Summer Time Skyline, 1973

Summer Time Skyline, 1973

via Toronto Before by Aladone on 7/31/08

Supply and demand at the gas pump

 

 

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Supply and demand at the gas pump

via The Progressive Economics Forum by Marc Lee on 7/24/08

One of my favourite comics explains the economics of gas prices:

 

 

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Metrocide: A Tale Of Sixty Cities

 

 

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Metrocide: A Tale Of Sixty Cities

via Torontoist by David Topping on 7/24/08

Is Toronto a dangerous city? And is it getting worse? This week for Metrocide, Torontoist is examining a sea of homicide data and trying to come up with conclusions based not in fear or fantasy but fact.

Photo of Calgary by D'Arcy Norman.

Ever since Toronto earned its reputation as a safe city, safe has tended to be a relative term—safe compared to Detroit, safe compared to New York, safe compared to Chicago. Comparisons between individual cities' crime rates are at once useful and flawed; while they help contextualize a city by putting it into dialogue with others, they also "provide no insight into the many variables that mold the crime in a particular town, city, county, state, region, or other jurisdiction" (so says the FBI). But insofar as they measure the effects of crime, rather than their causes, city-to-city comparisons are a good basis for determining relative safety, and—especially when it comes to homicide rates—play a large role in shaping public perception.

Today, we'll look at how Toronto's recent homicide rates stand up to thirty-four American cities and twenty-seven Canadian ones.

A Note on Statistics

Today, we're comparing Toronto to American and Canadian cities only. Not that we wouldn't like to toss worldwide cities into the mix, of course, but there are some problems with doing so. No over-arching body (say, the United Nations) seems to have homicide data for individual cities (rather than (whole countries) measured in any consistent way. Second, if we researched cities on an individual basis (say, picked twenty large European cities based on size), it is unlikely that each would measure homicides and homicide rates the same way as every other city or country did. (Would negligent manslaughter count in the numbers? Would non-negligent manslaughter? Infanticide? Will they provide rates, or just numbers? And if it's just numbers, will they provide a population that the rate can be determined from?) Geography is an issue, too: as we've shown in the past two days, homicide rates change for Toronto depending on what you define "Toronto" as. At this point, thus, accurately comparing worldwide cities is unfortunately beyond the scope of this week's project.

Fortunately, Statistics Canada and the FBI do make good statistical bedfellows; so far as we can see, their data measures cities in the same way for determining the same data. So: how does Toronto's homicide rate compare to American cities'?

Extraordinarily well; Toronto's numbers absolutely pale in comparison to American cities. Its metropolitan homicide rate in 2006 was lower than every American city with a population above 500,000 (charted above). And of the seventy-two American cities with populations over 250,000, Toronto's 2006 metropolitan homicide rate (1.8 per 100,000) was lower than every other city except for Plano, Texas—the wealthiest city in the United States—which had a homicide rate of 1.6 per 100,000.

In Canada, the picture is different. (Do note the change in scale from the American cities chart, and that this chart lists 2007 homicide rates.) Canadian cities, overall, do quite well in comparison to American ones in terms of homicide rate, regardless of geographical proximity; in 2006, Windsor's homicide rate (1.5) was thirty-one times smaller than Detroit's, and in the same year, Toronto's homicide rate (1.8) was fourteen times smaller than Buffalo's.

But, as we noted in March, and as was widely-reported last week, Toronto still holds its own against other Canadian cities. Of the twenty-six Canadian cities with a Central Metropolitan Area (CMA) population above 100,000 (charted above), Toronto's homicide rate in 2007 (2.0) ranked ninth highest, tied with Saint John. Of the nine cities in Canada with a CMA population above 500,000, Toronto's homicide rate in 2007 ranked fifth highest—with a lower rate than Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver—and is not far from Montreal, Hamilton, and Ottawa's rates (for all three, 1.6 homicides per 100,000). No large city in Canada had as good of a year for homicides as Quebec City had in 2007: of a population of about 750,000, it had no homicides whatsoever. Even if that was in part the result of good fortune—the last year it hadn't had a homicide before 2007 was 1962, its violent crime rate is similar to Toronto's, and it will unfortunately not be able to repeat the feat this year—the Québec capital consistently has a homicide rate that is on the low end of Canada's larger cities.

Sources

Canadian cities' 2007 metropolitan homicide rates are from the just-released Statistics Canada report. 2006's rates can be found in last year's report.

American cities' homicide rates are from the FBI, via Wikipedia.

 

 

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Heritage Toronto walking tours this weekend: Bâby Point, and in the Footste...

 

 

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Heritage Toronto walking tours this weekend: Bâby Point, and in the Footsteps of Black Victorians

via Spacing Toronto • understanding the urban landscape by Matthew Hague on 7/24/08

This weekend's Heritage Toronto walking tours are a great way to get out and explore the city (free + no reservations required):

Bâby Point: 10 000 Years of History
Saturday, July 26 - 1:30 PM

Leaders: La Société d'histoire de Toronto
Start Point: SW corner of Jane St and Bâby Point Rd/Annette St
Finish Point: Near Old Mill Subway Station
Duration: Approx. 2 - 2.5 hours
Walk Difficulty: Long walk with slopes, many stairs and some rough ground

Explore some of Toronto's First Nations and French history with this tour of the area named after the estate of James Bâby, an early French settler. Hear about the Seneca village of Teiaiagon, the Carrying Place trail and the first French fort in what is now Toronto. Tours will be offered in English and French.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

In the Footsteps of Black Victorians
Sunday, July 27 - 1:00 PM

Leaders: Mackenzie House Museum
Start Point: South St. Lawrence Market, 95 Front St E at Jarvis
Finish Point: Mackenzie House, 82 Bond St, S of Dundas St
Duration: Approx. 2 hours
Walk Difficulty: Average walk on sidewalks

In the 19th century, Toronto was a centre of antislavery organizations and Black cultural and political activities. Hear about the men and women of the community as we visit some of the sites known to them.

Spacing is pleased to be the promoting sponsor of the Heritage Toronto walking tours.

Photo by Bobcatnorth

 

 

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The real reason for French immersion

Dan Gardner's column is intresting - especially seeing as my older brother went to French immersion for a bit and then I went to enrichment. My parents = social snobs? Hmm.

zooming in green

...and the neat thing is that I think it was taken right here...

zooming in green

via [daily dose of imagery] on 7/21/08

Biking on Don Valley track.

Sand Wars

Eons ago, I read a book on a related topic by a Cdn author with the quirky name of Silver Donald Cameron - which spoke of the issues of retaining beaches - which mostly comes down to 'stealing' the sand from where the ocean wants to take it - at great cost to all concerned - the beach, the taxpayers, and the next town down the shore...

Sand Wars

via Pruned by Alexander Trevi on 7/16/08

(Houses on stilts on Nags Head, North Carolina. Photo by Stephan Delfour-Given/AFP/Getty Images.)

In a familiar story that may yet become all too familiar to everybody in a climate-changed future, the Italian cities of "industrial Brindisi" and "elegant, baroque Lecce" are battling each other over sand.

Quoting The Guardian:

Faced with losing the pristine San Cataldo beach to creeping Adriatic sea currents, the town of Lecce in Puglia arranged to dig up 200,000 cubic metres of sand out at sea in front of neighbour - and rival - Brindisi. But with EU-funded work set to start proud locals in the port city of Brindisi rose up in protest, with 10,000 signing a petition to stop the digging, hundreds forming a human chain along their own, eroding, beach, and fans at a local football match unfurling a banner stating: "Don't touch the sand."

As interesting as this tale of mineral piracy is, it would be moreso if we were to hear that a landscape architecture firm has been commissioned to do some sort of project to be sited on this stretch of contested coastline.

Not only will they have to maneuver through a potentially explosive political landscape but the designers must simultaneously attend to the physical forces at work in this coastal landscape — such as beach erosion and surfzone currents — that, while much is now known about them relative to just a few decades ago, are still largely mysterious.

Maybe there is a competition for a new beachfront promenade or another Trump golf course or one of those so-called eco-towns or just a sprawling mansion for a chief executive and his family as a summer retreat from the city. The project site is no longer in Puglia but in a barrier island, such as North Carolina's Nags Head, pictured above. It's a mobile landscape, a fragile terrain always in danger of collapse, where everything is beyond the control of engineering. Entrants will have to navigate between programs of containment and resilience, between settlement and retreat, between conflicting ideas of permanence and impermanence.

And all entries will be the best projects ever. Obviously.

In any case, to return back to Italy, after Lecce was ordered to stop digging for sand, officials there were asked where they will now get their material from? The will import it from economically desperate Albania — which, of course, means that it will be another case of the rich exploiting the poor to maintain their quality of life and the exploited is left with a degraded landscape.

In the Archives:
Climate Ghettos

Related:
The Retreating Village

Tech and the Olympics

Cool article about R&D, Innovation and the Olympics.

Bad Ideas in Regulation: Food Safety

Ottawa washes hands of food safety: "A government plan to transfer key parts of food inspection to industry so companies can police themselves will put the health of Canadians at risk, according to leading food safety experts who have reviewed the confidential blueprint."

Oh. Because it's worked so well in other areas...

Visualizing. Me.

Clearly I need to write more, and/or input some of my own thinking here instead of just re-posting. On the other hand, I did create this site primarily as a data dump for stuff I thought was "neat." Oh well.

Urban bees in Toronto

Map of the Week: Urban bees

via Map of the Week by Toronto Star on 7/10/08

For most city dwellers, beekeeping is pretty much out as a hobby, at least pursued close to home. Ontario law forbids hives within 30 metres of a property line on the other side of which is a dwelling, park or place of public assembly, or within 10 metres of a highway. For most city dwellers, that pretty much crushes the idea of a back yard hive, as appealing as the idea might seem (or appalling, to the neighbours).

But two sites near the city's downtown (map link) are home a total of 22 working beehives: the roof of the Royal York Hotel (which Daphne Gordon wrote about in June) and the Brick Works near Bayview Ave. and Pottery Rd. The Brick Works site is much the largest, with 19 hives. At the seasonal peak, that means about 880,000 bees.

The area surrounding a beehive necessarily plays host to the bees. The distance bees fly to gather pollen varies, but a 1992 study found that they readily fly four kilometers in all directions, which means that gardens from Flemingdon Park to the CNE grounds are being visited by working bees.

So my place is almost in range!

After Beijing 08, the fight for human rights must go on

Provocative ads for Amnesty International.
Weight lifting
Archery
Swimming

Clever, but it's also interesting to think how the West's credibility on these matters (you know, torture and the like) by the US's actions in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

What T.O. should learn from Other Cdn Cities

We could be even better
I like the street food, the local museum concepts and the waterfront. Comparing Vancouver's waterfront with Toronto's is just depressing. The winter fest is tough - the weather doesn't consistently work as well as it does in Quebec.