A Bit More Detail

• The BBC takes a look at Pontic Greek, a Greek dialect that survives precariously in exile from its homeland in Anatolia.


• Klaus Meyer writes at The Conversation about how Hitler, in his rise to power, became a German citizen.


• Low-income families in the Toronto area face serious challenges in getting affordable Internet access. CBC reports.


• Jeremy Keefe at Global News takes a look at Steve Skafte, an explorer of abandoned roads in Nova Scotia.


• In some communities in British Columbia, middle-class people have joined criminal gangs for social reasons. CBC reports.

• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines an early medieval France that became not a notional kingdom but rather a decentralized empire, a Holy Roman Empire of the French Nation.


• This r/imaginarymaps map imagines a greater Austria that includes Slovenia.


• A Greater Slovenia, encompassing lands from Austria, Italy, and even Hungary, is the subject of this r/imaginarymaps map.


• Could an Austria divided in the Cold War be divided like this r/imaginarymaps map?
  
• This r/imaginarymaps map shows a Japanese Empire that survived until 1956, encompassing much of the Russian Far East as well as Manchuria and Korea.

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait notes evidence that white dwarf Gaia J1738–0826 is eating its planets.


• Crux takes a look at the stars closely orbiting Sagittarius A* at the heart of the galaxy like relativity-proving S2.


• D-Brief notes a recent proposal for an unmanned probe to Uranus and Neptune.


• Dangerous Minds shows the eerily decomposing sculptures of YuIchi Ikehata.


• Bruce Dorminey explores the provocative idea of era in the early Moon where it was briefly habitable.


• Far Outliers explores the reasons why George Orwell has become so popular lately.


• Hornet Stories notes that Tom Daley has recently posed nude for a painting by the celebrated David Hockney.


• JSTOR Daily explores the reality behind the imminent arrival of the laser gun into militaries worldwide.


• Language Hat notes that the Austrian state of Vorarlberg sponsors an interesting contest, of performances of songs--including pop songs--in local dialect.


• The LRB Blog notes the severity of the forest fires in Greece, aggravated by climate change, systematic corruption, and recent austerity.


• The Planetary Society Blog shares photos of asteroid Ryugu taken by the Hayabusa2 probe.


• Roads and Kingdoms reports on a T-bone steak heavy breakfast lasting twenty hours in Bilbao.
  
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps notes a joke political party in Hungary that wants to make the country smaller.


• Window on Eurasia notes how the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Moscow is caught between its Ukrainian goals and its Russian links.

• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling mourns the death of Alvin Toffler.


• The Big Picture shares images of the Istanbul airport attack.


• blogTO notes Toronto's recent Trans March was the largest in world history.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly interviews memoirist Plum Johnson.


• Centauri Dreams considers the determination of distances to dim stars and looks at the total energies likely to be used in interstellar travel and interplanetary colonization.


• Crooked Timber notes the ordered recount in Austria's presidential elections and advocates for anti-militarism.


• D-Brief notes the exciting discoveries of Ceres, and observes that ancient tombs may have doubled as astronomical observatories.


• The Dragon's Gaze considers where warm Jupiters form, considers the stability of complex exoplanet systems, and notes a high-precision analysis of solar twin HIP 100963.


• The Dragon's Tales wonders if the shape of Martian sand dunes indicate a denser Martian atmosphere a bit more than four billion years ago.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers evictions and poverty in the United States.


• Inkfish notes that different honeybees seem to have different personalities.


• Language Hat notes the import of Maltese in Mediterranean history.


• Language Log talks about Sino-Japanese.


• Lovesick Cyborg shares the doubts of polled Americans with the viability of virtual lovers.


• The LRB Blog shares an article supporting Corbyn.


• The Map Room Blog notes that San Francisco was literally built on buried ships.


• Marginal Revolution notes the collapse of Greek savings and looks at Euroskepticism's history in the United Kingdom.


• Steve Munro updates readers on Union-Pearson Express ridership.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer thinks the Netherlands Antilles offer useful models to the United Kingdom, and is confused by a claim that that bias against Mexican immigrants does not exist when the data seems to suggest it does.


• Torontoist goes into the life of conservative Protestant newspaper publishing Black Jack Robinson.


• Transit Toronto notes that in a decade, GO Trains will connect Hamilton to Niagara Falls.


• The Volokh Conspiracy argues against using the Brexit vote to argue against referenda.


• Window on Eurasia notes the Russian deployment of military forces to the Belarus border, looks at Tatarstan's concern for its autonomy, observes the changing demographics of Ukraine, and notes the Russian debate over what sort of European Union collapse they would like.


• Arnold Zwicky remembers his father through ephemera.

Wiry despite his advanced age, the billionaire is bustling across Austria's political stage, flanked by blondes, as his party's top candidate in the election to Lower Austria's state parliament. Stronach, born in the southeastern state of Steiermark, emigrated to Canada in 1954. Decades later, he has turned his attention back to his native Austria. To the delight of political comedians, he still speaks German with a strong Canadian accent, and he occasionally hurls bilingual insults at the national elites, calling them "bulls without balls."

"I'm establishing a do-tank, because there are already plenty of think-tanks in Austria," Stronach says derisively.

Wherever he looks, from Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann on down, Stronach sees nothing but weaklings "raised on the government's milk," and no one who, as he says, can hold a candle to him, the man "from the real economy." Speaking to a crowd of hooting supporters in Tulln, he says that Lower Austria has been run for more than two decades by a conservative, Christian, "tough-talking braggart," and has practically deteriorated into a dictatorship controlled by small-minded party loyalists.

[. . .]

The fact that Stronach still feels misunderstood by many fellow Austrians has structural reasons. Postwar Austria has a political system deliberately designed for consensus and the accommodation of differing views. It is a place with little room for megalomania and a tradition of wheeling and dealing across political lines. But today's Austria is still foreign to Stronach, who once shipped out in third class on a freighter to work hard and eventually succeed in Canada.

Stronach is about as out of place on this political stage as a jackhammer at a chamber music concert. He threatens the political class merely by being different -- and by calling for the prosecution of those responsible for past bribery scandals. "If you want to drain a swamp, a swamp of corruption," he says, "you shouldn't ask the frogs first."

While one in three Austrians can now "imagine" voting for Stronach, the liberal Vienna coffeehouse crowd is already groaning about the crusade of the unpolished Austro-Canadian politician. Stronach has dismissed Armin Wolf, a popular host with Austrian public broadcaster ORF, as a "schoolboy," saying he knows nothing about the economy. And he has berated the publisher of the newsmagazine profil as "the guy with the purple socks who knows how to ask stupid questions, but not much else."

Eastern Europe ’s cities are an education in different regimes of public space. Within the spatialisation Lefebvre describes as modernist, rationalized ‘Abstract Space’ public areas of cities are reduced to their function, utility and managed in terms of maximizing value within an overarching vision of land as a commodity to be bought and sold. Although utility is included in calculating its exchange value, this monetary abstraction – the price of land — ultimately over-rides even the use value of land and a necessary platform for economic activity. This tends to reduce city spaces to infrastructure which is understood in terms of needs such as transportation, costs of land and maintenance. Urban public space is a lost money-making opportunity if only because it is withdrawn from the real estate market. Elements such as sidewalks are thus reduced to the minimum required by social uses and safety standards.

In the late 20th century, under what Lefebvre understood as a statist mode of production and accumulation, urban space is not just infrastructure but managed more consciously as a means of social control and as a way of facilitating commerce and trade. This implies policing the minutiae of uses of these areas, moving on loiterers and banning unproductive uses of space. Legitimated, tax-paying businesses are favoured by banning or limiting street traders and peddlers. Traveling between Ukraine and Austria highlighted this for me on a recent trip.

Like many Western cities, the touristic ancient squares of Salzburg provide a good example of such management – a widespread approach, not something unique to Salzburg. Impeccably swept by street-cleaning equipment, stalls vending (usually gourmet) food simulate historical uses of the Platz and Markt and long-established cafes have the right to put out tables for patrons within carefully bounded,, but unmarked, areas. The invisibility of these boundaries of areas of entitlement undergird the simulacrum. The squares are thus vastly empty apart from specifically placed activities such as taxis queued for customers, tourists and tour groups headed one way or another, clustered around a fountain or jockeying for the ‘Kodak spot’ from which to take cliched snapshots as personal souvenirs of Salzburg. Missing in this sketch, and perhaps detectable only via tourists’ weary feet, is the genera absence of public seating and benches in these squares. The only available seating is in cafes for paying customers. Needless to say, itinerant peddlers and beggars have been systematically moved on by police.

What really distinguishes L’viv from the cities of Western Europe is its extensive greenery, parks and promenades. Like Salzburg there are distinct seasons with less clement weather yet, lined with benches, L’viv’s public spaces support an active and inclusive public life which seems to include all ages, abilities, genders and social groups. Families with children occupy benches or stroll by elderly men playing chess in impromptu games on the benches. Strollers practice a now rare, genuine flaneurie – strolling in the heart of the city ‘to see and perhaps be seen’ — of the sort hosted by promenades such as Barcelona’s Ramblas. This is a way of participating in the life of the city and bringing these places alive. Nor is it simply a scene of pedestrian mobility. Rather than seeking what Perniola calls the ‘tranject’ — a simulated cinematic tracking shot as the visual synthesis of what a city is, people stroll and meander (perhaps more energetically than tourists), children trace complex racing zigzags, toy electric cars are available for rent for a few minutes, photographers pose tourists with life-sized plush animal, hawkers display Ukrainian memorabilia on some benches. Monuments to local personages and nationalist heros such as Taras Shevchenko overshadow the space. They underscore the importance of past events such as the historical tragedy of the Ukrainian famine and the pre-capitalist spatialisation of peasant serfdom which lasted into the twentieth century in Ukraine.

When the Iron Curtain between the then Czechoslovakia and Austria tumbled 18 years ago, residents of the grey, run-down and impoverished Bratislava crossed the nearby border, just 7 kilometres away, in search of jobs and western goods in better-off Austria.

Now the Slovaks are scouting Austria's border region in search of land or houses, which are substantially cheaper here than in booming Bratislava.

Three years ago Miriam's Slovak-Canadian husband Daniel Soska, 39, a regional sales director in a telecoms company, was one of them.

"If we wanted to have the same land 7 kilometres from downtown Bratislava on the Slovak side we would have to pay at least four times more per square metre," he said.

[. . .]

The expansion of the borderless Schengen area on December 21 will bring Wolfsthal even closer to the Slovak capital than it has been for 90 years - since the time when Bratislava, known then in German as Pressburg, belonged to the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.

The village's population has been shrinking since the monarchy disintegrated into nation states after World War I and a border between Austria and the nascent Czechoslovakia emerged in its backyard.

In the years after World War II, the Iron Curtain came and a once-busy imperial tram line between Bratislava and Vienna, which passed through Wolfsthal, finally ceased to run. The village faded from a stop on a busy artery into a declining station in the middle of nowhere.

"This used to be the end of the world," said the 45-year-old Schoedinger, a former policeman whose entire life has been linked to the border. "I've witnessed everything that happened here," he added.

[. . .]

The village of 250 weekend inhabitants and 800 permanent residents, 40 per cent of whom are now under the age of 30, saw a rise in its population for the first time in 2001, the mayor said.

Schoedinger has been in talks with Bratislava's public-transport authorities so a regular bus line could start running between the city and his hometown as soon as the border controls disappear.

"Now we have a future," the beaming mayor said. "We live in a region between Bratislava and Vienna. That's what is important, not which passport we carry."

When Daniel Sosin was looking to buy a house for his family in the north-western Polish city of Szczecin he was aghast at how little he would get for his money. So he went looking across the nearby border with Germany, buying a 150-year-old house in the village of Penkun for about the same price as a bachelor flat in Szczecin.

"Poland is an unkempt country and I don't want to live like that," says Mr Sosin, an architect, sitting in his house overlooking a cobbled street in the heart of the village. "I want to live in a beautiful area. It will take Poland generations to get to the same level as here."

Mr Sosin is part of a wider trend as people from the new EU member states, often flush with cash from real estate booms in their home countries, are beginning to buy properties in nearby "old" EU states to the west. Penkun is in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, one of Germany's most economically depressed areas. Thousands of young people have left for better prospects in the west, leaving behind empty houses and apartments that are being snapped up by Poles.

"We have a few dozen calls a day," says Mariola Dadun, owner of the A do Z real estate agency in Szczecin. "There are three reasons people are interested in Germany: prices, prices, prices."

[. . .]

In eastern Germany prices are also rising thanks to the arrival of the Poles. "Before Poland's entry into the EU there was depopulation here - a lot of houses were abandoned and there was no real estate market at all. The early pioneers who bought a few years ago were able to pick up houses for very little but prices have risen since then," says Jan Rybski, a property developer in Löcknitz, a German village 25km from Szczecin. "But even if land prices are becoming similar, you still get a lot better quality and infrastructure in Germany than in Poland."

Lothar Meistring, Löcknitz's mayor, is upbeat about the new Polish residents. Over 200 Poles live in the village and a further 400 in the immediate region. He says many have bought and renovated old properties or purchased land to build houses. "In many neighbouring areas they have to pull down houses because they are disused, as people move away. Here, it's the opposite - we are building new places."