In Toronto, public housing is getting a massive do-over. Well, at least in part. Witness the Regent Park revitalization: Within the last year, vertically dense, glass and concrete structures with the look and basic amenities of the better condos that line the Gardiner Expressway rose up near Dundas and Parliament.

The buildings reflect light, unlike their Hobbit-hollow-on-the-road-to-Mordor predecessors. The streets now actually resemble city streets, boulevards even. There are mixed heights together with widened perspectives. The buildings appear better spaced and the space between buildings no longer looks like an afterthought. The glazing and cladding reference the sky and the lake. A new aquatic community centre is being built to replace the old, odd one that is attached to a smokestack. This is a great thing for Regent Park. It actually looks like a part of Toronto.

There will be integrated stores and banks and underground parking. Mixed use and mixed income are the catchphrases.

But despite the Regent revitalization being in-step with the design-times, there is a creeping sense of deja vu. Is it possible that this might not be the “fix” for that the troubled neighborhood that everyone envisions? Someone dreamt up the previous incarnation with some set of “ideals” in mind. Is the concept of affordable housing in Toronto as now as the new buildings? Will the new buildings transform the old community?

This is not a question that can be answered now or even soon. Despite the good looks and good neighborhood planning and great ideas about mixed income cohabitation, this is an experiment in social housing, and the concepts are really hypotheses about what makes good public housing. How do we define the good in this case? What outcomes are most desirable? Only the next 20 years will tell whether the new Regent Park is more successful than the old.

In the meantime, there is an excellent website that reminds us that the road to social housing hell is paved with good design-driven intentions and that the devil is in the details. Top down design did not bring the bottom up. Not in these cases.

Peruse these (in)famous public housing projects and judge the odds on Regent Park for yourself. I think they are better than even.

http://www.oobject.com/category/15-housing-projects-from-hell

Every iPhoneur (the post-post-modern flaneur) operates in a state of flow when they are perambulating around the city with their camera poised: walking, observing, discerning. Every picture (“capture” in the iPhoneur’s lingo) represents a unique, timeless and irreproducible moment of truth. Each pathway to that enlightened photo is unique…..

Is it?

As much as I would like to think so, I have bumped into (literally) many photographers on the same unique visual journey as me.

Well, maybe the photo is unique but the trip is not. Eric Fischer used Flickr geotags and strings of PERL programming to produce a beguiling set of minimalist maps that turn Flickr geotags into vectors that map out where people walk around, photographing. Called the The Geotaggers’ World Atlas, the series of maps in ultrafine red and black lines show where people are snapping pictures in major cities. Toronto is mapped.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157623971287575/

The maps are not interactive, yet, but they are nonetheless remarkable visualizations of human photographing behaviour.

And if you are a flickerite who geotags their photos, then you helped create this map.

Top Up

Top Up has come to my neighbourhood. Born in the upper crusty Leasides in the 90s it crept across the Millwood bridge and has reproduced on every street. Beige stuccoed boxes are replacing homegrown, affordable, in-need-of-love worker’s cottages and three bedroom homes. The decharacterization of East York has begun.

My five year old thinks it grand. Every day in building season there is a different place to see mighty machines and work, beating down the old worker’s cottages and bungalows, gouging out new basements and delivering cement.

The first one was a welcome surprise. An old, Bonanza-style shack disappeared overnight. I was happy to see it go. In my little hometown across the lake, a dog barking from the porch was met with a ‘Shut Up Rusty” from the owner. When the hounds barked from this porch, the owners peered out the window and nary a scold was issued. Hmmm. Can only mean that Bad Guys lived there. A modest, salmon coloured stucco back split, new but not showy replaced it. The contractor lives in it with his family.

The second occupier is pretty horrible to look at. Kitty corner to the Bonanza replacement, Two viennese pastry squares, frosted with stucco and hackneyed Hapsburg details, with hideously mismatched wooden fencing and builder style decks sprang up. I want to say they weren’t that bad. I want to.

I figured it was isolated. Then one fine morning, holes starting appearing on my block. Within a few months, two tall and thin stuccoed domiciles occupied centre stage on the street. My house was no longer the tallest. Neighbours started talking about stuccoing their facades.

At first I was enthusiastic. The presence of these modern domiciles will make my property value rise, right? They have replaced some incredibly ugly wood framed homes that looked like badly concealed double wide trailers.

Does this tear down, top-up trend represent the vanguard of gentrification for my neighbourhood? Do I really want it gentrified like this?

I future posts I am going to explore: (1) Can we be the next Leslieville if the creative types can’t afford the downstroke? (2) Who is putting these houses up and why and (3) Why do they look like they do?

Stay tuned….

This week urban theorist Richard Florida released his latest publication – “The Great Reset”. In this new book, Florida examines the recession as “the mother of invention” and as he points out in the video CURL helped produce – “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste”.

He reflects back at other periods of economic crisis such as the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Long Depression of the late nineteenth century and suggests that these periods of ‘reset’ are great opportunities to remake our economy and help cities thrive.

“Florida identifies the patterns that will drive the next Great Reset and transform virtually every aspect of our lives — from how and where we live, to how we work, to how we invest in individuals and infrastructure, to how we shape our cities and regions. Florida shows how these forces, when combined, will spur a fresh era of growth and prosperity, define a new geography of progress, and create surprising opportunities for all of us. Among these forces will be

* new patterns of consumption, and new attitudes toward ownership that are less centered on houses and cars
* the transformation of millions of service jobs into middle class careers that engage workers as a source of innovation
* new forms of infrastructure that speed the movement of people, goods, and ideas
* a radically altered and much denser economic landscape organized around “megaregions” that will drive the development of new industries, new jobs, and a whole new way of life”

(www. randomhouse.ca)

www.creativeclass.com

Canada has offered a $550 million loan for the construction of a bridge joining Detroit and Windsor. The bridge would mean long and short-term job creation and economic growth for the Windsor region. The loan would be repayed to the Canadian government in full via toll revenues. It could also mean a break for a cash-stripped Michigan government.

I wander. I have never been lost….in the geographical sense. But I like to roam. Peregrination is my preferred word for this activity, not just because it is a big, important sounding word, but because it calls to mind a stealthy black figure with scimitar wings cutting the blue overhead , peering down with bionic vision, able to dive at its prey like a German Stuka plane.

My family encouraged hiking, biking and trips as far as our resources would take us (Utica, NY anyone?). My dad was a peregrinor in his own right and set a course on a map so he could deliberately divert and deke through back roads and avoid the highways. He managed to get us damn-near lost on what my younger brother and I dubbed “Magical Mystery Tours” which were either unmagical and full of knee jerk remarks from other motorists or led to interesting situations, such as a memorable roadside tour of “drinking shacks” in the “hollers” of rural West Virginia. Exasperated after one particularly long and nauseating spin around the outskirts of Newark New Jersey I pointed to a hooker on the corner and asked “Why don’t we ask this nice young citizen for directions into Manhattan?”.
By the time I was old enough to be a bored teenager, I was a rover. Indiscriminately mobile. There was nothing much to do in my crooked little industrial town that was fun and legal. I was too young to hit the bar(s) so I hit the pavement. Divided in half by a broad canal, my tonw had a white picketed WASPy side (with a surprising number of Catholic schools) and a Franco-Italian side, across an out of use shipping canal. The Other Side of the Canal was desireable because it had three things: ethnicity, poverty and danger . This was the oldest side of town. People talked differently. They drank differently. There was a main street that led across a sad but sturdy steel beam bridge, a library built with the aid of Carnegie money, and of course, the 24/7 factories. On humid nights I could just hear the steady heart beat of the drop forge 10 km away. All the old buildings were there, and a cannon as well, pointed toward the opposite canal bank.
By day I rode out into the country on old gritty roads flanked with farm houses, ditches, and rabies mad hunting dogs that snapped at my wheels. At night I roamed the Other Side, looking at buildings, eves-dropping on conversations and finding out that my emotions resonated to concrete and brick, steel and asphalt. Roaming became as much about the feelings and internal states that these sights produced, and associations to the required reading in my English classes vectored out like electron traces in a cloud chamber. This was no a deliberate make-work project for my bored, sex distracted teenage mind; it was an automatic reflex. I could be looking down at the river and the cinematic ghost of Huckleberry Finn on a rough hewn raft would float by. Any poured concrete building pulled the curtain up on a drama that mixed the characters from 1984, Brave New World and that magnificent dystopian movie from the 70s, Logan’s Run. My right palm would itch where the flashing red jewel would have been.
Trips to Toronto were a rover’s delight. While my mother shopped, I decamped with my dad and younger brother to Queen’s Park (which oddly, had only a statue of a prince), where my dad would be accosted for smokes (one fella prefaced his ask with “kind young sir”-an epithet that made my brother and I howl). My dad grew up in Toronto and regaled us with startling stories like how the yuppie fiefdom that is Yorkville (pre-1 million dollar “rock”) was once once a hippie haven where you could find Leonard Cohen sleeping it off in the back of a car while beautiful losers danced like charmed cobras in the middle of Yorkville avenue.
When I was 14 I took a not-so-bad photo of the George Washington Statue in Georgetown DC with my parent’s Vivitar 110 camera. At fifteen I used my summer job money to buy a 35mm Minolta. I started to photograph in the places where I wandered. As it evolved along with my wandering, and I made it into graduate school, I began to think a lot more about what it meant to wander, travel, and realized that I was trying, with every photography, to capture my feel for a place or an idiosyncratic urban detail. Finally, it coalesced, and now I am a compulsive photographer and observer of urban minutiae. Acquiring an iPhone has only made it easier.
Addicts hate fixing alone, so I plan to use this blog to reach out to other people who have the same strange need to explore and critique the urban landscape. Neighbourhood observations, critiques of urban trends, book review mash-ups: all are on the this map. And of course, photography.
Glad to meet you. Let’s get mobile.

Jason Ramsay, PhD.

It started in the summer of 2009 with U.S. government surveillance balloon hovering over the city of Sarnia, Ontario and led to a city-wide protest during which residents bared their bottoms to the camera.

With a population of 72,000 Sarnia borders with Port Huron, Michigan and in the most recent months has been dealing with fighter jets flying over the city’s downtown. The Michigan Air National Guard flies the planes out of its Selfridge base near Detroit and frequently over the border as part of it’s training routes.

Sarnia’s Mayor Mike Bradley has written to Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, asking him to investigate the fighter jets which create a lot of noise pollution and disturb the Sarnia community.

We’ll see what the city’s residents come up with now – mooning the fighter planes might not go so far!

On May 1 and 2nd thousands of Torontonians will take part in the 4th annual Jane’s Walk – a series of neighbourhood walking tours done in honour of urban activist/writer Jane Jacobs. What started in Canada four years ago has now gone global with 46 North American cities participating last year. This year atleast 112 walks are being offered in Toronto, with an array of volunteer tour guides to keep things interesting.

For more information and to sign up for a tour of your favorite neighborhood visit: http://janeswalk.net

The city of Toronto has decided to embrace a program that has long been active in Canadian cities such as Montreal. Although we won’t see it this summer, Bixi Bike sharing system is scheduled to launch in Spring/Summer 2011. With 1000 bikes in 80 locations, it’s a great alternative to getting around the city, not worrying about getting your bike stolen or waiting for the TTC.

City staff and PBSC have negotiated the draft terms of an agreement whereby PBSC would enter into a 10-year agreement with the City to be launched May 1, 2011. When the program is deployed, Torontonians and visitors would have access to 1,000 bicycles via 80 fully automated and conveniently located “bicycle parking stations” in the downtown area during the first year of operation with the potential to expand the system to other areas in the future. PBSC would be responsible for the $4.8 million capital investment to manufacture and install the public bicycle infrastructure and for the operation of the program, and the estimated $1.3 million average annual operating cost. In return, the City would provide a loan guarantee to assist PBSC in securing favourable financing. The City would be responsible for the cost of replacing the bicycles and stations due to vandalism and theft in excess of a six percent threshold.

The proposed agreement between the City and PBSC provides Toronto with a significant program which aligns well with the City’s sustainable transportation and environmental objectives, with minimal cost or financial risk. The draft terms of agreement are very favourable to the City in comparison to other cities around the world with similar public bicycle programs.

Are you an artist looking to showcase your global cities related work? CURL is always looking for interesting artists to profile in the Artist-In-Residence section. Please forward samples of your work and bio to mars@criticalresearchlab.org