Illustration by Flavia Chan

Dear city planners,

I was 10 years old when I picked up Pokémon for the first time. I remember unwrapping it Christmas morning and rushing to immediately grab my Nintendo DS to play it, immersing myself in this world where creatures and humans not only coexist but work together to build a brighter future. A world where cities are built around landscapes, renewable energy, and pedestrians. Throughout the game I would walk, bike, and ride trains to (as their tagline goes) “catch ‘em all” and beat the game.

While I’m not proposing you start to let 10-year-old kids run around and explore as they please, there is something to be learned from the world of Pokémon. With the climate crisis worsening and major cities becoming inaccessible to pedestrians, we should be looking at the Pokémon video games—most notably the 2019 games for the Nintendo Switch, Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield—as inspiration for future city planning.

As an adult, I revisited the Pokémon games and could not help notice how much these games encapsulate the visions we have for our cities. These in-game cities are built entirely for walking and biking, not a single car to be seen. Additionally, these cities are built with the natural landscape in mind. I sat there in awe, just like I had 13 years ago, of the way nature and people interacted. Both living in harmony, benefiting from each other.

Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of the Pokémon games, had this exact same vision for the franchise. As a child living in the still rural landscape of Machida, Tokyo, he was an avid bug collector, which inspired his childhood nickname, “Dr. Bug.” But as he grew older, more of the places he explored turned into highways and apartment buildings. When he first imagined Pokémon, he wanted kids to experience the same awe and wonder he did exploring as a child in the wilderness. But how will children be able to experience that when we are building our cities without taking into consideration the nature and people that live around them?

City planners, it may sound obvious, but you need to start building cities for people. According to a survey by Nature Conservatory Canada, nine out of 10 Canadians are happier in nature, but 74 percent of those surveyed said it’s easier to just stay indoors. This can be attributed to the destruction of natural landscapes to make way for more urban development, which is the same thing Tajiri experienced during his childhood.

It’s time for you to look at the world of Pokémon and take a page out of Tajiri’s book. He has given us the perfect example with the video game world that he has created. People are meant to explore and coexist with nature, not destroy it to build skyscrapers. If we continue down this same path of urbanization, soon 10-year-old children will only be able to experience the wonder of exploration through a screen. By incorporating eco-friendly infrastructure introduced in Pokémon into our city planning, children, both present and future, will be able to experience the thrill of exploring in person.

Yours in exploration,

Marco Ovies

A Bixi bicycle stand in Montreal. Creative Commons photo by Flickr user pdbreen.

When Toronto launched Canada’s first bike share program in 2001, many saw it as a miracle project. Mirroring the popular-abroad systems of Paris and Vienna, the system allowed cyclists to grab their bikes at one hub, cruise the streets, and then drop the bike off at a rack nearest their destination—all for a daily or monthly fee. It seemed bike sharing would cut traffic congestion, greenhouse gas emissions, and even obesity.

It wasn’t to be. The program crashed after only five years and Canada’s been stuck in first gear since. Thanks to Bixi, that may soon change. The international company—which already operates programs on three continents—ran a trial bike share program in Ottawa-Gatineau and a five-day demonstration in Vancouver this past summer, and was in negotiations with Toronto in 2009. While its efforts to revive bike sharing there were a failure, Bixi’s fledgling program in Montreal is gaining momentum fast.

The program has been in operation less than a year and already has 5,000 bikes, 400 stations, and 10,000 full-time members. That’s massive compared to the 450 users Toronto had at its peak before the 2006 closure.

A coordinator with the group that ran Toronto’s short-lived program says the on-and-off success of bike shares in Canada comes down to funding. “It’s a struggle being able to charge enough,” admits Sherri Byer. Indeed, Toronto’s Community Bicycle Network was forced to shut down its program after falling short $80,000.

While Bixi’s fee structure has kept it stable so far, the company actually credits its success to community consultations promoting bikes. Byer agrees combating people’s stereotypes is important. “North Americans generally don’t believe in bikes as transportation,” she says. “They’re seen as a recreation vehicle.”

Even so, while change may be a long road, Bixi has given bike-share enthusiasts heart. Eleanor McMahon, president of the cycling advocacy organization Share the Road, says there’s no question that bike sharing needs to come back, it’s just a matter of when and how. “Cycling is not viewed as mainstream, and it’s time that city government stepped up [and talked about it],” she says. “We have to ask, what kind of city do we want?”

It's time to rid our neighbourhoods of the green menace. Creative Commons photo by Robert S. Donovan.

From the first breath of spring, we North Americans dream of an expanse of green grass, a vast carpet that tickles our skin and stains our sundresses on which we can spend long, lazy days barbecuing and reading summer fiction. But our love affair with the lawn has got to stop.

Even pesticide-free, grass is an environmental menace. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates the footprint of fertilizing an acre of lawn equals a 700-kilometre car trip, and Statistics Canada found that gas-powered lawnmowers—which two-thirds of Canadians with lawns own—contribute to smog as much as driving from Saskatoon to Montreal. Kentucky bluegrass, which actually has its roots, so to speak, in Europe and the Middle East, is so ill-suited to our climate that it requires constant water and food (causing irate and impassioned CBC Radio listeners to vote it Canada’s worst weed). But lawns stretch across 32 million acres of the U.S., occupying more space than wheat, corn or tobacco. (There are no comparable numbers collected from Canada.) Who knew so much green space could be such bad news?

Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn (Metropolis Books, 2008), a project by artist and environmental designer Fritz Haeg, documents one solution to our yard woes. He turned lawns into farms, growing “edible landscapes” in three sites in the U.S. and one in England. Destroying the uniform lawns, to Haeg, is more than ecological: it’s revolutionary. “The monoculture … covering our neighbourhoods from coast to coast,” he writes, “celebrates puritanical homogeneity and mindless conformity.” Like Joni Mitchell’s hissing summer lawns, which represented control and repression in unhappy suburban marriage, Haeg’s work dismantles the way the lawn “divides and isolates us.”

Haeg’s projects defied that isolation, with communities collaborating on the antilawn designs. But for those of us with small green squares, going lawn-free doesn’t have to be complicated. The answers are easy to implement. Put down mulch so water stays in the soil. Compost and collect rainwater. Plant native species in abundant diversity: they won’t need much water and they’ll handle pests better (start with Evergreen’s native plant database). Plant trees: they are still the best carbon sinks we have. Get out your shovel, put on some sunscreen and let it grow, lawn-free, from there.

Toronto's Rogers Centre (formerly Skydome), built with public funds and later sold off to private business for a pittance. A major league sports team is often assumed to be more economically stimulating than actual results attest. Creative Commons photo by Mike Babcock.

The National Hockey League playoffs open this week and the abundance of emotion-laden storylines are sure to captivate a significant portion of the the Canadian sporting public’s hearts. But while three Canadian squads—the Vancouver Canucks, the Montreal Canadiens and the Ottawa Senators—vie for Lord Stanley’s coveted Cup, there’s another, less exciting, story unfolding that probably should captivate our minds, even those of the non sports-adoring variety.

Tomorrow, the city council of Glendale, Arizona will vote to approve the arena-lease agreements for the two bids put forward to purchase the suburban community’s NHL hockey club, the Phoenix Coyotes. But, as the Globe and Mail reported this weekend, even if the leading bid, submitted by Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reisdorf, is approved the lease agreement may not survive. In an interesting twist of fate, a lawyer for the Goldwater Institute recently announced that the conservative watchdog group won’t hesitate to take the city of Glendale to court if it appears the agreements are in violation of Arizona laws against public subsidies for private corporations.

The concern for Goldwater is a piece of the Reisdorf “memorandum of understanding” that calls for local taxpayers and businesses to foot up to $165-million of the purchase price and annual operating losses. While this sort of stipulation isn’t unusual in the standard agreements between sports franchises and host cities, it is unusual that a powerful watchdog is calling both parties out.

For too long, the public has dogmatically accepted the connection politicians and team owners like to tout between sports franchises and local economic development. Massive public subsidies are regularly given to billion-dollar sports operations under the guise that they will bring an influx of new economic activity to the local community. This year alone, Winnipeg, Quebec City and Hamilton have all, at one point or another, flirted with the idea of bringing a professional hockey team home. And each has made claims about the economic benefit a pro franchise would bring. However, the problem is that justification is demonstrably false. There is, in fact, no economic rationale for publicly funded sports teams and stadiums.

According to Andrew Zimbalist, a prominent sports economist at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, all independent scholarly research on the economic impact of sports teams and stadiums has come to the same conclusion: there isn’t any. As he told Stephen J. Dubner on the New York Times Freakonomics blog, contrary to the rhetoric often aired by local politicians and sports teams owners, “one should not anticipate that a team or a facility by itself will either increase employment or raise per capita income in a metropolitan area.”

The economics behind this are complicated, but, generally, three principles hold. First, sports stadiums rarely create new capital: consumer spending on sport is almost always a redistribution of existing dollars in the local economy. People don’t spend money they wouldn’t have otherwise; they simply spend some their entertainment budget on local teams instead of something else. Second, much of the income generated by the team ends up leaking out of the local economy. Millionaire owners and players have their savings tied-up in world money markets and often live and spend their money outside of the host city. Third, and perhaps most importantly, host governments typically contributes close to two-thirds of the financing for the facility’s construction, usually takes on obligations for additional expenditures and routinely guarantee a significant amount of revenue. In other words, it’s the taxpayers that bear most of the risk—not the multimillion-dollar franchises that make a city home.

That’s not to say there aren’t perfectly good reasons for cities to host big-time sports teams or build world-class sports stadiums. It’s just that the supposed “positive economic impact” of a sports franchise shouldn’t factor into local governments’ decisions. Cities spend millions of dollars on cultural activities that they don’t anticipate to yield additional revenue. Sports teams can have a powerful cultural impact on a community and are integral part of most cities’ social fabric. If local residents value sport they are obviously welcome to allocate public dollars toward it. In fact, I, for one, hope they do. But sports teams and stadiums should be sold as a source of civic pride—not as a source of economic development.

In her new book, Imagining Toronto, York University geography professor Amy Lavender Harris creates a literary map of that identity building. What she finds is a literary scene that is reflecting the city’s shifting geography, moving into inner suburbs like Scarborough and North York, and well into deep suburbia: Pickering, Vaughan, Ajax.

Harris began writing her book two years ago after scouring the city for books for a Toronto literature course. She soon found herself delving into the city’s literary history, as framed by the narratives of iconic neighborhoods like the Annex, Parkdale and Cabbagetown. Now she has oriented the city’s public spaces in its literature, tracing Toronto’s identity to the streetcar lines and architectural icons that recur in its literature.

It’s those architectural icons that often define the Toronto identity, for better or worse. “The CN Tower comes to mind because it’s the most iconic, as well as in some ways, hated, symbol of Toronto,” she says—but that was until Michael Lee-Chin’s crystalline addition to the Royal Ontario Museum was unveiled, Harris notes.

Harris says there is plenty of literary history to left to map. “If you could say everything there was that could be said about Toronto, then it would be a pretty boring place.”

All the papers last week were abuzz about an op-ed written by now-backbench Conservative MP Maxime Bernier. Writing how climate change is an unsure thing indeed, he said his party was on the right track by playing it cool in Copenhagen.

He was roundly criticized by Canadian media and bloggers. Globe contributor Robert Silver called him Canada’s Sarah Palin. The National Post’s article on the matter began with Environment Minister Jim Prentice stating that the Harper government did not share Bernier’s skeptical position on the science. And Sun Media writer Lorrie Goldstein’s article, Mad Max makes sense on climate change, stated: “The good news is Harper is better on climate change than the opposition parties. The bad news is, that’s not saying much.”

Wait a minute. Harper not strong enough on climate change? Sounds like something we’ve been saying for a while.

Goldstein, however, thinks he hasn’t rejected climate change enough. Even believing in the evidence is too much.
But that’s okay, who reads the Sun anyway?

Oh right, lots of people.

Sun Media Corp. is Canada’s largest newspaper publisher, having eaten up dozens of mainstream dailies and hundreds of other community papers. It reaches over 10 million Canadians.

Bernier’s view was echoed by Conservative bloggers and comments in online articles. There was significant talk of Bernier setting up a future leadership run for the Conservative Party.

Move over to provincial politics and Ontario’s Conservatives have already chosen their Bernier. Leader Tim Hudak, elected last year, is a right-winger through and through. The Party’s environmental platform is perhaps yet to be hashed out for the next election, but there are rumours that the Green Energy Act—a new staple of support for renewable energy projects in the province—might be something Hudak would repeal.

This would be made politically salable by the unexpectedly strong pressure from supposed grassroots organization, Wind Concerns Ontario, which has branches in towns across the province. Hundreds come out to environmental assessment meetings to oppose wind establishment in their areas. These people are finding a friend in Tim Hudak.

Similarly, the Ontario Landowners Association is one to watch. The organization is another collection of rural groups from across the province with a membership 15,000 strong who support policies that may appear radical or American to their urban friends. And though some are good stewards of their land, they may not be interested in hearing about climate policy.

Although Randy Hillier, first president of the Association, lost soundly to Hudak in the Party’s leadership bid, its strong anti-Liberal message of rural land rights and ability to bus people to meetings may give Hudak the desire to lean on it in the next election. Having been in a room of rural Ontarians during a presentation by climate change skeptic Patrick Moore, I know that there is a widespread desire to hear and believe in the other side.

Drilling down one more level to municipal politics, Rocco Rossi, former National Director of the Liberal Party of Canada and inner-circle advisor to Michael Ignattieff has thrown his hat in the ring for Toronto Mayor, promising to ditch bike lanes and pause the city’s ambitious transit plan. After having taken Al Gore’s climate presentation training, this so-called “liberal” is looking to plan a city without the critical infrastructure necessary to support a safer method of travel for both cyclists and drivers, ditching a key urban carbon reduction measure.

But could it work for him? With commuting cyclists currently making up a very small proportion of residents, a move to make driving even appear more convenient, in a time when traffic jams clog Toronto morning streets, might be politically expedient in many Toronto neighbourhoods.

The United States is undergoing a strong movement of its far-right known as the Tea Party, described in a weekend article by Frank Rich. Rich warns to take the group seriously. The Tea Party has got people in the U.S. talking, and its mainstream conservative party getting nervous.

American writer Chris Hedges gives his answer to the movement and the weakness of Barack Obama (at Copenhagen and beyond), in a piece yesterday stating that the progressive left and the Democrats have succumbed to cowardice and have lost their energy. He urges a move back to third parties on the left, suggesting that a credible alternative to the state of the economy and society is what is most needed to bring the public onside, not liberals talking about policy all the time.

And so in the rural revolution and climate change deniers and their supportive media and blogs, Canadians may have our version of the Tea Party. While Americans, politics may be their hockey at the moment, we too may soon have an excited right which could pit itself against climate progress at a level that even Stephen Harper won’t touch. And whether that means bringing rural landowners in for climate consultation or starting a socialist revolution, it sounds like something worth planning for.

Wintertime in Canada is sure to mean roads covered in snow, ice and salt. Here’s a look at the country’s de-icer of choice— how it’s good, how it’s bad, and what can be used instead.

Click below to see the PDF full-screen:

In December 2001, Environment Canada officially declared road salt to be damaging to the environment. Since then, a “Code of Practice for the Environmental Management of Road Salts” has been voluntarily implemented by many municipalities and provinces. It explains how to optimize road salt usage, recommends alternatives be adopted when possible, and says that vulnerable sites be spared road salt altogether. Toronto reduced its salt usage by 37,000 tonnes in the two winters following the implementation of its version of this plan in 2001.

Road salt can severely threaten the ability of plants to survive already harsh roadside conditions. One government study found that an average of 1.86 trees per kilometre on the highway are affected by salt and need to be replaced each year, to the tune of $300-$886 per tree. Thanks to aerial dispersion, vulnerable areas can stretch up to hundreds of metres from roadways.

Sodium chloride can seep into roadside runoff and eventually find its way into nearby lakes, where it can sink to the bottom and shut off the oxygen supply to the bottom-feeding organisms that become food for some fish. The end result can be a disrupted ecosystem.

Environment Canada estimates that road salt corrosion costs about $143 every year for each vehicle in the country. Salt also corrodes concrete, steel, and asphalt, causing municipalities and business to have to refurbish 600 parking garages annually and to spend $763 per square metre to repair corroded bridges.

So why do we use this stuff? Because it improves driving conditions immensely. Environment Canada says that road salt usage results in vehicles consuming up to 33 percent less fuel and reduces winter accidents by more than 88 percent.

There are alternatives to road salt out there. Calcium magnesium acetate—or CMA—is used to de-ice planes and is considered to be a greener option. But it’s not cheap. A ton of CMA goes for about US$450, compared to about US $50 for a tonne of road salt. While CMA might be too pricey for local governments, it’s certainly an option for environmentally conscious businesses and homeowners.

The Simply People Festival shows there's still more to be done.

If the LGBT community can have Pride Week, complete with parade, then the world’s most undervalued minority — people with disabilities — can have at least one day to come together for disability pride.

That’s the idea behind Simply People.  Canada Wide Accessibility for Post Secondary Students [CANWAPSS] had its 6th annual Simply People Festival yesterday. It’s an opportunity  for Toronto’s disability community to gather under the shadow of city hall in Nathan Philips Square and listen to performers like Justin Hines or, as most people know him, “That guy in the wheelchair from the Ontario Tourism Commercial,” and bask in all they’ve accomplished — except Ontario has ensured they still haven’t accomplished much of anything.When David Lepofsky, chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act [AODA] Alliance and fellow disabled traveler, has to start his speech to those attending the festival with, “I’m going to give you good news, bad news and hopeful news,” you know that the disabled community is getting about as much respect as Rodney Dangerfield.

He was talking about the AODA. It’s that small piece of legislation the able-bodied population has largely no idea exists, which stipulates the province has to be fully accessible. If you don’t read past that sentence it is the good news he mentioned, but McGuinty runs Ontario like an infommercial so, “Some restrictions apply.” One of them being, and this is the bad news, that Ontario has until the year 2025 to get the province up to snuff when the law can actually be enforced.  Oh, and Lepofsky informed the attending audience that with five years already passed since  the law was enacted, the province is already behind schedule. If I live to 2025, I’ll be almost 40 and now with 100% accessibility even more behind schedule, who knows if any of us will live to see it.

His hopeful news was his hope that the larger disabled community would all get involved in pestering the provincial government even more than we already have, just to make sure our representatives stick to a commitment they already made. Well, as a member of the disability community, I am not a babysitter and I refuse to have a parent/child relationship with a politician. The most dangerous part of Lepofsky’s suggestion is that if this commitment falls through, disabled people may blame themselves and suddenly politicians can turn around and say, “You didn’t lobby us enough to make accessibility happen.” Whatever happened to doing something simply because it’s the right thing to do? Fundamentally, priority one of any government in Canada should be to  stay in line with our  Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Part of this general malaise for the causes of the disabled in Ontario, that puts any action toward improvement consistently on the back burner, is the fault of the disabled community.  Ironically, that was on display underneath the celebration Simply People was supposed to be.  Yesterday was supposed to be a celebration of disability pride, but there were too many empty seats to give you the sense that the majority in the community are prideful. If many of us won’t care to show up, there is no way an Ontario politician is going to care about our issues.

Looking to the stage, Justin Hines looks like a leader and a symbol of a person with a disability making a larger impact for all of us. The Justin Hines Foundation benefits people with disabilities. However, he is known to perform frequently at Hugh’s Room, one of the most inaccessible venues in the city and they don’t make it any more accessible for those times he’s performing. In fact, if you phone them up and ask them, they will tell you that they have no immediate plans for making the club accessible — yet, Hines performs there.

Also at the festival, Mayor David Miller emphasized that Toronto will finally get accessible street cars in 2011 as if he expected all of us to stand up and bow down.  Then my friend Saburah Murdoch turns to me and says, “In the 25 years I’ve lived in Toronto, I’ve never been able to ride a streetcar.”  I ‘m asking on what planet is waiting 25 years to ride a streetcar acceptable? Mayor Miller also pointed out that when Toronto’s media covered and debated the new streetcars, they neglected to mention that they were accessible.

If that doesn’t show that Toronto doesn’t give two shits about its disabled population, I don’t know what does.

Living in Ontario often makes me feel like I’m Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner and I’m the only one who realizes that there’s a world outside The Village that I’m desperately trying to wake others up to.

I grew up in Surrey B.C., a suburb of Vancouver, where much of the activism and political heavy lifting that Ontario is going through now, had already happened in the mid-80s. For much of my life, accessibility was simply normal and if something wasn’t accessible, Vancouver got right on that without so much of a hem or a haw. B.C. will be fully accessible by 2010.

Is it wrong for me to assume that Canada’s largest city and the province with the largest disabled population should be setting the standard, not getting its ass handed to it by a province on the other side of the country? Toronto has been established much longer than Vancouver and yet disabled Torontonians still have 16 more years of waiting to do.

I came here and suddenly, I had to get used to the new “We’re working on it” status quo. I meet frustrated disabled residents so used to waiting, that they’ve basically given up hoping for anything big in a timely fashion.  I saw it at The Simply People Festival: there were respectful claps, but there were no whoops and hollers. Just like the disabled community seems fine with waiting and nobody is willing to mobilize and get angry.

So before we celebrate disability pride, before we toot our own horns about how much we’ve already accomplished, why don’t we get something done for accessibility that won’t take 16 years to become reality.

These kinds of problems have been around for years, of course, and the most visible public activism around bikes and cyclists’ rights have been the Critical Mass bike rides, where groups of cyclists take an unplanned route through the city, filling at least one lane of traffic, to prove the point that, as the Critical Mass slogan goes, “We’re not blocking traffic—we are traffic.”

However, Critical Mass has also driven away some cyclists who don’t like the tone of the rhetoric or the behaviour of the participants. One of the Critical Mass refuseniks, Jennifer Watkiss of Vancouver, recently started a new bike ride that aims to be a more polite alternative, called Critical Manners.

The first ride, on August 14, attracted about 100 cyclists. Reviews on the group’s website were generally positive, but not without criticism: Changing traffic lights splintered the mass into several groups, and a varied body of hand signal knowledge resulted in a few close calls when inexperienced cyclists stopped suddenly. The next ride takes place on September 11.

Q&A:

This: What made you want to start Critical Manners in Vancouver?

Jennifer Watkiss: The idea came about for the Vancouver police when the Vancouver Police issued their first-ever warning about a Critical Mass ride, for the July 2009 ride. The June ride had had a number of altercations, they had blocked off one of the major arteries in and out of town, and the July ride was set to come up on a long weekend, being the last Friday of the month. So the VPD issued a warning. I was explaining what the ride was to a friend of mine who had been out of the country for the past ten years, and was wondering what the fuss was all about. I’d always been frustrated with Critical Mass, thought it wasn’t the right thing to represent cyclists in Vancouver and hasn’t been for quite a while. So I was explaining to him what this was, and looking up the origins of Critical Mass found Critical Manners, which started in a similar response in San Francisco in, I believe, 2007. So I thought, wouldn’t that be a nice thing to do, and I figured I’d suggest the idea and, you know, 10 friends would show up, but cyclists in Vancouver really jumped on the cry and started to invite their friends, and pretty soon we had about a hundred people come out for a ride about three weeks ago.

Other than the people who came out to ride, what kind of response have you heard?

Most of the feedback has really come from cyclists who are frustrated with Critical Mass. It’s gotten a reputation for being quite antagonistic, and it’s sort of the most noticeable bike protest in Vancouver. So motorists are frustrated with it, and a lot of other cyclists are frustrated with it because they don’t want to be painted with the Critical Mass brush. Because the general consensus is that Critical Mass riders—or that cyclists, because of Critical Mass—are sort of kamikazes and civil disturbers. The biggest response was from cyclists, and then the media really picked up on it, because with the [VPD’s] announcement to stay out of downtown, a lot of people were really, really offended by that, rightly so, because why should they be held hostage downtown by a couple thousand cyclists who think they should have the right to block off traffic without any sort of plan, one Friday every month, especially considering the level it had gotten to.

What are the differences in terms of the actual ride? How is Critical Manners different from Critical Mass?

This is really about taking a positive action to show that something different can be successful. So there are two core differences: one is that Critical Manners has a planned route. One of the biggest disruptions with Critical Mass is that without a planned route—just the people in the front at any given time decide where to go—it throws off traffic, because no one knows where to avoid. Either you avoid the entire downtown core, or you just kind of cross your fingers that you don’t cross their path. So there’s that one. We always have a planned route, so that if anyone should feel the need to avoid us, they can. It’s also a courtesy to the city, there are lots of events that go on, and we don’t want to clash with film shoots, or other special events that people are planning, or road closures. The other thing is we truly ride as part of traffic. So we don’t take up a whole lane of the road, we ride as you would expect cyclists to ride every day. That’s largely single file: mostly because that’s part of the law in B.C., it’s part of the Motor Vehicle Act that bicycles are not supposed to ride “two abreast”, is the specific wording, and bicycles are to ride as far to the right as is practical. Often that means bike lanes, otherwise it’s to the right hand side of the road, that magic sweet-spot where hopefully you won’t get hit by a door opening in front of you, or crushed by traffic that’s going the same direction.

What we’ve seen in the last week, [with the Darcy Allen Sheppard case] is that the low-level, simmering antagonism between cyclists and motorists has boiled over in the last couple of days. Did you feel the same level of ambient hostility to you, as a cyclist, from motorists before you started doing Critical Manners?

Quite a lot. I’ve commuted almost every way you can think: bike, transit, car, walking, and I know, before I started biking regularly about four years ago, I was one of those drivers who thought, “Ugh, bikes, they’re horrible.” Just as a general sentiment I was willing to paint cyclists with the brush of acting like the laws didn’t apply to them. I’ve certainly felt that same hostility now as a cyclists, despite doing my best to try to ride within the rules of the road, in a safe and respectful manner. And I know other people do too, but there is certainly that low-level antagonism here, and there has been for quite some time. It’s one thing that keeps people from getting into cycling, is they just don’t feel safe. The cycling resources are getting better, but it feels still like “Bikes vs. Cars,” instead of everyone sharing the road. So Critical Manners is certainly a step to try to alleviate that, to put out some respect from cyclists for all road-users, in the hopes that will generate a bit more good feeling from everyone.

Some of the sentiments we’ve heard around here in the last few days are that people don’t want “good feelings”—what they want are hard-enforced laws, better bicycle infrastructure that will make bicycling safety the default rather than the exception on city streets. Critical Mass had always been what people felt was a necessary piece of civil disobedience in order to call attention to these issues. Do you think there’s legitimacy to that?

Absolutely. When the mass rides started, I certainly think they went a long way in drawing attention to cyclists, and saying “We’re out here, and when we get together as a group, we’re not small.” Vancouver, I feel, has gone quite a long way over the past few years, of trying to implement cycling infrastructure. The biggest problem with Critical Mass as it stands right now is that it has gone beyond bike activism and it’s attracted anarchists, basically. I’ve heard the sentiment often that “I love Critical Mass and I love to disturb the peace,” in words that aren’t quite that diplomatic. So there are also a number of cycling organizations that are doing what I think is a correct next step, and Critical Manners certainly follows with them, in saying, “Let’s use the bike resources, or ride as safely within the law as we can,” and when that’s not working, let’s demonstrate that to the city. Our city council right now is quite committed to bike resources, so let’s go out and show them we need new cross-town routes. We have a lot of North-South routes but only one East-West route that’s designated with a bike lane. We need more dedicated bike roads, not just bike lanes. Things like that. The Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition organizes rides to evaluate the current state of bike routes, so they go out and ride and say OK, this route has had a lot of increased traffic over the last little while, it’s less safe for bikes, or if new lights have been put in or not. There’s a lot of work going on in terms of continuously evaluating and improving the cycling infrastructure, and a lot of people don’t see that, because all they see is a mass of beer-drinking, pot-smoking, crazy people on bikes screaming at them.

How to get local produce in the city? Look up. Illustration by Peter Mitchell.

Canadian architecture student Gordon Graff attracted worldwide interest when he designed SkyFarm, a 59-storey farm for downtown Toronto.

What inspired you to design a vertical farm?

Sometime in 2006, when I was first working on my masters at the University of Waterloo, I knew I wanted to focus on how to turn a city like Toronto into a truly ecologically sustainable city. What frustrated me was that food was rarely in the discussion. It was all about reducing energy use and other fantastic things, but a big issue like the security of the food source of a city and the negative ecological impact of agriculture on the earth never came into the discussion. So I just sort of drifted toward the notion that it would be great if somehow we could actually produce food within cities.

What happened next?

In 2006 I was researching hydroponic configurations, and I came across a website for Dr. Dickson Despommier [a professor of environmental health science at Columbia University] called verticalfarm.com. Here was a professor not connected to architecture who was pushing for skyscraper farms. It was another actual voice out there, giving an academic basis to what I was doing. Around the same time I saw there was a competition to design skyscrapers, and everything just clicked.

You called your design SkyFarm.

I did it rather hastily, and it didn’t win. But Dickson put my drawing on his website and there was an incredible viral spreading of the design. BCME, an Australian publication, put it in their magazine. Global TV interviewed me. When the architecture magazine Azure said it wanted to do a story featuring the design, I figured I should put something better forward, and that led to the current iteration of the design.

This is the 60-storey building you proposed for downtown Toronto.

Yeah. It would have 2.7 million square feet of floor area and 9.5 million square feet of growing area and could feed about 40,000 people a year.

What are the main features of the building?

It’s really just a high-density hydroponic farm that has food growing on different floors. The building’s structure would be similar to that of a commercial or residential high-rise except for some small details. It would be a lot like a conventional greenhouse except the lighting would be artificial instead of sunlight.

What kind of lighting would you use?

LCD grow lights. Some would be on 24 hours a day, so the building would glow at night.

So it would use an awful lot of energy—

—and a lot of water.

How would you compensate for those requirements?

The building would have two key components: a small biogas plant and a “living machine.” The biogas plant would collect methane (natural gas) from the farm’s abundant plant waste, the grass “silage” growing on the south-facing wall, as well as the city’s sewers. The methane would be used to power a generator to deliver electricity to the building. The living machine would filter the farm’s water, recycling it back into the farm rather than into the city’s waste water system. With these two components in place, the SkyFarm would be extremely resource efficient.

What could be grown?

Technically any crop, but a few like rice, which requires a lot of water, are probably too costly to grow.

Is there any reason a vertical farm wouldn’t work?

There are definitely hurdles to overcome, but technologically and economically, vertical farms are viable. They just need the first investments by investors and/or governments to become a reality.

What’s the next step for you with this project?

After my master’s thesis is finished later this summer I plan to formalize a business plan for my design of a vertical farm embedded within a condo—an “agro-arcology.” I’ve been approached by a few developers about the concept, so the logical next step is to create a proper cost analysis.