News, Monday, October 19, 2009
Toronto street furniture: garbage in, garbage out Why don’t we invest in making our sidewalks look great?
If cities are an expression of civic consciousness, our politicians and urban designers must think we’re pretty dumb. Take a look at streets and sidewalks in Canada and tell me I’m wrong. What should be a celebration of public life and camaraderie looks as dour as a Dickensian bowl of gruel. Overcrowded with overscaled cars, our streets have become death traps for cyclists. Our sidewalks are paved-over cow paths, designed as if to punish those who have exited the cocoon of their automobiles.
He said he is bullish about Hamilton, especially with planned public transit improvements over the next several years.
New solar farm can provide power for 1,000 homes
STONE MILLS, Ont.–Construction manager Michael Henderson beams with pride as he gazes out at a black sea of 126,040 solar panels, each resting majestically against 36 hectares of south-sloping terrain.
Canada’s largest solar generating station, called First Light, made history on Sept. 26, when at 10:16 a.m. it became the first multi-megawatt solar farm in the country to connect to the electricity system. First Light covers an area large enough to fit nine Rogers Centres and convert enough sun rays each year to power 1,000 homes cleanly.
Civic leaders are struggling to meet big-city challenges
Like many societies around the world, Canada has urbanized at a tremendous rate over the past century. According to Statistics Canada, the proportion of the Canadian population living in urban regions was 80 per cent in 2006 – a dramatic shift from the start of the 20th century, when just 37 per cent of us lived in urban regions. Moreover, the demographics of our cities have changed radically: Once dominated by people of European heritage, they are now populated by immigrants and the descendants of immigrants from everywhere on the planet, including increasing numbers of aboriginal peoples.
Many of our systems – political, economic, infrastructural – have had a hard time keeping pace with this massive demographic shift. Mr. Miller was handling not only the ordinary managerial issues that face any municipal leader (a city workers strike over the summer was one recent hurdle), but also the broader systemic challenge of leading a fast-growing city with one of the most diverse populations on Earth, while wielding very little power to generate revenue or fund advances in areas such as planning, transit and infrastructure. Citizens watch in dismay as their mayors implore senior governments for a share of their own tax dollars, like children begging for candy, and wonder who is to blame in this perennial charade.
A recent survey of Canadian public attitudes suggests that people living in Canada’s larger cities are less satisfied with their local quality of life than people living in smaller towns – a finding that may indicate that this country’s urbanites are feeling the lag between what their cities need in order to thrive and what existing systems are able to provide.
What Can Danish Hogs Teach Us About Antibiotics?
Denmark is the largest exporter of pork in the world. The country, not much larger than Massachusetts, produces more than 26 million hogs each year–much of it in an industrialized system–selling nearly 90 percent of its pork to nations around the globe. But more important, Denmark is one of the first countries proactively seeking to reduce the growing public health threat of antibiotic resistance by banning the use of antibiotics in healthy food animals, a practice still widespread in the United States.
How Traffic Jams Help the Environment
By requiring car drivers to pay a fee to drive in a city at peak hours, congestion pricing reduces traffic and raises money that can be used to support public transit—both worthy goals.
Yet congestion pricing has dubious environmental value. Traffic jams, if they’re managed well, can actually be good for the environment. They maintain a level of frustration that turns drivers into subway riders or pedestrians.
The Enormous Environmental Consequences of Artificially Lighting Up the Night
To understand light pollution, it’s important to know there are two different types: First, there is astronomical light pollution that obscures the view of the night sky, and the second kind is ecological light pollution, which alters natural light systems in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.
Burlington set to change with the times
Mayor Cam Jackson says Burlington is a work in progress, a city building and renewing itself at the same time.
Jackson presented a two-page list of infrastructure plans — including the construction start on McMaster’s DeGroote Centre for Advanced Management and the Performing Arts Centre as well as a $1.6-million turf field and soccer dome at Sherwood Park — for his annual state of the city address to the Burlington Chamber of Commerce at the Burlington Golf and Country Club yesterday.
Decentralizing Electricity The Coming Energy Revolution
The power grid of the future is one of humanity’s boldest visions. Gigantic wind farms in the sea and enormous solar fields in the desert are to generate the bulk of our power in the years to come. But consumers and companies are also producing energy with mini-power plants in their own basements and solar panels on the roof. And intelligent appliances are saving energy in our homes: washers, dryers and refrigerators that communicate with each other wash, dry or cool when electricity is cheapest. The information age is arriving at a new level: It’s becoming the electricity age.
To Save Water, Developers Ditch Lawns
“Yards will be sunk down a couple inches below the sidewalk so they act as a bowl, soaking up moisture. Any runoff — or rainwater — that does hit the pavement will flow down into 55,000-gallon cisterns built under the streets. That water will be available to homeowners for outdoor irrigation. But it will be rationed tightly.
Toronto the Good - and bad and sad and mellow and …
As a city, Toronto has a mind – or two or three – of its own.
We’re friendly, selfish, fretful, sensitive, competitive, dutiful, curious, narcissistic and angry – but in differing degrees across Toronto, suggest results from an online personality survey. We are also attracted to those most like us, splicing the city into psychological subsets that neatly follow neighbourhood boundaries, according to a mapping exercise done by the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management.
Canada quietly asks EPA to weaken anti-pollution measures
Embassy in Washington asks agency to alter plan that would force lake freighters to stop burning dirty bunker fuel
Rural blogs harvest truckloads of urban fans
Farm girl websites gain devotees dreaming of a ’simpler’ life
Alleyways: the Key to Better Urban Design and Meeting EmissionReduction Goals?
Using alleyways to fill in the city? Seriously? When he first said this I turned my head to the side, tried to digest the graphic on the screen as best as possible and just thought, I’m not really sure I get the vision. We’re going to put businesses in alleyways? How will they fit? Is there even enough room? Turns out, there are some pretty smart and creative folks in Sacramento who have spent many hours working on just this issue and seems you can do more than just put a building there - one can help a city achieve sustainable development goals for the next 100 years.
Editor’s pick of the week The End of Free Parking in Santa Monica
“Santa Monica arrived at the market-based pricing idea when consultants hired to evaluate the need for additional downtown parking discovered something unexpected: The city actually had plenty. The problem was that visitors and employees were vying for the most convenient spots as hundreds or thousands of other outlying or privately owned spaces sat empty.”
Team Germany Wins Solar Decathlon…Again
The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that ‘Team Germany’ from theTechnische Universität Darmstadt has won the 2009 Solar Decathlon with their project surPLUShome. This is the second time in a row that a team from TU Darmstadt wins this international contest after already snatching the title in Solar Decathlon’s last edition in 2007.
Staying Sane in the City
We all know that civilization is moving to the cities. In many ways, this is a really positive trend. Having a greater percentage of people living in dense urban areas will be good for resource efficiency.
But this is also going to present some new challenges. Humans, after all, evolved over eons to live on the Sereghetti. Our bodies and minds are designed for an environment very different from Tokyo or Manhattan. How exactly this affects civilization in the future is unclear, but it’s worth thinking about. A new study by researchers at the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam looked at how close people lived to green areas and how that affected their physical and mental health.
There’s just too much emphasis on “getting a job” these days.
Okay, so we’re at nearly 10 percent unemployment nationally (if you believe the Federal numbers), so many people are without a steady stream of bi-monthly paychecks. Yet, 90 percent of Americans who had a job when the economy tanked, still do. But for some that means being a wage serf, cubicle clone or working in the Dilbert world of dysfunctional corporate America – working hard to make someone else richer (and often, with ecological impacts). There’s too many CEO bonuses and none for the employees who clean the counters, work on the assembly lines (ideally making hybrid vehicles), or take care of customers. The vast majority of education system continues to be committed to helping people find jobs, not make a sustainble life, especially one that doesn’t destroy the planet or exploit people (though more are starting “sustainability curricula”).
Dr. David Suzuki School in Windsor has chosen GTA based Bioroof to design and plant green roof
One of the most visible green attributes of the public school will be its green roof. The team which submitted the winning design includes Wilk & Associates, Wytech Building Envelope Solutions, Tremco Roofing, Landsource Organix and Bioroof Systems. This team was selected for their commitment to ecological and environmentally friendly products and their building techniques.
Bioroof’s EcoSystem green roof was chosen because of its unmatched ability to manage stormwater, accommodate native plants and increase cooling benefits.
Good neighbours, green places key to quality of life, says national survey
OTTAWA – Even during tough economic times, Canadians are most likely to identify good neighbours and green surroundings as key to the quality of life in their community, according to the results of a new national public-opinion survey.
The survey, which was commissioned by Community Foundations of Canada as part of its Vital Signs program and conducted by the Environics Research Group, shows:
* Almost nine in ten Canadians consider the quality of life in their community to be good, if not excellent.
* Community size counts. In communities of fewer than 5,000 residents, 43 percent rate local quality of life as excellent, as compared to 32 percent of those in cities of 100,000 people or more.
* Canadians identify investing in infrastructure (e.g. public transit, roads, better health and social services) as the most important step to improving their community’s quality of life.
CUPE Ontario and Council of Canadians speaking tour on trade arrives in Kitchener on Monday
Kitchener – In the midst of the ‘Buy American’ local procurement controversy, ‘Say bye to buy local’, featuring Council of Canadians national chairperson Maude Barlow and CUPE Ontario President Sid Ryan, will arrive in Kitchener on Monday, October 19. The Kitchener event will be held from 7-9 p.m. at Lyle S. Hallman Faculty of Social Work Building (120 Duke Street West).
The Ontario speaking tour will then proceed to Toronto, Sudbury, Windsor, Kingston, London, and Hamilton. The events will reveal how secret trade deals are threatening local economies, communities, jobs and the environment.
New Study Shows More Walkable Homes Are Worth More
CHICAGO - Though housing values are still slow to rebound from the collapse of the real estate market, a new analysis from CEOs for Cities reveals that homes in more walkable neighborhoods are worth more than similar homes in less-walkable neighborhoods, pointing to a bright spot in the residential real estate market.
Old industrial sites ripe for new life
Throughout Ontario, our urban landscape is littered with memories and relics of our industrial heritage. And although our society has built incredible industrial monuments throughout the past century, many have fallen into disrepair or have been abandoned altogether.
As the sands of time slowly erode these structures, new opportunities for reuse and re-investment may arise, and many of these former industrial sites are finding new life as innovative residential and mixed-use communities.
Former industrial lands and commercial facilities that are now vacant or under-used are referred to as brownfields. They are found throughout the province and often have tremendous potential for redevelopment.
How cities drive plants extinct
How towns and cities cause the extinction of local plants has been revealed for the first time.
An international team of botanists has compared extinction rates of plants within 22 cities around the world.
Both Singapore and New York City in the US now contain less than one-tenth of their original vegetation, reveals the analysis published in Ecology Letters.
However, San Diego, US and Durban, South Africa still retain over two-thirds of their original flora.
Both the pace of urban change and how many plants remain in a city are good predictors of whether plant species will survive there in the future, says the report.
Facebook draws a growing crop of farmers
With a hand-held video camera, a computer and 800 cows, Barbara Martin of Lemoore is letting the world into her life as a dairy operator.
No, it’s not a new reality television show. And Martin isn’t craving her 15 minutes of fame.
But she is joining a growing number of farmers and others in agriculture who are using social media tools to communicate with each other, send out information and educate the public about agriculture.
Dairy operators have become especially skilled at launching Facebook pages, blog posting and using Twitter, a microblogging site.
Martin uses all three to tell the public about the family’s 800-cow dairy. She launched her blog, “A Dairy Goddess’s Blog,” in late August.
Post Feedback
ATTENTION: Just a heads up to all SD’ers.. Today (Sunday, the 25th) there will be a presentation going on with some great speakers at the Art Gallery of Windsor with a focus on Mass Transit, its history, its future, and its role in urban design. I SOOOO wish I could attend but unfortunately I’m at work. Hoping some of you will be able to make it there.