Conversations in the Book Trade: Books, art, art-books, and ... authorial movies.
Cities are fundamental to human society. They bring people together, make cultural and economic life possible, and create opportunities that would be difficult to sustain in isolation.
But cities can also damage the environments on which they depend. Traffic contributes to air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions. Roads and buildings absorb heat and replace living ground with impermeable surfaces. Urban development can fragment habitats, intensify flooding, generate waste and leave too little room for trees, birds and other forms of life.
These problems are not inevitable. Well-designed cities can use less energy, make walking and cycling safer, improve public transport, restore streams and green spaces, protect biodiversity and become healthier places to live. A densely populated city can even have a smaller environmental footprint per person than a more sprawling settlement, provided its infrastructure and policies support that outcome.
There is no single blueprint. The best ideas often begin with people who know a particular street, neighbourhood or city through everyday experience.
Think of a city you know well. It might be the place where you live now, somewhere you grew up, or a city you visit regularly. What practical change would make it more ecologically friendly?
A public discussion about sustainable cities, urban ecology and the future of our communities.
Canada and the United States emerged from the First World War with enlarged factories, heavy debts, restless workers and farms built for a wartime market that was disappearing.
The peace of 1918 did not restore the economy of 1913. War had changed what North America could produce, how governments raised money, and what farmers and workers expected from prosperity. The central postwar problem was conversion: how could economies organized for extraordinary military demand return to civilian life?
population around the end of the war
Canada had mobilized on a remarkable scale for a small country. Munitions production enlarged manufacturing, Victory Loans deepened domestic finance, and federal income taxation appeared in 1917. More than 600,000 Canadians served and roughly 61,000 died. Veterans' pensions, war debt and demobilization followed the troops home.
1920 census population
The United States entered the war much later, in April 1917. Its industrial base and internal market were vastly larger. Wartime mobilization accelerated shipbuilding, steel, chemicals and finance, while the country emerged as a major international creditor. Its postwar adjustment therefore occurred from a position of greater scale and financial power.
The cities eventually recovered during the 1920s, but agriculture did not share the prosperity evenly. Wartime Europe had needed North American food. Farmers responded by expanding acreage, purchasing machinery and often borrowing. When European agriculture recovered, world supplies increased and prices fell. The mortgage did not fall with the price of wheat.
For many farm families, especially in export-dependent regions, economic insecurity did not suddenly arrive with Wall Street in October 1929. Its foundations had been laid during the postwar adjustment.
These bars visualize the demographic difference that shaped the two industrial systems. Population alone is not a measure of industrial power.
A vast domestic market, deeper capital markets and the ability to sustain mass-production industries primarily through internal demand.
A smaller population spread across great distances, high infrastructure costs and strong dependence on exports, British finance and increasingly American capital and technology.
The sequence shows how apparently separate sectors were becoming parts of one economic system.
Industrial economies become powerful by connecting sectors. The same connections can transmit weakness.
Why is it misleading to begin the Great Depression story only with the stock-market crash of 1929?
Did Canada's First World War deaths create the mass unemployment of the 1930s?
Le Canada et les États-Unis sont souvent considérés comme des pays similaires. Toutefois, leurs histoires, bien qu'ayant suivi des trajectoires comparables, furent tout sauf parallèles. La Grande Dépression et ses causes sous-jacentes en sont de bons exemples.
Canada and the United States are often considered similar countries. But their histories, although traveling similar tracks, were anything but parallel. The Great Depression and its underlying causes are good examples of this.
One author, every frame — image, text, sound, and edit.
Award-winning writer, filmmaker, and musician working across English, French, and Korean. Based in South Korea.
The practice
Harvor's videopoems are what he calls authorial movies: films in which a single person originates every element of the work — the writing, the image, the sound, the performance, the edit — rather than directing a crew toward someone else's script or score.
The result sits closer to a poem or a piece of music than to a conventional short film: a single sensibility, followed all the way through.
Recurring concerns
How ecosystems and human systems now move together — extraction, weather, and the altered ground beneath ordinary life.
Inherited patterns, dependency, and the fragile work of repair, drawn in part from the life of the artist's late brother.
Drones, surveillance, and remote violence — and what these instruments do to the people who use and endure them.
Attention, tenderness, and the long labor of staying, examined without sentimentality.
Presented internationally
Join the conversation
Share the city or neighbourhood, describe the environmental problem, and suggest a realistic improvement. You can also reply to another reader's suggestion and build on it.
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