A Bit More Detail

• The Ottawa Citizen suggests a recent audit of OC Transpo should have offered warnings of the Confederation Line problems to come.


• A project office has been set up for the extension of the Yellow Line in Longueuil and elsewhere on the south shore. CTV News reports.


• La Presse looks at the concerns of some artists in Rosemont-La-Petite-Patrie that they might be forced out by gentrification.


• That the Bay Building in downtown Winnipeg has been evaluated as being of little value offers an opening to Heritage Winnipeg. Global News reports.


• The New Brunswick government is forcing suburbs of Saint John to pay for city facilities that they also used. Global News reports.


• Short-term rentals are having a negative effect on real estate markets in Halifax. Global News reports.


• Downtown Lethbridge faces struggles to attract business. Global News reports.

• Maclean's reports on how, a century after Shoal Lake 40 First Nation was made an island to provide drinking water for Winnipeg, it finally was connected to the mainland by a road.


• CityLab reports on how the pressures of the tourist season make it difficult for many permanent residents of Martha's Vineyard to maintain homes.


• Fogo Island, Newfoundland, recently celebrated its first Pride Walk. CBC reports.


• Yvette D'Entremont writes at the Toronto Star about how the diaspora of the Newfoundland fishing island of Ramea have gathered together for regular reunions.


• J.M. Opal writes at The Conversation about the origins of white Anglo-American racism in 17th century Barbados.

• io9 reports on the Fathers Project, a new alternate history project imagining what might have become of queer people in North America if HIV had not existed.


• Them interviews Valentina, fresh off of RuPaul's Drag Race and now appearing in a TV version of the classic Rent.


• CBC reports on two people in Winnipeg who want to build a library there for queer people of colour.


• Guardian Cities takes a look at the question of how gay-friendly different cities are. Locals' opinions, not just public policies, matter.


• Tim McCaskell writes at NOW Toronto about the threat posed by the growing presence of chemsex in queer Toronto (and beyond, too).

• The vacancy rate in Kingston is easily the lowest of any major Ontario city, even worse than Toronto. Global News reports.


• CBC notes that Ottawa is continuing to work on building a film centre in its Greenbelt.


• La Presse notes that residents of the neighbourhood of Glenmount, in the Montréal borough of Côte-des-Neiges, are threatening to separate from the city.


• Québec City has again been rejected by the NHL, the North American hockey league deciding not to situate a team in this pro-hockey town despite strong local support. CBC reports.


• After more than a year, regular passenger rail service has finally resumed between Winnipeg and Churchill. CBC reports.

• blogTO reports on the efforts of York University to try to salvage the Markham campus cancelled by the Ontario provincial government.


• CTV News reports on the Bear Clan Patrol, a First Nations group that has taken to patrolling the streets of Winnipeg to watch out for the ongoing meth crisis.


• The Discourse wonders whether the new city council of Vancouver will be as committed to reconciliation with First Nations as the old one.


• Vice reports on the latest from the Michigan town of Bay View, where there is an almost incomprehensible reluctance among many in that Christian-founded town to allow non-Christians to own property there.


• Matthew Teller at Adventure writes about Ushuaia, the Argentine community that is the southernmost town in the world, and looks at this isolated community's difficulties.

• The question of re-opening the storied intersection of Portage and Main, at the heart of Winnipeg, to pedestrian traffic is being hotly debated. The National Post reports.


• CityLab describes how the New York city of Buffalo is enjoying a huge boom in the creation of public art.


• Wired describes Chicago's Wild Mile, a new riverine habitat ingeniously created for the manmade North Branch Canal.


• The World Economic Forum reports that, on the theory that public transit is a public good, Estonia is making public transit free throughout the country, including in the capital of Tallinn.


• Guardian Cities notes the energetic effort of Oman to create, where five years ago there was just desert, the new city of Duqm.

• Is a mysterious chair in Dartmouth a legacy of the Halifax Explosion? Global News reports.


• Who is Googling Winnipeg, and why? Global News reports.


• The Nunavut capital of Iqaluit faces a serious prospect of water shortages, as its water source Lake Geraldine cannot support growing consumption. CBC reports.


• Guardian Cities reports that the old Tsarist-era palaces of St. Petersburg face a grim future unless someone--artists, say--can rehabilitate these edifices.


• Guardian Cities shares photos of the subway stations of Pyongyang.

• A Casavant pipe organ in a church in Saint John, New Brunswick, is up for sale, with an uncertain future. Will it be played again? CBC reports.


• Syrian refugees resettled in a Hamilton highrise tower have encountered bedbug-related nightmares. The Toronto Star reports.


• Radio Canada suggests that the substantial Francophone minority in Winnipeg--the largest such community in western Canada--may have helped the city attract investment from France and Québec, here.


• JSTOR Daily notes the disastrous experience of Atlantic City with casinos.


• Egypt is planning to deal with congestion and pollution in its capital city of Cairo by building a new capital city. The Guardian reports.

• TVO notes that municipally-operated gold courses are apparently commonplace in Ontario. Should cities divest of these, freeing up land and cost for other better uses?


• The idea of municipal sales taxes seems like something that should get implemented in Ontario cities, yet few seem willing to move on this. The Toronto Star examines the issue.


• CBC reports on how the small southern Ontario town of Goderich managed to accumulate 18 family doctors, thanks to a concerted and planned effort to recruit new physicians.


• Global News takes a look at some of the ghost signs of Winnipeg, legacies of an early commercial era.


• Terry Glavin at MacLean's suggests that the government of British Columbia might finally be taking steps to ensure affordable real estate options in Metro Vancouver.

[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.