A Field of Mittens Appears in St Henri.

The lot at the corner of Rue Saint Philippe and Rue Notre Dame spends most of the year as a ‘sort of’ green space that people mostly just cut across when they are heading to and from the Metro and Rue Saint Philippe. Every so often though one of the resident artists finds a way to turn it into an impromptu art space. One of these installations was a vast collection of mittens in various states of attention, most straight up, some on their way to the ground and some already there.
The mittens were of varying shape colour and size, most likely found in a bargain bin maybe or a lost and found? Whatever their origin they were a great addition to the neighbourhood before time and destructive individuals removed them.

*If you are the artist responsible for the mitten field please email us at: urbanneighbourhood@yahoo.ca so we can give you your due!

Of windy cities, neighbourhood development and construction gone wrong.

Blair Kamin talks fusing modern with traditional: An expansion Done Right.

In the Toronto Star Christopher Hume gets excited about a waterfront proposal.

Do you prefer the edgy or the grand, and where do you want your cultural institutions? its A Tale of Two Downtowns.

Don’t you just want to hug a designer? How Designers Banded Together to Remake New York’s Libraries.

What could possibly go wrong with a government contract? Find out in the tale of Government Square!

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The streets of London appear as a stop animation film, giving the viewer a taste of what the city looks like from above to a catchy soundtrack with great effect!

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This short film was filmed and produced start to finish in 12 hours by Matt Gosden and Rob Rackstraw.

Shot on an Olympus E-PL1.
Music by Matt Gosden

London cityscapes shot with kind permission of The Paramount Restaurant, Centerpoint Tower, London ( http://www.paramount.uk.net )

sign found by our intrepid explorer Chris K on the outside of a church in Munich.

Notice the second one on the right…”NOT ALLOWED TO PUT HANDS IN YOUR POCKETS… THERE IS EVIL IN YOUR PANTS” haha classic!

Dorchester Square in downtown Montreal has spent most of the past two years behind a fence getting a make over. The square was originally inaugurated in 1878 and has four statues and a kiosk that are arranged to form a five point cross. Originally the Catholic Sainte-Antoine Cemetery for victims of the 1851 Cholera Epidemic, the majority of the bodies were later exhumed and moved to the Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery on the Northwestern side of Mont Royal.

The square was long one of the cities preeminent park spaces due to its location adjacent to a number of high profile projects that were built in the late 1800s, the construction of the Mary, Queen of the World Cathedral (started 1875 and consecrated in 1894) and the Windsor Hotel (completed in 1878) The construction of the Sun Life Building (completed 1931), Windsor Station (completed 1889), and the Dominion Square building; solidified its status. For many years it has been the centre of the central business district in downtown montreal. In later years the park suffered from a lack of maintenance and the city of Montreal undertook a major renovation to bring the square back to its former glory.

Since I work in the previously mentioned Sun Life Building I stepped out the other day to take some pictures. Of particular interest to note are the cross patterns randomly scattered through the paving stones. According to the city of Montreal spokesperson Philippe Sabourin, they were included as a reference to the park’s past as a cemetery and are only found in parts of the park that made up that parcel of land, which is why you wont find any up in the Northern end. The city has further renovation plans next year for the Northern parcel where the loading and unloading area known as Rue Dorchester Square and the kiosk sit.  Rue Dorchester Square is the main loading and unloading stage for the majority of the Tourist buses dropping off shoppers and tourists who visit nearby Rue Saint Catherine.

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A surprise trip to Vancouver found me checking out the new residential district left by the Olympic Village. Take a look at our image gallery if you haven’t had the opportunity to see it yet.

View looking south east down Mackay street in Montreal QC next to Concordia University taken as part of a study for the Greening Mackay project. Photo by Jeremy Kloet.

Street Art painted on the back of a garage on Rue Maria in Saint Henri , Montreal Quebec.

A look at ways that people are suggesting that we make our cities better.

Brookings

April 14, 2010 —

Host: Why the focus on metros?

Bruce Katz: Metropolitan areas in the United States and here in Europe really concentrate all the assets that drive prosperity and will drive economic recovery. So the top 100 metropolitan areas in the United States — these are the big cities and the suburbs that surround them — sit on only 12 percent of the land mass, they house two-thirds of the population, they generate about three-quarters of the gross domestic product.

But when it comes to the assets that drive prosperity, they’re about 94 percent of venture capital in the United States, they’ve got all the talented workers, those with graduate degrees, the engineers, the scientists. They’re our freight hubs, rail and air, and they have that quality of place that really attracts, particularly, the younger generation. So they pack a really powerful punch. But the United States tends to think of itself as a network of small towns. It really doesn’t think of itself as a powerful metro nation. So to a large extent the country nor the states, because we are a union of states still in many respects, don’t really leverage the assets in these places. Take me to the article

Project for Public Spaces

Transformative Times: Earth Day 1970, Placemaking, and Sustainability Today

40 years ago this week, I coordinated the first Earth Day celebration in New York City. The city had never seen anything like it.

We were laying the groundwork for a new way of looking at the world—expanding the public’s thinking beyond the limited vision that characterized fields like industry, economics, science and politics to embrace a much larger view of the whole planet.

Earth Day transformed New York—literally. To draw attention to protecting the environment in cities, we turned Fifth Avenue into a “place” by eliminating traffic from 59^th Street to Union Square.  People poured out of offices and apartments to walk down the middle of the most important street in New York on a beautiful spring day. (This was five years before I founded Project for Public Spaces, but you can see the idea was already germinating.)

It was a lot of fun for everyone, but also a potent symbol that this new movement could bring great, positive changes to our lives.  And ideas born on the first Earth Day are beginning to come to fruition today, with the closing of portions of Broadway and the New York City Summer Streets Program which PPS helped bring about.

Union Square Park was the site of the main Earth Day celebration with an enormous stage set up for speakers, prayers and music. Booths promoting ecological awareness spread throughout the park. Bliss and the promise of a better world were in the air, along with whiffs of pot in a few isolated corners.

A view towards the underside of the Autoroute Jean Lesage after the Echangeur Turcot. Taken as part of a photo survey for a project I worked on to redevelop the Turcot Yards, that included a redesign of the Turcot Interchange and Highways 720 and 15.

'Slow As A Beard'

Graffiti with a turn of phrase about the time factor involved with beards. Seen painted on the Jersey barrier on the edge of the parking lot next to the St Henri Metro station in Montreal.

Back when I lived in Ulsan 울산 South Korea I had a studio apartment for the first ten months next to a drainage ditch. About the only time of the year that the ditch was pretty was during Cherry Blossom week, the two weeks that the trees exploded into bloom that was a welcome change from Yellow Sand week. I often thought that it would be great if there was a path that ran down the side and maybe a little landscaping. Well it turns out that the city eventually came up with the same idea, though I have a feeling that the project in Seoul had a lot to do with it.

Thanks to a friend of mine who is currently residing in Ulsan we can see the second life of this former spillway. Cherry Blossom is still when its at its best but now it also  looks pretty good rest of the year. Photo by Deirdre Madden. Check out some of Dee’s city profiles here at Urban Neighbourhood.

On Sunday March 8th 2010 Jeremy Dean made New york City history by taking his converted Hummer entitled Futurama out for a spin. Entering Central park in New York at 69th St. and Central Park West (at the old Tavern on the Green location) Dean had his hand crafted vehicle pulled by two white horse aptly named Duke and Diesel.

Dean has taken a gas guzzling 8 mile-per-gallon HUMMER H2, a symbol of extravagance, and converted it into a working horse drawn cart. Dean has pimped it out with silver chrome, working LED lights and a booming audio and video system. He calls this piece the CEO Stagecoach.

Location View: Jeremy Dean, CEO Stagecoach, Central Park, New York, NY. 2010
videographer Gareth Paul Cox, editor Diego del Sol
video courtesy of {CTS} creative thriftshop, New York.

to view more on this project please visit: http://www.creativethriftshop.com

With spring upon us its nice to remember what Montreal is like in the summer some times. Place Ville Marie, the Sun Life Building, the Cathedrale Marie Reine Du Monde, the Queen Elizabeth hotel, Gare Centrale and the Canadian National Railways building make up the view.

3d virtual reconstruction of the roman insula in the roman city of Conimbriga (Portugal). Más información: http://italicaromana.blogspot.com