Canada and the World Backgrounder articles from March 1996

Canada and the World Backgrounder archives from March 1996

Neglected offspring.(senior levels of government are neglecting urban needs)
March 1, 1996... Cities, to use a boxing metaphor, punch above their weight. Lima, with just one quarter of Peru's population, generates over two-fifths of its national income. Sao Paulo accounts for a tenth of Brazil's population, but over one third of its...

Cultural crucibles: for 6,000 years, cities have been the engines of cultural and economic advance.
March 1, 1996... The word city comes from the Roman idea of civitas, the community, and civis, a citizen. This is true of French - cite, Italian - citta, and Spanish - ciudad. The same Latin root gives us the word civilization. So, the concepts of cities and...

Alexandrias.(prevalence of ancient cities throughout Asia named after Alexander the Great)
March 1, 1996... Four hundred years before the birth of Christ a powerful state arose in what is today Macedonia, north of Greece. It's capital was Pella. This was clearly a city of substance with mansions and a theatre capable of holding 10,000 people. Alexander...

Economic engines: all cities are unique in detail but most resemble each other in form and function.
March 1, 1996... Nearly half the world's population and three quarters of all Westerners live in cities. And, daily new arrivals settle in urban areas. Even Los Angeles, choking on, pollution, divided by race riots and drug wars, and sitting on top of an...

Choice locations.(Canadian cities where people want to live)
March 1, 1996... Cities are where people want to live. In 1994, Toronto and Vancouver were the two most popular destinations for people moving within Canada. Younger people - those under 45 - also favoured mid-sized cities such as Calgary, Kitchener-Waterloo, and...

Urban definition.(Jane Jacobs' definition of urban settlements)
March 1, 1996... In 1969, Jane Jacobs wrote The Economy of Cities. In it, Ms. Jacobs defined urban settlements, and her definition still stands up today. City - a settlement that consistently generate its economic growth from its own local economy. Town - a...

Cosmic, practical, and organic.(three different designs for cities described by Kevin Lynch)
March 1, 1996... An American city planner, Kevin Lynch, has suggested that all cities fall into three categories. In his book Good City Form, mr. Lynch called the firs group "cosmic cities." These are urban areas that developed because of some royal, religious,...

Developers' rules of thumb.(brief statistics for city planning)
March 1, 1996... The maximum distance people will willingly walk before getting into a car: 180 metres The maximum desirable commuting time: 45 minutes Number of people who must live within a 15-minute drive of a shopping mall for it to be successful:250,000...

Service providers.(problems and suggested solutions for city governments)
March 1, 1996... It's about money, or more accurately, the lack of money. Worldwide, city governments raise only about a quarter of the revenue they need from such sources as property taxes. For the bulk of their funding, they rely on transfers from higher levels...

Chain of command.(city services are managed by mayors and city councils)
March 1, 1996... Cities are run by councilors elected by residents to do the job. The head of the council is the mayor. The council operates like the board of directors of a company. It hires a city manager whose job it is to run the day-to-day affairs of the...

Assessing assessments.(various kinds of property tax assessments)
March 1, 1996... The financial base of all cities in Canada is a tax placed on property. The idea is that the owners of property are the users of city services - police, fire department, road maintenance, etc. So, cities decide on the value of a piece of property...

The doughnut city.(inner city decay in Montreal, Detroit, and Toronto)
March 1, 1996... When Canada completed its first century as a country, the world beat a path to Montreal to help us celebrate. Expo 67 was an exciting event in an exciting city. Montreal was leading the way in urban development and it was the most powerful cog in...

Skyscrapers.(brief history of skyscrapers and the suggested impact of telecommuting)
March 1, 1996... The word "skyscraper" appears to have been used first in the 18th century to describe a high-flying on a ship. In the United States in the 1840s, it came to mean a very tall person. It was not used to describe buildings until the first modern...

City dtress.(higher rate of schizophrenia seen in men raised in the city)
March 1, 1996... The Stress of living in a city might turn you mad. This is the conclusion of Dr. Glyn Lewis of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, England. In a 1992 issue of the medical journal The Lancetf, Dr. Lewis wrote that the incidence of schizophrenia...

Containing sprawl.(increasing population density through city planning to save money)
March 1, 1996... It might be the sort of neighbourhood your grandparents or great-grandparents called home - narrow streets lined with trees and a mixture of detached, semi-detached, and row houses with front porches that invited neighbours for a friendly chat....

Study what works.(downtown Toronto neighbourhood densities)
March 1, 1996... Toronto is something of an exception to the empty core common in many North American cities - Boston, Vancouver, and San Francisco are similar. In a sought-after downtown Toronto neighbourhood densities are medium, but rarely more than fourplex....

Costly suburbia.(reducing consumption and travel time through increased population density)
March 1, 1996... * Studies in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, London, Toronto and elsewhere have shown a consistent pattern: doubling residential or population density reduces annual distance travelled by car per person or per household by 20% to 30%. * Heat...

Virtue from necessity.(brief comparison between Canadian and European city planning)
March 1, 1996... Newspaper columnist Michael Valpy doesn't like suburbia - he doesn't like it at all. In a 1995 column in the Globe and Mail he wrote that: "My heart leaps at the sight of a town that comes to a neat, abrupt end without straggles of houses and...

The roads more travelled.(hindering automobile use in commuting)
March 1, 1996... Like most Canadians, Vancouverites love their cars. A 1992 survey, of travel habits of 15,000 households found that during rush hour - between ra a.m. and 9 a.m. - commnuters were spending more time on the road, travelling farther, and at a...

Gasp.(automobile pollution in Mexico City, Mexico, causes driving restrictions)
March 1, 1996... In mid-January 1996, ozone levels in Mexico City reached unheard of heights even for this heavily polluted city. When the ozone hit 2.5 times the level considered safe, officials banned driving for half the city's cars for two days. This pleased...

Carpooling with a difference.(California drivers reject a car pool lane on the Santa Monica Freeway)
March 1, 1996... When California transport officials tried nearly two decades ago to reserve one lane on the Santa Monica Freeway for car pools, drivers were furious. They disobeyed the rules by placing cardboard passengers in their cars and filed lawsuits that...

The search for the village.(migration to and construction of meaningful neighborhoods with strong community connections)
March 1, 1996... Combining home and work environments was once considered unacceptable in some cities. Vihen the city of Toronto drew up its Official Plan in lilffl, it made a point of setting apart industrial, residential, and commercial areas. City planners...

Power shopping.(opinion and impact of warehouse stores on smaller competing stores)
March 1, 1996... Some urban experts believe that big box retail stores are destroying neighbourhoods. Retail warehouses are the ultimate in selling power. They offer more goods at better prices than you can find anywhere else. People like them; they want them....

Search for utopia: planners are constantly looking for ways to design our cities that will banish their social evils.
March 1, 1996... Social engineers are people who try to solve society's problems through the use of technology. They don't like the haphazard and sometimes messy way in which Nature organizes things. Social engineers were put on this Earth to design cities....

Little boxes.(brief history of William Levitt's Levittowns)
March 1, 1996... William Levitt is considered to have been the inventor of modern suburbia. After World War II, Mr. Levitt revolutionized the home-building industry in the United States. He used poured concrete slabs for foundations and prefabricated walls to...

A tale of two cities.(comparing the differences between Singapore and Bangkok)
March 1, 1996... One provides a textbook lesson in urban design; the other is pure chaos. Singapore and Bangkok could hardly be more different Singapore has been planned down to the last detail. It is efficient, fast-moving traffic is electronically controlled,...

Nature - the enemy.(using nature in community planning in Australia and Arizona)
March 1, 1996... For most of the 20th century, urban Utopia has started with the bulldozers rumbling onto the site. Once everything that Nature has set up is scraped flat the real business of building a community can begin. However, many designers and planners...

The social animal.(Louis Worth comments on human relationship differences in urban and rural settings)
March 1, 1996... Human like to be with other humans. Isolation is something that causes mental ill health in most of us. The American sociologist Louis Worth studied how relationships among humans differ between urban and rural settings. In 1938, Mr. Worth...

Bad breath.(top ten cities with the worst air quality in 1990)
March 1, 1996... The Population Crises Committee released a list of the world's cities with the worst air quality in 1990. Almost all the offenders were in the developing world. 1. Delhi (India) 2. Beijing (China) 3. Calcutta (India) 4. Tehran (Iran)...

Toxic town.(increased urban populations in developing countries is turning some cities into polluted wastelands)
March 1, 1996... Weekends find many Canadians escaping the hustle and bustle of the city for their peaceful country cottages. For the 50% to 75% of Third World city-dwellers who live in slums there is no escape. Acccording to the World Bank, our planet will...

Water supply.(Mexico City's water supply)
March 1, 1996... Mexico City sits in a high valley, approximately 2,000 metres above seal level. Local water supplies meet the needs of only about one third of its 20 million inhabitants. Another third of the supply comes from the next valley; the remaining third...