[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Oshawa, Chicago, Montréal, London, Bulawayo

[rfmcdonald]

• Rosie Di Manno writes at the Toronto Star about the import of the concert that Sting threw in Oshawa for newly unemployed GM workers there.


• Chicago is going to house some innovative new public housing designs, combining low-cost homes for access to physically attached libraries and their educational opportunities. WTTW reports.


• CBC takes a look at the desperate last gap of the Montreal Star, forty years ago.


• CBC reports on the mass excavation of tens of thousands of bodies, and their study by experts, conducted as part of a program of commuter rail construction at a site in London.


• Ozy looks at the decline of Bulawayo, the second city of Zimbabwe.

Comments

[ffutures]

The bodies thing isn't exactly unprecedented - I used to work for a London church school that ran out of land and had to dig down when they wanted to build a new gym; it turned out that the playground was what was left of the church's old cemetery, which they sort of knew but believed had been cleared when the school was built in the late 18th century.

Except that when they did trial excavations they found graves and mausoleums, including the tomb of one of the founders of the Church of England who was believed to be buried in an adjoining bit of park. It took more than a year for archaeologists to clear all the bodies and bury the remains (mostly five to a coffin) at another site, the museum of London did a big exhibit on it for a while because there were a lot of other things buried with the bodies.