Before it became the Zikawei Library, the building was designed as a bookstore by David Chipperfield Architects. Unfortunately, just after the facade and the structure of the building were completed, the building was left vacant.
After two investments of the bookstore had bowed out, this building was eventually designated to be the public library in Zikawei District and named the Zikawei Library.
Open drug use is among the activities that would be prohibited by the City of Edmonton in a proposed new bylaw governing public spaces.
City council is slated to review the proposed Public Spaces Bylaw at a special meeting on Feb. 2. It would replace three existing ones: the Public Places Bylaw, the Conduct of Transit Passengers Bylaw and the Parkland Bylaw.
A move to ban open drug use is something harm-reduction advocates worry will lead to more deaths on Edmonton streets, however.
Bradley Lafortune, the president of Public Interest Alberta, told CTV News Edmonton on Friday that driving drug users out of sight will lead to catastrophe.
It’s more lonely to be in a crowded room than it is to be alone. To have an array of connected souls laid across, distant from yours. Almost as if there’s some sort of barrier that stretches between you and others, isolating you.
Each of them indulges in their own conversations creating a hubbub around you, and almost like a rash on your arm it becomes a nuisance; how loud it gets. Overbearing distortions of voices layered on top of another screaming at you as if to rub it in your face.
It feels like the world has an inside joke that you’re on the outside of. Making you a spectator.
Tags: @waitingforthesunrise
HIII so this is the first thing from the anthology, 'the flower diaries' which I wrote in the last few months of 2023! I will be releasing them in a random order though not really synchronous to the draft I have.. but anyway I hope you guys liked this one!
“....the expansion of the artificial swimming pool system [occurred] in the context of increasingly polluted waterfronts. The growth of cities could crowd out and damage the spaces in which public swimming took place. One response to the bacteriological revolution - the extension of sewers to remove dangerous germs from all home environments - generated a public health crisis, by transporting bacteria to the places where citizens might swim. Concerns about water quality, and the ability to quantity it, both prompted and complicated efforts to find healthy places to swim in industrial cities.
....the development of Hamilton [Ontario’s] municipal swimming pool system [was situated] in the context of the environmental degradation of the industrial city as its commitment to economic expansion compromised an aspect of public health. Like the construction of the city’s elaborate water supply and purification systems, the building of swimming pools allowed city officials to continue using Hamilton’s bay [on Lake Ontario] as a sink for residential and industrial wastes, and to do so without significant investments in wastewater treatment facilities. Until the Second World War, Hamilton’s city leaders and medical authorities confidently believed that they could identify, delineate, and construct safe swimming areas along the shores of their harbour, and supplement them with a few public swimming pools. After the war, however, they abandoned their efforts altogether. For those who could not flee the city for clearer waters of northern lakes [because they could not afford to], municipal authorities offered artificial swimming pools as the only healthy place to swim locally. ...while swimming pools reflected a number of social and cultural values, they must be recognized chiefly as a technological fix for an urban public health crisis. Artificial pools for swimming allowed Hamilton’s city leaders to abandon the natural waters of the bay and the public beaches frequented by the working class to the effluent left by “the constructive power of the profit motive.””
- Nancy Bouchier and Ken Cruikshank, “Abandoning Nature: Swimming Pools and Clean, Healthy Recreation in Hamilton, Ontario, c. 1930s-1950s,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History Volume 28:2, 2011: p. 318-319
La Villette park
Paris, France
1982
Michel Corajoud (1937–2014), architect
Elia Zenghelis (1937–), architect
Rem Koolhaas (1944–), architect
OMA (1975–), architect
i love you graffiti i love you stickers i love you doodles i love you permanent marker drawings i love you carved messages i love you bulletin board with countless posters i love you shared spaces/furniture that reflect the people who use them i love you individuals expressing something small that leave a lasting mark for years to come i love you little human touches in an environment i love you being in a world that feels lived in .
This would be awesome. We’re in desperate need of public spaces where you (a) don’t have to spend money, (b) aren’t expected to be drunk or high, & (c) don’t get in trouble for lingering (“loitering”) to chat, connect, etc. :/
For anybody who doesn't know, benches with middle "arm rests" like this one are designed to make it difficult / unattractive to lie down on. This is supposed to keep people from sleeping in public spaces, but fails to provide alternative places for people to go.
At Long's Park in Lancaster, the local Sertoma Club donated several of these hostile benches to replace a portion of the normal benches (sans armrests) located throughout the park. From my walk around the park this morning, I estimate about a third of the benches have been "upgraded".