World Wide Wednesday: Car bans, pilot projects and urban farms

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 Sydney, Australia, the City council is pushing to accomplish renowned urbanist Jan Gehl’s vision to ban cars in the city’s central business district. The transformations will include reduced speed limits, three piazzas linked by streets aimed at pedestrians and public transit and a completed bike network by 2012.

• Fashionable women cyclists and cat-calls go hand in hand in London, England, says one British cyclist, forcing them to face the predicament of whether to lose the skirt for the spandex.

• All is not well in Disney World as two monorail trains crashed into each other early Sunday morning, killing the driver.

• San Francisco is follow NYC’s lead in using ‘pilot projects’ to create new public plazas in the city’s streets. By taking space away from cars using moveable furniture, left over granite blocks from city salvage yards and engaging the commercial businesses around the plaza, local residents have flocked to the new public spaces, forcing them to remain open later into the evening.

• Alberta moved one step closer this week to building a high-speed train route between Calgary and Edmonton.  Recent studies have revealed that enough people would use it and that ridership would increase with faster trains.

• Fruits and vegetables are sprouting in vacant land in Cleveland as residents turned abandoned lots and former wastelands into urban farmland. Northeast Ohio, where $7 billion is spent annually on food and less than 5% of food is produced locally, urban farming is garnering the interest of both environmentalists and economists.

• President Obama recently created the Office of Urban Affairs which aims to establish a policy agenda for inner cities and the suburbs that surround them. With the idea that metropolitan regions are the country’s economic engines, the new office hopes to reverse the federal disinterest in cities over the past decades.

• With the future of Toronto’s pedestrian bridge at the foot of Portland Street still in question, Glasgow recently unveiled its new pedestrian ‘Squiggly Bridge’ spanning the River Clyde.  The 7-million pound structure is meant to act as a catalyst to regenerate the area.

• Chicago’s Riverwalk has opened along the south bank of Chicago River, providing an interesting comparison to Toronto’s new wavedecks currently being unveiled.

Photo by lupinehorror