Jane Jacobs' "big R&D lab" in downtown Toronto industrial sites redevelopment

20 years ago Jane Jacobs was given the chance to put her ideas into practice in the renewal of two large downtown Toronto in-decline industrial sites. The King Street neighbourhoods were a priority of then-mayor Barbara Hall and she asked Jacobs’ advice. Details of this fascinating story are told in the links below by Spacing Magazine’s Shawn Micallef in Curbed.com and in a Globe and Mail piece by Stephen Wickens.

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401 Richmond in the western neighbourhood of the "Two Kings", which the Zeidler family purchased in 1994, is an illustration of Jacobs’s arguments about urbanism and a piece of her legacy in Toronto. Eberhard Zeidler, the patriarch, was the architect who designed the Eaton Centre. When the Zeidlers purchased 401, the old steampunk neighborhood around it, once the heart of Toronto’s schmatte trade, was dead. "There was one restaurant in the area, just a greasy spoon. Now there has to be like 20 or 30 in that section there," says Margie Zeidler, Eberhard’s daughter and the driving force behind what would become the vital building beloved by so much of Toronto today. Today that 1994 landscape is unimaginable and the building is at the heart of one of the most intense areas of development in North America, with condo towers sprouting where there were once acres of parking lots and buildings left fallow after deindustrialization. Read more: Jane Up North - Curbed

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She wasn’t at all surprised to see people saying 

what would Jane Jacobs have thought; 

but what Jane Jacobs would have thought 

was think for yourself. — Jim Jacobs

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Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff talks to Charlie Rose about the future of cities

Thousands of people a week are signing up for New York City's free WiFi hotspots: https://t.co/HK28T0BOE9 #LinkNYC pic.twitter.com/DRMdHZzVyZ

— Brian Fung (@b_fung) April 8, 2016

From Bicycle Diaries / David Byrne — "Our cities are alive, just like us..."

Our cities are alive, just like us; they have both a deep intelligence that guides them and a physical presence. They’re...

Posted by The Sidewalk Ballet on Monday, October 19, 2015

New plaza in Vancouver’s gay village to be named after Jim Deva

New plaza in Vancouver to be named after Jim Deva, the late and beloved co-owner of Little Sister's Bookstore....

Posted by Arsenal Pulp Press on Thursday, July 9, 2015

Jane Jacobs / Systems of Survival A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics chapter one

"My personal favourite is Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics. Although written in the dialogue format, which some readers find irksome, this is a demanding, profound book that raises for me so many important questions about the values that underpin the different functions necessary to contemporary life." From: Mary Rowe on cities, nature, and chaotic systems — Mary Rowe Dir, Urban Resilience and Livability, Municipal Art Society NYC 

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... the old oracle said,

"All things have two handles:

beware of the wrong one."

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

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I was sure Systems of Survival would be a difficult read. In fact it’s in the form of an engaging dialogue, the form she also used for her 2000 book The Nature of Economies.

Retired publisher Armbruster invites 5 friends and colleagues to discuss something troubling him: that “the web of trust [and honesty] upon which so much depends, is in a deplorable state.” He opens with an anecdote about taking a consulting fee he’d been paid in Hanover Germany to a local bank for transfer to his home bank in New York City. He realized later he’d turned over to a stranger a sum of money in return for a piece of paper written in a language he couldn’t understand and that he no concern that the funds wouldn’t be in his home account when he needed them. From this observation of unquestioned trust he also notes widespread and well known examples of “chicanery and avarice” and examples of every day folks “conspiring with dishonesty when it seems to benefit them.”

When he returned to NYC he researches examples of “embezzlement… fraud… collusion… kickbacks… cheating... bill padding… insider trading and stock manpulation… patent infringement… lies and coverups… With the exception of some of the embezzlers… these were all crimes committed by business owners or managers, bent on victimizing other enterprises, or else their own workers, their own customers, their own suppliers, or the public at large.”

Armbruster “dangles the bait” and they all agree with more and less enthusiasm to continue the discussion in four weeks time when academic, animal behaviour researcher Kate will present the first report to the group, a report to “identify our systems or systems of moral behaviour concerned with work. [For instance] What sort of rules safeguard the security of moving money around? We know honest accounting is one, but we also know it’s fragile…. Just some thinking about the commonplace norms we purport to depend on."

Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend — Discovering the sociability, the congeniality of the city

In this excerpt from Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, the first book of the four Neapolitan novels, the 12 year old Elena spends the day with her father. She has qualified for high school and he wants to be sure she knows how to navigate the city to get to her new school. Her neighbourhood has been her entire world up to this point, a place described as violent—feuds and recriminations, domestic violence. This is her father's day to day world, he's a porter at city hall. She observes in him traits of habit and character that he never displayed at home or in the neighbourhood. And through observing her father she experiences a very different world, a world of civility, courtesy, congeniality. She witnesses and documents what Jane Jacobs said were the "sidewalk contacts [that] are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow." To my reading Ferrante's account through the eyes of her 12 year old protagonist rivals Jane Jacobs' description of the "sidewalk ballet" of her New York Hudson Street neighbourhood.

The boundaries of the neighbourhood faded in the course of that summer. One morning my father took me with him. Since I was enrolling in high school, he wanted me to know what public transportation I would have to take and what route when I went in October to the new school.

It was a beautiful, very clear, windy day. I felt loved, coddled, to my affection for him was added a crescendo of admiration. He knew the enormous expanse of the city intimately, he knew where to get the metro or a tram or a bus. Outside he behaved with a sociability a relaxed courtesy, that at home he almost never had.

He was friendly toward everyone, on the metro and the buses, in the offices, and he always managed to let his interlocutor know that he worked for the city and that, if he liked, he could speed up practical matters, open doors.

We spent the whole day together, the only one in our lives. I don’t remember any others. He dedicated himself to me, as if he wanted to communicate to me in a few hours everything useful he had learned in the course of his existence. He showed me Piazza Garibaldi and the station that was being built: according to him it was so modern that the Japanese were coming from Japan to study it—in particular the columns—and build an identical one in their country. But he confessed that he liked the old station better, he was more attached to it. Ah well, Naples, he said had always been like that: it’s cut down, it’s broken up, and then it’s rebuilt, and the money flows and creates work.

He took me along Corso Garibaldi, to the building that would be my school. He dealt in the office with extreme good humour, he had the gift of congeniality, a gift that in the neighbourhood and at home he kept hidden. He boasted of my extraordinary report card to a janitor whose wedding witness, he discovered on the spot, he knew well. I heard him repeating often: everything in order? Or: everything that can be done is being done. He showed me Piazza Carlo III, the Albergo dei Poveri, the botanical garden, Via Foria, the museum. He took me on Via Constantinopoli, to Port’Alba, to Piazza Dante, to Via Toledo. I was overwhelmed by the names, the noise of the traffic, the voices, the colours, the festive atmosphere, the effort of keeping everything in mind so I could talk about it later with Lila, the ease with which he chatted with the pizza maker from whom he bought me a pizza melting with ricotta, the fruit seller from whom he bought me a yellow peach. Was it possible that only our neighbourhood was filled with conflicts and violence, while the rest of the city was radiant, benevolent?

He took me to see the place where he worked, in Plaza Municipio. There, too, he said, everything had changed, the trees had been cut down, everything was broken up: now see all the space, the only old thing left is the Maschio Angioino, but it’s beautiful, little one, there are two real males in Naples, your father and that fellow there. We went to the city hall, he greeted that person and that, everyone knew him. With some he was friendly, and introduced me, repeating yet again that in school I had gotten nine in Italian and nine in Latin; with others he was almost mute, only, indeed, yes, you command and I obey.

From Price Tags — Ed Glaeser (“Triumph of the City”) on Vancouver… and Sam Sullivan

Georgetown row house block; courtesy of the Congress for the New Urbanism

Ed Glaeser (“Triumph of the City”) on Vancouver … and Sullivanism | Price Tags

In a one-week period earlier this month, Edward Glaeser’s schedule took him from a conference in Leeds, England, hosted by the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, to Stanford for an urban summit, to Milwaukee to speak at Marquette, home to Boston for a night, down to Washington to give a keynote address at a World Bank conference and finally off to Delhi for a two-day visit. What’s driving this demand for his views is not only his reputation as a top-notch urban economist, but his thoroughly researched message about our urbanizing world. Half of humanity now lives in urban areas, he reports, and by 2050, that figure will rise to three-quarters of humanity. In Glaeser’s eyes, this urbanization is a profoundly positive trend. Despite the challenges cities must learn to overcome — including crime, sanitation, services for the poor — they are sites of intense collaboration, innovation and opportunity. Read more: Humanity’s Greatest Invention? Face-to-face with Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City — Medium

@WilliamPennFdn — $11 million Philly investment: "Reimagining the Civic Commons”

Can civic places, including libraries, parks, trails, plazas and community centers, be reimagined to make cities more successful? The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and William Penn Foundation are investing $11 million in an initiative led by Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park Conservancy to test this idea. The initiative will explore whether reinventing and connecting these public places as a network of civic assets will help cities attract and keep talented workers, advance economic opportunity, encourage residents to become more engaged in shaping their communities, and begin to level the playing field between more affluent communities and those in need. Read more: Building more successful cities the focus of new $11 million investment to reinvent Philadelphia’s public places.

Charles Marohn in The American Conservative — Cities for People—or Cars?

One hot summer day I walked through an old, neglected neighborhood, the kind of place where feral cats stalk mice in the weeds near cracked foundations. I carried a tape measure and clipboard, for measuring the width of the sidewalks, the spacing between trees, the length from the back of the curb to the front of the houses. I was channeling my inner New Urbanist, my desire to practice a primitive form of urban archaeology. I was attempting to discover deeper truths about what makes a city successful. Read more: Cities for People—or Cars? | The American Conservative

How urban designer Ken Greenberg's neighbourhood made succesful transition from industrial to mixed use

More at @CBCToronto Toronto 2025: How to grow, with minimal growing pains

From @Upworthy — Cities being described as "obesogenic" environments.

I never realized how dumb our cities are until I saw what a smart one looks like. @MazWasHere HT @kimsmythe http://t.co/2ppUrFvKta
— TheSidewalkBallet (@1sidewalkballet) March 20, 2015

For Warhol, J.G. Ballard, and others the destroyed car is one of the most potent symbols in modern art

Post by The Sidewalk Ballet.

From Urban Toronto — Westbank Proposes Fully Rethought Mirvish Village Redevelopment

Ever since it was announced last year that David Mirvish had sold his family's iconic Honest Ed's store and Mirvish Village properties at Bloor and Bathurst Streets to Vancouver-based developer Westbank Corp, people have been wondering what the proposed redevelopment of the site would look like. Would the quaint and eclectic atmosphere of Markham Street be maintained? How tall and dense would the proposal be? Will it end up with a monolithic feel? More at: Westbank Proposes Fully Rethought Mirvish Village Redevelopment | Urban Toronto

Post by The Sidewalk Ballet.

Parking Madness 2015! It's depressing what we've done to downtowns @schmangee @StreetsblogUSA

Sorted through 26 N. American parking craters this year to make this list. http://t.co/ZoPInUpVFg pic.twitter.com/xiKKlMphxy
— Angie Schmitt (@schmangee) March 12, 2015

It's depressing what we've done to downtowns. We've featured 48 of these now. It's endless http://t.co/ZoPInUpVFg pic.twitter.com/O7khMKn1gw

— Angie Schmitt (@schmangee) March 12, 2015

More at: Parking Madness 2015! First Match: Camden vs. Mobile | Streetsblog USA

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Enter the urban jungle: watch 5 films on the cities of the world @thenfb

Post by NFB.

From Governing.com — Urban Acupuncture Is Coming to America

Post by The Sidewalk Ballet.

From The Vancouver Sun — Vancouver swaps parking requirement for car shares

At the proposed new mixed-use Oakridge Centre there will be up to 75 car share vehicles, purchased by the developer for the Modo car share cooperative, for use by the public. In exchange for this, for every car-share vehicle, the City of Vancouver will allow the developer to build up to five fewer underground parking spaces. Welcome to the new world of collaborative partnerships between developers, the city, and car share companies, unique in Canada and spreading to other municipalities in the region. Read more: Vancouver swaps parking requirement for car shares

Charles Montgomery in Salon.com — Wal-Mart: An economic cancer on our cities

Most of us agree that development that provides employment and tax revenue is good for cities. Some even argue that the need for jobs outweighs aesthetic, lifestyle, or climate concerns—in fact, this argument comes up any time Walmart proposes a new megastore near a small town. But a clear-eyed look at the spatial economics of land, jobs, and tax regimes should cause anyone to reject the anything-and-anywhere-goes development model. To explain, let me offer the story of an obsessive number cruncher who found his own urban laboratory quite by chance. Read more: Wal-Mart: An economic cancer on our cities - Salon.com

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#TEDTalk @JeffSpeckAICP at @TEDCity2_0

Like "The Walkable City" book by @JeffSpeckAICP? You'll love his #TEDTalk at @TEDCity2_0: http://t.co/NwSa2iJAQb pic.twitter.com/VjxTPU87fA

— TEDCity2.0 (@TEDCity2_0) November 5, 2014

From craftsy.com —Bright Lights, Big City Inspiration: Urban Sketching Tutorial

Illustration: Bird’s eye view via Craftsy member artistkierstan.

Urban sketching might seem intimidating at first, but there’s a whole world of subject matter out there just waiting to inspire you. In this post, we’ll explore a number of different ways to approach sketching in the city, from subject matter to style. More at: Bright Lights, Big City Inspiration: Urban Sketching Tutorial