News, Tuesday, August, 4, 2009
Saving the economy one local book at a time
So BookPeople and Waterloo called in Civic Economics, a consultancy. They went through the books and found that for every $100 spent at the two locals, $45 stayed in Austin in wages to local staff, payments to other local merchants and so on. When that sum went to a typical Borders store, only $13 went back into circulation locally.
Cheap Ways To Revitalize Your Downtown
“Do more with less,” is a catch phrase managers love to say and workers hate to hear. It’s also one we’re hearing ad nauseam in today’s economy. And just as regular Joes and Janes are tightening their belts and getting creative with the monthly budget, so too must local officials accommodate revenue streams and tax rolls that are in free fall. It also means that expensive projects like streetscape redesigns and downtown marketing efforts must be shelved while DDA directors find more cost-effective ways to move their city centers forward.
White Roofs Catch On as Energy Cost Cutters
Their solution was a new roof: a shiny plasticized white covering that experts say is not only an energy saver but also a way to help cool the planet.
Relying on the centuries-old principle that white objects absorb less heat than dark ones, homeowners like the Waldreps are in the vanguard of a movement embracing “cool roofs” as one of the most affordable weapons againstclimate change.
The laneway house: A novel solution to Vancouver’s real-estate crunch
Donna Woodman is one of the many people in Vancouver anxiously waiting for council to approve Wednesday the city’s latest effort to cope with high house prices and lack of space: the laneway house.
Like others who have expressed an interest in this new housing form – converting the garage to a home – Mrs. Woodman was considering the option at her son’s east Vancouver residence because it would solve a lot of problems for the family.
SHANGHAI–It’s a simple pleasure, but Xu Beilu enjoys it daily: gliding past snarled traffic on her motorized bicycle, relaxed and sweat-free alongside the pedal-pushing masses.
China, the world’s bicycle kingdom – one for every three inhabitants – is going electric.
I’m seeing this trend on the streets of Windsor
The greenest grocery store, biggest “living wall,” and more eco-innovations
Sustainable Transportation Resource Guide
ASLA created a new online resource guide on sustainable transportation. The guide contains lists of organizations, research, concepts and projects related to sustainable transportation, including siting, planning, and designing sustainable transportation infrastructure. Developed for students and professionals, the resource guide contains recent reports and projects from leading U.S. and international organizations, academics, and design firms.
The World Seen as ‘A City’ — But How To Shape It?
The world is on a path of “blind urbanization.” And the issue’s not just in sheer numbers, the amazing country-to-town migration that last year pushed cities to a majority of mankind, roughly 3.4 billion inhabitants with an added 2.3 billion predicted for 2040.
Slower traffic, more pedestrians could revive cities
City planners could revive Woodward Avenue with bike lanes, slower traffic, 100,000 new trees and big improvements at pedestrian crossings.
In Hamilton: Students scour the city for unkempt properties
City’s goal is fairness with rain water tax, now this is a could be a great tax!
Hamilton is looking to tax rain water — but it won’t be Mother Nature getting the bill.
Instead, the city wants to target expansive parking lots and big box stores that send storm water rushing into the sewers without helping to pay for treatment costs.
“It’s all about fairness,” explains Jim Harnum, head of the city’s water and waste water department.
“We’re trying to shift responsibility.”
Bing: It’s time for the city to face reality
Detroit is in danger of running out of cash if the city doesn’t take steps to eliminate a $20-million to $25-million budget shortfall before Oct. 1, Mayor Dave Bing told the Free Press on Thursday.
The creative economy = the ‘direct economy’
For the purpose of understanding the evolution of our economy and our quality of life, if there was ever one definitive graphic, this is it. However, to understand the current creative, knowledge-based, whole new mind economy from an individual’s point of view, you have to get to know the work at ThinkStudio, a global think tank based in Switzerland.
HOUSING THE NEXT GENERATION WITH OLD SHIPPING CONTAINERS
If the predictions are accurate, America will have to house some 100 million more people by 2040 to mid-century than is now the case. Despite the current round of foreclosures and rising apartment vacancy, over the long term the demand for humane, affordable, sustainable housing is going to escalate dramatically in the coming years.
Dumpster Pools Create Urban Oases Vacant Lots Become Coolest Spots in Town
In the latest twist on staycations, Brooklyn swimmers have been taking refreshing dips in their newly crafted neighborhood Dumpster pools.
The transformation from waste to water was generated by Macro Sea, a New York-based design company looking to expand the concept around the country.
ReBurbia — What’s YOUR Vision for Transforming the Suburbs?
We all know that North American sprawling exurbs need a 21st century makeover, but what will Suburbia 2.0 look like? A star-studded cast of Worldchanging allies from Dwell andInhabitat have launched a very intriguing contest to find out. They’re encouraging entrants to push the limits of their imaginations:
Calling all future-forward architects, urban designers, renegade planners and imaginative engineers:
Show us how you would re-invent the suburbs! What would a McMansion become if it weren’t a single-family dwelling? How could a vacant big box store be retrofitted for agriculture? What sort of design solutions can you come up with to facilitate car-free mobility, ‘burb-grown food, and local, renewable energy generation? We want to see how you’d design future-proof spaces and systems using the suburban structures of the present, from small-scale retrofits to large-scale restoration—the wilder the better!
How Much Do Bicyclists Really Slow Down Drivers?
Anyone who’s ever ridden a bike more than a handful of times in this country has experienced it. The honking, the rude remarks, the vehicles speeding past with drivers shouting “get out of my way.”
There’s no doubt that drivers sometimes have to slow down because there’s a cyclist in the road ahead of them. But Streetsblog Networkmember M-Bike.org wants to put the inconvenience in perspective:
Throughout the Detroit suburbs, cyclists can expect to hear the occasional verbal assault from motorists. The typical theme is “you don’t belong on the road” or “you’re in my way.”…But are motorists really that concerned about being occasionally slowed due sharing the road with cyclists? How much time do Metro Detroit motorists “lose” to cyclists on the roads?
A Fable About Sprawl
Once upon a time, there was a city called City. And everyone living in City voted in the same elections and paid taxes to the same government.
And then 5 percent of the people decided that they wanted to live in an new neighborhood that was opened up for development by the highways. And they called it Richburb, because they were, if not rich, at least a little richer than many of the people in the city (since even if there wasn’t zoning to keep the poor out, new housing usually costs more than old housing anyhow).
Higher education the key for a sustainable city,
DOWNTOWN CHARACTER AND STREET PERFORMERS
Carmen Ruest, Director of Cirque de Soleil, recently revealed her start as a street performer, or busker, in Canada. The interviewer did not hesitate to contrast this with the current state of Downtown Orlando, which forbids street performers. Eliminating this ban will improve Orlando’s urban consciousness, both downtown and elsewhere, and improve the city in general.
The Downtown Development Board (an arm of city government) has long stated its mission to promote arts-based businesses downtown. In the nineties, this board even had special incentives for independent creative enterprises to encourage a local arts scene. Only later did the city give in to the temptation to go for the big box retailers, and all bets were suddenly off.
THE SUBURBAN ECONOMY AND ITS ENEMIES
Life Before Air Conditioning and The Unchilled Life
Tags: air conditioning, bicycles, creative economy, detroit, dumpsters, economy, Hamilton, Infill, intesification, rain water, sprawl, street performers, suburban. education, Sustainable, transportation, white roofs
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Great editorial in the Toronto Star - Everything in this article could be said just as easily about Windsor but with even more emphasis!!
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/675699
Wake up and smell the exhaust
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With the strike over and Toronto returning to normal, it’s time to get back to more important matters, namely the civilizing of the city.
Pundits and politicians remain fixated on the lowest common denominator, of course, but they can be safely ignored. The mouth-breathers have had their moment in the spotlight, let us now thank them and move on.
And so the Case Ooteses, Denzil Minnan-Wongs and Karen Stintzes can stop blinking and crawl back into the shadows from which they came.
If Toronto hopes to remain competitive in a world increasingly dominated by city and regional economies, it must learn new ways of thinking and doing. However tempting it may be as a strategy, parochialism is not enough. The world no longer ends at the border of Etobicoke, Toronto or even Canada, for that matter. But if the planet has grown smaller than ever, the stage has never been bigger.
Why this city? That’s the question we must ask ourselves. What can we offer that any other mid-level burg here or the U.S. or Europe can’t?
It has become clear, however, that we are rooted in the mindset of the 1970s, blissfully unaware that a new reality has dawned.
Let’s look instead to cities that lead, cities that are reinventing themselves as places where people live because they want to not because they must, places that are remaking themselves in the image of a human being, not a car, places that offer quality of life not just low taxes.
Cities as disparate as New York, London, Stockholm, Copenhagen and now Sydney, Australia, are moving to reclaim their public realm for people. Historic squares that were turned into parking lots in the years after World War II are now being returned to pedestrians. Café life in Copenhagen, for instance, which didn’t exist 40 years ago, now flourishes. And, yes, they know what winter is.
Whole precincts in these communities and others have been set aside as pedestrian zones. And local merchants notwithstanding, business prospers in these designated areas.
Toronto, meanwhile, has been too scared to do anything more than close off a street here and there for a day or two.
By contrast, in New York, Times Square itself has been closed to vehicular traffic, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
Is it any wonder tourism in Toronto is in a state of slow but steady decline?
When city council voted to close the fifth lane of Jarvis St. recently, the howls of outrage were deafening – and pathetic.
It’s time Torontonians woke up and smelled the exhaust.
It doesn’t help that we have fallen 25 years behind the rest of the world in public transit, which alone has seriously harmed the GTA’s ability to keep pace. Now we are desperately trying to catch up, but many fear the (high-speed) train has already left the station.
How ironic that as we become more like the U.S., the U.S. wants to become more like us.
For Toronto, however, the message is clear: we make it as a city-region or we don’t make it at all. This point was reiterated most recently by the Greater Toronto Region Economic Summit, which recommended the formation of a “war cabinet” to oversee growth in the 416 and 905.
The analogy was apt, implying as it does that we must put aside the things that divide us and act in concert to deal with some higher threat.
That threat is real, but it doesn’t come from away. It is everywhere we turn. The enemy is us.
Christopher Hume can be reached at [email protected].
Tomato processor finds the sweet spot
Local farms help canner develop organic protocol
http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/676130
August 05, 2009
PAMELA CUTHBERT
SPECIAL TO THE Toronto STAR
Whether it’s diced, crushed or in one piece, Bill Thomas considers the tinned tomato from a holistic point of view. The president of the small-scale Thomas Canning Co. near Windsor sees at once a healthy, tasty food – and a mess of environmental issues surrounding the red, acidic fruit as it goes from pasture to preserve.
A third-generation tomato processor, Thomas says simply, “I like to support local and we’re trying not to waste anything.” It’s the starting point that led to the development, back in the 1980s, of an in-house “sustainability program” that employs a grading system assessing everything from crop rotation and no-till systems to weed and disease management, water use and harvest practices. The model proved so sound it became a precursor to the now-popular Local Food Plus (LFP) third-party certification system.
“Their program today for tomato production is the one I developed,” explains Thomas, who worked with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food on the project. Mike Schreiner, a cofounder of LFP, says that “Bill has been a real innovator in terms of sustainability … For the most part, (LFP) integrated his protocol into our standard.”
One of Thomas’s major accomplishments, adds Schreiner, was his ability “to encourage his growers to adopt his Integrated Pest Management (IPM) programs.” IPM is a way to manage pesticide spraying , something that Thomas calls “one of the pillars of sustainability.”
The biggest challenge was persuading the farmers who supply the company to get on board. “This was very new at the time. It was one thing to have the program, but another to find growers who were interested.” He worked with “about 15″ growers and used the process as a stepping-stone toward certified organic production. Thomas Canning supplies private labels in the U.S. and owns the Utopia brand, a combination of organic and local that is rare for canned tomatoes.
“The sustainability program was a middle road,” he says, estimating that today, organic accounts for 50 to 60 per cent of Thomas Canning’s production, with the goal to make that 100 per cent in the future. “Turning more conventional acreage into organic means sustainability in the long term.”
The family-owned business is in Essex County, a region known as the Tomato Capital of Canada in large part due to the presence of H.J. Heinz Co. Of Canada, plus a handful of other commercial processors. The area runs north from Lake Erie with a moderate and moist climate particularly suited to the crop. Thomas estimates “there is about half a million tonnes of tomato production here.” (California dominates the tomato market producing 10 to 12 million tonnes.)
The company serves another market: providing processed foods that are truly “Made In Canada.” Many tomato-based products such as soups and sauces contain paste or concentrate “that can be sourced from any place,” he adds. “Paste can be bought in totes and you don’t always know where it’s coming from.” But Thomas’s tomatoes are all grown in Ontario.
Among tomato lovers, Utopia is also getting good reviews on websites such as Chowhound.com. Thomas mentions the absence of calcium chloride, a commonly used firming agent. “So ours are softer but the flavour is better and it’s a more natural product.”
California’s output is a major obstacle , but providing a premium, organic product is opening up a niche. The volume is on a small enough scale that Thomas says his company can make financial sense of having separate processors dedicated to conventional or organic “so there is no crossover.”
Ironically, it will require more exports for Thomas Canning to go 100 per cent organic – and that runs counter to some of Thomas’ principles, such as focusing on local economies. “It’s the reality,” he says, adding that “transportation costs should be minimal.”
Urban Farming and Detroit. Posted Aug 6, 2009 on CNN.
http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/06/news/economy/detroit_food/?postversion=2009080608
Friday Aug 14, 2009 will be the 6th anniversary of the great Northeast blackout. Although the blackout was not about power consumption, there is a contest to reduce power consumption between 8am and 8pm in Ontario Cities.
Just wanted to get the word out before 8am.
http://www.countmeinontario.ca/
This is sponsored by Ontario, OPA, EDA, IESO, HydroOne, AMO