Paris is undergoing a transportation revolution that champions the movement of people over the movement of vehicles and the most recent change was put to the people of the city. Citizens of Paris have voted to triple parking fees for heavy, road destroying, SUVs that take up more space than
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mark a. rayner: Formidable! My Night at the Moulin Rouge
If you’ve seen the movie Moulin Rouge (2001), then no doubt you’re expecting an extravagant, musical story about this evening. Let me set you straight:… The post Formidable! My Night at the Moulin Rouge appeared first on mark a. rayner.
Continue readingThings Are Good: The Transformation of Paris from Traffic Jams to Quick Movement
Paris once had a reputation for horrible traffic, long queues of cars and taxing journeys via cars. When you have a problem stemming from one element sometimes it’s best to just get rid of it. That’s exactly what Paris is doing. By getting rid of the car traffic jams are
Continue readingThings Are Good: Paris, the City of Bike Lights
When I visited Paris long ago it was a traffic clogged mess, with lovely architecture. Parisians have had enough of bad traffic and decided to solve their mobility challenges by adding more ways to get around the city. Thy’ve already returned urban space to pedestrians and started to build more
Continue readingThings Are Good: Paris’ Cafes Will Stay After the Pandemic
Cities around the world finally shunned cars from streets and returned the precious urban space to people in order to provide safe socially distanced places for people. These urban improvement efforts started during the COVID-19 pandemic have shown to people that we’ve given too much of our urban landscape to
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Good City is Only 5 Minutes Away
Paris is showing the world the future (their present) of good urban design, and it’s all about 15 minutes. We’ve looked at this concept before, and every year Paris pushes us further. The city has already reduced their reliance on automobiles and increased mobility for the entire populace. They’ve added
Continue readingPostArctica: Tour de France 2019
Tour de France. Like the World Cup of soccer, the best of sports on a global scale. Or as my grade 8 teacher, Brother Victor, once referring to soccer as the only true world game, might say, this is the absolute summit of such a simple thing as bicycling. It
Continue readingThings Are Good: Christiana Figueres: The Climate Risk Reward Ratio has Changed
The architect of the Paris Agreement, Christiana Figueres, is optimistic about the future of the planet and she sees the technology sector key in moving our economy to a carbon neutral system. She sees the exponential growth in the technology sector and argues that we need that sector’s help to
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: Paris!
Ms Soapbox and her daughter have gone to Paris for a week. Take good care of the province and the country until we get back. What pops into your mind when you see this: Louvre or Da Vinci Code?
Continue readingThings Are Good: This New Paris Community Demonstrates Sustainable Cities
In the capital of France, the new Clichy-Batignolles development demonstrates how a city can have a carbon-neutral footprint while providing modern living. The development itself is built on old industrial lands and includes community housing, a theatre, and many other important features of a city including a massive park. The
Continue readingThings Are Good: Covert Strategies for Supporting Urbanism
One of the biggest challenges facing cities in the 21st century is how to make them more people friendly. Parts of many cities have been left to rot, or have been neglected, thanks to decades of car-dominated thinking. This car-focussed, and individualistic, urban design has made discourse around making cities
Continue readingPostArctica: Marguerite Duras – The War, A Memoir
A friend recently told me that he likes to save texts, not quotes but texts, larger pieces, that he finds interesting. I am reading this book and thought this was a powerful passage. It is the end of the Second World War and she is wondering if her husband is
Continue readingThings Are Good: Pedestrians In Paris To Get 50% Of Street Space
Paris has had decades of extremely bad traffic and there’s no obvious solution: other than get rid the traffic. Infrastructure that encourages car use makes traffic worse while also debilitating cities as a whole. So Paris is doing what most places are afraid to try: giving the streets back to people. “Parisians are finding out […]
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Continue readingAlberta Politics: Questions without answers: Why are our U.S. allies so ambivalent about ISIS, and what does it mean for Canada?
PHOTOS: U.S. State Department spokesperson Mark Toner. (Screen grab from C-SPAN.) Below: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Conservative interim Opposition Leader Rona Ambrose and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. For all we know, Syrian President Bashar a…
Continue readingThings Are Good: Summary of COP21 Climate Deal
The Paris climate (COP21) talks are over and the deal has been struck, many are rightly calling this deal a huge step forward! All countries agreed to cutting emissions while running a more efficient world economy. Nations of the world have agreed that our current trajectory of wastefulness will make life for everything on the […]
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Continue readingAkaash Maharaj - Practical Idealism: National Post: NATO and the Judgement of Paris
The lessons of Afghanistan were purchased at a bitter cost: the war claimed more lives, more years, and more money than any other campaign in NATO’s history. Unless the alliance takes those lessons to heart, a war in Syria and Iraq to extinguish D…
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: The Paris Attacks In Contex
Propaganda, hysteria, ultra-violence and imperialism, as usual “A people unaware of its myths is likely to continue living by them.” – Richard Slotkin I have been too horrified by the predictably violent and insane reaction of the Western pow…
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: No Room at the Inn
Sham, 1 year oldRoszke/Horgos. In the very front, just alongside the border between Serbia and Hungary by the 4-meter-high iron gate, Sham is laying in his mother’s arms. Just a few decimeters behind them is the Europe they so desperately are trying to reach. Only one day before, the last
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Blowing up other countries, for dummies
Even before the terror attacks in Paris last week, the possibility of terrorists was the reason the Harper government gave for being so incredibly slow to accept Syrian refugees. When the news of the attacks broke Friday afternoon my time, it was literally minutes before I heard it in the
Continue readingParis—the blowback of imperialism
U.S. President Barack Obama has referred to the atrocities in Paris as attacks “on all of humanity.” He is wrong, of course. The attacks were specifically directed at France, an ex-imperialist European nation that has a long history of colonizing, oppressing and exploiting the Muslim peoples of North Africa and
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