News, Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Editor’s pick: For Windsorites, a must read
Hume: Markham’s bold proposal is suburbia’s salvation
The land-use rebellion now unfolding in Markham is another skirmish in the war against the development industry.
At stake is who controls growth – government or industry?
Though some would have us believe that the end of suburbia represents a clash of cultures, an attack on middle-class virtues and market infallibility, it has more to do with wresting public powers from private hands.
Of all the myriad functions performed by local government, none is more fundamental than planning. Few would argue that the public sector’s role is to set and enforce the rules by which we build our communities.
Markham’s food belt
In a nod to advocates of locally grown produce, Markham town council is considering creation of a “food belt” outside currently built up areas. This would effectively freeze outward urban expansion. While developers understandably bristle at such restrictions, there are good reasons to welcome this bold initiative.
Hamilton: Creative catalyst could boost core
A major report that advocates Hamilton get behind developing a massive arts incubator downtown lands at city hall this morning.
The Hamilton Creative Catalyst Project Feasibility Study calls for the city to take advantage of creative energies already transforming parts of the urban landscape by creating a centralized facility downtown to house and nurture a burgeoning “creative sector.”
The $150,000 report comes before the economic development and planning committee at the Sheraton Hotel this morning.
According to the report, the “creative catalyst” incubator would occupy an iconic building or buildings and generate up to $3.8 million in property tax annually depending on the tenant mix and location…..
….The city-commissioned report, done by Toronto firms N. Barry Lyon Consultants and Consulting Matrix, recommends Hamilton’s creative sector — particularly the city’s undervalued music industry — be used to help revitalize the downtown and grow the local economy.
It compares Hamilton’s potential as a “cultural city” with Austin, Texas, Halifax and Glasgow, where the music and arts scene have spurred significant economic and urban landscape revitalizations.
Lakes wind could power Ontario: report
Offshore turbines would spawn huge industry that has potential of outpacing entrenched generators such as nuclear, hydro, developer says
Manufacturing in trouble? You can thank the tar sands
A less flattering picture emerges when you factor in something that doesn’t get enough attention in Canada: how hitching our economy to dirty oil production turns our dollar into a petro-loonie. This hurts manufacturing by pricing our products out of international markets as our currency follows the price of oil ever upward over time.
Shocker: We don’t pay enough for electricity
We are paying too much for green power dreams and we are paying too little for electricity. Consumers in Ontario and across the country should pay a higher price for electricity, especially in peak periods, to reflect its environmental cost and the cost of new generating facilities.
Quebec charging ahead with $4.5 million electric vehicle trial
Hydro-Québec plans to launch the largest electric-vehicle trial in the country later this fall, a $4.5 million project over three years that will put 50 electric cars on the streets of Boucherville. The utility has partnered with Mitsubishi Motors, which will supply its i-MiEV electric cars for the trial
DETROIT NEEDS A BOLDER PLAN
The Brookings Institution recently unveiled “The Detroit Project”, a plan to revive Detroit, in the New Republic. Brookings’ plan has good elements and recognizes some important realities, but also has key gaps. It relies excessively on industrial policy and conventional approaches that are unlikely to drive a real turnaround in America’s most troubled big city.
THE URBANOPHILE PLAN FOR DETROIT
Turning around Detroit means facing head on the core problems that hobble the region, notably:
• America’s worst big city race relations
• A population that is too big for current economic reality
• A management and labor culture rooted in an era that no longer exists and is unsuited to the modern economy
• A tax, regulatory, and political system toxic to business
PERSONAL RAPID TRANSIT: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY TRANSPORT?
..the chance to visit Taxi 2000. This Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) company is based just minutes from my office in Minneapolis. I’m no expert on rail systems, but I’ve always believed that an elevated system that can run freely over existing right-of-ways makes more sense than an antiquated system based on nearly 200 hundred year old technology.
Since we plan new neighborhoods and cities, I saw a great opportunity to design a new town with an elevated PRT system as a major design influence, not as an afterthought. A perfect combination: a new age city based upon the latest methods, with a convenient way to access most of the region, based on a 21st century design, not an 18th century one.
HOUSING: DENSITY & DESIRE
Who’s right? Nobody. There is no ideal density number in planning or development. Forget the search for a numerical value. Instead, concentrate on livability.
Major Study on Effect of 20 mph Traffic Speeds on Injury Rates
One of the most important issues facing cities and towns is traffic safety. For transportation planners and engineers, this has led to the use of traffic calming strategies designed to reduce vehicle speeds. But the underlying question is the extent to which the reduction in speeds reduces accidents and injuries. A comprehensive study was recently published in the British Medicial Journal that provides an important look at this — by examining 20 years’ worth of data in London on the effect of introducing 20 mph zones. We first heard of this study from a blog posting by the New Haven Safe Streets Coalition. Thanks!
Read the full article: Effect of 20 mph traffic speed zones on road injuries in London, 1986-2006: controlled interrupted time series analysis (British Medical Journal, BMJ, 10 December 2009).
A Cultural Revolution in Dallas
“Dallas has long been seen as a city (and metro area) rich with money but poor on quality of life. Downtown is full of colossal office buildings, huge parking garages and one-way streets that whisk office workers in and back out to the suburbs as efficiently as possible. But Dallas has always strived to be a world-class destination, and its leaders have looked to great architecture and art to make that a reality since 1890, when the city spent $300,000, then an outrageous sum, on a courthouse in the middle of downtown. It showed that Dallas was leaving its Wild West reputation behind.
Nowadays Big D has a collection of modern buildings by famous architects to rival that of any metropolis. Even so, this has been a monumental year for Dallas architecture.”
This piece looks at the city’s new performing arts complex, and the new football stadium in nearby Arlington as signs of Dallas’ increasing attention to architecture.
[I've] written extensively about genetically modified organisms (GMOS). Farmers are essentially giving up the wheel to corporate entities that research, develop, and mass produce seeds. But a recent story on NPR brings to light how rigorous seed licensing is sticking it to the farmer, or their wallet for that matter.
Monsanto has figured out a system by which the company can take its customers for what they’re worth, literally. Once farmers use Monsanto’s Roundup Ready, which is a line of designer genetically-modified seeds, they have to continue to purchase the seeds year after year because it’s illegal, yes illegal, for farmers to save seeds. Last year alone the cost of these seeds went up 50 percent.
Organic market in Canada
The market for organic produce in Canada has been growing steadily at a recent rate of about 20 per cent a year, according to the Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada.
In the most recent Organics Insights Report conducted by Nielsen, sales of organic products at grocery stores and mass merchandisers totalled $654 million in 2007, a 20-per-cent growth over 2006 figures.
‘Condo commuters’ can ease gridlock
Each day, a small army of condo commuters walks to work, avoiding the blight of traffic by using the fastest, cheapest, most reliable and healthiest mode of transportation available – their own two feet.
Now the transportation habits of these downtowners have been documented in a new draft planning report by the city. The research is being held up by planners as hard evidence that the right kind of development can be a powerful antidote to car dependence.
Windsor and London are: We’re back of the pack
The lack of a green bin program, user fees or tougher bag limits go a long way to explain why London has fared badly compared to others when it comes to diverting waste from the dump.
In 2008, the most recent year for which data of waste diversion was collected, London ranked 10th of 12 larger urban centres, with only 41% of its household waste directed away from the landfill.
Only Windsor and Ottawa fared worse and the latter has done something about it, distributing 240,000 green bins the last few months of 2009.
Another truism but very often we do not realise its importance. The great buildings - I mean great public buildings - in the history usually the churches and cathedrals, now the buildings of culture: theatres, operas, museums. But lets look at this phenomena a little bit closer. What are the possible locations of great buildings within the city structure? Here we find very different solutions.
Usually the great buildings are connected with great public spaces. This was the case of Egyptian pyramids and the ceremonial procession road, as well as the procession road from the Ishtar Gate to the ziggurat in Babylon. In the second case theirs direct neighborhood consisted of private housing.
For regular readers of TreeHugger, aquaponics—an agricultural system that combines hydroponics and aquaculture—is nothing new. Though numerous home-based and DIY systems are on the market, the concept has yet to make a big splash as an urban food source.
The time for that to change, Good writes, has come.
One of the problems with aquaponics systems is that, traditionally, they use petroleum-based fertilizers, prohibiting the products from being considered organic.Good explains that Cityscape Farms in San Francisco is working to change that:
How to Make Municipal Wi-Fi Work
The idea of free Internet for all Americans looks good on screen, but the concept also raises crucial questions. And for the past few years, as cities across the country jumped on the broadband wagon, many government IT leaders kept getting stuck on the first and most important one: How?
Since 2005, various U.S. cities from Philadelphia to Houston have announced plans for Wi-Fi networks only to turn around and cancel them later because of lack of funding or subscription support. Many local governments refused to be anchor tenants because they didn’t want to commit to buying a specified volume of service.
Not all municipal Wi-Fi networks fell flat. Some cities have succeeded in delivering broadband service to the public. For instance, first responders in New York can access files through the $500 million high-speed New York City Wireless Network (NYCWiN), built and operated for the next five years by Northrop Grumman Corp. Other areas such as Bristol, Va. and Corpus Christi, Texas, have also developed thriving models of a public network.
These success stories prove that municipal Wi-Fi can indeed work, but that doesn’t mean there’s only one way to solve the problem of the digital divide. In the past few months, two major cities have illustrated two very different ways in which a city can make that big connection.
Seth Godin and CEOs for Cities raised the issue of what do to with public libraries in the 21st century. Over time, all books will be available on the internet, which will mean fewer people checking out the hard-cover, hard copy versions.
Seth thinks they should “train people to take intellectual initiative.” Not a bad goal, but we have universities for that and increasingly they are reaching out to the broader community.
So what to do with all these small and large public places dotted around a city that belong to the taxpayers. Why not make them into “third places” that are free as well as community resource points. Currently, small business people and others wanting to network or discuss an idea need to spend money to “rent” a table at Starbucks or another wireless cafe.
What if libraries offered comfortable spaces for people to meet and chat, as well as spaces for silent reading or working –free wireless, of course, plus the ability to borrow a computer while you’re there. Maybe for a small fee (or free), small meeting rooms could be reserved complete with technology like projectors. Maybe local groups including meetup ones would have a free place to meet: a novel writing support group or political campaigners.
What if these existing places could also become community resource points staffed by volunteers. Tourist and travel information in one corner, help with your resume in another, tax advice in a third place and maybe legal help at certain times in another area….
Vancouver engineers its own urban dream
….It’s known as the “ecological footprint.” Ominously, Rees found that the 2.2 million people who live in the Vancouver region would need an area 57 times larger than their own city to sustain them. Indeed, if everyone on Earth lived as people in Vancouver did, Rees calculated, it would take four planets to keep them alive.
That message resonated, and it changed Rees’ adopted city. To a degree probably unmatched anywhere else in North America, the city of Vancouver has tried to impose notions of sustainability in its decisions on what, where and how to build.
The result has come to be known as “Vancouverism,” an urban motif of public transit instead of freeways, a low-carbon energy infrastructure and gleaming high-rise condominium towers in sunlit, walkable neighborhoods laced with urban parks…
For Canadian cities, big isn’t always best
Forget Montreal and Toronto – they have the size but not the sizzle.
An unvarnished assessment of Canada’s cities has selected six as the most attractive to move to, and they don’t include the country’s two biggest.
It gives top honours – an “A” grade – to an eclectic assortment of urban areas: Calgary, Ottawa, Vancouver, St. John’s, Waterloo, Ont., and the Toronto suburb of Richmond Hill.
The assessment, in a report by the Conference Board of Canada, calls these municipalities “city magnets” for their ability to appeal to newcomers, whether they be relocating from within the country or emigrating from abroad.
Holland To Start Taxing Based On Mileage In 2012
Traffic sucks. It is a waste of time and of fuel. But even though we have congestion problems of our own in America, it is nothing like the Netherlands, where an estimated 70 million hours a year are wasted by the populace stuck in traffic. The problem is so bad that in 2012 a new law goes in effect in the Netherlands that will tax drivers based on how many kilometers they drive. As Europe’s most densely populated and congested country, Dutch politicians hope a hefty tax levied against most drivers will encourage people to use public transportation and lessen their legendary congestion problems.
Here is the caveat that caught my eye though. Dutch officials estimate that 6 out of 10 motorists will end up paying less, because the new tax will replace registration and the 25% (!!!!!!!!!) sales tax on new cars. So why would people drive less, if it costs less?
Tags: 3rd Places, City planning, culture, density, Detriot, Downtown development, GMO, gridlock, Hamilton, Libraries, local economic development, london, Markham, organic farming, rapid transit, recycling, Tar Sands, Urban farming, Vancouver, Wi-Fi
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Hamilton: Creative catalyst could boost core
A major report that advocates Hamilton get behind developing a massive arts incubator downtown lands at city hall this morning.
The Hamilton Creative Catalyst Project Feasibility Study calls for the city to take advantage of creative energies already transforming parts of the urban landscape by creating a centralized facility downtown to house and nurture a burgeoning “creative sector.”
The full study and report below:
http://www.hamilton.ca/NR/rdonlyres/7823BED2-9AC5-4D55-A6FF-ED582135FB51/0/Jan19PED08280a.pdf