We’ve all heard about how downtowns have failed in smaller cities while big box stores like Walmart succeed; what we don’t really talk about is why and what’s the solution. First we need to establish that suburban big box stores are horrible for people and the economy (which is easy);
Continue readingTag: urban
Things Are Good: Streetmix: Remix Your Street
Streetmix Let’s be honest, people are bad at conveying their ideas on what streets can look like. Thankfully there’s an open source project designed to help people remix their local streets and share it with others. The web based design tool Streetmix provides a simple drag and drop interface to
Continue readingPostArctica: Ruth Orkin, An American Girl in Italy, 1951
Iconic photograph often thought to portray the negative experience of women as they walk city streets. Yet the woman photographed, Ninalee Craig, has since said, “At no time was I unhappy or harassed in Europe” and that “[the photograph is] not a symbol of harassment. It’s a symbol of a
Continue readingThings Are Good: Safer Cities Stem from Active Communities
In the 1990s former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani popularized the broken window theory which is a zero tolerance approach to getting rid of crime. At first it proved successful and the approach spread, only later was it revealed that other factors were at work. Today, the solution to fighting
Continue readingThings Are Good: This is Systemic Street Safety
The video above demonstrates how communities can transition from an unhealthy, vehicle focused, urban design to a healthy pedestrian design. Regular readers of this site know that streets designed for people are better for communities by making cities healthier and economically more productive. Cars are an clunky way to move
Continue readingThings Are Good: Cyclists Obey the Law More Than Drivers
Cyclists are law disobeying maniacs! At least that’s a common and all too nasty rumour in North American cities. It turns out that car drivers are the maniacs according to a study fresh out of Florida. The study, the largest of it’s kind, put sensors on cyclists which monitored their
Continue readingThings Are Good: EU Launches Urban Mining Project
The European Union’s newest mining project focuses on urban areas throughout the continent. Their ProSUM project built a database of metals, chemicals, and materials brought into the EU market over the last ten plus years; the idea is that the produced goods can be “mined” again. It’s a really novel
Continue readingThings Are Good: Walkable Towns are Economically More Productive
Any visitor to a North American city knows that a lot of the geography is designed for single occupant car-based transportation. Anybody who’s spent months in any of these places knows that this car-focused design has been an unmitigated disaster. People are dying, the planet is being killed, and so
Continue readingPostArctica: Some Sculptors
Subodh Gupta “Subodh Gupta (born in 1964) is an Indian Contemporary artist based in New Delhi. Trained as a painter, he went on to experiment with a variety of media. His work encompasses sculpture, installation, painting, photography, performance and video. He is married to artist Bharti Kher and is represented
Continue readingPostArctica: December 6, 1989
Lest we forget.
Continue readingPostArctica: Election Selfie
On November 5th Montreal elected its first woman mayor, Valerie Plante. I was volunteering that day and spent a couple of hours in the De l’Eglise Metro handing out voting reminders. Later on another volunteer and I were knocking on doors after 7pm (polls closed at 8). We were motivated
Continue readingThings Are Good: Let’s Outright Ban Cars in Large Cities
Vehicles have been used to kill a lot of people throughout 2017, sometimes it’s an act of terror and other times it’s drivers being startlingly incompetent. Either way, people who walk are under threat from vehicular traffic in our cities (remember that everyone is a pedestrian). This past weekend in
Continue readingThings Are Good: European Cities Announce Bans on Fossil Fuel Vehicles
It’s no shock that cars are bad for health, what is shocking is that we continue to build cities to support automobiles. This is changing in some European cities and hopefully the idea will spread. Quite a few large cities in Europe are outright banning cars that use consume fossil
Continue readingPostArctica: Influences
There is this building on Saint Ambroise in Saint Henri that I always refer to as the “Cartier-Bresson Building” because it reminds me of this picture. And that’s the way that works. Never be afraid to let your influences influence you!
Continue readingThings Are Good: Yes in my Backyard!
For too long cities have been plagued by NIMBYism – people who chant not in my backyard. People who oppose change have held back communities for too long and now people are shouting yes in my backyard – YIMBY. In Toronto the rise of this movement has led to annual
Continue readingPostArctica: 780 Saint Remi – Then and Now.
Took this picture about 7 years ago after much of the Turcot Movement had already happened. Much on my mind at that point. This was a pretty cool building inhabited by many artists. It was only 4 storeys and the lofts all had those incredible floor to ceiling windows that
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