[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] Five city links: New York City, Lisbon, Lagos, Donetsk and Luhansk, Hong Kong

• CityLab looks at the sheer density of the Marvel universe in New York City.
• CityLab reports on how the Portuguese capital of Lisbon is suffering a rash of thefts of its iconic tiles.
• A series of private movie screenings in Lagos are explored in CityLab, as a way of building community.
• Open Democracy takes a look at how the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, in the occupied Donbas, are now being run.
• Guardian Cities reports on how urban explorers and photographers in Hong Kong are trying to archive images of their changing city.

[MUSIC] Five music links: Nick Cave on AI, Lisbon, Yiddish, Cranberries, psychology

• I am not quite sure I buy the argument of Nick Cave at Vice’s Motherboard that artificial intelligence will never be able to write a great song.
• Roads and Kingdoms shares a soundtrack of Lisbon pop songs, in a variety of genres.
• CBC reports on the remarkable recovery of a collection of Yiddish-language songs from the Second World War that led to a Grammy nomination.
• Rolling Stone reports< on the work that went into the last, and final, album of the Cranberries following the untimely death last year of Dolores O'Riordan.
• At Global News, Alan Cross writes about the psychological and even therapeutic effects of different sorts of music.

[DM] Some news links: history, cities, migration, diasporas

I have another round-up post of links at Demography Matters, this one concentrating heavily on migration as it affects cities. An essay will come tomorrow, I promise!

• JSTOR Daily considers the extent to which the Great Migration of African-Americans was a forced migration, driven not just by poverty but by systemic anti-black violence.
• Even as the overall population of Japan continues to decline, the population of Tokyo continues to grow through net migration, Mainichi reports.
• This CityLab article takes look at the potential, actual and lost and potential, of immigration to save the declining Ohio city of Youngstown. Will it, and other cities in the American Rust Belt, be able to take advantage of entrepreneurial and professional immigrants?
• Window on Eurasia notes a somewhat alarmist take on Central Asian immigrant neighbourhoods in Moscow. That immigrant neighbourhoods can become largely self-contained can surprise no one.
• Guardian Cities notes how tensions between police and locals in the Bairro do Jamaico in Lisbon reveal problems of integration for African immigrants and their descendants.
• Carmen Arroyo at Inter Press Service writes about Pedro, a migrant from Oaxaca in Mexico who has lived in New York City for a dozen years without papers.
• CBC Prince Edward Island notes that immigration retention rates on PEI, while low, are rising, perhaps showing the formation of durable immigrant communities. Substantial international migration to Prince Edward Island is only just starting, after all.
• The industrial northern Ontario city of Sault Sainte-Marie, in the wake of the closure of the General Motors plant in the Toronto-area industrial city of Oshawa, was reported by Global News to have hopes to recruit former GM workers from Oshawa to live in that less expensive city.
• Atlas Obscura examines the communities being knitted together across the world by North American immigrants from the Caribbean of at least partial Hakka descent. The complex history of this diaspora fascinates me.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares a lovely photo of the Earth peeking out from behind the far side of the Moon.
• At the Broadside Blog, Caitlin Kelly shares lovely photos of delicate ice and water taken on a winter’s walk.
• Centauri Dreams looks at the study by Chinese astronomers who, looking at the distribution of Cepheids, figured out that our galaxy’s disk is an S-shaped warp.
• D-Brief notes new evidence that melting of the Greenland ice sheet will disrupt the Gulf Stream.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing takes issue with the uncritical idealization of the present, as opposed to the critical examination of whatever time period we are engaging with.
• Gizmodo notes that an intensive series of brain scans is coming closer to highlighting the areas of the human brain responsible for consciousness.
• Mark Graham links to new work of his, done in collaboration, looking at ways to make the sharing economy work more fairly in low- and middle-income countries.
• JSTOR Daily notes how the mystic Catholicism of the African kingdom of Kongo may have gone on to inspire slave-led revolutions in 18th century North America and Haiti.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at an exhibition examining the ambitious architecture of Yugoslavia.
• The Map Room Blog links to a cartographer’s argument about the continuing importance of paper maps.
• Marginal Revolution shares one commenter’s perception of causes or the real estate boom in New Zealand.
• Neuroskeptic considers the role of the mysterious silent neurons in the human brain.
• At NYR Daily, Guadeloupe writer Maryse Condé talks about her career as a writer and the challenges of identity for her native island.
• Roads and Kingdoms shares a list of ten dishes reflecting the history of the city of Lisbon.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel takes a look at the promise of likely mini-Neptune Barnard’s Star b as a target for observation, perhaps even life.
• Window on Eurasia shares the perfectly plausible argument that, just as the shift of the Irish to the English language did not end Irish identity and nationalism, so might a shift to Russian among Tatars not end Tatar identity.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Niagara Falls, Montréal, Vancouver, Lisbon, Naples

• Gilbert Ngabo writes about how Niagara Falls, New York, would love the GO Train to cross the border into his city, his article featuring in the Niagara Falls Review.
• Michelle Da Silva writes at NOW Toronto about how the Montréal Igloofest is such a great idea.
• The tax on empty homes in Vancouver may yet be increased, to discourage speculation. Global News reports.
• Guardian Cities notes how tensions between police and locals in the Bairro do Jamaico in Lisbon reveal problems of integration for African immigrants and their descendants.
• CityLab notes how the popular novels of Elena Ferrante may drive gentrification in the Naples neighbourhood of Rione Luzzatti.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Brampton, Milton and Markham, New York City, Atlanta, London, Lisbon

• The Ontario government’s cancellation of new post-secondary campuses years in the planning for booming Brampton, Milton, and Markham hurts these centres needlessly. Global News reports.
• Guardian Cities notes how the scale of voter repression in Georgia may not be enough to prevent the election of Stacey Abrams, given the scale of black migration to Atlanta.
• Feargus O’Sullivan at CityLab takes a look at a new report noting both the importance of venues for experimental music in New York City (and other cities) and these venues’ vulnerability to gentrification.
• A long-abandoned street of Victorian London has been remade, CityLab reports, into a component of London Bridge Station.
• CityLab reports on the beautiful, but dangerous, tiled sidewalks of Lisbon. Is it worth keeping them?

[URBAN NOTE] Five cities links: Hamilton, Detroit, Luxembourg, Lisbon, Comrat

• Mark McNeil at the Hamilton Spectator notes that real estate prices in Hamilton, often thought of as Toronto’s less expensive bedroom community, are also rising very quickly.
• The VICE article takes a look at the man who created Detroit’s African Bead Museum.
• The former red-light district of Luxembourg City is also maneuvering to take advantage of the post-Brexit resettlement of Europeans financiers. Bloomberg reports.
• Architectuul looks at how architects in Lisbon are trying to take advantage of their changing city, to help make it more accessible to all.
• The Guardian has a photo essay focusing on Comrat, a decidedly Soviet-influenced city that is the capital of the autonomous region of Gagauzia, in Moldova.