A Digital City building cities for a digital age

Belmont Village: An Idea in the Making

I would just like to point out the latest page I have added to my Articles section, called Belmont Village: An Excercise in Creativity. It features a display panels and some amazing 3D models I have been working on as part of a major team urban design project for one of my classes at the University of Waterloo. In the next week, I will be finishing a model of the entire site, and will post an updated version shortly after the project is complete. Here is an example!

Need I say more? Go check it out!

A Modern Toronto Subway Station

The appearance of a typical
TTC subway entrance.

The Toronto Subway is run by the Toronto Transit Commission, and serves over 1.2 million people every day. It has 4 underground lines and one above ground line, of which the Young-University-Spadina line is the oldest. Transit service on this line is generally excellent, with trains arriving 3 to 4 minutes during rush hour. However, there is one major problem with the subway: it can be very confusing to an outsider like me, and it tends to look downright ugly!

I’m sure it can be improved, however, and I’ve spent several hours designing a new subway entrance – it was a great learning experience! Perhaps later I will finish with an entire station design, complete with signage and everything, but without further adieu, here it us!

Lit up at night.

The bathroom tiled walls of most TTC subway stations do have some cultural and historic significance, and really they don’t look half bad when they’re well maintained and surrounded by a modern structure!

If you like the design, please comment!

Thoughts on Bailouts, Deficit Spending

There has been pressure in Canada to deliver stimulus packages and bailouts to every big company that needs them during the credit crisis. A wave of bailouts began in the American financial sector, and has now spread quickly to the auto sector, which appeared to be on the brink of collapse.

If Prime Minister Harper must
follow an economic policy word
for word, it should be Chancellor
Merkel’s, not President Bush’s.

But first, let’s get one thing straight. Canada’s banks were rated the strongest in the world in October. The government did not have to act to protect them, something that was deemed necessary in the United States. This is a good thing: to me, a capitalist system should not throw money at failing companies — many of which are falling because of their own risk taking. Why should the government insure stupidity?

The next thing on the table is the bailout of the automakers. They are losing money at ridiculous rates, so the American government decided to use taxpayer money to avert their imminent collapse. Perhaps such a measure was necessary given the current state of the American financial system — but it is certainly not necessary here in Canada! If the auto companies are really worthy of a “bridge loan”, they should be able to get it from our (healthy) banks. If the banks won’t even lend to them, why should our government!

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, seems to be one of the few world leaders who are making sense on the economy right now.

The Chancellor has said she won’t engage in “senseless” competition with other countries to deliver stimulus packages. [article]

This is exactly what Canada should be doing as well. Sure, if other countries want to bail out inefficient, inept, and money losing corporations, let them do it. But here in Canada, let’s keep our government out of deficit, and let hard earned cash stay in the pockets of people who have actually worked for it.

My Visit to Hong Kong: Part 2

Buses in Hong Kong

Extremely dense, mixed use
city blocks

Older style tenements

Inside of a highway cloverleaf

A streetcar with an elevated
highway in the background

Hong Kong is the ultimate urban machine. Each part is carefully placed and tuned so that the entire system can run at high speed, 24/7, it has to be! The lights in this city are never out; people work early in the morning until late into the evening, while shopping areas are packed with people during the midday and evening hours, and entertainment districts keep the late night and early morning hours busy.

Every inch of this city is used up as well, and almost always with more than one floor. There are some areas downtown where you feel like you’re in one of those sci-fi cities of the future, the ones where neighborhoods are classified in vertical levels. There are good and bad things about a city this dense, as well as some important lessons to learn about it.

Mass Transit and Road Networks :: If the roads are the arteries of Hong Kong, the busses are its blood cells

• City bus service is excellent, with a number of bus companies running a range of vehicles, from huge double deck buses to smaller van sized vehicles. A single double decker bus can fit a huge number of people inside, and they usually come at most every ten minutes!
• Most major buildings have large bus terminals in the basement.
• Hong Kong subways are clean, frequent, and very well designed. The system has an excellent interlining system, so when you get off at a station to transfer to another line, you usually just have to walk across the platform to get on the train to where you want to go.
• Subways are the gateway to a true world-class city!
• Roads are very well designed and generally move smoothly. Flyovers and elevated highways are a common and necessary part of the transportation infrastructure.
• Toronto could learn from the use of space below elevated highways in Hong Kong — most of them stand elegantly on a wide central pier, and have sculptural dividers or even gas stations below them.

One of the biggest positives about a dense city like Hong Kong is the constant availability of mass transit. However, density comes with costs; such as a lack of historic building stock, and a level of overcrowding that can become tiresome for a North American.

A Sign of the Times

As I have become more interested in economics, I have paid much more attention to the business section of the newspaper. The news of economic downturn grows darker and darker every day, and I am almost certain that nobody has any idea of how to fix the situation. This is shaping up to be a doomsday scenario with frightening speed.

It all started with a burst of a housing bubble in the United States, which most people thought was inconsequential at the time. Foreclosure rates soared, and soon the big banks started to come crashing down. When will it end? It is hard to say, but these two articles show a startling sign of the times.

Wal-Mart worker killed in bargain-hunting stampede

“I really can’t focus on gifts,” she said. “I have to focus more on helping [my relatives] pay their bills. It’s hard,” she said of being a single mom on a small income. “I’ve always filled the tree. But you have to be honest. This year, I’ll do the best I can.”

Forty thousand show up for free harvest

Joe and Chris Miller’s fields were picked so clean Saturday that a second day of gleaning — the ancient practice of picking up leftover food in farm fields — was canceled Sunday.

“Overwhelmed is putting it mildly,” Chris Miller said. “People obviously need food.”