[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Milton, Hamilton, New York City, Mexico City, Tel Aviv

• MacLean’s reports from the GTA suburban city of Milton, a key battleground in the federal election.
• Hamilton police continues to be caught up in controversy over its handling of Pride. Global News reports.
• CityLab profiles new murals being created in New York City’s Harlem, on 125th street, here.
• Guardian Cities considers some ambitious plans for remodeling Mexico City, with vast new neighbourhoods and airports, which never came off.
• Atlas Obscura looks at a notable library of books and other documents in the Yiddish language, housed out of a decrepit bus terminal in Tel Aviv.

[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] “Milton — a snapshot of a region struggling with growth”

San Grewal of the Toronto Star looks at how Milton is, or is not, preparing for its ongoing breakneck growth.

No community in Canada is growing faster than Milton. And there’s probably no place in the country where the stresses of daily life, for residents like Zeeshan Hamid, are so closely tied with the inevitable growth.

Two of Hamid’s three children learn inside portables at their elementary school, which opened just four years ago. That’s not rare. Most schools in Milton are far beyond capacity. Hamid even feels lucky that his youngest actually gets to stay inside the building.

Hours before his children leave for school, Hamid’s own workday commute begins with one purpose in mind: finding a parking spot at Milton’s only GO Train station.

It was opened in 1981, after a decade of startling growth that saw the municipality’s population soar, from 7,018 residents in 1971 to 28,067 a decade later, a 300 per cent increase. Flash forward to today, and that figure is a mind-boggling 1,600 per cent, with Milton’s estimated population at the end of this year projected to be around 120,000.

With the GTA’s population set to rise by almost 3 million people over the next 25 years, the vast majority in the 905 area code, the provincial agency responsible for implementing the growth strategy is facing sharp criticism about desperately needed infrastructure that’s nowhere in sight.

“Our forecasts are suggesting that there’ll be approximately 13.5 million people in the Greater Golden Horseshoe by 2041,” says Larry Clay, assistant deputy minister of the Ontario Growth Secretariat, which operates under the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. “The growth is coming, this is likely where it’s going to grow, and we need to plan better for it, going forward . . . it’s a very fast growing region.”