World Wide Wednesday: Car free streets, transit cuts, and mass eviction

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.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

• This past Sunday, on the sixth and last ‘Sunday Street’ of the year, thousands of San Francisco residents enjoyed car free streets from Golden Gate Park to the San Francisco Zoo. Check out streetfilms.org for video footage from the popular event.

• Detroit, Michigan, already long emblematic of urban decline, will likely soon face drastic cuts to its public transit. The city’s $300 million dollar budget gap will reportedly result in massive cutbacks to Detroit’s bus system, directly effecting the over 24, 000 residents who do not own cars.

• LaneFab (the creation of carpenter Mat Turner and designer Bryn Davidson) is a unique design scheme intended to increase density in downtown Vancouver by turning the city’s abundance of alleys and laneways into viable housing. Infilling of these areas behind residents’ homes is now possible as a result of a bylaw passed by city council in July that allows homeowners to covert their laneways into rental housing.

• According to England’s Daily Mail, a large squatter settlement in Calais, France could be “razed to the ground” within the next month. The settlement, referred to in France as ‘the jungle’, is the current home to over a 1, 000 Afghan and Iraqi refugees.

photo by Ann Larie Valentine