WislaHD
Superstar
No, but its become one of my favorite blogs on urban planning. I'm someone who has spent extensive time in Europe and it saddens me that my home city seem so lacking in contrast to Europe. Especially when it is largely lacking in the little things, like cycling infrastructure, public spaces and human-scale streets. It seems by far and large the main culprit or at least common denominator of this is our car-centered culture.
I spent most of my summer in my father's home city of Katowice in Poland. Katowice is a large city but it isn't really an old and bustling touristic European city like say Krakow, Prague, Stockholm etc., quite the opposite in fact; it was built largely after the industrial revolution and is a massive industrial and mining center both during the communist era and today. (Think Pittsburgh) Yet when I was there this summer, what I saw was a city actively investing in its downtown core, closing off streets to cars, expanding sidewalks and revitalizing streets, adding tram lines and segregated bike lanes through its downtown core, building multiple fountains and public spaces that put Yonge-Dundas Square to shame, not to mention laying beautiful tiles in the most active pedestrian areas. All this in an industrial city in Poland with really not much financial means and without any tourism industry to justify it. If we even attempted to do anything of similar scale in Toronto, a city with the economy of a small country, it would be decried as public waste and a waste of taxpayers dollars.
My point is, we could do so much more with the resources we have. We are collectively plagued by our auto-centric culture and small-city mentality more so than "conservative ideologues" and Ford nation. (apostrophes around conservative because in Europe conservatives fully embraced cycling culture, alongside every other demagogue.)
