Yule Heibel's Bookmarks tagged thestar →  View Popular

And so it is a measure of how far removed we have grown from ourselves that many of us now see walking as extraneous. It is viewed as a kind of hobby, a pastime, a luxury, certainly not essential, and definitely not a means of transportation.

Indeed, we have reached a point where we classify ourselves according to whether we walk or drive. Thus we are either drivers or pedestrians. Because walking is not considered necessary, we give precedence to those who travel in cars and trucks. From their perspective, people who walk are obstacles, in the way.

Though we can't turn back the clock, the only way to ensure urban health is to plan cities with walking in mind. If nothing else, this necessitates a human scale. There's no better measure of that than walking. Not to say that everyone will walk everywhere, but that we should be able to, it should be an option. No, it must be an option.

Fleet St., Lake Shore Blvd. and around the Rogers Centre. These islands of condos separated by six-lane highways are hostile, even dangerous, for walkers. Pedestrians are definitely not welcome here; they get in the way of drivers, who are always in a hurry.

This is not how to build a city. This is how to destroy a city.

The only question left is what role the private sector should play in the rebuilding process. Get used to it, Caplan warns. AFPs, as they're now called – alternate funding plans – are here to stay.

"The private sector isn't a magic solution," he admits. "It will never be involved in more than 15 per cent of infrastructure projects. But overall, AFPs cost less and can lead to innovation."

Although some have been dubbed failures, most recently Brampton Civic Hospital, like anything else, they can be done well or poorly.

The dozens of presentations at the conference highlighted the remarkable transformation in how museums display their collections and interact with the public.

For example, the McCord Museum of Canadian History in Montreal has poured significant resources into digitization, amassing more than 135,000 digital images that are freely accessible online. Similarly, the Canadian Museum of Civilization (which includes both that museum and the new Canadian War Museum) attracted a record 1.8 million visitors in 2006, but more impressively hit 66 million page views for Web-based content.

Many museums are using online video, social networks and interactive multimedia to pull content from diverse places to create "virtual museums." So, the museum community has emerged as a leading voice for the development of legal frameworks to facilitate digitization and avoid restrictions that could hamper cultural innovation.

Yet some fear the advocacy and actions of museums in embracing the Internet are not consistent, particularly in their policies on works for which copyright has expired.

Many museums receive regular requests for copies of works in collections to be reproduced in school texts, magazines or other publications. The fees vary widely. Some museums levy handling and/or reproduction fees and permission fees, despite the expiry of copyright.

The Access to Information Act records covered requests to the National Gallery for copies of public-domain artworks between February 2006 and January 2007. The gallery received approximately 250 such requests, and imposed contractual restrictions on use of the images and levied an average fee of $379.

Internal documents reveal the gallery often added hundreds of dollars to the total cost of fulfilling a request, despite the fact that the images were in the public domain. In fact, the permission costs for such works were actually higher than those for works still subject to copyright. The gallery reasoned that the copyright holder would apply additional charges.

In the meantime, the ownership of the land had evolved into a patchwork of civic, provincial and federal agencies that in addition to the TRCA includes the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Toronto Economic Development Corp (TEDCO) and the Toronto Port Authority. Its annual management budget is paltry, under $200,000.

Perhaps because of this administrative confusion, and continuing neglect, the Spit was free of the kind of human intervention that has altered the landscape everywhere else. By the time the city started to get serious about reclaiming and revitalizing the waterfront, the Spit was an established part of life in Toronto. Though only open on weekends and holidays, it had become a magnet for birders, bikers, hikers and joggers. Indeed, it has achieved storied status, attracting 250,000 visitors annually. We see it now as a shining example, a desperately needed ray of hope in a world fast destroying itself.

Half a century after the Spit was begun, its problems are the result of this unexpected success. In 2006, the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp., now Waterfront Toronto, announced plans to incorporate the Spit into a larger park, Lake Ontario Park.

This isn't necessarily cause for alarm. But we shouldn't forget that the key to the Spit's transformation from dump to natural habitat has been the absence of man. True, hundreds of trucks show up most working days. But their impact is minimal. They drive down the road that forms the spine of the peninsula, drop their load, and return.

The real threat may come from the people who go to the area for leisure. Though well-meaning and sympathetic, they represent the forces of gentrification. Despite their good intentions, their presence means planners feel pressure to ensure the park has all the amenities – toilets, interpretive centres, picnic benches, trails, lights, information kiosks and so on, the whole paraphernalia of civic green space – the public expects.