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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• Organizers of “Burning Man”, the annual art fair and temporary city of over 50, 000 located in the Nevada dessert, argue that contemporary cities can learn from the festival’s success. Next year’s theme will be “Metropolis: The Life of Cities” promising explicit exploration of what urbanists can learn from the Burning Man festival.
• Belgium’s new Lià¨ge-Guillemins train station, described by the Guardian as “easily one of the world’s finest…suggest[ing] openness, a dissolving of boundaries, infinite horizons, speed, grace and ease …”, has quickly become a destination in and of itself. The station, which took 13 years and £267 million to build, is the work of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava known to Torontonians for his work on the BCE Place.
• The small English village of Highworth is in the midst of an impassioned fight over public space after a group of villagers, believing their gardens weren’t big enough, annexed “in blitzkrieg style” the open space adjacent to their gardens.
• Last week in World Wide Wednesday we talked about (Park)ing day 2009. Check out the photographs and stories of how it unfolded.
• A recent Wall Street Journal article looks how American suburbs are failing to meet the needs of the elderly and focuses on retrofitting the traditional American suburb.
• Sociologist Dave Horton’s five part essay entitled “Fear of Cycling” (published on copenhagenize.com), is especially topical for Toronto’s cyclists as bike safety has become a increasingly contested issue among Torontonians and at City Hall.
photo by Iversonic
3 comments
The villagers of Highworth, who “annexed” the open space for their gardens have company here in Toronto. Just look at the hydro lines. People would plant gardens there, knowing that they may disappear at any time by human pests.
Thank you for covering Burning Man without snark or derision. The ability to design a city from the ground up is an urbanist’s wet dream, and I have always thought we in the public space movement have a lot to learn from the burn.
Burning Man is NASCAR for artists and bohemians.