Toronto City Council Channels Harry Potter, Graffiti Blitz, Tree House Cities, and Facebookville

In a long, torturous special meeting of council scheduled to decide whether to fire the rest of the Toronto Community Housing Corporations board members, it was ruled that speaking of the auditor general's report that had caused this whole snafu was out of order. This led to what can only be described as the Harry Potterfication of council as The-Document-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named became the preferred way of alluding to the forbidden report. Not allowing council to reference a report that was being used to fire board members is almost as ridiculous as not allowing them to talk about 2012 impacts of the 2011 budget at the 2011 budget meeting. If this keeps up, by the end of the year council will only be able to communicate in a combination of increasingly vague hand gestures and blinking.

Steve Kupferman over at OpenFileTO has done some investimagating and found out the incredible numbers of graffiti violations that have been issued under Rob Ford's reign. In fact, in a little over three months there have been almost the same number of violations issued as in the previous twenty months under David Miller, leading some to wonder about the clean-up costs associated with this for small businesses. But Shawn Micallef, over at Spacing, has found some graffiti that even Rob Ford may not want to scrub off.

Have you ever found yourself wandering the streets with a pen and notebook and way too much time on your hands? At least two people in New York City have, and they've decided to do something about it dammit. One is drawing every building in NYC while the other is drawing every person in NYC. Too bad by the time they finish, pen and paper will be a thing of the past and they'll have to complete their project by digitally downloading their drawings into their iPad 58 through Apple's new-fangled mind-reading app.

A Vancouver architecture firm is experimenting with the idea of wooden skyscrapers as the way to a sustainable future, sparking a furious debate over the gender equality of a future city possibly overtaken by No Girls Allowed boy's clubs.

Facebook as Urban Planning? A bunch of architecture students are rounded up to try to make Facebook's new digs feel more like a neighbourhood, with one student saying that they wanted to make the "edge of the campus more permeable and remove the line between public and private land". No word yet on how much control Facebook employees would have over these privacy settings.

And, the non-sequitur: a Chilean man who has 82 tattoos of Julia Roberts on his body, proving that, yes, you can have too much of a good thing.

Ford Nation, Jane Jacobs Dissed, Vancouver's Modern Treehuggers, and a Concert Hall that Doubles a Bomb Shelter

"It took a while, but for Mayor Rob Ford the reality check is no longer in the mail: It has arrived." I wish I could take credit, but leave it to The Star's Christopher Hume to come up with that zinger in discussing Rob Ford's plea for money from McGuinty. But if Ford has indeed received his reality check, he certainly hasn't cashed it in as it emerged last week that Ford has threatened to unleash Ford Nation on McGuinty in the next election, causing people all around the city to throw up a little in their mouths. But, as it turns out, Ford Nation is a real thing. Only it won't be called Ford Nation. It will be called the Respect for Tax Payers Against Gravy Trains Above Ground And Also Those Wasteful Spending Pinkos Action Group.

There must be some megalomania in the water, as the Conservatives have also decided to create their own moniker and rebrand the Government of Canada as the Harper Government. In keeping, I have decided to rename my neighbourhood Jaketown. I mean, the Annex, who thought that one up?

Speaking of the Annex--I mean, Jaketown--Edward Glaeser, author of the book Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier had the nerve to come to Toronto and diss Jane Jacobs. Oh, no you didn't! He says that tall buildings are good for cities and that Jacobs had it wrong when she said that old, low-rise buildings were important to keep in the housing stock to ensure affordability and street activity. He also said she was wrong about books with shorter titles conveying their meaning in a more concise way. Like, really, The Economy of Cities, what's that even about?

Just don't ask a Canadian about the economy. A recent Globe and Mail article mapped the huge disparities in Canada's math skills--but don't worry, the report uses pretty pictures and colours so we can all understand the information. Like, for instance, did you know that twelve out of every seven Torontonians can't do basic addition or subtraction? It's scandalous!

In other scandalalous news, Toronto has recently been focussed on the fall of the Urban Affairs Library and the Toronto Community Housing Corporation, but for resident's of Vancouver's Sixth Avenue it's been all about the proposed removal of thirty giant Elm trees from their street. The Park Board decided to hold off for the time being, but look unlikely to budge on the issue. Yeah, I bet those tree-hugging Vancouverites are gonna channel their inner hippie and chain themselves to those Elms, just like old times! But it looks like they've decided to go the more modern route and form a Facebook protest group instead.

Vancouver architect Bing Thom has proposed an idea that buries a concert hall underground in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery, which sounds like a great idea! What could possibly go wrong with building a giant theatre deep in the earth in a city holding its collective breath waiting for The Big One? No word yet on whether the concession stand would also stock a variety of canned goods, flashlights, blankets, and a wind-up radio.

Lastly, someone has been giving out $5 bills to cyclists in Toronto as a thank-you for riding. But what about the car drivers? Who's going to give them money for driving?

How Much Do You Trust Your Infrastructure?

A few days ago in The Globe and Mail I stumbled upon this incredible photo taken by Cheng Min of the Associated Press:

It shows the opened floodgates of the Three Gorges Dam in China (also the subject of a very good Canadian film, Up The Yangtzee), which were opened to reduce stress on the structure and help with recent flooding. What is most crazy to me about this picture is not the roaring wall of water (although that is pretty impressive), but the seeming nonchalance of the photographers standing mere feet away from said roaring wall of water. I mean, all that is separating them from certain death is what looks like a pretty flimsy railing and some concrete and they almost look bored.

This got me thinking about how much trust we put in our infrastructure. We have no problems going across bridges, leaning up against railings on the balconies of high rise apartment buildings, or walking under overpasses. City dwellers do each of these things on a fairly regular basis with no heart palpitating thoughts of "is this safe?". All it takes is one trip on a subway system to see all the commuters staring blankly or calmly reading a book as the train they are on hurtles them through underground tunnels built decades ago underneath the city to see how strong this trust can be. There are people placidly taking a dump and reading the morning paper in skyscrapers that are hundreds of feet tall for heaven's sake and we don't even blink an eye at how utterly amazing that is.

Take the recently completed Burj Khalifa (pictured left, courtesy of wikicommons), the tallest building in the world. It is 2,717 feet tall. There has to be some sort of primal instinctual fear that arises when humans step foot on the top floor of that building, and yet soon there will be people going about their daily routine at the top of this building, and then another building will surpass it in height and the Burj Khalifa will one day look quaint. All you have to do is take a look in your city at the skyscrapers that used to be the tallest in the land, and see how utterly eclipsed they have become by those around them to know that one day something will be built higher. But how high can we go before the trust runs out? Is there even a limit?

And it's not just infrastructure, but the people around us as well. Because to live in a city we have to trust them, sometimes with our lives. I often think, while I'm standing on the sidewalk waiting for a light to change so I can cross the street, how crazy it is that all that separates me from the stream of several ton vehicles driven by strangers, is a small curb and what I would hope would have been really really good driving lessons.

Living in a city is all about trust, more so than living out in the suburbs or in the country, simply for the fact that there is so much more infrastructure and people around us that we need to trust. But we don't think about it as trust--this stuff (whether people or structures) is just there. It's only when things fail that we are woken up to the fact that they are people-made structures made by not infallible people. Take the crumbling overpasses in Montreal, or the collapsed subway tunnel in China, or the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis of which you can even watch a video.

Of course, all these failures aren't in the forefront of our minds, otherwise we'd never leave our houses or apartments again. And we'd never have those amazing images of a gushing wall of water at a recently opened dam.