“Temporary/tactical urbanism grants designers the freedom to fail. Urban design is not a science and the city does not have the controlled conditions of a laboratory; yet our cities are littered with the permanent remains of failed urban design experiments based on flawed thinking. A temporary framework enables us to increase the range of experimentation and speed up the learning process. The city is simply too complex and unpredictable to enable the approval of every smart idea that comes along. Temporary/tactical urbanism is a means of breaking down urban design to an incremental scale that enables us to bypass the status quo…”   (Kim Dovey, Urban Design Thinking, 2016, page 241)

Someone found this and showed it to me, recently. I had forgotten about it.

Mélanie Joly’s team argued for 130 kilometers of Bus Rapid Transit lines, or surface metros, to be built by 2020. This clear, clean idea needs to be kept in the public eye, and expanded.

Marc Garneau is Transport Minister. Two key Montrealers in important seats. Let’s go!

Melanie Joly’s plan:

“Première phase du réseau de SRB :

• Newman / Victoria (9 km) (du métro Angrignon à Lachine)
• Pie -IX et Notre-Dame (17 km) (d’Henri-Bourassa à la Place des Arts)
• Henri-Bourassa (12,4 km) (du métro Henri-Bourassa au Pôle Anjou)
• Du Parc (9,5 km) (de Chabanel à la Place des Arts)
• Côte-des-Neiges (9,3 km) (de l’Hippodrome au métro Bonaventure)
• Centre-ville (5,3 km) (boucle entre Griffintown et l’Université McGill)

Deuxième phase du réseau de SRB :

• Sherbrooke Ouest (3,8 km) (du métro Vendôme au terminus de Montréal-Ouest)
• Sauvé / Côte-Vertu (17,2 km) (de Technoparc au métro Henri-Bourassa)
• Marcel-Laurin / Laurentien (5 km) (du métro Côte-Vertu à Cartierville)
• Jean-Talon / Maurice-Duplessis (15,9 km) (du métro Pie-IX au terminus de Rivière-des-Prairies)
• Sherbrooke Est (11,6 km) (du Pôle Anjou au terminus de Pointe-aux-Trembles)
• Pierrefonds (9,7 km) (de Pierrefonds-Ouest à la gare Roxboro-Pierrefonds)
• Côte-Saint-Luc (4,6 km) (de Cavendish au métro Villa-Maria)”

What if the Occupy Movement and the 2008 financial crisis had peaked at the same time, Noam Chomsky mused when speaking to a packed crowd at Concordia University, last autumn.

Perhaps the popular movement could have pressured President Obama to give General Motors (effectively nationalized by the US government at that time, you may recall) to its workers, along with a mandate to make mass transit solutions for US cities.

This idea is repeated in a nice article on Mondragon, by Hanna and Alperovitz.

What industries in Montreal would work best under worker control? Is the social economy up for a move to the next level? Under what conditions? Playful thoughts.

Vunderbar! I love this!

Management styles at the MUHC and the CHUM are said to be quite different. Are these echos of culture?  Would we want to change these, and if so, how? How would we grapple with these deep cultural patterns?

1890-2010.
House prices adjusted to inflation, the maker says.

Trying to get my grubby little hands on William H. Whyte’s “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” and finding it curiously difficult.

Here is a link to the trailer, where the copyright owner jealously guards a hoard of classic vids.

We have much to remember that we already knew. This is an example.

This is just fantastic. A scalable infographic that shows relative size of objects in the universe, from the sub-nano size of super strings to the unobservably enormous outer limit of the universe. Takes a little time to load, but it’s worth it.

We need something like this that explains urban planning. And includes the political process. Haha!

Anyone wanna try?