[URBAN NOTE] Ten city links: Laval, Calgary, Vancouver, Cleveland, Machu Picchu, London, Görlitz …

• The Québec city of Laval now has a cemetery where pets can be buried alongside their owners. CBC reports.
• Talk of Alberta separatism has already cost Calgary at least one high-profile non-oil investment, it seems. Global News reports.
• A new piece of public art in Vancouver, a spinning chandelier, has proven to be a lightning rod for controversy. CBC reports.
• Guardian Cities looks at the continuing fight against lead contamination in Cleveland.
• Machu Picchu was built in a high remote corner of the Andes for good reasons, it is being argued. The National Post reports.
• Wired looks at how rivals to Uber are currently fighting for dominance in London, here.
• Guardian Cities shares a cartoon history of the birth of Nairobi, here.
• The east German city of Gorlitz offered interested people one month’s free residence. The Guardian reports.
• JSTOR Daily notes that Hong Kong was born as a city from refugee migrations.
• Is Tokyo, despite tis size and wealth, too detached from Asia to take over from Hong Kong as a regional financial centre? Bloomberg View is not encouraging.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Architectuul profiles architectural photographer Lorenzo Zandri, here.
• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait notes a new study suggesting red dwarf stars, by far the most common stars in the universe, have plenty of planets.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly shares 11 tips for interviewers, reminding me of what I did for anthropology fieldwork.
• Centauri Dreams notes how water ice ejected from Enceladus makes the inner moons of Saturn brilliant.
• The Crux looks at the increasingly complicated question of when the first humans reached North America.
• D-Brief notes a new discovery suggesting the hearts of humans, unlike the hearts of other closely related primates, evolved to require endurance activities to remain healthy.
• Dangerous Minds shares with its readers the overlooked 1969 satire Putney Swope.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that the WFIRST infrared telescope has passed its first design review.
• Gizmodo notes how drought in Spain has revealed the megalithic Dolmen of Guadalperal for the first time in six decades.
• io9 looks at the amazing Jonathan Hickman run on the X-Men so far, one that has established the mutants as eye-catching and deeply alien.
• Joe. My. God. notes that the Pentagon has admitted that 2017 UFO videos do, in fact, depict some unidentified objects in the air.
• JSTOR Daily looks at the origin of the equestrian horseback statue in ancient Rome.
• Language Log shares a bilingual English/German pun from Berlin.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money reflects on the legacy of Thomas Jefferson at Jefferson’s grave.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution looks at a new book arguing, contra Pinker perhaps, that the modern era is one of heightened violence.
• The New APPS Blog seeks to reconcile the philosophy of Hobbes with that of Foucault on biopower.
• Strange Company shares news clippings from 1970s Ohio about a pesky UFO.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel explains why the idea of shooting garbage from Earth into the sun does not work.
• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps explains the appearance of Brasilia on a 1920s German map: It turns out the capital was nearly realized then.
• Towleroad notes that Pete Buttigieg has taken to avoiding reading LGBTQ media because he dislikes their criticism of his gayness.
• Arnold Zwicky looks at diners and changing menus and slavery.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Hamilton, Montréal, Lorain, Buenos Aires, Jakarta

• Tensions between the LGBTQ communities of Hamilton and the police remain high. Global News reports.
• The federal government will be providing funding for the new Great West Park of Montréal. CTV News reports.
• CityLab looks at the hometown of Toni Morrison, the Ohio community of Lorain, here.
• Guardian Cities looks at the question of how, or whether, a Buenos Aires slum should become an official neighbourhood, here.
• Guardian Cities reports on a small neighbourhood, Cosmo Park, built on top of a shopping mall in Jakarta, here.

[URBAN NOTE] Ten city links: Hamilton, Ottawa, Montréal, Kingston, Vancouver, Toledo, NYC, Bodie …

• CBC Hamilton reports on the options of the City of Hamilton faced with its having hired a prominent former white supremacist.
• CBC Ottawa reports that flood levels on the Ottawa River have reached record highs.
• The Montreal Gazette considers possible solutions to crowding on the Montréal subway, including new cars and special buses.
• Kingston is preparing for flooding, the city seeing a threat only in certain waterfront districts. Global News reports.
• Vancouver is applying a zoning freeze in a future mass transit corridor. Global News reports.
• CityLab looks at how the post-war dream of mass transit and densification for the Ohio city of Toledo never came about, and how it might now.
• Guardian Cities looks at construction proposals for New York City that never were.
• CityLab looks at how the California ghost town of Bodie is kept in good shape for tourists.
• Vox notes that just over one in ten thousand people in San Francisco is a billionaire.
• Leonid Bershidsky at Bloomberg considers why productivity in Berlin lags behind that in other European capital cities. Could it be that the young workers of Berlin are not devoted to earning income?

[DM] Some news links: public art, history, marriage, diaspora, assimilation

Some more population-related links popped up over the past week.

• CBC Toronto reported on this year’s iteration of Winter Stations. A public art festival held on the Lake Ontario shorefront in the east-end Toronto neighbourhood of The Beaches, Winter Stations this year will be based around the theme of migration.
• JSTOR Daily noted how the interracial marriages of serving members of the US military led to the liberalization of immigration law in the United States in the 1960s. With hundreds of thousands of interracial marriages of serving members of the American military to Asian women, there was simply no domestic constituency in the United States
• Ozy reported on how Dayton, Ohio, has managed to thrive in integrating its immigrant populations.
• Amro Ali, writing at Open Democracy, makes a case for the emergence of Berlin as a capital for Arab exiles fleeing the Middle East and North America in the aftermath of the failure of the Arab revolutions. The analogy he strikes to Paris in the 1970s, a city that offered similar shelter to Latin American refugees at that time, resonates.
• Alex Boyd at The Island Review details, with prose and photos, his visit to the isolated islands of St. Kilda, inhabited from prehistoric times but abandoned in 1930.
• VICE looks at the plight of people who, as convicted criminals, were deported to the Tonga where they held citizenship. How do they live in a homeland they may have no experience of? The relative lack of opportunity in Tonga that drove their family’s earlier migration in the first place is a major challenge.
• Window on Eurasia notes how, in many post-Soviet countries including the Baltic States and Ukraine, ethnic Russians are assimilating into local majority ethnic groups. (The examples of the industrial Donbas and Crimea, I would suggest, are exceptional. In the case of the Donbas, 2014 might well have been the latest point at which a pro-Russian separatist movement was possible.)

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Montréal, Dayton, London, Singapore, Berlin

• CBC Montreal reports on how, and why, an Anglican church in Montréal will be hosting a circus.
• Ozy reports on how Dayton, Ohio, has managed to thrive in integrating its immigrant populations.
• CityLab notes how the Tate Modern gallery in London won a lawsuit against neighbours who complained gallery-goers could see inside their homes.
• Linda Lim at Bloomberg explains why Singapore is not a useful model for the post-Brexit United Kingdom.
• Amro Ali, writing at Open Democracy, makes a case for the emergence of Berlin as a capital for Arab exiles.

[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.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Vaughan, Kingston, Youngstown, Washington D.C, Almaty

• Urban Toronto notes the rising towers of the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, at the western end of Line 1.
• People in the city of Kingston are concerned by the implications of new Ontario government bills. Global News reports.
• This CityLab article takes look at the potential, actual and lost and potential, of immigration to save the declining Ohio city of Youngstown.
• Washington D.C, CityLab notes, is the latest city to be consumed by a debate over whether or not mass transit should be free.
• Guardian Cities reports on the remarkable discovery of long-hidden public art in the former Kazakhstan capital of Almaty.

[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Hamilton, Québec City, Markham, Cleveland, Vancouver

• CBC Hamilton shares the arguments of local housing advocates that removing rent control will not encourage the construction of more affordable housing.
• La Presse notes that Québec City is moving towards construction of a tramway system.
• Christopher Hume writes in the Toronto Star about the new Aaniin Community Centre in Markham, here.
• CityLab looks at redlining in Cleveland, here.
• This pair of videos, taken 52 years apart, does a great job of showing the remarkable transformation of the skyline of Vancouver. Global News has it.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomer notes Apep, a brilliant trinary eight thousand light-years away with at least one Wolf-Rayet star that might explode in a gamma-ray burst.
• Centauri Dreams notes that AAVSO, the American Association of Variable Star Observers, has created a public exoplanet archive.
• The Crux considers/u> different strategies for intercepting asteroids bound to impact with Earth.
• D-Brief notes the discovery of a solar twin, a star that might have been born in the same nursery as our sun, HD 186302 184 light-years away.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes that although NASA’s Gateway station to support lunar traffic is facing criticism, Russia and China are planning to build similar outposts.
• JSTOR Daily notes the research of Katie Sutton into the pioneering gender-rights movement of Weimar Germany.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money celebrates the successful clean-up of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, once famously depicted on fire.
• The Map Room Blog links to maps showing Apple Maps and Google Maps will be recording images next for their online databases.
• Jamieson Webster at the NYR Daily takes a critical, even defensible, look at the widespread use of psychopharmacological drugs in contemporary society.
• Roads and Kingdoms carries a transcript of an interview with chefs in Ireland, considering the culinary possibilities overlooked and otherwise of the island’s natural bounty.
• Rocky Planet considers the real, overlooked, possibility of earthquakes in the relatively geologically stable east of the United States.
• The Russian Demographics Blog notes how, in the transatlantic wine trade, American interest in European wines is surely not reciprocated.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel notes how Einsteinian relativity, specifically relating to gravitational lensing, was used to predict the reappearance of the distant Refsdal Supernova one year after its 2014 appearance.