Archive for ‘Daily Life’

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May 2, 2009

Top Ten Rules of Street Parking, learned by experience

(For link to Toronto parking regulations, see bottom of this post.)

Absolutely, while the wisdom of keeping a car downtown is questionable, on-street parking is one area of social interaction which can be smoothed by congenial neighbours or can be a continual source of aggravation by ones who are not. Street parking is a reflection of how we live together.

  1. If you circle the block looking for a parking spot, one will open up in front of your house as soon as you walk up the pathway to your front door.
  2. Parking switchovers (staying up late or rising early to move the car to the opposite side of the street) occur every two weeks on downtown residential streets for the ostensible purpose of clearing the dust and debris off the street; however, throughout course of the entire spring, summer and fall, you will only see a street sweeper twice. Corollary: Parking switchovers will not occur in the winter even though several feet of snow accumulate on both sides of the street and snow plows pass by more frequently.
  3. Switchover days almost always fall on a week-end, when most local residents are sleeping in.
  4. The day you forget to move your car for the switchover will be the same day your neighbour forgets to warn you.
  5. Leaving room between cars in the summer is anti-social, ensuring fewer cars are able to park on the block; leaving room between cars in the winter is essential, to get enough traction to break out of the snowbanks.
  6. In the winter, your neighbours who do not have a car will feel free take a parking space in front of their house to put their snow.
  7. If your neighbours go on vacation, they will have left the car awkwardly parked to take up two spaces. If they haven’t left their keys with anyone, they will be parked so as to block three spaces.
  8. If a new neighbour moves onto your block, they will have at least one more car than your former neighbour did.
  9. Down-towners can be distinguished from Suburban-ites by their swiftness and skill in parallel parking. Corollary: If there is nothing on TV, spending an evening on the front porch can provide good entertainment value.
  10. Cars are an essential signal to your neighbours, providing vital information such as whether you are home.(I’ve had neighbours come check on me because my car hasn’t moved in long time.) Corollary: If you need help (parking your car, getting a jump, or a push), stand by your car and look forlorn. Good people will come to you.
  • For a more interesting foray, see the Map of the Week from the Toronto Star’s FOI request, looking at parking ticket locations in the city.

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Posted in Daily Life, Neighbourhoods | 3 Comments »

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April 30, 2009

Proximity makes the heart grow fonder

How do friendships form? gives some insight into why mixed neighbourhoods are important. The study, from Marmaros and Sacerdote, researchers from Google and Dartmouth College, tracked the 4.2 million e-mail exchanges between university students for more than a year to identify the social networks they established.

As Dartmouth students are assigned randomly to student residences, the researchers were able to track how factors like geographic proximity, family background, racial identity and shared student activities affected the formation of friendships between students.

The literature explains we are most likely to become close friends with people with whom we have frequent contact.  Fostering friendship with a random stranger further away requires an additional investment of time with no guarantee of a positive pay-off of a close friendship. Marmoros and Sacerdote wanted to test the theory that we are more likely to become close friends with someone with whom we have “lots of local, low cost social interactions.”

In essence, when we see a neighbour regularly, we get a short-term and a long-term benefit: in the immediate interaction, we are provided with the opportunity to exchange information and then, over the course of time, trust is built through reciprocity. Both these benefits can emerge at a fairly low cost to ourselves without a large investment of time or other resources. Random interactions expose us to the possibility of bigger pay-offs.

Marmaros and Sacerdote found such a “neighbourly effect” among the students whom they mapped. Students were more likely to form friendships with those who lived close to them or who shared an activity or class. The effect was lessened if students did not share the same racial or family background, however, the effect was still positive.

A caution from the study:

  • The positive effects on social interaction were only found at fairly close distances, such as among those living on the same floor in a school dorm.

Otherwise shared activities were required to demonstrate significant cross-cultural friendship formation. Even while seen as a broad societal benefit, the authors explained, an individual may be less likely to form a cr0ss-cultural friendship if it is seen as more “costly” in terms of time or additional risk factors. Happily, proximity to each other seems to help overcome the racial barrier.

Two additional noteworthy upsides:

  • Close friendships continued even when students moved further distances from each other. The opportunity to form friendships across a variety of identities, provided by living close to each other, provides a lasting effect. Once friendships are formed, most students found it worth continuing to invest in them.
  • Citing other research and expanding on their own, the authors describe the positive equity effects on the attitudes of white students who live with a Black roommate. While the white students were not more likely to have a larger circle of Black friends (as a result of having one Black friend), they are “more likely to support affirmative action in admissions and societal income redistribution.”

Posted in Daily Life, Diversity, Neighbourhoods | Leave a Comment »

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April 19, 2009

The riches that social networks provide

One of my neighbours complained to me recently how the neighbourhood had changed. With the reconstruction of Regent Park, a wave of newcomers had been (dis)placed into the TCHC housing behind his house (also social housing).

“They have no respect for the neighbourhood,” he said, “and they’re causing all kinds of trouble.”

Now on the face of it, Don’s complaint could be seen as a predictable reaction to the arrival of newcomers, however I sympathized with him. This wasn’t a case of NIMBY-ism, because his complaint was really more about bad planning than about “bad” people.

In a hard-hitting article published in The Atlantic last summer, Hanna Rosin explored what happened to residents of large urban housing projects who had been moved to housing in “better neighbourhoods.”

Rosin followed residents of the projects and spoke to academics who were examining the impact of these displacements. She described some foreboding findings:

  • Social problems which had been concentrated in high poverty areas were dispersed into the neighbourhoods where residents found new housing and were more difficult to police. In effect, the bad spread further.
  • Social networks were decimated. Moved to new neighbourhoods, residents lost any long-standing or supportive relations upon which they might have come to rely and were slow to build new ones. In short, the good was lost.

Without supports, either formal or informal, to ease the transition, outcomes were bound to be poor.

Strong social networks build when we live near someone for years, or send our children to the same local school, or meet on a summer stroll past a front porch. Social networks are even more important in a low-income neighbourhood because we share resources among us.

For instance, my neighbour Marlene announced no one needed to buy a bundt pan because she had bought one recently. And, I know, that if I need a ladder, Ming and Doug both have one, or if they need a jigsaw, they can borrow mine. If I lived in another, less well-networked neighbourhood, we each would have faced the choice of buying our own or doing without.

Our new, displaced neighbours were settled here in a strange neighbourhood without these resources, and no provision was made to fill the gap.

I should borrow that bundt pan to make a welcome cake and introduce them to the neighbourhood.

Posted in Daily Life, Income, Neighbourhoods, Social Capital | 2 Comments »

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April 2, 2009

Urban or Suburban: Physical activities differ by kind, not amount

I have the daily pleasure of walking, to work, to shop, to visit my neighbours. In fact, at least once a week one of my neighbours and I will head out for an evening march, just to avoid too many evenings in front of a screen. I fit the profile of a central urban resident, as released in a Stats Can study looking at the physical activity levels of urban and suburban residents, Life in Metropolitan Areas.

My extended family live in less dense neighbourhoods, further out from the city core, with big lawns, wide streets, and impossibly long walks to a hardware store or a restaurant. The study shows however that their physical activity levels are still likely on par with mine because they do more outdoor yard work (much more!) and they are also more likely to engage in an active leisure activity.

So, the study’s analysis of daily activitity shows, however we do it, urban and suburban dwellers tend to spend about the same amount of time engaged in daily physical activities. (If you’re interested in some of the other demographic characteristics of active people, see a previous Statistics Canada study, Who participates in active leisure?)

There were, however, two exceptions to the comparable physical activity levels amongst urban and suburban residents.

Suburban dwellers who were less physically active were those who:

  • work or go to school more than 9 hours a day, and/or
  • live in the tall residential apartments and condominiums that sprinkle most of Toronto’s suburbs, those that live in the tall towers, far from easy transit or commercial activities. 

While New Urbanism (see also CBC’s video clips on the topic) addresses some of the issues of built form and more compact and walkable communities, targeted intitiatives, such as the Mayor’s Tower Renewal project, are more likely to make a difference to those who are not physically active. Introducing such things as commmunity gardens and mixed commercial activity, the Tower Renewal Project changes the landscape surrounding tall buildings, thereby providing further opportunties for local residents to be physically active, whether through walking to do their errands or yard work.

Today’s Stats Can study simply underscores how landscape offers different opportunities to be physically active.

 

 

Posted in Daily Life, Neighbourhoods | 1 Comment »

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March 23, 2009

The little hockey team that could

I played hooky to watch my daughter’s high school hockey team in the City playoffs last year. I went on a whim. Work was relaxed, and she needed a ride. I drove her and equipment bags out to the suburban arena, layered up, ready to watch, reading material at hand.

By the end of the first period, the team had called me out of the viewing stands to help – me who had only ever watched one full game of hockey, help! I was assigned to door-opening duties in the box so the players could make their on/off-ice shifts more quickly.

By the end of the second period, I was shouting encouragement to the players, by name, and by the third, I was an avid fan.

As the lowest-ranked, the team was seeded to face the top team in the playoffs. But that wasn’t the only reason they were the underdog in this game.

This was a new team, put together by three Grade 11 students who had played competitive hockey. The best player on the team, a skating fiend, fitted her helmet over corn rows. The other great talent on the team was shorter than all the others by a head.

But as an inner city, high-need school, they didn’t have a large pool of talent to draw on, especially not among girls. My daughter had been tapped because she played a good game of field hockey and is pretty athletic. Others were corralled in as well.

Not the usual recruitment pool, this team.

Equipment was gathered from an assortment of family members and second-hand shops. (One of the best players was able to outfit three of her teammates from family cast-offs.) The school principal made sure they all had hockey sweaters.

The team we faced was better-equipped.

Our hockey bags had been mainly hauled on the TTC. Theirs were couriered by minivan and SUV. Our team shared four water bottles. No tray of individual bottles for them – all was shared.

At the warm-up, the other coach had dumped a bag of pucks onto the ice for her girls; we borrowed a puck from a guy hanging around the arena; he had run out to his truck to get one he thought he had. (The other team then loaned us a second one.)

My daughter’s team was also outnumbered, almost three to one, by the other team’s players. We had eight girls – so that meant everyone was vital. Our goalie had her arm in a sling before the game, but had soldiered out to her net, holding it gingerly. I shuddered every time the other team rushed her net.

Still, the story grew more Disney-esque.

Two of the eight players, there today in the City playoffs, had never skated before they joined. They learned, when they joined the team four months earlier, and there they wobbled on the ice, arms outspread like gangling windmills, forcing the other team to skate around them, these large living pylons a part of the defensive strategy. Once or twice they even connected with the puck.

With so few players, only three of the team could rest at a time and only for a minute or two. It was hard to catch your breath when you were shouting encouragement to the others on the ice, but the girls bellowed to their teammates as they grabbed a drink.

When the game was over, and the ref had to be paid, the girls hunted through their wallets. (Turns out play-offs are more expensive than regular games.) Loonies were pooled.

And still, after it was all over, the team hooted in glee. The team had managed to score a goal this time, and they reminded me gloatingly, they had been beaten way worse by others.

This team effort was sports – at its best.

Postscript: The team’s  second season has just wound up.

Posted in Daily Life, Inequality, Public Education, Youth | 2 Comments »

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March 16, 2009

A New Community Crisis Response Model: Changing the impulse for fight-or-flight towards tend-n-befriend

Everyone knows about the impulse, when cornered, to fight or flight. However a UCLA psychoneuroimmunological research team has developed a theory which says that some of us, mainly women, react to stress with a response they call “tend and befriend.” That is our first impulse is to protect the vulnerable and then to gather with others in protective and supportive clusters until the danger has passed. The research team, headed by Dr. Shelley Taylor, has tied this to levels of oxytocin and other hormones which effect our response.

When we feel threatened, rather than retreating into our homes, and locking the doors (or moving straight out of the neighbourhood), instead, we can gather together and build community amongst ourselves.  These more pro-social actions, linking ourselves to each other, are a positive and, according to Taylor and her colleagues, natural response to threat.

The power of this idea lies in how it can be applied to community development and the provision of an alternate model for community organizers in their response to crime, fear and disorder in a neighbourhood. Their work should turn to strengthening of the social ties between neighbourhood residents.

Taylor’s theory underscores Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earl’s ideas on collective efficacy: the ability and belief  of a community to bring about positive change. But more about their ideas another day.

Posted in Blog menu, Daily Life, Neighbourhoods, Social Capital | 3 Comments »

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March 7, 2009

Jane's Walk, May 2 & 3, 2009

The first time I went on a Jane’s Walk I learned that there was a graveyard , filled in the 1800s with dozens of people, under the houses a few streets from my home. The homes were built right over it. On another walk, in Parkdale, I learned the architectural technique of spotting a building erected in the 1840s through its double chimneys. (“Of course!” said a historian who lives near me.)

The next year I went on a Jane’s Walk, I was trying to learn more about my new workplace, a local community agency, and issues in the area. I wasn’t disappointed; the woman who led the walk raved about the agency and highlighted key local issues. So I introduced myself and began a friendship.

Another neighbour and I have also lead walks through the “Gerrard Street Bazaar,” where I have lived for 17 years. A local restaurant, the Mahar, always supplies samosas and hot tea, a welcome treat to the thirty of us drenched by heavy rains last year.

Jane’s Walk, in honour of urban theorist Jane Jacobs, is scheduled again this year, led by the Centre for City Ecology with support from the Metcalf Foundation, the Toronto Community Foundation, Avana, and other progressive funders.

Sign up to host a walk, become a supporter, or join others for a neighbourhood stroll through the city, on the first week-end of May this year. See you on the streets!

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March 5, 2009

Are hospital visitors targeted for parking violations, or are we just negligent roadhogs?

My parents go to the hospital so frequently that the last time I escorted them, they carefully coached me in how to avoid getting a parking ticket. It’s energy well-spent, given the frequency with which parking tickets are handed out around hospitals from York region, to Ottawa, from Newfoundland to Australia.

Whether you are visiting, attending a doctor’s appointment, or rushing there for an emergency, parking tickets are a common part of the hospital experience, along with high parking fees, shortages of spots, and meters which expire in short intervals.

A recent piece in the Toronto Star highlighted how frequently hospitals visitors are stung by the green hornets here in Toronto. The streets around hospital made up half of the top ten sites for parking tickets in 2007. The Ottawa Citizen found similar patterns in their examination of the issue in 2007. The Vancouver Sun also found the same, to a lesser degree.

It’s the sort of thing that drives people crazy, filling Bulletin Boards and other blogs (see here for a hilarious list of the ten worst parking tickets ever issued).

Some places in the world are trying to find a solution. Scotland now offers free parking at most of its hospitals, and Wales is considering the same, while recognizing the complexity of such an endeavor, and wondering how to discourage “freeloaders” without setting up another expensive bureaucratic layer.

Some argue, perhaps fairly, that if you own a car, you need to take responsibility for it. Residents who live near hospitals have to put up with slackers on a daily basis. It must grow tiresome.

However, hospitals are one of the likeliest places in the city where some administrative discretion should be used. People attending hospitals are often ill, or escorting those who are, and they have little control over the sorts of delays they may face once inside.

I have my bias in answer to the question: I remember a sweet and random act of parking kindness  I received at my local hospital once, when I raced, daughter in my arms, son at my side, into the emergency room. When we left, all safe a few hours later, I realized that I had parked by the entrance and not even noticed the meter by my car. But there sat my car ticket-less.

Someone had put some money into the meter.

read more »

Posted in Blog menu, Daily Life, Daily Life, Mapping, Neighbourhoods | Leave a Comment »

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February 13, 2009

February 17 Event: Neighbourhoods & Mental Health

Urban Moods and Urban Myths: Do Neighbourhoods Matter for Mental Health? Café Scientifique. Presented by The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Centre for Research on Inner City Health (CRICH). Tuesday, February 17, 7-9 pm: Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen St. West, Toronto. Free, all welcome.
To RSVP, e-mail Tynama at smh dot toronto dot on dot ca

Posted in Daily Life, Neighbourhoods | 3 Comments »

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February 8, 2009

A Night at the School Council

I wrote this a few years ago as a Facebook Note. It seemed an appropriate time to revive it:

My son’s school is considered a high-needs school according to the school board’s Learning Opportunity Index, at the top end of the range, just edging into the middle of the pack.

The neighbourhood is full of working class families, Canadian-born or from other lands, who grow vegetables rather than landscape rocks in their front yards. Nearby homes are, increasingly, filling up with young professionals, congratulating themselves on finding homes so cheap within easy commuting of downtown.

However it is also a school that stands out. The Toronto Star says that its EQAO scores are above what they “should” be given the student demographics. The school librarian picked up a book and taught herself cricket so that she could coach the group of young boys who asked for a school team. We have family dances and great community movie nights in the gym. And we still have itinerant music teachers. My son has learned cello and steel pan for the past couple of years. One of the Grade Six teachers organized a knitting club this year, and kids knit 750 dolls, which will be used as packing for medical equipment being sent overseas to hospitals which need it. (The dolls will then be distributed to kids in those places.)

So this is what I learned at this week’s school council meeting:

1) Rosedale Public School (a small K-6 school that serves one of the richest enclaves in the country) recently contacted our school principal. They wondered if they could borrow our steel pans this summer. Parents had raised $16,000 to send their junior students to Australia for a tour. (We’ve loaned them, because we know the importance of cooperation, in a place like this.)

2) My son’s graduation trip has been set. They are going to the well-treed park, five minutes north of the school, on the other side of the tracks, and bringing some Frisbees. The price is right, and the school council is going to buy everyone a Popsicle.

Sigh.

Posted in Daily Life, Inequality, Neighbourhoods, Public Education | 2 Comments »

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