A post with limited appeal

Eloise, almost two, likes my carved elephant - a gift to me from her aunt Ashley.

I have a few followers who come here looking for pictures of my two grandchildren. These folk are mainly relatives who don't have a Facebook account. Today, for them, I am posting two pictures: One of Fiona and the other of Eloise.

Fiona, 3, performs impromptu dance celebrating her graduation from French pre-school.

For those who are interested, both pictures were taken with a Canon S90. This camera, when used at wide angle, has an f/2.0 lens. This means the glass directs lots of light into the camera making the use of flash arbitrary. I hate on-camera flash and try to never use it. This camera is a godsend for shooters like me.

I believe today's upgraded version of my camera is the Canon S110. I have found my camera to quite durable and assume the new model is equally as rugged. The model before the present one, the S100, is also a good camera with some advantages over the new model, and if one can find the older model one can save a little money and still have a fine camera.

A meaningless ReThink London survey

Claiming to be an attempt at clarifying what exactly is important to Londoners, the ReThink team created the survey shown above. The resulting five statements are fine examples of how not to conduct a survey.

How many folk would say that they don't want to protect the stuff they cherish? Cherish: hold dear, care for, nurture. What a loaded word.

Or who would want planners to design incompete neighbourhoods or unhealthy neighbourhoods?

My guess is that everyone who participates in the survey becomes one of the 10,000 Londoners said to be deeply involved with the ReThink London process.

Many neighbourhoods have character, not just Wortley Village

Shaded suburban street in south west London. Note garages are to the side.

I'm disappointed in ReThink London. Planning a city is a big task and it is a task best done with big plans. But the plans cannot be divisive but must involve everyone in the community, including local politicians. If the members of city council are not on board, the plans are just so many empty promises.

On a corner lot, Byron home's garage is on the side, out of sight.

I find the ReThink process involves small thinking on a grand scale. I call the thinking small because it seems contained, boxed in, trapped in a maze of clichéd urban planning approaches.

This is not to say that small thinking is wrong. It's not. The ideas are just expected: line some core streets with trees, protect the Wortley Village heritage neighbourhood, adhere to placemaking, smart growth and compact development practices.

If the ideas are good why am I so aggravated? Why? Because all too often the ideas seem to spring from text books and not from an intimate knowledge of London. The ideas do not come from the heart. The ideas have no soul.

What I have found surprising is that the city planners do not seem to be familiar with their own city. When urban planning LFP reporter Randy Richmond interviewed planning director John Fleming, and an urban design expert who was a member of the London placemaking team, Richmond was told, "We have to tame the garage."

Hawthorne Village, Milton: Does London have to copy this?

Ah yes, tame the garage. No need to say snout-nosed neighbourhood. We all know what is being talked about, and we all know the new urbanist solutions, such placing all garages at the back of the lot, hiding them in laneways at the rear of the homes.

Richmond reports that planners say it's easy to turn lots on their sides, as in Hawthorne Village in Milton, making them wide and shallow to allow garages to be built beside homes rather than in front.

Why go to Milton to sample this approach? Just go to Byron, only fifteen minutes from downtown London. This late twentieth century Eadie and Wilcox subdivision has wide lots, narrow streets and in many cases no sidewalks. Most garages are off to the side of the homes and not jutting out in front. The aging Byron subdivision tamed the garage decades ago.

According to city planners, mandatory sidewalks are so yesterday. "Shared space" is the phrase of the day. Cars and pedestrians share the space and this makes those on foot more alert and encourages motorists to reduce speed.

In many ways this Byron neighbourhood is the wave of the future but built yesterday. Again, a tip o' the hat to Eadie and Wilcox.

This rather impressive London suburb garners little interest from city planners, while Wortley Village and Old South rate a discussion paper examining how to best protect these heritage neighbourhoods.

Is this home less significant than my '20s Petersville home?

I'm all in favour of protecting the character of the Old South or the Woodfield Community east of the core but I question why we stop at protecting a few, select heritage neighbourhoods. Decades before a heritage community became a heritage community it was just a collection of new homes, a subdivision outside the city centre.

I used to live in the former Petersville on the west side of the North Branch of the Thames River. I found my 1920s era  home on Wilson Avenue listed by the city as a residence with architectural significance. A small, barn-shaped home, it is an example of a working class home from the days before the Great Depression.

Sadly the stucco has been covered with vinyl siding, the front porch enclosed and the small front yard covered with paving stones. Also, the porch has been notched to allow parking on the front lawn. The notch allows the front of the parked car to slip under the porch. Faux shutters now border the upstairs windows. There is talk of protecting Petersville but that protection will come too late for my former home.

This Byron home has the look my Petersville home once had.

As part of ReThink London I suggest rethinking how we protect neighbourhoods. What's good for Old South is also good for the Woodfield Community or for Byron or Westmount or for the whole city.

I believe the city should have a department that assists homeowners in the upkeep of their homes. These maintenance and reno experts would be able, thanks to computer software, to quickly show homeowners how to best retain the original visual look of their homes. They could point homeowners in the right direction for finding companies capable of doing the required work.

Since moving to Byron I've watch a number of homes undergoing improvements that were anything but improving. If, in 70 years, someone wants to preserve the Eadie and Wilcox Byron subdivision, it may not be possible. With the passing decades the original neighbourhood will be renovated out of existence.

Since suburbs seem to encourage driving rather than walking maybe we should be applying some of the Old South thinking to Byron and other subdivisions.

Note the artist's conception, on the left, showing the finished look.

When a local developer built a new apartment building on a major corner in Wortley Village, stores were located at street level and two levels of luxury apartments were constructed above. This is an old approach, mixing commercial and residential, and very much in tune with the heritage of the Old South neighbourhood.

More and more, box store retailers are being forced to endure having apartments located above in the name of compact development. Why is this not being done in London? At one ReThink event we were told it's being done in Vancouver with great success.

If London is going to grow in a more compact manner, neither Old South nor Byron can be the model. Yet both neighbourhoods deserve respect. Many Londoners see the value of Old South thanks to the patina of age.

If the Eadie and Wilcox development in Byron manages to move into the future intact, it too may gain the heritage patina that comes with time. Maybe then planners will realize that these wide lots complete with large flower gardens and fleshed out with trees and bushes have created an almost park like setting for the residents.

It is a wonderful place to walk and lots of people do. The sidewalks are often filled with folk walking their dogs or simply out for a stroll. Thanks to the pedestrian walkways linking various crescents and courts distances are often shorter on foot than by car.

I have taken this wide path to stroll from my home to the grocery store.

When walking to the grocery store or the bank, I often take a wide path that ends at Colonel Talbot Road. Unfortunately the last 100 yards is just a crude  path. One might say, when it comes to walkability the city planners talk the talk but fail to walk the walk.

Duplex in Hawthorne Village in Milton, Ontario.

Some years back when Randy Richmond wrote a piece entitled: A Tale of Two Suburbs - Placemaking, he wrote the piece with the help of city planner John Fleming. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the city planner spoke very highly of Hawthorne Village in Milton, Ontario.

Check out the duplex, on the left, found in Hawthorne Village. There are streets lined with these homes.

Now check out the duplex, below, built by Eadie and Wilcox in Byron fully twenty years before the Milton development. In many ways London developers have been very imaginative.

Show London developers a better way of doing things, an approach that others have found profitable, and with the right planning guidance in place the city might become a better place, maybe even a world class mid-sized city.

A duplex in the Byron subdivision in London.

For background on this post, read the Randy Richmond story published some years ago in The London Free Press. (If the link has not been broken. I've noticed that this happens occasionally.)

Posed photos make one ask, "What is photojournalism?"

File photo? An image by stock shooter Olga Lyubkin and sold by fotolia.

Sometimes you see an image and you just know it isn't journalism. I confess, in the old days posed shots in newspapers were all too common. I can recall when I first became a shooter for a newspaper that the head of the department was a weekend wedding photographer and he let his wedding shooter aesthetic poison his eye for photojournalism.

This was the early '70s and a then teenage reader, the late Paula McLarty of Sault Ste. Marie, made me aware of the pitfalls of managing the images shot for the newspaper. She was very perceptive, many readers are, and she could spot the real from the faux and she could not understand why we bothered. News photographers should bring the world into our homes, not deliver trite, managed advertising images to our doorstep.

I became a member of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), I attended Flying Short Courses and for more than a decade I ran a photojournalism seminar held annually at Western University in London, Ontario. The London Free Press, then owned by Walter Blackburn, generously supported the local seminar. The paper even sent a dozen or so copy editors to the Saturday portion of the event. Photography was important.

I'd like to say we never faked an image. Now and then, we did. But as a rule we used local people who actually were involved with the story. We just managed the moments, we posed the subjects to create "better" images on the page. Paula would have been quite rightly appalled.

By the time I retired I posed very, very few pictures when illustrating an action. I had learned that reality had its own beauty, its own aesthetic and must be respected.

Sadly, the lessons taught at the locally held seminars have now been forgotten. Images that are far more plastic than anything I ever produced are becoming the norm thanks to the insensitivity of media owners Sun Media / Quebecor.

Almost 60 years have passed and the late Paula McLarty's views on what constitutes photojournalism and deserves to be in a daily paper are still relevant.

Forks of the Thames surrounded by flood plain

Yellow indicates extent of flooding expected once every 200 years.

When I moved to London back in '76, I lived in the former Petersville situated immediately across the Thames River from the downtown. I loved my 1920s home. I loved the location — near the river. But come the spring of '77, the river rose to within an inch of the top of the West London Dike and the city piled sand-bags on top of the storm sewer grates on my street. I learned from my neighbours that in the past my neighbourhood had been flooded a number of times. After this, I distrusted my home's location — near the river.

Now, I live in Byron on a sloping rise of land known as the Ingersoll Moraine. My home overlooks the western end of the city. I no longer worry about flooding. I like the location — high above the river.

According to the city planning department, the place to accent in London is the land at the Forks of the Thames. I can see that but I can also see exercising caution, showing restraint. As Londoners well know, when one thinks of the forks of the Thames one should also think of flooding.

Look at the satellite view. Note the large neighbourhood on the west bank of the river above the forks. It is built on flood plain. Residents died when serious flooding inundated this area in the past. After the flood of '37 there was talk of London buying all the housing affected, moving the residents out and tearing down the homes. The argument was that this would be cheaper than building all the flood control dams and dikes required for proper protection.

In the end, the municipal and provincial governments went with the dams and dikes. But even with all the protections in place, in 1977 the area came within one rainfall of suffering the fabled one-in-two-hundred-years flood.

Before Londoners can get behind any plans for the forks, the planning department has to assure Londoners that any proposal does not involve building on flood plain. And you don't even have to think Calgary or Winnipeg to understand the threat. Just think London: 1883, 1937, 1947, 1977, 1986, 2000 and April 2008 and again in December of 2008.

Weather patterns are changing. When it comes to buildings and rivers, I personally like to err on the dry side.

She's in her Polka Dot Period.

Polka Dot No. 2

Just a quick post today.

I noticed a new wrinkle to my granddaughter's art. She has taken to putting multiple dots of paint in her work. Curious, I inquired about the dots.

"Not dots, Guga," she told me. "Polka dots."

What I find curious about her work with "polka dots" is that each picture is different. She is not only experimenting with dots but with ways of using dots in a work of art. When it comes to painting, the kid is more sophisticated in some ways at the age of three than I was in my late teens entering art school.

Polka Dot No. 3

Only an illustration but proves concept works. Really?

Same photo illustrates plans for old Vic Hospital site and Forks of the Thames.

The City of London planning department is creating the city's new 25 year plan and encouraging public participation under the catchy label of ReThink London. The last figure I read said the enterprise is costing at least $300,000 and has attracted the interest of more than 10,000 city residents. It is not a lot of money for a city the size of London. Still one has to wonder what exactly Londoners are getting for their ReThink money.

The recently released report entitled DowntownLDN/Our Move Forward is a case in point. According to The London Free Press, director of planning John Fleming has said a "concrete beach" is in the cards for The Forks of the Thames. To give Londoners an idea what the concrete beach might look like the planning department included an illustration — an illustration showing Streets Beach in the South Bank development in Brisbane, Australia.

The Australian development features one of the largest man-made lagoons in the world complete with a large man-made beach. It took some 4000 cubic meters of sand to create the beach and requires another 70 tonnes of sand annually. Despite Fleming's description reported in the local paper, the beach is not concrete.

When I tweeted my criticism — "Photo NOT proposed Thames beach. It's AU. Mega buck project. Costly upkeep." — I received a quick reply from Citizen Corps saying, "That's correct. @jmfplan stated that it was a photo from AU and proof that this concept can/does work."

Following this line of thought, how well is the concept working out for Brisbane. Actually very well but there is the little matter of the 2011 flood. It caused more than $7 million in damages, necessitating repairs to both the pool liner and the beach.

I once owned a small sailboat. Using the John Fleming, Citizen Corps supported, approach here's a photo showing what my boat was like.

Admittedly it is not actually a photo of  my boat but it does show that the concept of a privately owned sailboat can and does work.

Addendum: Not only does the picture from South Beach in Brisbane work for giving Londoners an idea what The Forks of The Thames will look like in the future. If you can believe The London Free Press, the same picture was used to illustrate the plans for the old Victoria Hospital site upriver from the forks.

Wow! Surely the city planners are not proposing two big pools complete with large, man-made beaches, and so close together. But hey, if one pool works in Brisbane, two will work in London. The planning department is confident the concept can and does work. They've got a picture.

If by chance you don't like either use of the picture from Australia, the city planners will not to be caught off balance. They have another illustration. This time the photo is from Portland, Oregon, and shows the well known Jamison Square interactive fountain. This photo is also proof that a concept can and does work.