gay ambassador to Denmark.


• Window on Eurasia notes how Russia's war in Aleppo echoes past conflicts in Chechnya and Afghanistan, and examines the position of Russia's border regions.

[URBAN NOTE] "Eglinton Station bus terminal finally being torn down"

blogTO's Derek Flack reported yesterday on how the Eglinton Station bus terminal is going to be torn down. That he used a photo I took of said terminal from above is a bonus, I think.

One of the most recognizable bits of TTC infrastructure is finally being torn down after sitting vacant for over a decade. The sprawling former bus terminal at Eglinton Station will be razed to make way for a new station entrance and eventually further development.

The outdoor bus bays that made up the former terminal are a relic from the 1950s when Eglinton was the terminal station on the Yonge Line. The size of the station, which seems odd these days, was a product of a lack of density in the area at the time as well as the importance of Eglinton as a hub that connected the suburbs to the newly built subway.

When the station and bus terminal were first laid out, few would have imagined that Yonge and Eglinton would become one of the most dense intersections in the city at the heart of a burgeoning vertical neighbourhood. The abandoned site had long been an anachronistic throwback to a sleepier version of Toronto.

[URBAN NOTE] "City eyes legalizing rooming houses in North York, East York and Scarborough"

Betsy Powell and Alicja Siekierska describe in the Toronto Star the push to legalize rooming houses in outlying districts of Toronto. I think this a good idea: When I first moved to Toronto, I lived in one. In an expensive market, they make sense.

The door appears to be opening to legal rooming houses across Toronto — including in North York and Scarborough, where many operate illegally despite local prohibitions.

“I would like to see a system that understands that these homes exist, not only in areas where they exist right now, but in areas all across the city,” said Councillor Ana Bailao, council’s housing advocate.

“They house a variety of residents, students, new Canadians, and others (for whom) that’s all they can afford. It’s an important part of the housing spectrum, and we need to make sure that we keep tenants safe.”

Rooming houses are currently permitted and regulated in Etobicoke and within the old city of Toronto. Owner-operators are charged a fee and must agree to annual inspections from licensing, building and fire department personnel.

In York, they can operate without a licence.

In total, there are 433 rooming houses operating legally.

[URBAN NOTE] The National Post on the reopening of St. Michael's Cathedral

In "Toronto’s St. Michael’s Cathedral reopens to joyous applause after five year, $128M renovation", the National Post's Joseph Breen reports on the reopening of the central building of the Roman Catholic Church in Toronto. My theological and political issues with said church aside, this is an attractive building. It is good to see it back in use.

Fr. Michael Busch, rector of St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto, was only making a little joke, about how people are always asking how much work it must be, renovating a huge downtown church all by yourself.

It was hardly an applause line, especially from a priest in a pulpit. But this was a midday Mass to thank the workers who spent five years shoring up the foundation of the 168-year-old centre of Upper Canadian Catholicism, bolstering the stone and brick with hidden steel, installing tiled floors and new statues, and painting the ceiling by hand.

Even after all the singing, backed by a brass band and a new Quebec-made organ, something about that reno joke sparked a contagious enthusiasm. It was the first chance for people to give thanks personally, rather than just hear Archbishop of Toronto Thomas Collins say it.

It started with one man in a worker’s jacket in the front row, rising to his feet and clapping.

Supportive applause rose gingerly from the pews. Some people around him stood up, too, but tentatively. Then the workers joined in together, and churchly decorum stood no chance.

[URBAN NOTE] On the real estate crunch in Shenzhen, China

Quartz' Echo Huang Yinyin writes about the extreme real estate crunch in Shenzhen, a booming city in southern China on the Hong Kong border.

Shenzhen is more than just the manufacturing hub for hardware products in China—it’s also the country’s hottest real estate market (link in Chinese). And housing prices are getting so high that the city is exhibiting the ultimate symptom of a bubble property market—outrageously expensive “micro-apartments” that aren’t even up to code.

This week, social media users in China were in uproar over Shenzhen property ranging in size from 5.7 to 7.5 square meters (62 to 80 square feet) that they called “pigeon cage” apartments. According to financial magazine Caijing (link in Chinese), brokers listed each apartment’s starting price at 880,000 yuan ($131,957), around 20 times the city’s individual annual income of 40,948 yuan ($6,136) (pdf, p. 387, link in Chinese).

One 6-sq-m (64.5-sq-ft) apartment was fitted with a desk, a 1.5-m-long (4.5-ft) bed that folds into the wall, and dozens of cabinets and sideboards, according to photos circulating on Chinese social media.

Much as tech companies like Google and Uber are causing housing prices to shoot up in Silicon Valley, the presence of Chinese tech giants like Huawei and Tencent in Shenzhen has caused young professionals to flock to the city. It now has China’s highest property prices (link in Chinese).

[URBAN NOTE] "Bankrupt Mining Town Downsizes to Avoid Becoming a Ghost"

Bloomberg's Chikako Mogi and Yuki Hagiwara describe how the Hokkaido coal town of Yubari is trying to downside.

A sleepy, former coal-mining town in northern Japan is taking unprecedented measures to combat its biggest challenge: a devastating shrinking of its population. Its success could decide the future for hundreds of other local governments waging the same battle for survival.

Since its peak in the post-war economic boom of the 1960s, the population of Yubari, a little more than an hour’s drive east of Sapporo on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, has declined by more than 90 percent to just 9,000 as older residents died and young people moved away to bigger cities. Ten years ago, it became Japan’s first municipality to declare bankruptcy.

To keep from becoming a so-called ghost town—when a city ceases to function due to a precipitous decline in population and is ultimately abandoned—Yubari embarked on a drastic experiment. City officials began merging schools, slashing government jobs and salaries, halting funds for public swimming pools, toilets and parks, curtailing services such as bus routes and snow removal, and downgrading the local hospital to a clinic. The most drastic measure has been the forced relocation of hundreds of residents from public housing on the city’s outskirts to blocks of new, low-rise apartments closer to the city center.

“Yubari can potentially lead the example of a real-time compact city,” said Yoshio Kurihara, senior researcher at Mitsui Global Strategic Studies Institute in Tokyo, who called Yubari’s experiment an “extremely important” model for Japan. “Successful results from the city’s trial can be applied on a nationwide scale.”

[URBAN NOTE] "The Indianapolis-Scarborough Peace Games"

Torontoist's Chris Bateman describes an odd series of international sports, bringing together athletes from Scarborough and Indianapolis in a cross-border competition for more than forty years.

This is a cute idea, even if the genesis leaves me scratching my head. (Why Scarborough? Why Indianapolis? This does not seem like a natural, or at least inevitable, relationship. Chance goes in interesting directions.)

Despite their geographic and cultural differences, starting in 1973 close to 1,000 athletes from the borough of Scarborough and the U.S. city of Indianapolis participated in a recurring amateur sporting event in the name of friendship and goodwill.

The Scarborough-Indianapolis Peace Games—named in honour of the peace treaty that led to the end of the Vietnam War—were initiated by Gene McFadden, an Indianapolis urban planner and community development specialist, in October 1972.

McFadden was interested in finding a Canadian counterpart willing to compete in a multi-sport event similar to the Olympics, so he contacted George Churchill in Brantford, Ontario.

Churchill had helped organize a similar event between Brantford and Berrien County, Michigan, and, at McFadden’s request, he sent letters to several Canadian cities he thought would be interested in participating.

Scarborough Director of Recreation Jack Keay was first to respond, and he was keen.

[PHOTO] My Nuit Blanche photos on Facebook

Nuit Blanche was superb. I uploaded the various photos that I took, on my Google Nexus 5 and on my camera, to a public album on Facebook, here.

I will be sharing the better photos from Nuit Blanche in the coming days. How fortunate that it came just as my stock of Prince Edward Island photos was being exhausted!

[FORUM] What social networking sites are you active on?

Two weekends ago, I had to reset the passwords on my different social networks. My E-mail had somehow become compromised, and my Facebook was briefly used to post spam in a single discussion group, so everything had to be changed, immediately.

I had to go to Facebook; I had to go to Livejournal, that site that started everything; Google+ and my linked accounts at Blogger and YouTube had to go; Tumblr was followed by Instagram and then by Flickr; my Twitter and LinkedIn, more peripheral than not, had to be changed. Even the Dreamwidth that is basically a backup for Livejournal, and the other sites (Quora, Goodreads, Yelp) that are functionally closely linked to Facebook, had to be changed.

What about you? Where are you active?