[URBAN NOTE] Fifteen Kingston, Ontario links (#kingstonon)

• CBC reports on suggestions that Kingston should plan for a population expected to grow significantly in coming decades, to not just expand but to have intensified development downtown.
• The rental housing market for Kingston is very tight, not only because of large student populations. Global News reports.
• Kingstonist reports on Queen’s plans to build a large new student residence on Albert Street, here.
• The Whig-Standard carries an account of the new Queen’s principal being interrogated by Kingston city council over issues of friction between school and city, including costs for policing (and not only at Homecoming weekend).
• This summer, farmers in the Kingston area saw poor crop production as a consequence of the weather. Global News reports.
• Happily, the budget of the city of Kingston was made to accommodate costs for Murney, the police force’s horse. Global News reports.
• Weston Food’s plant in Kingston has seen forty jobs cut. Global News reports.
• Lake Ontario Park, in the west of the city, may be reopened to limited camping. The Whig-Standard reports.
• Kingston hockey player Rebecca Thompson is now playing for the team of Queen’s. Global News reports.
• Queen’s University is not alone in urging its exchange students in Hong Kong to evacuate. The Whig-Standard reports.
• Yesterday, a plane crashed in the west of Kingston, killing all seven people aboard. CBC reports</u..
• Chris Morris at Kingstonist has a long feature examining the Kingston Street Mission, interviewing outreach worker Marilyn McLean about her work with the homeless of the city.
• Kingston-born street nurse Cathy Crowe talks about homelessness, in Kingston and across Canada. Global News reports.
• The family of Royal Military College cadet Joe Grozelle, who disappeared from his campus and was later found dead two decades ago, wants his fate reinvestigated. Global News reports.
• A hundred students at a Kingston public school are being taught how to skate, part of a pilot program. Global News reports.

[URBAN NOTE] Nine Toronto links

• Metrolinx using paid influencers to promote the Ontario Line is certainly a choice. The Toronto Star reports.
• Union Station retiring an old mechanical system 90 years old used to control TTC vehicles is a landmark event. The Metrolinx blog reports.
• Jamie Bradburn looks at the birth of the Gardiner Expressway, here.
• Alok Mukherjee at Spacing questions why police in Toronto have stopped enforcing traffic regulations.
• Protesters charged with blocking the Bloor Viaduct during the Extinction Rebellion have had the charges dropped. Global News reports.
• Sean Marshall shared his account of his address to the Toronto Police Services board, here.
• Jamie Bradburn looks at the history behind the mid-20th century expansion of Church Street.
• NOW Toronto notes that workers at the Broadview Hotel have become unionized.
• Samantha Lui writes at NOW Toronto against the false negative stereotypes applied by so many–even briefly by Google–to Scarborough.
• CBC notes that a lawsuit surrounding benefits fraud by TTC employees has been settled, expensively.

[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: 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] Five city links: New York City, Pittsburgh, Montréal, Brande, Cork

• Bloomberg notes that, while New York City is gaining jobs, it is losing residents because of its housing crisis.
• CityLab takes a look at patterns of crime and race and violence in greater Pittsburgh.
• La Presse notes that Montréal, picking up from neighbouring Laval, has started a process of public consultations to try to come up with a common image of the metropolis’ future.
• Guardian Cities notes that fashion giant Bestseller plans on building its skyscraper headquarters, 320 metres tall, in the rural Denmark town of Brande.
• This Irish Examiner article, part of a series, considers how the Republic of Ireland’s second city of Cork can best break free from the dominance of Dublin to develop its own potential.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: sex work, front doors, Eglinton East, TTC, past subways

• Helen Armstrong at NOW Toronto writes against the crude repression, well short of constructive regulation, facing sex workers in Toronto.
• Donovan Vincent at the Toronto Star notes the Toronto controversy around the idea of having houses with two front doors, including one for a basement unit. Why must that unit’s residents be hidden?
• blogTO notes the utter absence of the Eglinton East LRT in the new Toronto transit plan.
• Steve Munro considers the poor state of planning, and funding, for Line 1 of the subway.
• Toronto Life goes back more than a century to take a look at the many discarded plans for subways. Is it comfort, at least, that the lack of good planning is a trait apparently inherent to Torontonians?

[URBAN NOTE] Six Toronto links: transit, Union Centre, real estate, police

• Sean Marshall reports on the long history of Toronto in coming up with new transit plans and failing to follow through.
• The failings of the one-stop Scarborough subway extension go back to the concept’s very conception. The Toronto Star reports.
• The new plans of the province of Ontario for taking over the TTC are, rightfully, causing alarm at Toronto City Hall. CBC reports.
• blogTO notes the proposal for Union Centre, a new skyscraper in downtown Toronto designed by the Bjarke Ingels Group that will feature a treed roof.
• blogTO notes a new report making it clear that housing affordability has become a major issue for Torontonians, with costs of ownership and rental having reached new highs relative to income.
• Alok Mukherjee makes the point at NOW Toronto that any inquiry into Toronto Police conduct in the McArthur killings has to be part of a general inquiry into how the police conducts itself internally.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Toronto links: Yonge and Eglinton, TD Centre, TTC, budget, Cantonese opera

• Urban Toronto notes that Yonge and Eglinton is now being torn apart, again, for Eglinton Crosstown construction.
• Chris Bateman writes at CityLab about the singular achievement of Mies Van der Rohe in designing the TD Centre.
• blogTO reports that the TTC has abandoned the policy of collecting personal information from passengers accused of misconduct, an echo of police carding.
• John Lorinc writes at Spacing about ways to reframe the language used in debating the budget of the City of Toronto.
• Arlene Chan at Spacing tells the century-long history of Cantonese opera in Toronto.

[URBAN NOTE] Seven Toronto links: Umbrella Academy, TTC, trails, crime, Port Lands

• Toronto Life includes photos of some of the most notable locations in the new Toronto-filmed TV series, The Umbrella Academy.
• This report revealing the scale of fare evasion and losses due to Metrolinx malfunction on the TTC, in the area of $C 64 million, is unsurprising. Global News reports.
• Sean Marshall reports on the new Canongate Trial in Scarborough, erected to help allow for safe pedestrian access to a street where a child was recently killed in a collision.
• Urban Toronto looks at the state of the renovation of the Park Hyatt at Bloor and Avenue Road.
• CBC reports that Bruce McArthur was linked, in 2013, to three of the men he was convicted six years later of murdering.
• Bianca Wylie at Spacing considers the lessons Toronto should take from the unfolding Sidewalk Labs drama in the Port Lands.
• This Metro Morning interview with Dan Doctoroff on the Sidewalk Labs’ plan for the Port Lands is revealing.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Colby King writes at the Everyday Sociology Blog about furnace, kiln, and oven operators as recorded in the American Community Survey. What experiences do they have in common, and which separate them?
• Far Outliers reports on the work of the Indian Labourer Corps on the Western Front, collecting and recycling raw materials from the front.
• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing makes the case that the seeming neutrality of modern digital technologies are dissolving the established political order.
• Joe. My. God. notes a report from Andrew McCabe suggesting that Trump did not believe his own intelligence services’ reports about the range of North Korean missiles, instead believing Putin.
• JSTOR Daily notes 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.
• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money reports on the connections of the police in Portland, Oregon, to the alt-right.
• Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution shares a report of the discovery of English-speaking unicorns in South America that actually reveals the remarkable language skills of a new AI. Fake news, indeed.
• The NYR Daily shares a short story by Panashe Chigumadzi, “You Can’t Eat Beauty”.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw welcomes a new fluidity in Australian politics that makes the elections debatable.
• Drew Rowsome looks at the horror fiction of Justin Cronin.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel shares some of the key historical images of Pluto, from its discovery to the present.
• Window on Eurasia takes a look at the only church of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church operating in Russia, in the Moscow area city of Noginsk.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell makes the point that counting on opinion pieces in journalism as a source of unbiased information is a categorical mistake.
• Arnold Zwicky looks back, on President’s Day at Berkeley, at his experiences and those of others around him at that university and in its community.