Holly

Pedestrian and bike-friendly urban areas don’t just reduce transportation emissions, but fossil-fuel use by buildings as well. Apparently a home that shares its sides with the houses next to it – and we have many of those in Montreal – uses one to two-thirds of the energy that a detached home does. There must be a similar effect for apartment buildings. Had not thought of that! We have lots of row-houses in Montreal, let’s make sure we keep them.

http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-avenue/can-we-build-our-way-reduced-carbon-emissions

This New York Times article about Pfizer closing its facilities in a city that had expropriated and demolished a neighborhood so that the company could build a “private urban village” (aaa! what?), leaving empty fields behind at the site of the ‘development,’ is just full of stupid. Unfortunately it all sounds very familiar. Except that the neighborhood residents took the city all the way to the Supreme Court, lost, and the conservative justices were the dissenters. Happily, 43 states have enacted legislation that will hopefully keep something similar from happening again. But, now I’m curious, what would Ayn Rand say?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/nyregion/13pfizer.html?em

The lovely Polis blog has an interesting article on the concept of ‘The Right to the City,’ which we had not heard of before now! There are some interesting links in the article to follow up on, including “The European Charter for Human Rights in the City.”

“This concept was coined by Henri Lefebvre, a radical French Marxist sociologist and philosopher, in 1968 and is about the rights of all urban dwellers, regardless of citizenship, ethnicity, ability, gender and so forth, to participate in shaping the city. It is about the rights of the excluded and marginalised to be part of the production of the city, for their needs and aspirations, rather than exclusively those of capital as occurs in most urban development, to be met in the process. The right to the city thus fundamentally challenges existing power relations and the deep roots of the capitalist system that drive urban development and the production of urban space, including social, political and economic relations.”

http://www.thepolisblog.org/2009/11/right-to-city-reflections-on-theory-and.html