The Ontario Municipal Board: Villain or Scapegoat?
I wrote (quoting liberally from Moore) for my Law Class paper last year. Personally i think the media sensationalizes and the public react. We as planners should focus more on the facts behind the cover stories.
-rudhro
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December 13, 2011
Written by Isidoros Kyrlan
Aaron A. Moore Ph.D. explores the question ‘Is the OMB a problem to Toronto’s development or just the scapegoat?’ Moore presented his research at the University of Toronto’s Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance last week. The presentation “Villain or Scapegoat?: The OMB and land use planning in Ontario” was a lead up to his upcoming book “Planning Institutions and Politics – The Ontario Municipal Board and Toronto” due out the summer of 2012. It was a timely presentation given City Council’s upcomingFebruary vote on whether to ask the Province to abolish the OMB for Toronto.
Moore’s research spans the past 10 years and he finds that the OMB is indeed masking the real issue. That issue is one of a flawed planning system that is arbitrary, and constantly challenged. He cites Section 37 of The Planning Act ’Density Bonusing’ as an example of how a well intentioned intensification initiative may lead to poor city zoning decisions. Density Bonusing is when a developer requests to surpass the maximum density allowed by zoning. The City of Toronto can ask for compensation to allow for the increased density, usually a monetary amount. The idea is that the city will use the money to accommodate the area for the increased density. In the last 3 years there were 261 zoning changes and 118 times Section 37 was implemented to compensate the city. The problem is that the city has an incentive to leave zoning densities low and request developers to compensate for exceeding the zoning. In the case for the City of Toronto, Density Bonusing funds are not accurately tracked to ensure they are invested back in the neighbourhood.
The OMB comes into play when developers exceed zoning density and neighbourhood associations feel they have justification for challenging the development. Neighbourhood associations rally their City Councillors to oppose the development, even if the City Planning Committee favours the proposal. The development is voted down at City Council and then appealed to the OMB. The OMB puts weight on professional planning expertise such as that of the Planning Committee recommendations instead of City Council’s. A development with planning support, but not council support will likely be approved. A Councillor can side with the voters of the neighbourhood association and blame the OMB as to why the development went through without risking growth and development in their ward. Moore cites that the number of OMB decisions favouring developers over city council has increased in correlation to the number of increased neighbourhood associations in the city. The OMB has become a relief valve for local politics.
With the Section 37 incentive and the councillors having the option to blame the OMB, a contentious environment is created of developer versus city planning versus city council versus the OMB. An outsider would view it as a chaotic system where there is no point to planning and zoning if it can all be challenged and changed at the OMB. Moore notes it is not like this in other jurisdictions; the State of Oregon was presented as an example of having institutions similar to the OMB, but with better planning that reduced appeals to those bodies. Moore noted that in Oregon planning is not just done at the local level, but at the state level as well. The state sets a land-use plan and approaches each city for a comprehensive plan of how their zoning will compliment the overall plan. Ontario has a growth plan often referenced in intensification challenges, but the province does not approach every city and ask for how their zoning will meet the growth plan targets. Instead, zoning has to be challenged, often at the OMB level, to meet the intensification objectives on a case by case basis. For comprehensive planning to take place in Ontario more resources would be required. Even in Toronto, Moore notes that city planning staff are evenly distributed among all wards, even though development is usually concentrated in a few wards.
Moore did raise a concern about the Toronto’s recent proposal to abolish the OMB in the city. Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam and Councillor Josh Matlow recommend that the OMB be replaced by the Committee of Adjustments, and any challenge to City Council decisions would be made in a court of law. In Moore’s research he found the courts to be expensive, time consuming, and possibly more in favour of developer arguments of fairness, rather than planning expertise. Where neighbourhood associations today feel powerless against the OMB due to a lack of planning expertise, in the proposed system they could be shut out due to legal costs and endless litigation. The current City proposal does not address Moore’s areas of improvement: comprehensive and transparent planning involving not just local but regional jurisdictions. Moore would like to see the Province and cities agree on growth objectives and have in place the zoning to accommodate those objectives, then developers, residents, and municipalities could stop wasting resources challenging each proposal. Moore has the research and numbers to show the OMB does not have to be a scapegoat. The only concern is that with comprehensive planning, Toronto could lose some of its current dynamism. Twenty years ago who could have planned for Maple Leaf Gardens to become a grocery store or Etobicoke’s motel strip to become a skyline?
Written by Isidoros Kyrlan
CHINA 2011: 16 VERY INTERESTING FACTS
ONE:
By 2025, China will build TEN New York-sized cities.
“[By 2025,] 40 billion square meters of floor space will be built — in five million buildings. 50,000 of these buildings could be skyscrapers — the equivalent of ten New York Cities.”
Jane Jacobs and the Power of Women Planners
Roberta Brandes Gratz
November 16, 2011
Fifty years ago this month, Jane Jacobs published Death and Life of Great American Cities and changed the way the world understands cities. Yet even when she’s acknowledged as an important urban thinker, the ‘housewife’ qualifier is invariably included. When we talk about strategies for city growth and economic development, women aren’t often offered seats at the table. They hold jobs in the field but few posts as critics. Jane was the exception. But the rules didn’t change a great deal.
Jacobs broke into the national discussion about cities somewhat by accident. She was a reluctant stand-in for her Architectural Forum male editor at a cities conference in 1956. She had written some insightful articles about how cities work, particularly in Vogue, documenting how New York City’s fur and flower districts evolved organically.
Today, her early observations are considered pathbreaking. But happenstance thrust her into the public eye.
Jacobs’ early attention-getting articles in Architectural Forum and Fortune Magazine happened because she had as a champion a distinguished male editor William Holly Whyte. Whyte gained fame for writing The Organization Man and for espousing ideas similar to hers. But he had to overcome a sputtering, angry Fortune publisher who once asked, “Who is this crazy dame?”
A housewife without even a college degree was unacceptable. After all, Lewis Mumford’s scathing review of Death and Life was headlined “Mother Jacobs Home Remedies.” (more…)
Is Civilization A Universally Bad Idea?
Written by Adam Frank
November 15, 2011
The ice ages came and the ice ages went. For more than a half-million years Homo sapiens endured the changing climate by adapting. Then, deep in the frozen expanse of the last global big chill, something new happened. We woke up to ourselves in a new way.
We became self-conscious, creating art, culture and tools of far greater complexity than anything that had come before. When the ice pulled back yet again, we eventually took a step of even greater consequence. We domesticated ourselves and put the Earth to the plow.
With agriculture came surplus and with surplus came new social arrangements. Eventually, we built cities and far-ranging empires to support them. Human beings began buildingcivilization. In doing so we set ourselves and the entire planet onto a new trajectory.
But did anyone ever stop to ask if it was a good idea?
Now before you give in to the easy snort and chortle that accompanies a seemingly absurd question like this, I am going to ask you to take the long view. In this case long means billions of years, and billions of planets.
We don’t want to ask the question: Is civilization good for you (or me)? Instead we want to ask: Is civilization good — in the long term — for planets and their capacity to support life (or at least technologically adept civilizations)?
In other words, we want to frame the question of sustainability in an astrobiological setting. (more…)
The $15-billion ambition to reshape Manhattan’s skyline: ”The last time the city saw such a transformation was more than 100 years ago, when Park Avenue and Grand Central Station were covered with the platform that is now crossed by millions of people a year without a second thought. If all goes according to plan, the hidden tracks below Hudson Yards will also be forgotten by the time the first residents move in.”
STEVE LADURANTAYE
Saturday, Nov. 12, 2011
The High Line park comes to an abrupt end on the west side of Manhattan, as a chain link fence keeps anyone from stumbling into a massive train yard that handles much of the island’s commuter rail traffic.
Within a few years, that fence be will gone and an entire city block will have been built atop the 26-acre rail yard. Literally on top – the trains will continue to run on the same tracks they are on today, but a $1.5-billion platform will keep them out of sight.
Five thousand apartments will sprout from the newly-built artificial land mass, along with a million square feet of retail space and six million square feet of office space – the same amount that can be found in all of Saskatchewan. That’s three office towers, nine residential buildings and dozens of stores. There are also plans for a school, a cultural centre and 12 acres of open park space.
The $15-billion project is ambitious even by New York standards, and will result in an entirely new neighbourhood on what had been considered a fully built-out island. But in the meantime, much of the site is surrounded by wooden hoarding bearing the name of Canada’s largest real estate developer – Oxford Properties.
The project is the company’s bold step into the United States. And for the hundreds of thousands of pensioners and workers who rely on the company to generate solid returns to fund their retirement – Oxford is the real estate arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System and owns and manages $17-billion of buildings – the stakes couldn’t be any higher.
This sliver of Manhattan is about to become a proving ground for some of the biggest players in Canadian real estate. Just across the street, Brookfield Office Properties, which is controlled by Toronto’s Brookfield Asset Management Inc., has its own project that will add millions more feet of office space.
That all of this is going ahead, despite the threat of another recession, illustrates the health of the Canadian property sector. Developers and landlords here came through the recession in far better shape than their American counterparts, due to tighter banking regulations and a healthier leasing market in Canada. They have the money, and are counting on better economic times in America’s largest city to make their bets pay out. (more…)
New TTC streetcar sneak peek
Nov 11, 2011
The TTC will give riders a chance to step into their new streetcars starting this Saturday.
A replica of the front half of the light rail vehicles are on public display at their Hillcrest yard. The TTC will be offering frequent bus shuttle service to Hillcrest from Nov. 12 until Nov. 15.
The modern streetcars are low-floor to ensure full accessibility, air conditioned, and will carry almost two times the number of passengers current streetcars can hold.
There will also be passenger safety alarms —like those on subways, and cameras on the vehicles sending images to the drivers video screen.
It is also the first vehicle that has pay-at-the-door technology so riders can use smart cards, debit or cash to pay.
Six year plan
The TTC hopes to have this new fleet on the roads within the next six years.
TTC Chair Karen Stintz said the significant investment was very much needed to meet the growing needs of the city.
“We’ve made a significant investment in these streetcars and we need them to modernize our system,” Stintz says. She says the TTC will have to find a way to get money for the vehicles despite budget cuts.
The TTC awarded a contract to Bombardier in June 2009 for the streetcars.
The public was consulted about the design that is set to replace the 30-year-old ones in use.
[AUDIO] CBC RADIO’S QUIRKS AND QUARKS DISCUSSES THE HUMAN POPULATION REACHING 7 BILLION, HOW IT HAPPENED, WHAT IT MEANS, AND WHY WE SHOULD CARE
The United Nations estimates that on October 31st, the world’s population will reach 7 billion. Although the actual number is not certain, it does underlie the fact that our population is growing at an alarming rate. It took until the early 1800′s to reach the 1 billion mark, but the last 50 years alone have seen the births of 4 of the total 7 billion This rapid increase raises the question, how many more people can the earth sustain? Or have we already surpassed the earth’s capacity? Among the many people asking questions like this are Dr. Madeline Weld, President of the Ottawa-based Population Institute of Canada, and Robert Engelman, President of The Worldwatch Institute in Washington. They discuss how various factors – including access to contraception, the empowerment of women, poverty, consumerism, and the environment – apply to our population growth, now and in the future.
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_________RUDHROISM
“Be afraid, be very afraid…” I love this–I have thought about so much of what they discuss in this two person interview. Oil, a non-renewable resource has allowed us to “over-shoot” where we as humanity really oughtta be today. The ‘stlen’ or ‘free’ energy boost since the 1850s. The unsustainable industrialized production of foods such as corn. The inefficient production of meat. The fact that cultures have not changed, yet babies no longer die. Cultures dictated that a “real man” or a “real woman” reproduce at a rate much higher than necessary for population replacement. But this was so when if you had 8 children, 5 perhaps were not expected to reach reproductive age. Today all 8 will make it, and in turn produce 8 of their own children due to cultural memes such as religion which dictate that this is the ONLY WAY.
So many have disagreed with me. So many have called me simplistic to point to the growth of population as the REAL problem and climate change as merely a symptom. But it is in no way ‘Malthusian’ to ask, what is the POINT of ‘conservation’, ‘kyoto protocols’, ‘environmental awareness campaigns’ etc etc etc, if EVEN IF we maintain 1990 levels of pollution, carbon consumption, garbage, the number of showers a human takes, and how many times a toilet is flushed per day–thus water use…the food one eats and from whence it originates, IF?
There are 10 Billion, 20 Billion, or 100 Billion humans?
This is not an irrational observation, though I have been told it is. This is not a simple minded, non-intellectual, comment.
This is about the Tragedy of the Commons. This is about witnessing the growth of certain cities, such as Calcutta, Shanghai, Lagos, Mexico City, Tokyo etc and seeing that for a given level of infrastructure, from trains, buses, roads, all the way to the farming lands that feed and the water basins that provide potable water to these megalopoli–only a certain number of people can enjoy them before it all becomes a hellish experience of the scarcity of resources writ large, on a daily basis. No room for your child in school, no electricity, no water, no fresh fruits and vegetables, no room on the road for your car, no sufficient public services of any kind.
I have been told that life and economics is not like this, as eventually all people reduce their fertility rates when they reach a standard level of income. I actually have a minor in Economics and have studied a variety of theories on developmental economics. So I am not speaking from ignorance or ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’. Listen to what is stated as ‘the scientifically sustainable human population’ in the audio link above.
I’d also recommend listening to Robert Wright’s Massey lectures on his book (or reading the book itself) called ‘The Short History of Progress’–where he shows that human history is filled with groups of humans not paying heed to the natural feedback loops of nature. We are a part of nature. And it frustrates me to no end, when humans in 2011 deny the unity that is humanity. There are no more ‘groups’–we are all one group, and are aware of this, in some respects yet not others.
We are all one. It doesn’t MATTER if you live in Edmonton, Mexico City or Calcutta. It doesn’t MATTER what your last name is, what religion you’ve been handed down or converted into and what this meme teaches you. There are basic facts about the sustainability of the human earthling population.
If you add to the population, it affects the whole world. But I don’t think humanity is yet ready to understand that we are indeed one.
““If you’re a typical North American, at the end of a long, stressful day at work, you’re not saying, ‘I can’t wait to get in my car. I would just love to go for a drive.’ It’s much more likely you’ll say, ‘I wish I could go for a walk,’ ” That’s the point at which people run up against what’s called the Marchetti Wall – the psychological barrier against spending more than about an hour getting to work or coming home. The concept is named for a Venetian physicist named Cesare Marchetti, who posited not only that human beings instinctively adjust their lives to avoid travelling more than that amount every day, but that we’ve been doing so since the Neolithic era…”
Cars have ruined our cities, our societies and are relationships–not to mention the more obvious environmental issues. I used to LOVE them…dream about them, yearn for them and have them define my concept of freedom, adulthood and status. I grew up in Edmonton though. Having since driven my last car from Vancouver to Toronto and sold it while it sat unused, cost me parking, insurance and other sundry charges–as I rode my bike or walked in the downtown splendour that is superurban downtown Toronto..I now just view them as moving chambers of internal combustion explosions–whether super new or an old beater: the technology is 150 years old. They are a hassle downtown, and I love that. ”Where do I park?” ”Where’s the gas station?” ”Shit! Another ticket??!!” ”My car’s broken down, I have to repair it for $2500…” “I still can’t find parking!?”
No more for me. And as an Urban Planning Grad Student in 2011, I relish the opportunities awakening in the cities of the world, to go back in time and redesign neighbourhoods and streets for human beings…
To rediscover what Jane Jacobs had referred to as the Ballet of the Streets of her beloved Manhattan. The death of the love affair with the car, is like how smoking is so frowned upon now…a paradigmatic shift is in the works, and as a soon to be professional Urban Planner, I can’t think of a better, practical, more necessary vocation.
Let the War on the Car begin. Let’s rediscover the joys of having Main Streets, not malls, and Eyes on the Street, not eyes in the rearview, and the strengthened Social Capital of familiar faces on the stroll home everyone.
-rudhro
Are we reaching ‘peak car’?
ANITA ELASH
Saturday, Oct. 22, 2011
Anyone who has been stuck in big-city gridlock lately may find this hard to believe, but millions of Westerners are giving up their cars.
Experts say our love affair with the automobile is ending, and that could change much more than how we get around – it presents both an opportunity and an imperative to rethink how we build cities, how governments budget and even the contours of the political landscape.
The most detailed picture of the trend comes from the United States, where the distance driven by Americans per capita each year flatlined at the turn of the century and has been dropping for six years. By last spring, Americans were driving the same distance as they had in 1998. (more…)
How Toronto Lost Its Groove: “As many of the world’s other megacities, including regional rivals like Boston and Chicago, prepare for an era of breakneck global urban expansion, Toronto persists in thinking small and acting cheap. Should the rest of Canada care?”
And why the rest of Canada should resist the temptation to cheer
BY JOHN LORINC
November, 2011
THE CITY OF TORONTO is stumbling toward the end of 2011 mired in a deep civic funk. Mayor Rob Ford, a renegade small-c conservative from the suburban ward of Etobicoke North, bulldozed his way to victory a year ago on a simplistic pledge to slash municipal waste. His mantra: “Stop the gravy train.” While he has yet to identify instances of reckless spending, he has ordered city officials to extract almost $800 million from Toronto’s $9-billion operating budget, the sixth-largest public purse in Canada. This punishing and potentially ruinous process may entail shuttering libraries, firing police officers, and scaling back everything from snow removal to grass cutting to transit. Municipal services — such as public housing, environmental advocacy, and even zoos — that don’t conform to the mayor’s narrow vision of local government may be eliminated, privatized, or significantly reduced.
Toronto’s woes, however, go well beyond the mayor’s fiscal populism. The Greater Toronto Area — a 7,100-square-kilometre expanse of 5.5 million residents who live in a band of municipalities extending from Burlington to Oshawa to Newmarket — finds itself increasingly crippled by some of North America’s nastiest gridlock, congestion so bad it costs the region at least $6 billion a year in lost productivity. Sprawl, gridlock’s malign twin, continues virtually unchecked, consuming farmland, stressing commuters, and ratcheting up the cost of municipal services. Without reliable funding, transit agencies can barely afford to modernize, much less expand, straining the GTA’s roads and highways to the bursting point.
READ THE REST OF THE STORY @ THE WALRUS…
Why living downtown has become more attractive
Tony Wong | Sun Oct 09 2011
When Jeff Walker purchased his home a decade ago in downtown Ottawa, environmental sustainability and transportation costs were a big reason.
“I had to sacrifice 20 per cent more space and yet pay 20 per cent more for the home, but I figured it was worth it,” said Walker, who is a vice-president and chief strategy officer at the Canadian Automobile Association. “I think it’s a calculus that many home owners do, especially since transportation in terms of time and money becomes a significant monthly overhead.”
The Toronto Board of Trade says the most pressing issue for the Toronto area is gridlock, costing the region $6 billion annually. A poll conducted for the board released last week says 61 per cent believe traffic congestion is at “crisis proportions.”
According to a Statistics Canada survey released in August, the Greater Toronto Area was once again the worst place to commute in Canada at 33 minutes.
Commute times and gas prices are two very big reasons that some buyers like Walker are avoiding the suburbs, even if they can get a bigger bang for their buck.
According to a recent U.S. based survey of agents by realty firm Coldwell Banker, the high cost of gasoline and long travel times is a major factor in influencing some home purchasing decisions.
Three quarters of agents said the a spike in gas prices influenced their clients’ decisions on where to live. Another 93 per cent said if gas prices continued to rise, more home buyers would choose to live somewhere closer to work.
“There is an implicit price that has to be paid for the length of a commute, whether it is in gas or in time,” said Phil Soper, CEO and president of Royal Lepage Real Estate Services. “The invisible hand of commerce is in the decision making process of urban verses suburban. People get a discount if they live in the suburbs and a premium when they live downtown.”
The 2004 documentary The End Of Suburbia argued that suburban sprawl is unsustainable. And that was when domestic crude was in the $37 range – where it has more than doubled today.
“America took all its post war wealth and invested it into something that has no future,” say the filmmakers.
That same year a study by University of Toronto civil engineering professor Eric Miller concluded that commuting costs and the extra expense of running a larger suburban home often eat into any mortgage savings.
What surprised Miller was that a similarly valued home in the suburbs also ended up costing more to run. That’s because you get more space for the dollar in the 905 compared with the 416.
But more space means higher utilities and maintenance.
The study didn’t include the value of time spent in the car traveling or the environmental impact of more pollution.
“I think the finding was that there is no such thing as cheap land, the further out you go, the more it will cost you,” said Miller. “And that comparison would be even more dramatic today since the cost of gas, cars and parking has gone up since then.” (more…)
Pedestrian-friendly city should be priority for all
Walkability needs to be an issue for consideration in the suburbs as well
Fact fatigue. I’m suffering from it after three days at the international Walk21 Conference and don’t quite know how to knit it all together.
So, here are some of the things I jotted down during the downtown meeting of 540 planners, physicians, engineers, architects and advocates.
It’s chic to be carless. People are willing to pay more – a lot more – to live in neighbourhoods where they can either walk to every imaginable amenity (including work) or have easy access to transit. Look no further than Yaletown, Coal Harbour, Gastown or most of Vancouver for proof. It’s happening worldwide.
But Daniel Sauter of Zurich’s Urban Mobility Research warned that as richer people crowd into city centres, the poor are pushed to where housing is cheaper in suburban areas that are generally badly served by transit, and often have fewer parks and amenities.
“The more successful we are [in promoting urban walkability], the more crucial it is that we think about the counter-effects of gentrification,” he said. “We have to think about that even as we advocate for improvements. Walkable cities are not just places for the well-to-do and tourists.”
The poor gain the most health benefits from walkable neighbourhoods. Low-income people have the highest rates of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, physical inactivity and chronic stress. That’s why British physician William Bird said poor neighbourhoods are most in need of retooling. Recognition of that fact is the primary reason the 2012 Olympic Park is being built in a financially disadvantaged, East London neighbourhood, he noted.
Inactivity accounts for four to six per cent of health care costs in Canada and the United States. That means health care spending could be reduced by five per cent if only people started walking.
350 calories. That’s how many there are in an apple tart or a pizza slice, according to Larry Frank, a professor at University of B.C.’s school of community and regional planning. He said it’s also the amount of energy a cyclist needs to travel about 16 kilometres (10 miles), a walker uses over 5.6 kilometres (3.5 miles), and an automobile needs to go 30 metres (100 feet).
Only 15 per cent of the suburbs are truly walkable and most North American development is suburban. Changing that means creating transit nodes, walking corridors, and increasing density with more infill housing and multifamily housing, according to Alex Taranu of the Council for Canadian Urbanism. But people will only walk if they have a sense of place, he said. That means to be successful, retrofitting the suburbs also means preserving green space (including agricultural fields) as well as heritage buildings. (more…)
[VIDEO] TORONTO NUIT BLANCHE 2008 – CITY HALL BLINKENLIGHTS INSTALLATION– “STEREOSCOPE”
MY FAVOURITE ART FESTIVAL IN TORONTO
MUSIC: EVIL 9 – WE HAVE THE ENERGY
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WITH SOME BENNY BENASSI ACCOMPANIMENT:
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BLINKENLIGHTS PREMIERE – BERLIN:
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BLINKENLIGHTS STEREOSCOPE – BEHIND THE SCENES
Nuit Blanche (All-Nighter, literally White Night, in French) is an annual all-night or night-time arts festival. A Nuit Blanche will typically have museums, private and public art galleries, and other cultural institutions open and free of charge, with the centre of the city itself being turned into a de facto art gallery, providing space for art installations, performances (music, film, dance, performance art), themed social gatherings, and other activities.
The tale of Rob Ford and how he’s lost the plot
Dan Yashinsky
Special to the Star
Aug 19 2011
Stories capture more votes than policies, and the strongest metaphor wins the election.
Humans are story-tropic creatures, we like suspense and we’re drawn to tales of heroes, quests, and courage, even in politics.
The right understands this better than the left these days. We saw, south of the border, how the positive rallying cry of “yes we can!” lasted about two years before the “tea party” — a perennially evocative trope in American politics — kicked its metaphoric butt. President Obama, a master storyteller before his election, lost his narrative mojo as the Republicans found a vocabulary that, true or not, was more emotionally vivid. George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics, rather wistfully pointed out in a blog last winter, it would be good to “loosen the conservative grip on public discourse.”
The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, a great believer in the power of stories, wrote that, “Storytellers threaten all the champions of control.” Stories enrich our expressive vocabulary, and give us new ways to imagine and talk about social and political change.
Aesop knew this well. In one of his more subversive fables, Lion, Fox, and Donkey go hunting. Lion asks Donkey to divide the meat, and Donkey divides it into three equal parts. Then Lion kills him, tosses the carcass on the pile, and asks Fox to try. Fox pushes everything over to Lion except for one dead crow. “How did you learn to divide things so equally?” Lion asks. “I studied with the dead donkey,” replies the fox. A useful, if chilling, story to remember in the age of Enron, Lehman Brothers, and the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us. (more…)
[VIDEO] PERVIOUS CONCRETE: a type of concrete without sand, can drain hundreds of inches of rain per hour, allowing water to filter into groundwater stores below, rather than run off into storm drains
IRA FLATOW, host: You’re listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY. I’m Ira Flatow.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “BIG YELLOW TAXI”)
JONI MITCHELL, SINGER: (Singing) They paved paradise, put up a parking lot with a pink hotel, a boutique and a swinging hot spot.
FLATOW: 1970 was the year of the first Earth Day, the same year Joni Mitchell wrote her environmental lament “Big Yellow Taxi,” about paving over paradise and putting up a parking lot. When Joni Mitchell sang about paving paradise to put up that parking lot, I’m guessing she wasn’t thinking of pervious cement, pervious concrete, a more sustainable type of concrete already in use all over the country. Water runs right through it. Yup. It’s sturdy enough to pave parking lots and driveways, but so porous, looks just like a rice crispy treat. So rainwater trickles right through it, down to the ground below, rather than running off and flooding storm drains and sewers.
It also allows you to actually feed the trees that may have roots running down there and all kinds of stuff underground, returning the water. (more…)
[PHOTOGRAPHY] Making Love To Toronto — Part Four: THE TORONTO MUSIC GARDEN
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These photographs were taken in the October of 2010. (more…)
“There is one policy instrument that raises the cost of suburban development without hurting local landowners: Transferable Development Rights (TDR’s). This instrument has been successfully tried in the U.S. and our governments could improve on their experience. TDR’s allow the sale of development rights from a protected area to areas suitable for densification.”
Reducing sprawl doesn’t require a heavy hand
SUMEET GULATI
Friday, April 22, 2011
Our homes and personal vehicles generate a large share of carbon dioxide emissions. Approximately 40 per cent, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
While the government’s ‘One Tonne Challenge’ (2004) did not encourage us to reduce our carbon emissions, the right price might. If we paid for our emissions, we would choose the location of our residences, their size and energy efficiency, and our vehicles appropriately. But pricing carbon, especially for individuals, doesn’t sell in politics. In its absence, we pollute too much. We live in big, energy inefficient residences, far from work and other amenities, and operate large, and sometimes multiple, vehicles.
What is the alternative? (more…)
The ‘Manhattanization’ of downtown Toronto
MARCUS GEE | Monday, Apr. 11, 2011
One of the best things that has happened in Toronto of late has been the surge of office construction downtown. After more than a decade of stagnation in the wake of the 1990s recession, developers have returned to the downtown core all in a rush. (more…)
