Each week we will be focusing on blogs from around the world dealing specifically with urban environments. We’ll be on the lookout for websites outside the country that approach themes related to urban experiences and issues in Toronto.
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• In Des Moines, Iowa, the City Council recently voted to make public dancing legal after 2 a.m. Believe it or not, a 1942 by-law was still in place banning public dancing from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. Monday to Saturday, and 8 a.m. on Sundays.
• Cleveland’s Fourth Street is buzzing after 15 years of restoration and building. Now home to 14 restaurants, eight bars, a bowling alley, theatre, coffee shop, nightclub and 322 rental apartments, the redevelopment follows earlier entertainment-based investment projects in the city.
• Bogota, Columbia’s Bus Rapid Transit System (B.R.T) TransMilenio moves more passengers per mile than almost any subway in the world, while being only a fraction of the cost to build. By taking away two of the four lanes on major thoroughfares to use as dedicated bus ‘tracks,’ TransMilenio has managed to reduce the city’s bus fuel usage and emmissions by more than 59%, making it the only project approved by the United Nations last year to sell carbon credits.
• Last week in London, England, a memorial for the 2005 subway bombings was unveiled. Steel pillars, one for each of the 52 victims, stand 3.5 metres tall in London’s Hyde Park.
• In an attempt to get more people cycling, New York City’s planning commissioner is putting out bike tour maps to guide riders through areas of the city they may not normally visit. Known to be quite complicated, these maps lead cyclists to all sorts of unexpected places.
• While Torontonians fight for more pedestrian-friendly streets and historical preservation in our city, in Kashgar, China, things are moving in a different direction. The future of the Old City part of Kashgar, cultural capital of the Chinese Uyghurs, may be demolition of its two-thousand year old buildings and tiny lanes to make way for low rise apartments and car-carrying streets.
• One of the landmark books on Los Angeles that “redefined the way the intellectual world — and then the wider world –perceived the city” — has recently been reissued. Written by Englishman Peter Reyner Banham, Lost Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies glorified the gas stations, freeways and modernist architecture that contemporaries of his considered (and many still consider) to be a disaster.
If you have any articles dealing with urban life around the world that you would like to share with Spacing readers, send the link to wednesdays@spacing.ca
Photo by Miguel Matus
