I rode the Toronto tram system on a recent trip to Toronto. I had to go from the subway to my hotel, and so thought the tram would be the best way. Unfamiliar with the city, or the tram system, I stood next to the driver to get directions of where to go.

“If you want to go there, you should get off at the next stop” he told me.

“Ok, great. That sounds good. Thank you.” I replied, as I walked to the door to get off.

The tram proceeded to blow straight through my stop.

“I thought you said that was my stop.” I said, a little miffed.

“Yeah, but you didn’t ring the bell” he replied, matter-of-factly.

I have the feeling that just about everyone has experienced going into a chain restaurant and asked them to make an exception on something, only to have it rejected.

“could I get an ice cream cone instead of onion rings? They’re the exact same price”.

“I’m not allowed to do that, sorry”.

Can’t open the cash for change. Can’t even be trusted to put the right amount of ketchup on a hamburger, so they had to engineer a caulking gun-like device to do it exactly the same every time. Want a large glass of water? Too bad, because the management counts the number of cups. This is a serious deficit in trust, and it’s a problem.

On the other end of the spectrum we have the lowly endangered shopkeeper, and her family-owned business. They can’t always compete with the big chains on price, but in many cases the service more than makes up for it.

We might have to pay a little more, but once you find a good shop, you’ll be more likely to get what you want. Getting what you want means more intelligent and effective consumption, which I believe is better for us, and the environment, in the long run.

Jane Jacobs, famous urban planning critic, was also quick to point out that the shopkeeper plays an important role in the neighborhood—watching the street, creating a hub for communication, and keeping money and business local.

Of course, we shouldn’t deify the shopkeeper too much. There are plenty of family-owned stores and restaurants with terrible products and services. The chain business does have consistency going for it. If you go to McDonald’s, you’re virtually guaranteed to get the same meal each time. It will never be completely terrible, but it will never be good either. Locally-owned restaurants might be terrible, but they might also be fantastic.

Part of me thinks we’re simply a society that doesn’t care anymore. We drive through ugly suburbs to mediocre restaurants, and buy cheap crap from the biggest, simplest, most obvious stores, run by people who don’t care, and aren’t given any real responsibilities or incentive to do the sort of real work they could be doing. We have little to no quality public space, and we’re too busy watching television to talk to our neighbors to find out what the good local restaurants are.

So, in concluding this long rant, I’d like to urge you to support locally-owned business. Eat their food, buy their stuff, and enjoy their services.

Golf de Rue (Road Golf) – the bottom of a no-parking sign has been turned into a golf hole.

I just got back from one of the first screenings of Alan Kohl’s documentary Roadsworth: Crossing the Line, the story of the Montréal-based street artist turned criminal turned legitimate artist Peter Gibson.

The first time I saw Roadsworth’s paintings, I thought it must have been commissioned by the city. It was so clean looking, obviously referenced the look and feel of the line markings on the road, and so pervasive in my neighborhood I assumed he must have been given permission by some municipal body. As the film documents, a lot of people in city hall thought the same thing. Eventually, however, the law caught up with him and he was charged with defacing public property. The film follows his legal troubles, and in part tries to wrestle with the notion of whether the law should differentiate between empty tagging and art that uses the context of the city to communicate in a way a gallery piece cannot.

There is a lot to love about Gibson’s pieces. They’re simple, fun, and accessible in a way that so much art seems to completely neglect. The movie also makes clear how slow Gibson actually works, taking in his surroundings and making pieces that integrate with the urban fabric.

Those in Montréal who care about these sorts of things should make a point of catching the movie at Cinéma du Parc starting Saturday, November 22nd, until Thursday November 27th. For everyone else across Canada and across the world, you’ll have to wait.

Some zany hipsters in Pittsburgh found out when the Google Street view car was going to come along a certain street, and staged a big party with a marching band, costumes, and confetti dropping from the balconies above.

Visit Street with a View for more.

Reading through James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, which chronicles the sorry state of (North) American urban planning and architecture, which seems to create spaces as forgettable and disposable as the fast food wrappers sold in these places.

Setting aside the many downsides of suburban life, I myself have sometimes wrestled with notion that so many suburban places are just plain ugly. I’ve wondered whether the aesthetics really matter. They almost seem secondary to the argument.

Kunstler’s passage on this issue, which he describes as charm, summed things up for me nicely:

Americans wonder why their houses lack charm. The word charm may seem fussy, trivial, vague. I use the term to mean explicitly that which makes our physical surroundings worth caring about. It is not a trivial matter, for we are presently suffering on a massive scale the social consequences of living in places that are not worth caring about. Charm is dependent on connectedness, on continuities, on the relation of one thing to another, often expressed as tension, like the tension between private and public space, or the sacred and the workaday, or the interplay of space that is easily comprehensible, such as a street, with the mystery of openings that beckon, such as a doorway set deeply into a building.

For more, I suggest Kunstler’s pithy and sarcastic podcast.