[URBAN NOTE] Five city notes: Montréal, Bronx, Nashville, Chicago, London

• People in Montréal will have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to walk over the Champlain Bridge, scheduled for demolition in the near future. Global News reports.
• The Conversation looks at the mass tourism, after Joker, directed towards a flight of stairs in The Bronx, and what this means for cities.
• CityLab notes the deep upset of the numerous and influential Kurds of Nashville with Trump.
• CityLab looks at how a Chicago magazine reflects the gentrification of large parts of that metropolis.
• Guardian Cities takes a look at what maps of Victorian London, mapping disparities of wealth and social dysfunction, reveal about the city now.

[URBAN NOTE] Ten city links: Montréal, Lac-Mégantic, Halifax, Calgary, Edmonton …

• Tracey Lindeman writes at CityLab about how Montréal is trying to keep the redevelopment of the Molson-Coors Brewery site from killing the Centre-Sud.
• In the Montréal neighbourhood of Park-Extension, evictions–renovictions, even–are on the rise. Global News reports.
• Lac-Mégantic now has a train depot that bypasses the heart of this traumatized community. CBC Montreal reports.
• Halifax is now celebrating the Mosaic Festival, celebrating its diversity. Global News reports.
• Jill Croteau reports for Global News about Club Carousel, an underground club in Calgary that played a vital role in that city’s LGBTQ history.
• This business plan, aiming to bypass long lineups at the Edmonton outpost of the Jollibee chain, is ingenious. Global News reports.
• The Iowa town of Pacific Junction, already staggering, may never recover from a recent bout of devastating flooding. VICE reports.
• Avery Gregurich writes for CityLab about the Illinois town of Atlas, a crossroads seemingly on the verge of disappearing from Google Maps.
• The proposal for Metropica, a new sort of suburb in Florida, certainly looks interesting. VICE reports.
• Guardian Cities shares a cartoon looking affectionately at Lisbon.

[URBAN NOTE] Seven city links: Paris, Montréal, Ottawa, Berthierville, Chicago, Berlin, Saint-Louis

• The terrible destruction of Notre-Dame-de-Paris makes me very sad. I hope restoration is possible. The Daily Beast reports.
• CBC Montreal celebrates the 50th anniversary of the first Expos game.
• Anti-poverty activists claim Ottawa claim Airbnb is hurting local housing markets. Global News reports.
• La Presse notes how people in the small Québec town of Berthierville are trying to keep their old monastery.
• CityLab reports on the artistic and architectural contributions of Theaster Gates to a divided Chicago.
• Guardian Cities notes the radicalism of rental activists in Berlin.
• CityLab notes how sea level rise is already hurting people in the Senegal coastal city of Saint-Louis.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Kingston, Montréal, Chicago, New Orleans, Buenos Aires

• Plans for a residential development in Kingston’s west-end Graceland district have raised environmental concerns. Global News reports.
• HuffPostQuebec shares the exciting plans for expanding and modernizing the complex around the Oratoire Saint-Joseph.
• CityLab notes how, despite having a declining black population, Chicago is set to elect a black mayor.
• VICE looks at the bars and nightclubs in uptown New Orleans that, in the 1970s, hosted the city’s jazz and funk scenes.
• Guardian Cities reports on the murga, the latest dance/pop culture craze in Buenos Aires.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• D-Brief considers the possibility that human food when eaten by bears, by shortening their hibernation periods, might contribute to their premature aging.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers the political power of sports and of music.
• Far Outliers notes the rising bourgeoisie of Calcutta in the 1990s.
• Steve Roby at The Fifteenth makes the case for Discovery as worthy of being considered Star Trek, not least because it is doing something new.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing notes how our tendency to track our lives through data can become dystopian.
• JSTOR Daily notes that Illinois is starting to become home to resident populations of bald eagles.
• Language Log takes a look at Ubykh.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes a Trumpist Canadian border guard.
• The New APPS Blog notes how helicopter parenting is linked to rising levels of inequality.
• The NYR Daily considers Jasper Johns.
• At Out of Ambit, Diane Duane considers the rhythms and cycles of life generally and of being a writer specifically.
• Otto Pohl looks at how people from the different German communities of southeast Europe were, at the end of the Second World War, taken to the Soviet Union as forced labourers.
• Steve Maynard writes at Spacing, in the aftermath of the death of Jackie Shane, about the erasure and recovery of non-white queer history in Toronto.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains what would happen if someone fell into a blackhole.
• Window on Eurasia notes that the number of immigrants to Russia are falling, with Ukrainians diminishing particularly in number while Central Asian numbers remain more resistant to the trend.
• Arnold Zwicky notes the telling omission of sexual orientation as a protected category re: hate crimes.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Ottawa, Kingston, Halifax, Chicago, Greater Bay Area and Hong Kong

• CBC reports on how Ottawa is storing its ever-growing mountain of snow removed from its streets.
• The city of Kingston, Ontario, is facing a growing shortage of family doctors despite it being a regional hub. Global News reports.
• The centenary of anti-Chinese riots in Halifax has just passed. (Would you believe I never learned of these at school?) Global News reports.
• VICE tells the story of how most people can, or cannot, afford to live in an ever-pricier city of Chicago.
• The SCMP reports on the “Greater Bay Area” plan just announced by China, an integration of the Pearl River area into a single global powerhouse. How will Hong Kong fit into this?

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Oshawa, Chicago, Montréal, London, Bulawayo

• Rosie Di Manno writes at the Toronto Star about the import of the concert that Sting threw in Oshawa for newly unemployed GM workers there.
• Chicago is going to house some innovative new public housing designs, combining low-cost homes for access to physically attached libraries and their educational opportunities. WTTW reports.
• CBC takes a look at the desperate last gap of the Montreal Star, forty years ago.
• CBC reports on the mass excavation of tens of thousands of bodies, and their study by experts, conducted as part of a program of commuter rail construction at a site in London.
• Ozy looks at the decline of Bulawayo, the second city of Zimbabwe.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Raccoon City, Hamilton, Chicago, Milwaukee, Paris

• Mark Clapham at CityMetric takes</u. an insightful look at the terrifying, dehumanizing, ways in which the fictional Raccoon City was designed.
• Alex Bozikovic writes in The Globe and Mail about the goals of the new chief planner of Hamilton, Jason Thorne, to help grow a dynamic and livable city.
• Guardian Cities looks at how many of the major streets of Chicago trace their ancestry to the trails of indigenous peoples.
• WUWM notes how Milwaukee has the largest concentration of Rohingya refugees in the United States.
• Mira Kamdar at the NYR Daily looks at the agricultural past–and potential future–of the Paris periphery, particularly but not only Seine-Saint-Denis.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Pickering, Durham, Delta, Cairo, Yarmouk

• Angela Bischoff at NOW Toronto is right to make the point/u> that the disposal of the nuclear waste from the Pickering plant is a major issue, though I do not think this waste disproves the case for the plant.
• Durham Region is set to experience something of a marijuana boom when cannabis production becomes legalized. The Toronto Star reports.
• The mayor of the British Columbian community of Delta is concerned marijuana might displace food production on scarce, and wants regulation to prevent this. Global News reports.
• Mother Jones notes the terrible damage that Ben Carson has inflicted, as housing secretary, on low-income residents of a development in embattled Cairo, Illinois.
• Open Democracy’s Budour Hassan pays tribute to Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria recently destroyed by the civil war that once was a capital of the diaspora.