City Comforts, the blog

Why use such retrograde imagery?

WorldChanging says that Cities Are Tools for Living Bright Green Lives.

We live on an urban planet. For the first time in history, a majority of us live in cities. How we grow those cities, how we build neighborhoods, how we provide housing, how we choose to get around, how well we incorporate nature into the places we live - these are the challenges that will largely determine our future.

All well and good. But then why use an illustration on its web site (the pages on cities) which to my glance appears to suggest the discredited future of  the  isolated towers of Robert Moses, Le Corbusier and the worst of 1950s urban renewal? Which suggests that the green urban future consists of huge buildings amidst which tiny humans are afterthoughts on a sterile plaza? I assume it's an oversight for a worthy group which I know is attuned to the fine grain of a walkable city. The image, however, suggests the opposite.

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Not even Howard Schultz's wildest dream

Starbucks Everywhere .

Hello, my name is Winter, and I have never been a member of the Wu-Tang Clan. Nevertheless, since 1997 (the same year Wu-Tang Forever was released) I have been on a personal mission to visit every Starbucks in the world. My original motivation was simply to accomplish something singularly unique. However, since that time, I have discovered many joys in the traveling and the challenge of my mission, and they help keep me going despite the ever-increasing difficulty. Just to be clear, I do have other interests, such as competitive Scrabble and trying to change the world, so please do not presume that Starbucks is my sole interest.(emphaasis added)

We can pay for health care in Dubai but not in the USA

Everyone in Dubai to have health care.

Every worker in Dubai, from chief executives to labourers, will have access to the same health care under a radical and unexpected overhaul of the system announced yesterday.

Jane Jacobs Speaks

From the CBC Archives (video) of 1969Remembering Jane Jacobs. Interesting clip which reminds us that Jane Jacobs was as much or more about economics as about urban design.

Should anyone doubt the power of civil servants buried deep in the bureaucracy:

Neighbors mourn mural creatures' extinction and also City paints over cherished Phinney mural

Before:

After:

Real reporting would involve interviewing not only City PR home-office types but also the guys who went out and did the destruction. Who are they? How did the orders come down? Why didn't they ask anyone to confirm the task? etc etc What were they thinking?

Terrifically-interesting post on Hyperlocalizing Hydrology in the Post-Industrial Urban Landscape

Here at Pruned

One of the things which excites me about the issue of storm-water runoff is that it looks to me like a problem which actually capable of resolution i.e. there are low-tech and cost-effective methods by which polluted waters from roads and parking lots can be treated and before they reach rivers, lakes and oceans.

The endless moment of the photo; but they are all dead now.

The day of judgment.

Since 1839, the world inventory of photographs has been accumulating at an accelerating pace, multiplying into a near infinitude of images, into a resemblance of a Borgesian library. This haunting technology has been with us long enough now that we are able to look at a crowd scene, a busy street, say, in the late 19th century and know for certain that every single figure is dead. Not only the young couple pausing by a park railing, but the child with a hoop and stick, the starchy nurse, the solemn baby upright in its carriage - their lives have run their course, and they are all gone. And yet, frozen in sepia, they appear curiously, busily, oblivious of the fact that they must die - as Susan Sontag put it, "photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading towards their own destruction ..." (emphasis added)

"This haunting technology has been with us long enough now that we are able to look at a crowd scene, a busy street, say, in the late 19th century and know for certain that every single figure is dead."

I've had the same unnerving magnificent idea when looking at an old photograph. Or standing in an old house or at any old place and realizing that real humans had stood there before me. Of course a photo shows real people with real faces, or rather, people who had once been real and who now live only in photos, so it is all the more awesome than a silent place. But places also speak.

A particular landscape in Dubai one warm windy day:

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The thought came to me that I had been there long ago, several millenia ago, herding sheep or goats. Not at all impossible, in fact, looking at family history. I don't often get such "woo-woo" thoughts. So who knows. It was a pretty place, at any rate..