I spent the weekend re-reading Jane Jacobs’ Cities and the Wealth of Nations, thinking that her concept of import replacement was suddenly relevant in Canada, where American tariffs and Canada’s counter-tariffs might make imports significantly more expensive. Since she is most famous for her views on cities and planning, I thought it might have lessons for the design of our buildings and cities in the face of the current economic situation.

Jacobs believed that entrepreneurs setting up businesses to replace imported goods with locally made substitutes were what drove the economic expansion of cities and their surrounding regions.

“City import-replacing of any significance occurs explosively and unleashes five great economic forces of expansion: city markets for new and different imports; abruptly increased city jobs; technology for increasing rural production and productivity; transplanted city work; city-generated capital.”

Jacobs released the book in 1984, before Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan started us on our Free-Trade years, and it landed with a thud, particularly among economists of the time. Free trade was all about removing friction and letting the most efficient factory win!

So, for example, Canada makes vast quantities of aluminum, sometimes called “solid electricity”, which we have lots of. But the only Canadian rolling mill capable of making can sheet for beer cans closed in 2008. So even though we are the world’s fourth largest producer of aluminum, it all goes south for rolling, and nobody in Canada even makes the tall-boy beer cans that are so popular now. As Emily Osborne points out in Case Study: Why Can’t Canada Make Cans? “Aluminum can manufacturing is only one example of an industry where we can move up the value chain to increase our productivity and economic resilience.”

Jacobs wrote:

“Economic life develops by grace of innovating; it expands by grace of import-replacement.”

I have tried to make the case that innovations in wood technology, heat pumps and single-stair building design could increase demand for missing-middle-style buildings and renovations that could reduce the need for imported materials. Jacobs also wanted to promote innovation by making standards and regulations more locally based.

“As a rule, nationwide or international product standards, other than the relatively few strictly required for health and safety, recklessly harm cities as well as hampering economic development and expansion generally. How can city producers undertake differentiations for their local markets, and then perhaps for exports from the city as well, if deviations from standards are discouraged or forbidden?”

An example I have mentioned before is the elevator. The Canadian government has pushed “regulatory alignment” with the USA, so we have big bespoke, expensive elevators that cost far more than they do in Europe, where they are small and prefab, great for small and prefab buildings, which we want more of. Similarly with heat pumps: the USA is resisting the use of propane as a refrigerant to protect big manufacturers of proprietary products, even though it's standard in Europe.

I wrote about self-sufficiency last year when Trump first threatened Canada with tariffs, but now we have a list of items that will become significantly more expensive because of the tariffs and Canada’s counter-tariffs.

• Steel, drywall, aluminum-framed windows and doors, and vinyl flooring and wall-coverings will all have a 50% tariff.

• Carpet and textile floor coverings, radiators and stainless steel sinks, 25%.

• Air conditioning (but not mini-splits) 15%.

• Even products made in Canada are affected: nails, screws, bolts, nuts, rivets, washers, and staples are tariffed at 50%; hinges and exit devices at 25%.

The tariffs will provide a major incentive to buy local and practice a bit of import replacement- mass timber for steel, and maybe wood flooring for vinyl and carpet (yay!) But even if a product isn’t tariffed, we should still look for Canadian alternatives.

Jane Jacobs’ thoughts about import replacement were not going to lead to economic growth in a frictionless free-trade world where everyone chases the cheapest product. Her critics at the time said her ideas would "retard rather than advance economic development."But in our current situation, with a lot of friction, her ideas may well be necessary for survival, let alone growth.

None of this is new. As Arthur Dennyson Hamdan notes in the Walrus, we have been arguing about this almost since Confederation.

“Since 1890, Canada had been dogged by American economic pressures, beginning with Republican congressman, and later president, William McKinley’s near 50 percent tariff on imports. Decades of negotiations followed, eventually leading to free trade agreements almost a century later, but anxiety over dependence on the US persisted—shaped not only by politics but also geography and population size.”

John A. Macdonald loved tariffs, believing that keeping out American manufacturers would give a bigger profit pie to Canadian farmers and mechanics (industrial workers). That was his National Policy.

Former Prime Minister John Turner, in his debates with Brian Mulroney about free trade, sounds prescient now, complaining about the free trade agreements:

"We built a country east and west and north. We built it on an infrastructure that deliberately resisted the continental pressure of the United States. For 120 years we've done it. With one signature of a pen, you've reversed that, thrown us into the north-south influence of the United States and will reduce us... to a colony of the United States, because when the economic levers go, the political independence is sure to follow."

This liberal commercial from 1988 sounds like the recent negotiations:

Perhaps John Turner was right, and maybe we should have listened to Jane Jacobs as well instead of tying ourselves to our larger neighbour. She writes:

“An import-replacing city does not, upon replacing former imports, import less than it otherwise would, but shifts to other purchases in lieu of what it no longer needs from outside. Economic life as a whole has expanded to the extent that the import-replacing city has everything it formerly had, plus its complement of new and different imports. Indeed, as far as I can see, city import-replacing is in this way at the root of all economic expansion.”

So when you buy goods or services made locally, the money goes back into the local economy, expanding it locally and nationally, instead of being shipped south.

I re-read Cities and the Wealth of Nations thinking I would be writing about buildings, and in particular, the kind of existing buildings that Jane Jacobs loved. My favourite quote of hers has always been “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings." I had written earlier:

“We should use this time to not only stop using products from the USA, but also the tired, high-carbon planning and development patterns we copied from them. We can build, instead, a walkable, wooden world.”

But this book takes us beyond cities and the built environment- it is about everything. Cities are the economic engines driving our economy, so we should not only buy Canadian, but buy as local as possible. We should reward local innovation and initiative, and we should be willing to pay a little more to support our neighbours.

John Turner was probably right about free trade, and Jane Jacobs was probably right about the principles of economic life. It’s time for some serious import-replacement in every part of our lives, and who knows, perhaps we shall see how it “explosively unleashes great economic forces of expansion.” I am looking forward to that.

Compared to cars and airplanes, the environmental impact of rocket launches has been considered minor. That’s because there aren't that many of them, but that’s about to change.

Lost among all the noise coming out of the White House lately are last week’s announcements, “President Donald J. Trump Launches the Golden Age of Space Transportation”. It’s a “National Security Presidential Memorandum to reinvigorate America’s leadership in space transportation and enable over 1,000 launches and reentries on American soil annually by 2030.”

“The Memorandum directs agencies to incentivize co-development of space transportation infrastructure with private sector partners, expedite permitting and environmental reviews, develop fair and transparent cost recovery policies for common space services and infrastructure, and develop range scheduling criteria and publish range schedules to maximize allocation of launch resources.”

This would all be as meaningless as Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario, except for:

This follows a recent Federal Aviation Administration rule that exempted space launches from the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says,

“America won the first Space Race, and we can do it again -- but only if we get government red tape out of the way. That's why President Trump has charged USDOT with unlocking the final frontier and re-establishing the United States' dominance in space.”

Jared Margolis, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, is quoted in Ars Technica:

“This reckless order puts people and wildlife at risk from private companies launching giant rockets that often explode and wreak devastation on surrounding areas. Bending the knee to powerful corporations by allowing federal agencies to ignore bedrock environmental laws is incredibly dangerous and puts all of us in harm’s way. This is clearly not in the public interest.”

So Trump wants to launch five times as many rockets per year, while waiving almost all environmental constraints. That will add up to many environmental issues that he wants us to ignore. An extraordinary 2024 report from NASA by Surenda Sharma, Impact of Spaceflight on Earth’s Atmosphere: Climate, Ozone, and the Upper Atmosphere:

“Estimates of launch and reentry aerosol emissions indicate that the many planned large LEO ( Low Earth Orbit) constellations will require an increase in launch tonnage from the current 3,500 tyr-1 to over 30,000 tyr-1 by 2040 (Shutler et al., 2022). Rocket combustion emissions will increase in step with payloads. Reentry emissions from vaporizing space debris and spent rocket stages will increase from the current 1,000 tons per year to over 30,000 tons per year (Shulz and Glassmeier 2021). These estimates do not include the uncertain but possibly significant launch requirements of new space systems in orbits such as MEO (Medium Earth Orbits) and GEO (Geostationary Equatorial Orbits) or of an aggressive program of Moon or Mars exploration. effort.”

Sharma notes huge knowledge gaps: “The overall lack of the scientific and engineering models, tools, and data required to assess the impacts of future spaceflight emissions is clear.” Yet thanks to Sean Duffy and the environmental rollbacks, we will never know.

What do we know?

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket burns about 500 tonnes of kerosene with liquid oxygen and produces between 200 and 340 tonnes of CO2 plus five tonnes of black carbon particulates high into the atmosphere. Michele Bannister of the University of Canterbury published a paper last year which finds that Near-future rocket launches could slow ozone recovery. “What we see is, you will get an impact on the ozone layer in particular ways even at the conservative level.” 1000 launches is above her conservative calculations.

Then there is the giant Starship, which burns methane, or liquid natural gas, a much cleaner fuel than kerosene. However, the quantities that are being burned are huge- 4,600–4,900 tons of methane and oxygen combined per full stack. The FAA claims that this results in 3,500 tonnes of CO2 emissions, but Scottish researcher Andrew Wilson did a full LCA and concludes that one Starship launch produces 76,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, which is quite the spread.

These are just American rockets. Everyone is rushing to launch tens of thousands of of satellites. One study, Global 3D rocket launch and re-entry air pollutant and CO₂ emissions at the onset of the megaconstellation era, looks at the pollution from the launches but also the stuff that comes down.

“Re-entry ablation and rocket launches both produce alumina particles (Al₂O₃) and gaseous reactive nitrogen (NO_x). Rocket launches also emit black carbon particles (BC) and gaseous chlorine, water vapour, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide (CO₂). Past modelling studies have identified small, yet notable depletion of stratospheric ozone by Al₂O₃, NO_x, chlorine.”

Years ago, I tried to calculate the space shuttle's carbon footprint, taking into account the electricity needed to make liquid hydrogen (15 Kilowatt-hours of electricity per kilogram), which at the time was mostly generated from coal, so I declared the space shuttle coal-fired. These days, it's mostly gas-fired, but it still takes 300–700 kWh per ton of liquid oxygen and methane. If the electricity is generated by SpaceX’s planned gas-fired generators, we are pumping out between 400 to 1,800 metric tons of CO2 just from liquifying the fuels for each launch. It’s another of those externalities that doesn’t come up in the calculations.

I grew up with the space program with its optimism and grand visions. I still have 65-year-old books from my childhood about it. But as my favourite author, Arthur C. Clarke, noted:

“This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.”

Between the launches of thousands of satellites and the building of thousands of data centres, all of these advances that the Abundance gang say will help mankind are contributing to killing it, and nobody promoting them seems to care.

We know that every kilogram of carbon released contributes to global heating. We know that the ozone layer was healing nicely, our one big climate success. Perhaps the price of those megaconstellations of satellites is just too high.

I spend my summer in a cabin on a small lake in a corner of Muskoka, Ontario, not the part famous for being a summer playground for rich Americans or the Heated Rivalry guys. But I follow the local news and was intrigued by a proposal by the Chairman of the District of Muskoka to invest $17 million in a factory to build prefabricated housing near the Muskoka airport. Muskoka Chair Jeff Lehman says,

“We must think differently and act boldly to save taxpayer dollars and build housing faster. We have a unique opportunity and the time to act is now.”

The Muskoka website describes the process:

The factory would build major parts of the homes indoors, such as walls (with windows and doors), floors, roofs, and stairs. These parts would then be delivered by truck and assembled on site.

This means that the housing constructed in the factory would be built similarly to how you see other houses being built today. For example, only the housing’s wood frame components would be built in the factory and would be manufactured with the same materials as used today on a site – just faster, cheaper, and to a high quality within a factory. Local contractors would still handle most of the on-site building work, including the foundation, all building services, and overall quality and final finish.

My first thought was that someone sold a slick pitch to the possibly unsophisticated councillors and mayors up here. But Jeff Lehman is not your usual local politician; according to his LinkedIn bio,

“He holds a B.A. from Queen's University, and a Master's Degree with first class honours from the UK's London School of Economics, where he lectured for two years following graduation. As an economist, he worked with cities across the country to manage redevelopment and invest in their urban infrastructure during a ten-year career as a consultant before entering public life.”

He was previously elected Mayor of Barrie, a city north of Toronto, and ran for Parliament. I suspect he has serious political ambitions.

Being smart may be part of the problem. I have been involved in prefab, either designing it, selling it, or writing about it for much of my career, and have met so many smart people who thought they had solved the problem of prefab. Gary Fleisher, one of the best prefab analysts, recently wrote about this phenomenon, asking What Could Possibly Go Wrong When Smart People Decide to Build a Modular Factory?

It is a brilliant article describing the modular and prefab world. It begins:

Individually, these people may be successful entrepreneurs, engineers, architects, developers, attorneys, technology executives, or investors. They have impressive résumés, successful careers, and enough business experience to know that starting any manufacturing company requires customers, capital, management, research, and a solid plan. Then somebody mentions affordable housing and modular construction, and much of that accumulated business wisdom seems to leave the room.

What happens next:

Someone says, “Why don’t we build the homes in a factory?” Another person points out that factories can build things faster. Someone else says automation should make them cheaper. Another starts talking about robotics, and before anyone has bothered to ask what an affordable home actually needs to cost, the conversation has moved from discussing America’s housing shortage to planning a modular factory.

However, it’s complicated.

“The answer is that a modular factory isn’t simply a manufacturing operation. It sits in the middle of manufacturing, construction, transportation, real estate development, financing, zoning, building codes, engineering, labor, supply chains, sales, installation, warranty service, and local politics. Success doesn’t require making one of those systems work exceptionally well. It requires making them all work together at the same time.”

Fleisher suggests talking to someone who knows something about the industry.

“Before deciding to build a modular factory, find someone who knows enough about this industry to try to talk you out of it. Ask that person to attack your assumptions, your market, your numbers, your production estimates, your management plan, your working capital, and especially your definition of “affordable.” Don’t hire that person to validate your dream. Hire them to find out whether the dream has any chance of surviving reality.”

And the funny thing about Muskoka is that someone who knows everything about the industry is right there in the district. Melinda Zytaruk built Tooketree Passive Homes in Baysville. Her factory cranks out “sustainable ecological, efficient, durable” panels that can be assembled into single and multifamily homes.

I watched as she blew away all the big builders in Ontario to win for Innovation in Industry at the Ontario Embodied Carbon Awards in 2024*. In 2025, her company got honourable mention; I think they would have won, but two years in a row might have been too much. They are recognised as a “Canadian Cleantech Innovator.” She is a research partner with NRCan. She has advised groups from here to Newfoundland about setting up prefab factories. She knows more about low-carbon prefab than anyone I know. (I admit to having a bias here; this site is called “Carbon Upfront” because embodied or upfront carbon is a major issue in the built environment, and Tooketree is an industry leader in reducing it.)

She has a factory right there in Muskoka, making sophisticated panels that meet Passivhaus standards. She would be perfectly happy to build those homes for Muskoka and has the capability and capacity to do it. Some claim the Passivhaus wall is too expensive, but on multifamily buildings with shared walls, the cost premium is often negligible and can be offset by savings on mechanical systems and operating costs.

But the smart guys think they know better. They don’t want to talk to her. In every small town, there can be complicated politics; there may even be some misogyny going on here.

The proposed Muskoka factory appears (I don’t know for certain) to be designed around a system from Promise Robotics, which uses robots and AI to do framing. That’s great; robotics delivers a quick, accurate frame. But framing is at most 15% of a home's value; it is not particularly hard, and many truss manufacturers and other companies already do it. It is not a complete wall; it is a small part of a wall, missing many of the hard parts: the insulation, the air barriers, the drainage layers, all the complicated bits and pieces, most of which panel shops like Tooketree or Quantum, down the road in Minden, do in the factory.

You still have to do the other 85% with trades that are hard to find in Muskoka; any plumbers and electricians here work for the millionaires and are like Linda Evangelista- they don’t get out of bed for less than $10,000. So you have to bring them in from somewhere else. You are still at the mercy of the weather, the foundation crews, and the banks, who don’t care if it snowed and the drywall crew couldn’t drive up from Barrie.

And most importantly, you have to feed the robot before it eats you.

Melinda gets this, and is very careful with her investments. They have a CNC machine to cut the wood, but build up their wall panels by hand. They are installing a new fancy machine that will blow in the cellulose insulation more quickly and evenly. I was in awe of a little $70,000 unitasker machine that just installs windows- how do you justify that? Melinda says windows are heavy, expensive, and a bit dangerous to install, and that over a few years, the machine will pay for itself. She knows what she is doing, and has learned it the hard way.

But as Gary Fleisher explains, smart people know better. Smart people like those behind Toronto’s Assembly Corp, which went bankrupt just weeks ago. Or like me, who is not going to admit how much money I lost chasing the prefab dream twenty years ago. It is a difficult, complicated business, where, as Gary Fleisher notes, “highly intelligent people can become highly intelligent stupid people surprisingly quickly.” I certainly did.

I am disappointed that Lehman and Muskoka Council aren't taking advantage of the resource they already have in the community. I don’t understand why Muskoka needs another prefab panel plant when, between Tooketree and Quantum in Minden, two of the best in the country are closer than people here drive for pizza. But small-town politics can get weird.

And as Gary Fleisher notes, nobody wants to hear “what may be the most irritating question: Why do you need to build a factory at all?”

I am just a little Muskoka taxpayer, but before I vote in the upcoming election, I am going to ask everyone running for office in my town of Lake of Bays that exact question.

*I previously said the award was in 2004; that was an error!

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney complained in his speech on Saturday that deals with the USA are “written in pencil.” We learned this when Howard Lutnick blackmailed Canada over the Gordie Howe Bridge between Windsor and Detroit, and I suspect Lutnick is behind the last-minute changes that led Canada to walk away from the Smoot-Hawley tariff negotiations. So now, as Mark Carney notes, we are in an economic war. Carney wrote a statement after the walkout:

“Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so they can own us, and I promised that that will never ever happen. We are keeping that promise. Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America. We are already giving ourselves more than they can take away, and we are just getting started.”

Last spring, I got started and wrote a series of posts, which I am going to republish here because they are more relevant than ever.

I introduced this article with a poster from the Canada Food Board during the First World War because that’s what my wife and kids were doing this week- preserving 200 pounds of tomatoes. It’s the time of year to hit the farmers’ markets and shake the trees to preserve or freeze food for the coming winter. Given the state of the American food inspection system and what’s happening with everything from blueberries to lettuce, it’s not only patriotic, but probably safer.

“Today, eating local and seasonal means far fewer imported American foods. We used to do it for the carbon; now we do it for the country.”

I am an architect by training and mostly write about the built environment, so I consider this my most important post. I call for more mass timber, Goldilocks-density housing, electrifying everything, more renovation and retrofit, and banning sprawl.

“We should use this time to not only stop using products from the USA, but also the tired, high-carbon planning and development patterns we copied from them. We can build, instead, a walkable, wooden world.”

I have long been an advocate of retrofit and renovation, having learned from the late Paul Oberman that new construction projects might have 50% of the money go to labour and 50% to materials, many of which were imported, whereas a restoration might be as high as 80% labour, and most of the materials were local. His pitch was that restoration and renovation kept money and jobs in Canada.

In my article, I call for banning demolition, investing in heritage trades, electrification and heatpumpification, and,

“Fix what we’ve got. Repair, restore, renovate, rebuild, and recycle first.”

I also called for the use of more biogenic materials like wood and straw, quoting Kelly Alvarez Doran, who complains, “We've plasticized our housing and our thinking. From the OPEC crisis onward, our narrowed focus on energy-use reductions has, ironically, blinded us to our ever greater reliance on fossil fuel-derived products throughout the built environment.”

Much of that is imported from the USA. I looked at how straw is being used around the world in everything from housing to factories and concluded,

“We have an opportunity here to build with local, low-carbon, healthy, tariff-free materials; we should grab it.”

Canadians have faced crises like these before, notably in the two World Wars, where citizens were exhorted to cut back on consumption to leave resources for the war effort. I have been collecting posters from those periods for years because they all reflect a low-carbon, 1.5-degree lifestyle.

“As Canadians, we can wean ourselves off American energy, food, goods and services. We can electrify everything with heat pumps, trains, electric cars and e-bikes. We can put our wood to work. We can adopt lifestyles that are more Scandinavian than American. Pour yourself a shot of good Canadian whiskey and think about it.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford wraps himself in the Canadian flag, but we should never forget- he’s owned by Enbridge, and in Ontario, most of the natural gas comes from Pennsylvania. He is the villain in so many of my posts, and now he's putting my family at risk by tearing out bike lanes.

“Of course, none of this matters to car-brained Doug Ford, who doesn’t care about my daughter’s safety in the bike lane every morning. His “Canada is not for sale” schtick did its job and helped get him reëlected. Now he can get back to building highways and sprawl.

But if we are going to be truly independent of the USA, we have to stop buying their oil, gas, and pickup trucks. Promoting bikes and building bike lanes is a lot faster and cheaper than nuclear reactors and pipes from Alberta.”

Aluminium is a big issue with the tariffs; Canada makes a lot of it because we have so much clean hydroelectricity. But as with so many other raw materials, we ship it south to add value. An interesting example is the beer can; we do not roll the can sheet needed to make them. The only cans that are manufactured in Canada are the smaller 355ml cans, but everybody is now buying the 475 ml tall boys, all of which are imported. And in Ontario, Doug Ford has pretty much destroyed the market for returnable bottles. I wrote at the time:

It’s too early in the morning for a beer, but when it is time it will be local. The next time I shop, it will be in glass.

Now, the best I can do is buy the smaller cans- at least they are made in Canada.

Finally, I make a call for sufficiency, for a future where we consume less and produce fewer carbon emissions, with less reliance on others. I have a long quote from my book, The Story of Upfront Carbon, and conclude my earlier post and this one:

Almost a hundred years ago, the Canadian historian Harold Innis used the biblical phrase, “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” to describe Canada’s dependence on natural resources. The American president, with his 51st state talk, would relegate us to that position again.

Nobody in Canada asked for this, but if we have to reorient our economy to deal with politics, why not make it a low-carbon sufficiency economy, defined by Samuel Alexander as one that provides “enough, for everyone, forever.” We can address two crises for the price of one.

Canadians face tough times ahead, and I will write more about this. I apologise in advance to my American readers if it gets boring for you, but it is important for me these days.

Last year, everyone was talking about Abundance, based on the thesis that we can have “the future we want” with affordable housing, clean air and water, supersonic weekends in London, all powered by geothermal, nuclear and renewables, with AI and other technologies lifting billions out of poverty, if we just let builders build and inventors invent.

In the meantime, we can keep burning fossil fuels because soon we will be able to suck the carbon dioxide out of the air.

This is the abundist dream fantasy Mark Carney is selling Canadians with the Pathways project, and what many companies are trying to sell with direct air capture (DAC) of carbon dioxide. There are lots of promises and lots of interesting research, but how much of it is realistic, affordable, and achievable in any reasonable timeframe? Can they really build and invent us out of this problem?

Here is an example. One intractable problem is making cement, one of Vaclav Smil’s four pillars of civilisation. It alone accounts for 7% of emissions. About half of the emissions come from the "chemical fact of life"—the CO2 emitted in calcination or turning calcium carbonate into calcium oxide, a key ingredient in cement. The other half comes from burning coal or fossil gas to drive the calcination.

Recently, researchers at ETHzürich wrote up a new study that “shows how cement production could in future be used to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere – based on a technology utilising lime.” Any proposal based on sucking CO2 from the atmosphere makes me sceptical, but what’s the plan here?

“For the study, the researchers collaborated with the US company Heirloom Carbon Technologies. The company is one of the world’s leading developers of DAC based on calcium looping – a process that utilises a chemical cycle involving various calcium compounds.”

In this system, limestone (calcium carbonate) goes into an electric calciner and decomposes into calcium oxide (quicklime) and carbon dioxide at 894°C. The CO2 from the calcination process is usually mixed up with the CO2 from the coal or gas used to heat it, but here we are using a LOT of renewable electricity, and get a clean stream of CO2 from the calcination.

Heirloom, as I explained in my earlier post, normally takes its own calcium carbonate, cooks it into calcium oxide, grinds it into powder, adds water to turn it into Ca(OH)2 slaked lime, spreads it out on cookie sheets, and absorbs CO2 out of the atmosphere as it recarbonates it back into calcium carbonate in a closed loop. They reheat it, capture the CO2 and stick it away somewhere, and then do it again. I tried to explain it here:

It is a modern riff on the classic lime cycle known for thousands of years.

The trick here is that they take the quicklime from the cement kiln’s calciner, send it on a detour to Heirloom, put it on the cookie sheets, and then, a few days later, send it back and run it through the calciner again. It is a bigger, more complicated loop, and it is no longer closed, since after a few round trips it is turned into cement and fresh limestone is needed.

Electrifying the calciner alone reduces emissions by 60%. Each run through the Heirloom DAC sucks out more CO2- do it often enough and you can get to zero emissions.

“We were able to show that the technology has a net-negative carbon footprint; in other words, commercial calcium looping DAC plants with CO₂ storage remove more CO₂ than they generate over their entire lifecycle,” says [researcher] Bolongaro.

The problem is the cost in electricity- 1550 to 2500 kWh per tonne of CO2 captured, or 614 to 990 kWh per tonne of cement. Mix it up into concrete and you are sitting at close to a thousand kWh per cubic meter.

Multiply all of this by the amount of concrete that is currently used every year, and the amount of renewable electricity available, and you can only conclude that we don’t have the electricity, we don’t have the money, and we don’t have the time. Even the researchers get this:

“The key calculations for the study are based on future scenarios up to the year 2050 and assume significant progress in the decarbonisation of the electricity supply. Furthermore, some of the plant components, in particular indirectly heated electric calcining kilns, are not yet in large-scale industrial use. It therefore remains to be seen whether the system can be operated economically.”

This is why, whenever I write about concrete, I conclude that the best way to deal with the problem is to use less of it. In many cases, we can substitute lower-carbon materials such as mass timber or stone. Will Arnold points to research showing that good design and smart span selection can reduce the amount of concrete in a floor slab by 30%. Recent research by Shoshana Saxe and Avery Hoffer at the University of Toronto has shown much the same thing.

As clever as those ETHzürich kids are, coming up with complex, expensive systems that will take decades to implement is not going to save us. If anything, they divert our attention from tools and options we already have. And it is why I always come back to Will Arnold’s three words: Use Less Stuff.

ETHzürich press release here.

Full article: Life cycle assessment of solid calcium-looping direct air capture and its synergistic dual use for net-negative cement

I have written often about falls and how they kill more people than guns or cars, but nobody wants to talk about it. I usually write about how it is a problem of dangerous design:

This isn’t just a problem of people being old and frail; it’s a design problem. It’s an interior design problem, a building design problem, an urban design problem, a maintenance problem, and an attitude problem of blaming the victim. As the population ages, the problems and the costs will only get worse.

I have cited research suggesting that 40% to 60% of falls are due to what I call dangerous design, but there are things we can do to reduce the risk and the damage.

We can’t do much about getting old, but Dr Howard Luks points to new research stressing the importance of muscle strength. The study of older Norwegian men and women found “greater muscular strength was associated with a lower risk of severe fall injuries.”

The study followed 3,000 adults over 80 years old, testing their handgrip strength and how quickly they could stand up from a chair five times. Luks summarises the results, noting that people classified as having strong leg strength had about a 40% lower adjusted risk of a serious fall injury. Luks notes:

“Getting out of a chair requires leg strength, coordination, balance, and enough power to move your body against gravity. In other words, the ability to stand quickly from a chair is capturing more than muscle strength alone. Those are precisely the abilities we need when we stumble, step off a curb awkwardly, or need to recover quickly before a loss of balance becomes a fall.”

The study explains:

“Increased muscle strength may protect against more severe fall injuries, potentially by enhancing protective mechanisms during falls, such as rapid upper-limb reactions, reaching for support, and using the arms to attenuate impact.”

Luks concludes:

“If you want to kick ass in your 80s, you had better be kicking ass in your 50s and beyond. The biology of aging and the rules that govern training and adaptation change as we age— and not in our favor.”

I have been going to the gym and have been doing my best to improve my leg strength, balance, and coordination, but I have previously quoted Howard Luks: “We don’t need more gyms — we need more opportunities to move. We can design cities, homes, and workplaces that invite movement rather than discourage it.” Luks makes a good list:

• Stairs that are visible, wide, and beautiful — not hidden behind emergency doors.

• Bike lanes and walking paths make active transport the most logical, pleasant option.

• Public spaces with benches you have to walk to, green areas you want to cross, and communities that reward being outdoors.

• Offices that prioritize standing meetings, walking breaks, and natural light.

• Neighborhoods where errands can be done on foot.

But if we are going to use those stairs, public spaces, and walking paths, we'll need the strength, coordination, and balance to handle them. I have found the gym helps with that.

The gym is particularly useful in the USA, where most people do not live in walkable communities, and the Department of Transportation is no longer supporting"DEI bike lanes," with a spokesperson saying,

"Since nearly 80% of the population uses cars to get to work and their important medical appointments, we are taking a closer look at federal guidance to ensure American families have the infrastructure they need. This is a common sense approach despite the Left's belief that everyone should ride a bike to their shoebox-sized apartment to eat crickets to achieve a phony climate agenda."

Or as Beth Osborne translated,

“Since we have forced people to get everywhere by car through government regulation that requires all your needs to be built far away and connected by roads that will kill you if you get out of your car, we are going to use the obvious result (forced driving) as a reason to double down.”

That’s the problem. I am a big fan of Dr Luks’ urban design prescription, but most Americans who follow his exercise prescription probably drive to the gym. Perhaps someday Secretary Duffy will get out of his RV and recognise that his voters are getting older, they can’t all drive, and they want to walk and bike to stay fit and healthy.

I was not surprised when the Ontario Court of Appeal overturned Justice Paul Schabas’ finding that Doug Ford’s removal of bike lanes was unconstitutional under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Schabas had concluded that removing the bike lanes “deprived bicyclists not only of security of the person but also of the right to life itself, and it did so in a manner that violated the principles of fundamental justice.” But the appeals court doesn’t concern itself with such trivial things. The constitution says that if the Province wants roads that kill its citizens, that is its right.

This isn’t our first rodeo; Toronto always loses. I noted in my previous post that “Under our constitution, the city is “a creature of the Province,” which has demonstrated that it can do pretty much whatever it wants.” Cities in Ontario have no rights unless the Province grants them. As the Justice noted in his overview:

The bottom line is this: there is no constitutional obligation to regulate the use of roads in any particular manner – no constitutional obligation to build bicycle lanes or to retain any that have been built. The legislature is free to legislate to remove a bicycle lane from a road – indeed, it may remove a road entirely – without implicating the Charter.

Had Court of Appeal Justice Grant Huscroft stopped with his statement that “Courts play no role in the policy development process, no role in the choices made by the government in proposing legislation,” I probably wouldn’t be writing this, and would have accepted that once again, Toronto got fucked. Even after he bluntly says he doesn’t care if people get killed, the “fundamental justice” of the constitution rules:

“Even if removal of the bicycle lanes were properly understood as having effected a deprivation of life or security of the person, any such deprivation would be in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.”

But he didn’t. He didn’t stay in his lane. He writes, “The Charter has nothing to say about whether bicycle lanes are a good or a bad idea – wise or unwise policy. These judgments are no business of the courts.” And then he makes it his business. He stuck his nose into the process and the government's choices. Huscroft complains that Schabas “weighed in on policy and political considerations” and then does so himself. He writes:

“Common sense provides the answer here: increasing the number of lanes available for motor vehicles must, at least to some extent, and for some period of time, be capable of contributing to reducing traffic congestion. The legislation is therefore rational.”

Except there are mountains of evidence that common sense is wrong, especially on Toronto’s Bloor Street, where the lane will be used for parking most of the time. The Province’s own experts and consultants admitted this. And it was never rational; it all started when a bunch of restaurant and bar owners in the west end complained about losing parking to the bike lane.

Huscroft then attacks witness Dr Shoshana Saxe. “Dr. Saxe is a proponent of cycling. Her evidence, and that of the respondents’ experts more generally, was impugned by the appellants on this basis.” He suggests that “academic expert evidence – social science research in particular – must be approached by courts with considerable caution. It is often geared towards supporting preferred policy outcomes rather than discovering the objective truth of a matter under investigation.”

Shoshana Saxe is an engineer, and has been the subject of many posts on this site, like this one below. She knows her shit. She is not espousing mushy “social science.” Matt on Bluesky wonders, “Do you think “social science” is just when a woman tells you things you disagree with?”

She based much of her evidence on the concept of “induced demand,” but Hustcroft dismisses it as a “theory”, noting that there are many other considerations such as the price of gasoline. But then we come to the most outrageous paragraph. He first quotes Schabas:

“[T]he evidence is clear that restoring lanes of motor vehicle traffic by removing the bike lanes, or reconfiguring them so that they are no longer physically separated from cars, will lead to more accidents, injuries and deaths. … It is reasonable to conclude that people who cycle will be injured and killed when lanes for motor vehicles are installed and protected bike lanes are removed. That impact is grossly disproportionate to the asserted benefit, taken at face value, of saving some drivers of cars a few minutes of travel time.”

Huscroft responds (my emphasis)

“There is much that is wrong with this reasoning. It minimizes the purpose of the legislation, in effect trivializing it by characterizing it as saving some drivers a few minutes rather than reducing traffic congestion, which may in turn result in a wide range of positive effects. At the same time, it inflates the negative effects of removing the bicycle lanes, talking of injuries and deaths that will occur only if the bicyclists choose to ride on the roads that have no bicycle lanes – a situation that obtains on roads throughout the province.”

But the purpose of the legislation was trivial. It was the Minister of Transport complaining that he didn’t know if he would get to work on time. It’s guys running a bar in Etobicoke. And then, Huscroft blames the victims, suggesting that they will only be killed or injured if they choose to ride on the roads.

Cycle Toronto is considering an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. My first thought was that this would be a waste of time; under the constitution, Doug Ford can indeed rip up the road if he likes, and could appoint himself Mayor for Life if he wanted to.

But then I read the decision and saw how Justice Grant Huscroft wraps himself in the Charter (which he evidently can’t stand) and then sticks his nose into the merits of bike lanes. He demeans Shoshana Saxe. He blames cyclists for their own injuries and deaths by choosing to ride in traffic. He comes off sounding like a car-brained jerk with a serious bias. I am not a lawyer and have no idea whether that is a basis for an appeal, but it gives me some hope.

And so does Shawn Micallef. There are more of us every day, and the war will be won.

Totally coincidentally, I came home from the gym to read the decision after listening to the latest episode of The War on Cars, Human Transit with Jarrett Walker, which everyone in Doug Ford’s Ontario should listen to, and which starts with the quote:

Get ready for next year’s CLIO advertising awards, or their Canadian equivalent, the EFFIES. They are going to go to whoever put together Alberta’s campaign selling gas-fired data centres- oh, sorry, just as methane was rebranded as “natural gas”, data centres are now “digital refineries.”

I am fascinated by marketing. I start every morning with my daily Seth Godin. I have written often about how to market Passivhaus. So I am absolutely blown away by the audacity and shamelessness of this campaign.

Natural gas has always had brilliant marketing, from the invention of its name (we should call it methane, and the US government wants us to call it “freedom gas”) to Bob Hope’s “now you’re cooking with gas” to Instagram influencers with their big gas ranges. However, Alberta takes it to a whole new level. The province is trying to justify the construction of massive new data centres powered by natural gas-fired generators, starting with a big one for Meta.

But first, they have to explain what data centres are and reduce our fear of them, suggesting they are no big deal; we have been relying on them for decades. And just as there was no spoon in The Matrix (it’s just digital code), Alberta explains:

“When people say “the cloud,” they mean a data centre. There is no cloud. There is just somebody else’s computer, in a big building, doing work on your behalf. AI data centres are the next generation of the same infrastructure. Instead of mostly storing information, they are built to think. Because they do far more work, they need far more power. Same concept. Much bigger engine.”

Think of them as digital refineries

Then they take the creative leap: they are not turning natural gas into chemicals or heat, but into information and intelligence. So it’s not a data centre, it’s a “digital refinery.”

“Alberta produces about 60 per cent of Canada’s natural gas. A data centre refines that gas, in stages, into the most valuable commodity of our time. Gas becomes electricity. Electricity becomes computing power. Computing power becomes intelligence: the answers, predictions and tools the world is buying.”

Brilliant. And this intelligence is evidently worth a lot of money:

“Turning Alberta natural gas into AI computing multiplies its value about 1,000 times. A gigajoule of gas worth about $2 at the wellhead becomes roughly $2,100 worth of AI answers sold around the world. Not 5 times. Not 20 times. A thousand times.”

For whom? All that value belongs to Meta, but hey, that’s fair; “Meta paid 100 per cent of the costs and carries 100 per cent of the risk.” But as Sabrina Perić notes in her devastating takedown, which I discovered after writing this post but add here:

“This is the trick at the heart of the whole page. A data centre does not refine Alberta’s energy into something Albertans sell. It consumes Alberta’s energy to produce something a foreign company sells. The metaphor inverts the actual relationship. It takes a facility that is, in plain terms, an enormous new draw on our electricity, our water licences, and our industrial airspace, and re-describes it as a value-adding export industry. Consumption becomes production. A cost becomes a product.”

And it’s totally environmentally friendly, just like 650,000 cars

But there is another risk that is borne by Albertans and everyone else. The big multipage website never once mentions the words “carbon dioxide”, and its “by the numbers” page never lists how many tonnes of it will be released. However, they do list how many megawatts of power are going to be generated by burning methane, and it is a straightforward calculation:

• Greenlight Power Plant: 932 megawatts.

• Methane consumption estimate: 150 million cubic feet of natural gas per day, 56.4 million MMBtu/year.

• Using EPA’s combustion factor (53.06 kg CO2/MMBtu) we get 56.4 million MMBtu × 53.06 kg/MMBtu ≈ ~3.0 million tonnes of CO2 per year, from the Greenlight plant alone.

• That’s equivalent to the emissions from about 650,000 ICE-powered passenger cars.

And that’s just one of the power plants, and they don’t even mention it on their environmental page.

Writing in The Tyee, David Climenhaga suggests that the campaign is sort of preemptive propaganda.

“In fact, there are many persuasive arguments for Alberta to pause and think carefully about the environmental, social and financial impacts of these water and power greedy megaprojects. But a recent poll suggested most Albertans have not yet cottoned onto those concerns. So it was probably inevitable the UCP would turn up the pressure on this sales job while Albertans were still unsure of what to think.”

And what a sales job it is! Compared to the hassle of building pipelines for gas, turning it into a product called intelligence is so much better!

“The product ships through fibre optic cable, at the speed of light. A digital pipeline that crosses borders without a decade of regulatory battles, carries the finished product instead of the raw one, and never sells at a discount.”

Really. It’s as brilliant as the name “natural gas” was.

I don’t know who Alberta hired to come up with this campaign, but “Digital refineries” may be their best pitch in decades; it’s right out of Mad Men, and they should be up for a CLIO or an EFFIES.

Climenhaga points to a Leger poll that found that after Albertans heard the Province’s “talking points,” support rose from 44% to 57%. The gas industry has never taken its foot off the gas with its marketing, but this campaign is just flooring it.

After all, according to the page titled Is Alberta selling out to big tech?

“Remember the value chain: about $2 of Alberta natural gas becomes roughly $2,100 of computing and intelligence.”

Digital refineries are going to print money. Who could say no to that?

I was recently bemused by a LinkedIn Post written by architect and development strategist Sam Mcheileh, looking at SANAA’s New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. He writes: “it looks straightforward: a stack of offset boxes. But shifting those volumes complicates everything - from the floor plans to the smallest details. It complicates the structure too.” He concludes:

“Simplicity is rarely the absence of complexity. More often, it’s complexity resolved so well that most people never notice it was there.”

I have been writing about simplicity for many years, and I am sorry; this ain’t it. I think Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said it better:

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

The New Museum is a lovely building, but as this drawing of its structure from SGH Engineers shows, it is anything but simple, with major structural moves to support all those big cantilevers. I commented on LinkedIn, and it started a wonderful discussion about simplicity, including comments from Nick Grant:

“Anyone who understands how stuff is made, whether a chippie, brickie, steel erector, architectural technologist, engineer or weekend DIY enthusiast will immediately see through the superficial sculptural skin to the underlying ugliness underneath.”

I’m with Nick, but then how we see things, and what we call beautiful, varies according to our own preoccupations and experiences. In the first paragraph of my book, The Story of Upfront Carbon, I wrote, “when you look at the world through the lens of upfront carbon, everything changes.” And when I look at this building, I see a lot of upfront or embodied carbon in all those cantilevers.

On the other hand, we have Professor Mark Mückenheim, complaining about my single-minded preoccupations:

Embodied energy, material choices, and construction methods matter. But sustainability and circularity need to be understood holistically and across longer time spans. Singling out one problematic aspect and declaring a building “unsustainable” reduces a complex question to a single metric. I would take one complex building that people will fight to preserve over a hundred disposable ones any day. The question is not only: “How sustainable was this building to construct?” but: “Will people still value it enough to keep it standing 100 years from now?”

Professor Mückenheim raises an interesting point. The New Museum and a certain almost-100-year-old building that people value enough to keep standing share an expensive feature: cantilevers. I can’t find my copy of Forrest Wilson’s classic What it Feels like to be a building, but hold your arm straight out for a few minutes, and you will get a good idea of what it feels like to be a cantilever- IT HURTS. This is why Fallingwater gets rebuilt at a cost of millions every few decades- it wants to be Fallingbuilding.

Cantilevers use a lot of material, with more reinforcing or structural steel. That’s why the Structural Engineers 2050 Smart Design Guidelines say,

“Avoid excessively long-span floor structures and excessive cantilevers where possible, particularly when subjected to high loading or stringent serviceability demands. Excessive spans and cantilevers will increase the embodied carbon (as well as the cost) of a structural system.”

A 2024 study, Embodied Carbon Premium for Cantilevers, concluded:

Unbalanced cantilevers in buildings can lead to a 10% increase in embodied carbon compared to alternative designs incorporating supporting columns. Such findings underscore the environmental premium for cantilevers, prompting a re-evaluation of design practices towards minimising embodied carbon.

Sam Mcheileh claims simplicity is “complexity resolved so well that most people never notice it was there.” This is just wrong. To quote William of Ockham in 1323, also spelled Occam, famous for his razor: “the simplest explanation is usually the right one.” It’s called the razor because it “shaves away” complications, and it gives Mcheileh a close shave- you can’t call complexity simple just because you can’t see it. And frankly, anyone who knows anything about buildings or ever played with Jenga Blocks sees it instantly.

Dieter Rams put it in the last of his ten design principles- you don’t keep adding stuff to make it look simple.

“Good design is as little design as possible. Less, but better—because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.”

Simplicity, as I learned from Nick Grant, is basically the principle that the simpler a building (or in fact anything) is, the easier and less expensive it is to build and maintain. Radical Simplicity asks, “What do we actually need? What is the least that will do the job? What is enough?”

Simplicity, as I learned from Will Arnold, is about using less stuff, which includes building clever and building efficiently.

Professor Mückenheim thinks the embodied carbon is worth it if we look at the long-term, hundred-year picture. I disagree; when Frank Lloyd Wright was designing Fallingwater, we didn’t worry about embodied carbon, but now we do, when every kilogram of carbon emissions matters. As Larry Strain tells us, there is the time value of carbon, a concept that “arises from the ruthless maths of climate science.”

"When we evaluate emission reduction strategies, there are two things to keep in mind: the amount of reduction, and when it happens. Because emissions are cumulative and because we have a limited amount of time to reduce them, carbon reductions now have more value than carbon reductions in the future.”

This is why I find Sam Mcheileh’s definition of simplicity so misguided, because it ignores the reason we should be embracing simplicity: it's about using less stuff now when it really matters, reducing Upfront Carbon, and building no more than we need. But then he worked for Zaha Hadid, who would recoil at such a concept.

Simplicity is not complexity resolved or complexity hidden. It is complexity reduced or eliminated. Simplicity is hard; I wrote years ago that “it is often harder for an architect to make a simple design look beautiful; they have to rely on proportion and scale. It takes skill and a good eye.” That’s why Dieter Rams’ designs look so simple, yet so beautiful. In a world where we need to use less of everything, simplicity, not hidden complexity, should drive every design.

Last words to Henry David Thoreau: “Our life is frittered away by detail . . . simplify, simplify.”

And if you want to hear me lecture on the topic for 20 minutes (and spend much of the time dumping on Bjarke):

UPDATE: I published this post because it was a subject I wrote about a decade ago, but my old post has not aged well. Then, and now, I do not agree with his sentiments. But the real difference between now and my earlier post is who is saying this. As commenter Bill notes,

“Of course, blaming boomers for the way they vote is also a way of diverting attention from the Bond Villain tech lords who have way, way, way too much influence over the political process through donating to politicians, manipulating people through social media and subsidized legacy news outlets that are little more than propaganda for the right.”

I should have recognised this.

Many are outraged by Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke’s suggestion that “when you get your pension deal it’s locked in and guaranteed. But now you are a dependent and that means no voting, just like dependents under age. Enjoy the deal, let people with a stake in the future decide.” Missing Middle’s Mike Moffat writes in the Globe and Mail:

“I find the idea of disenfranchising retirees highly objectionable. Canadians, however, should be concerned that demographic and social trends are changing our politics for the worse by creating an electorate that worries more about their own bank accounts than the country’s overall prosperity.”

That trend he mentions is the Demographic Time Bomb when the number of retired baby boomers explodes in the next few years.

Moffat points to a fascinating study, Ageing Advanced Capitalist Democracies, in which the author Tim Vlandas contends that older voters are less concerned about economic growth and more concerned about inflation eating into their retirement savings. They are less concerned about education and more concerned about house prices.

“As the share of the elderly increases and ageing makes the median voter less concerned about growth and unemployment, all political parties are increasingly pushed to become relatively more indifferent to stagnant economic performance. Instead, parties focus more on keeping inflation down and house prices up, since this tends to matter more to the elderly.”

Whereas the Shopify Guy wants more growth, more people, more shopping.

Moffat and Vlandas are not wrong about older people having different interests than the young, and it is not a new phenomenon; people have talked about this for years. In 2017, during the first Trump administration, I wrote about it on MNN with tongue in cheek; being over 70 now, I want to keep my vote, and I do worry about the fate of the planet. But I often worry about others of my generation.

In 1729, Satirist Jonathan Swift made “A Modest Proposal” that the “impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies. This satirical hyperbole mocked heartless attitudes towards the poor, as well as British policy toward the Irish in general.”

In 1970, Douglas Stewart, a university professor in California, was upset by the rise of Ronald Reagan and suggested that perhaps there were too many old people moving to California and voting. He made a modest proposal of his own, writing a controversial article in the New Republic titled “Disenfranchise the old”:

“The vote should not be a privilege in perpetuity, guaranteed by minimal physical survival, but a share in the continuing fate of the political community, both in its benefits and its risks. The old, having no future, are dangerously free from the consequences of their own political acts, and it makes no sense to allow the vote to someone who is actuarially unlikely to survive, and pay the bills for, the politician or party he may help elect.... I would advocate that all persons lose the vote at retirement or age 70, whichever is earlier.”

Now, as a baby boomer within two elections of that “best before” age, of course I’m shocked and appalled at such a suggestion; it’s ageist and discriminatory, and boomers and seniors have so much to offer.

But Stewart has a point. What he saw in California in the ‘70s is playing out in America today. The boomers and the older voters won the presidential election (although Donald Trump did win among young white people without a college education). I noted in an earlier post,

And as I predicted, the millennials did not show up in anything like the numbers the boomers and seniors did, and the current government is doing everything in its power to turn back the clock, to reduce taxes on the rich baby boomers, to remove regulations that protect the environment for generations young and yet to come, so that extractors and developers can make money now.

In effect, the older voters get to keep what’s theirs and leave the mess for the kids to clean up.

You can see this happening plain as day with the new Trumpcare act working its way through the Senate, one that dramatically cuts funding for Medicaid. Note the shape of the spending curve for the aged — it goes up and then down, so that the impact on older voters isn’t felt for a decade, when many might well be dead. Because as Reagan noted, “You dance with the one that brung ya.”

‘Kicking the can down the road’

You can see it happening with debt and the way governments are run. Sayyajit Das writes in Bloomberg about how we’re living today at the expense of tomorrow:

The prevailing approach to dealing with these problems exacerbates generational tensions. The central strategy is “kicking the can down the road” or “extend and pretend,” avoiding crucial decisions that would reduce current living standards, eschewing necessary sacrifices, and deferring problems with associated costs into the future.

You see it happening in cities and suburbs around North America, where older voters reject initiatives to build transit, increase density or install bike lanes in favour of NIMBYism, resistance to change, and maintaining the right to drive a big car anywhere and to have free or cheap parking when they get there.

I’ve argued in the past that millennials have nobody to blame but themselves if they don’t show up and vote, but that’s not entirely true; the older people in charge have made it very difficult for them to vote and have gamed the system. And once they have that power, they use it. Daniel Munroe discusses the issue in Macleans:

Decisions made by older generations will affect the interests of younger and unborn generations, but those younger generations will themselves have less or no say. Moreover, as some argue, older citizens have greater incentives to deplete natural resources, underinvest in infrastructure, accumulate public debt and ignore the environment. Polls of top political issues show that concern for the environment and education declines with age. Grandma votes against carbon taxes and recycling programs, and Grandpa votes against education spending? So take away their right to vote and let younger people make decisions about the future.

Munroe concludes that this is perhaps a bad idea.

So long as older citizens are still living citizens, a fair and legitimate democracy must continue to recognise their political equality and provide them with means to influence decisions that will affect their interests. Frustration with the policy preferences and omissions of older citizens is a long-standing complaint of younger citizens. Future generations will no doubt continue to shake their heads at many aspects of the world they inherit. The challenge for living, and especially older, generations, is to vote and engage in politics in ways that go beyond self-interest.

And in the end, it’s probably a moot point anyway. According to Ronald Brownstein in the Atlantic, the next presidential election in 2020 is going to be the first since 1974 in which the baby boomers are not the largest cohort, where millennials will be 34 percent of voters while boomers will shrink to 28 percent. Only half of eligible millennials voted in 2016; one suspects that in 2020, they may be older, wiser and more engaged.

They had better be paying attention, because as Sayyajit Das so elegantly put it:

Future generations will bear the ultimate cost of present decisions or inaction. As in Francisco Goya’s famous painting, “Saturn Devouring His Son,” today, the old are eating their children.

For almost a decade, I have been working in fits and starts on The New Manual of the Dwelling, my take on how to design a home, in the style of Le Corbusier’s 1924 Manual of the Dwelling. (See introduction here.) I have published bits of it on this site, and will be serializing the book here with new chapters every week. Or maybe on a separate site; please see the poll at the end.

How I got stuck in the kitchen

I don’t cook. Some (including, I believe, my wife) might say that should disqualify me from having strong opinions and writing about kitchen design. I was well along with this chapter for The New Manual of the Dwelling when I read John Ota’s wonderful book, “The Kitchen: A journey through history in search of the perfect design,” which stopped me in my tracks before I got out of the introduction:

“I would love a kitchen that brings people together—laugh, eat, cook, share, connect with memories, feelings and our past. My mom had a cluttered kitchen, and more than good food came out of it. I want a kitchen floor we can dance on.”

I don’t dance either, certainly not in the kitchen. Ota’s book gave me a year of writer’s block, and I have been stuck in the kitchen ever since. He wrote,

“I love talking to people about their kitchens—the type of sink they chose, the stove, the fridge, the flooring, how they entertain. Most of all, I love talking to people about what they make to eat in there.”

My story is far less romantic, and after reading Ota, I thought maybe I shouldn’t be writing about this at all, given that I don’t cook, I don’t dance, and when it came to my research, I don’t even talk to people or eat their food.

But there is more than one way to look at the subject. I can’t sit on this stuff forever, so I am pulling it together and publishing it here with some updates. Regular readers will have read bits of this before, most recently in my post about gas stoves, and I apologize for any repetition.

I see the kitchen as a story of technological, economic, and, above all, social change, primarily concerning the role of women. These are all coalescing to change food, diet, and kitchen design.

It’s also a story about the women designers and writers who defined our kitchens over the last 150 years. Most of these women who designed or wrote about kitchens had one goal: to make cooking as efficient as possible so that women would be free to do other things. None of them particularly loved cooking; some of them didn’t even know how. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky said, “I designed the kitchen as an architect, not as a housewife.” Lillian Gilbreth was a psychologist doing time-motion studies and considered her time “too valuable to be devoted to actual labour in the home.” Some of them wanted to get rid of kitchens altogether- I published this earlier:

My wife, Kelly Rossiter, cooks very well, and used to write about it professionally for various websites. She has a separate kitchen without a table or island; we have never danced in it. She would prefer that I kept out of it. It is next to our dining room, with its giant mid-century modern former boardroom table, which we use for three meals a day and live our lives around.

My interest in kitchens goes back many years to when I was practicing as an architect in the 1980s, but it took a serious turn in 2007 when the Interior Design Show in Toronto included an installation of a model kitchen designed by architect Donald Chong and built by Derek Nicholson, titled “Small fridges make good cities.” It was not a small kitchen, but it had a small fridge; the message was that you should get out into your community and buy fresh food, supporting your local butcher, baker and greengrocer, much as people do in Italy or France. It profoundly influenced me then and still does.

It made me recognize the direct connection between our kitchen’s design and the community around us; the kitchen isn’t just a room in the home but a window into our economy and society.

From open to closed to open again

Until recently, most of the world had open-plan homes; everyone lived, slept, cooked and ate around the fire in one room, often with a high ceiling and a hole in the roof. The development of the chimney in the twelfth century improved things a bit.

Seigfried Giedion writes in Mechanization Takes Command:

“The open fire, the flame in the hearth, ran through the ages. Until late in the seventeenth century, it was often the sole heating agent in the cold season... Only in the fifteenth century, with the awakening of a burgher consciousness, did the kitchen become a separate room of the house. But even into the seventeenth century, it often served as the burgher dining room, often as the bedroom too, and occasionally as a social chamber.”

In North America, settlers and farmers often built houses with two rooms; one was the farmhouse kitchen with a fireplace where people did pretty much everything, and another room where they slept. Making dinner required the labour of both men and women; if you were out on a farm, the men would raise the crops, butcher the animals, and whittle the spoons and bowls. Ruth Schwartz Cowan described life in “More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave:”

Under the conditions that prevailed in the American colonies during the eighteenth century, the work processes of cooking required the labor of people of both sexes; cooking itself may have been defined as women’s work (which it was), but cooking could not be done without prior preparation of tools and foodstuffs, and a good deal of that prior preparation was, as it happens, defined as men’s work.

In the 18^th century, the cast-iron cook stove changed everything. Linda Peterat ^⁠describes the cook stove revolution of the 1800s:

Women were eager to adopt the cook stove. They had long endured the hot, smoky and heavy labour of open hearth cooking and suffered “hearth death” that up to the seventeenth century was a principal cause of death among women, second only to childbirth. Women also frequently burned holes in their aprons and skirts from the sparks of the open fires. The style of eating changed as a result of this technology. Meals prepared in open hearth cooking were often one-pot meals, whereas stoves permitted many dishes to be cooked simultaneously.

Others argue that catching on fire was never second to childbirth as a cause of death; It happened rarely, and the leading cause of death was disease. We know from modern experience that cooking on open fires causes pneumonia in children and heart disease in adults, and no doubt did among our ancestors. But in any case, the cast-iron stove was a revolution. Not for the first or last time, cooking technology changed what and how we eat. Some weren’t so sure about it and preferred the old ways; Peterat writes:

Others, mainly men, sentimentalized the open fire of the old fireplaces, believing that adopting a cook stove would ruin domestic life and social intercourse that occurred in the glow of an open fire.”

Notwithstanding the traditionalists, the stoves were a huge success. However, according to Ruth Schwartz Cowan, they didn’t significantly reduce the amount of work in cooking, because in one of those ironies of household technologies, it changed what we eat.

The stove, in short, augured the death of one-pot cooking or, rather, of one-dish meals — and, in so doing, probably increased the amount of time that women spent in preparing foodstuffs for cooking. The diet of average Americans may well have become more varied during the nineteenth century, but in the process, women’s activities became less varied as their cooking chores became more complex.”

The more compact stove and the addition of piped water and gas tied all the kitchen services together in one place, and let the middle class enjoy what the rich had for years- a separate kitchen, keeping the noise, smells, and danger of cooking away from the family living areas. It was about class and aspiration- we don’t have to live in the kitchen anymore! We might have servants! (Very few actually did, but that is another chapter.)

Then there was the health aspect, with the development of germ theory and the Domestic Science movement of the 1870s. The kitchen got medicalized- it had to be washable and spotless. This was harder to do when everyone was living in it.

A separate kitchen was a sign of progress, modernity, health and wealth as opposed to what we came to call a “farmhouse kitchen.”

The “small fridges make good cities” kitchen was a form of farmhouse kitchen, with preserves in jars lining the walls and a giant table in the middle. Shortly after seeing it, I was interviewed by a now-defunct green building magazine and described my dream kitchen:

“Local food, fresh ingredients, the slow food movement; these are all the rage these days. A green kitchen will have big work areas and sinks for preserving, tons of storage to keep it in, but will not have a four-foot wide fridge or a six-burner Viking range. It will open to outdoors to vent the heat in summer, to the rest of the house to retain the heat in winter. The dining area will be integrated into it, perhaps right in the middle. A green kitchen will be like grandma’s farm kitchen- big, open, the focus of the house and no energy from the appliances will be wasted in winter or kept inside in summer.”

Frank Lloyd Wright liked the farmhouse kitchen too; he reminisced about it in The Natural House in 1954:

Back in farm days there was but one big living room, a stove in it, and Ma was there cooking—looking after the children and talking to Pa—dogs and gas and tobacco smoke too—all gemütlich if all was orderly, but it seldom was; and the children were there playing around. It created a certain atmosphere of domestic nature which had charm and which is not, I think, a good thing to lose altogether. Consequently, in this Usonian plan, the kitchen was called a ‘workspace’ and was identified largely as the living room.”

But then, a few years later, I read the late Paul Overy’s book, Light, Air and Openness, and my thinking changed again- not just about kitchens but about modernism.

There are many reasons that our kitchens evolved from the open to the separate and back to open. Some were nostalgic; some were technological; some were epidemiological and medical; but by the twentieth century, the key factors were social and political, about the role of women in society. Maybe that’s another reason I shouldn’t be writing this; I don’t cook, I don’t dance, and I’m a man. But I am going to give it a shot.

Next week: The women who revolutionized kitchen design.

Question: Should this be here or on a separate site?

I can’t decide whether this should be a feature here or a separate substack devoted to The New Manual of the Dwelling. I am not sure if everyone is interested in this, it will avoid repitition of older repurposed posts, and it might be more useful if it is all in one place. On the other hand, I have written so much about this and related topics here already. What do you think?

Jeff McFadden of A Systemic Approach is a writer I admire, and who, more than anyone I know, practices what he preaches. He complains that nobody wants to make the smallest effort to change our ways:

“We’d be perfectly happy if someone would make a magic gadget that eliminated climate change without us having to change anything, no matter how small, about our personal lives. If we personally have to see any difference more major than an LED bulb instead of a 100-watt incandescent, we can’t tolerate so much as reading about it.”

And another commenter on Substack has a similar complaint:

“We’re not going to do a damn thing about climate change until it is forced upon us by circumstances out of our control (i.e., climate impacts themselves). Yes, yes, we could do something, but it is very clear that we as a society have not and will not do anything. And you, as an individual, are too small to matter.”

With a great deal of respect to both writers, I don’t agree. I believe that people are willing to make changes in their lives, and that individuals are not too small to matter. I have written about this in both of my books and in numerous posts:

As proof of my thesis, look at what is happening in Canada right now in reaction to Donald Trump’s intimidation and threats. People are making changes in their personal lives, individuals are taking action, and it is collectively making a difference.

Bill McKibben has written that “the most important thing an individual can do is be a little less of an individual and join together with others in movements large enough to make change.” That’s what has happened; as Dave and Deb of The Planet Democracy note, “Canadians have spoken and acted with their wallets.”

American car sales are down 22 percent. American wine sales fell by $357 million last year. Ten million fewer Canadian tourists went to Florida, costing the industry US$ 4.5 billion and about 14,000 jobs.

It has made such a big difference that Trump is upset and just threatened additional tariffs on Canada “in response to Canada’s discriminatory treatment of American products.” They note in a fact sheet that most countries just folded under pressure and agreed to tariffs. “Over the past year and a half, only two countries have chosen to retaliate against President Trump’s tariffs rather than negotiate a deal with the United States: the People’s Republic of China and Canada.”

The hilarity of Trump’s new action is that he is angry that Canada had the nerve to not lie down and accept his demands like Europe did. So he is adding a 50% tariff on a weird list of products including Canadian alcohol, paper products, hockey sticks, and whey. Americans can expect to pay more for baby formula, protein supplements at the gym, and house construction and renovation.

However, while claiming he doesn’t need anything from Canada, he does need energy and potash, so they are not tariffed. While many Canadians suggest retaliation with an export tax, that’s not going to happen in the middle of Alberta’s separation referendum.

A major complaint is that provincial governments, which sell most of the alcohol in the country, removed American bourbon and wine from the shelves. However, even in Alberta and Saskatchewan, which sell oil and potash to the USA and prefer Trump to Carney, and allow the sale of American alcohol, they found that sales didn’t recover. Canadian citizens just aren’t buying.

To Jeff McFadden’s point about people not willing to give anything up, I agree that switching from bourbon to rye or from a Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay to a New Zealand or Canadian version is not exactly onerous. But many people have given up trips to Disney World; Canadian bookings are down 45%. Many Canadians have changed habits, are paying more for Canadian or Mexico-sourced food, and might not be going back; Dave and Deb note:

“They keep framing the boycott as a temporary measure, as something Canadians are doing until the trade war ends, after which everything snaps back to normal. That is just not going to happen. Canadians have long memories. Canadian consumer behavior wasn’t structural; it was habitual. And when you give 40 million people a compelling moral and economic reason to break a habit, they form new ones.”

None of this means that the determination and solidarity shown with the US boycott would translate to dealing with climate change; too many Canadians believe the marketing from the fossil fuel industry and voted for Premier Enbridge. Even though every word in that ad is either a distortion or an exaggeration, that’s what our governments and the industry are selling us.

Mark Carney is little help here, as I note in the post above: “Thousands will likely sicken or die this summer from heat and wildfire smoke, yet our Prime Minister keeps peddling pipelines and the fossil fuels that are causing this.” He has probably read Machiavelli’s The Prince:

“It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.”

My second commenter noted that “We’re not going to do a damn thing about climate change until it is forced upon us by circumstances out of our control.”

I would have thought that the current fire events in North America and Europe would be the kind of circumstance which would make people reconsider their life choices, but apparently I would be wrong; After Marco Chown Oved wrote on LinkedIn:

“The ship has sailed on forest fires (especially in Canada). No amount of Fire Rangers, helicopters, waterbombers or tree thinning is going to change the simple fact: warmer temperatures mean drier forests means more fires.”

This elicited 145 comments, about half of which a) deny that these fires are unusual, b) that the fires are started by the government to scare us about climate change so they can take away our cars and our freedom, and c) claim that it’s El Niño and has nothing to do with climate change, which doesn’t exist.

James Hansen warns that there is a lot of El Niño blaming happening and writes, Beware Media Hype. It’s Not the El Niño!

Emily Atkin at Heated does a great job of explaining why there are so many American politicians blaming Canada’s forest management practices rather than climate change:

“Fossil fuel money is an immensely powerful, intensely corrupting force in American politics that limits not only what conversations we can have about massive problems, but what we can do to solve them.”

It’s a powerful and corrupting force in Canada as well.

The reality of the climate emergency is that it’s out of control. It’s killing people. My hope is that at some point soon, enough people will realize it’s time to do something, both individually and collectively. Canadians have shown that when we want to or need to, our actions can make a difference; it’s time to step up and deal with a bigger problem than California wine and cheese. It’s the very air that we breathe.

I have edited this post to remove images that could be subject to copyright and have provided links instead.

Patrick Sisson, a writer I have long admired at Fast Company, writes Want to live forever? There’s a house for that, all about “longevity architecture.” He describes it as “less about making an aesthetic statement than it is about bodily optimization,” but I have something to say about that.

This is a new name for what I have long described as “healthy homes.” Sisson name-checks our historic precedents, including Alvar and Aino Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium and Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House. I discussed both in my last post on healthy design: Minimalism is not a style; it’s a prescription.

The new Longevity Architecture is popular with the very rich. Sisson quotes the CEO of the International Well Building Institute (which had a wellness real estate spinoff years ago):

“An important part of this context is that longevity feels like the new luxury good,” says Rachel Hodgdon, IWBI’s CEO and president. “The billionaire’s quest to live forever, the notion that self-care, quality experiences and mindfulness and wellness can extend not just our lifespan, but also our health span.”

But this is my first problem with the concept. Sisson points to a Sotheby's luxury outlook report which focuses on 262 Fifth Avenue where “a big part of the marketing pitch includes expansive wellness features, including air filtration, radiant-heated flooring, fresh air recirculation on an hourly basis, and Lutron systems that allow exacting control over environmental factors.”

But I have written about this building and said: “262 Fifth pushes unsustainability to new heights.” It is so thin and so tall, “I cannot even begin to estimate the upfront and operating carbon footprint per square meter or per occupant, but it is going to be outrageous.” I complained,

“If the cost of this building was only measured in money, one might just say, who cares, it’s their money, if they want to live in something like this. But it’s not just money; it’s carbon dioxide emitted while making the concrete, steel, aluminum and glass, and it’s being emitted now. The rich might be able to afford the real estate, but the rest of us can’t afford the carbon.”

So the billionaire owners get to sit inside with their fresh air, water, and circadian lighting while poisoning the world. I concluded, “This is why we need a big honking progressive upfront carbon tax to put a real price on the environmental cost of these kinds of buildings.” Yet it can be marketed as “longevity architecture.” Longevity for who? I think that is a bit of a contradiction.

Then there is the work of Kas Bordier, the founder of Mavi, a design consultancy, who says, “Longevity architecture should become a standard for the industry, with people looking at the health rating of the space the same way as the energy rating.” I totally agree. She also built a terrific website, Longevity Architecture, describing “the science and design of built environments that measurably extend human healthspan, cognitive performance, and biological resilience.”

“Longevity Architecture is the practice of designing buildings and interiors that actively support human health over a lifetime. It brings together what we know about light, air, sound, temperature, materials, and spatial design to shape spaces that help people think better, sleep better, and age more slowly.”

I have spent some time reading her essays, and they should be read widely. She understands the difference between thermal comfort and thermostat control, the importance of dealing with noise, and pitches Passive House:

“Passive House is not a luxury specification. It is a rational economic decision with compounding health returns. The 4 to 6% premium buys measurably better air, measurably better acoustics, measurably better thermal stability, and measurably lower operating costs for the lifetime of the building. The case is no longer theoretical. It is empirical, economic, and increasingly urgent.”

Where it all falls down.

It’s all wonderful stuff- fresh, clean air, filtered water, healthy materials, biophilia, quiet and comfort. What Kas Bordier and the other promoters of longevity architecture don’t seem to mention is the single main cause of reduced longevity: falls. Mavi has 129 factors covering “every domain measurable” and none of the ten domains deal with fall prevention or mobility.

According to the CDC, “unintentional falls are the leading cause of injury and injury death among adults aged ≥65 years.” Roughly 1 in 4 older adults falls every year — over 14 million people — generating about 3 million ER visits and 1 million hospitalizations annually. In 2024, 43,020 older Americans died from preventable falls, 55% of which happened in the home.

Click here to see the living room

But if you are serious about longevity, you have to deal with this. So let’s look at the model residence where “Kelly Hoppen sets the interior language. Kas Bordier sets the longevity specification,” starting with the living room. First of all, there is only one silly chair that would be impossible to get out of, and the rest are sofas. When you get older, chairs are preferred.

“Sofas, couches, and benches usually have a single, shared seating surface and may lack armrests on both sides. For seniors with limited mobility, couches can be difficult to get into and out of. Individual chairs with armrests offer the most support and safety when standing up or sitting down.”

Boomer billionaires don’t have limited mobility yet; they have gyms and coaches. But many likely will at some point. So many of the furnishing choices, from the sofas to the stools in the kitchen, are wildly inappropriate for older people.

Click here for a walkthrough of the apartment

Then there are the colours. The seating is beige, the walls are beige, the carpet is beige, everything is beige. When you get older, you need a bit of contrast. One study, Contrast Sensitivity Impairment is Associated with Limitations of Physical Functioning and Activities of Daily Living Among Older Adults, found:

“Contrast sensitivity or the ability to distinguish objects from their background is an important yet overlooked component of visual function. While routine eye exams assess visual acuity using high-contrast letters, they do not evaluate contrast sensitivity, a key aspect of vision required for detecting subtle differences between objects and their background.”

Contrast sensitivity impairment is associated with a 50–60% higher hazard of incident mobility and stair-climbing difficulty. And here we have a sea of beige and almost no contrast anywhere.

Then there is the question of the effect of all this circadian lighting. I have been discussing the importance of natural light, circadian rhythms, and appropriate colour temperatures for years, most recently when I complained about my classroom. I have also written Boomer Alert: You Need Better Lighting to Compensate for Aging Eyes, noting that “the older eye loses some sensitivity to short wavelengths ("blue light") due to progressive yellowing of the crystalline lens.”

This is your eye as you age. The lens is going yellow and cuts out 72% of the blue by the age of 80. The rods in our eyes, which deal with low-level light, are sensitive to the blue-green end of the spectrum, yet our fancy lighting in this apartment is dialling back the blue light to give us very warm 2700°K and the output levels to 250 lux. Meanwhile, we are looking at all this beige furnishings through beige lenses; I’m surprised we can see anything at all.

Circadian lighting is wonderful; I invested in Hue RGB bulbs in my house so that I could tune them for the right light at the right time. But where many people have thermostat wars, spouse Kelly and I have colour temperature wars. My aging eyes want the light white and bright; she is a few years younger and wants it warmer and dimmer. Douglas Steele, in Circadian Lighting: a Neuroscientist’s Perspective, explained:

“The idea that there can be a “specific recipe” for human-centric lighting that can be universally applied to all persons is unrealistic because of the tremendous variability between individuals based on age, setting, genetics, environmental factors, individual physiology, and personal behaviors such as coffee or alcohol consumption, ambient lighting preferences, and undesired exposure from other ambient light sources. While many of these factors could potentially be accounted for as models such as these become increasingly sophisticated, no effort has been made to do so.”

We are talking about longevity, about designing for older people. If you design an entirely beige room full of armless sofas with warm low circadian lighting, you are going to have older people falling down, and that doesn’t do much for longevity.

Click here to see stair in hallway

I should stop, but nobody should put a circular stair in a home designed for longevity. There is a reason that they are generally banned in exit stairs; they are dangerous. Your left foot has a different tread run than the right foot, and your brain has to figure this out, and when your brain gets older, it gets harder. You need a proper handrail, not just the top of a wall. And according to AARP, you need 300 lux, not 250.

Click here to see main ensuite bathroom

And don’t get me started about freestanding killer bathtubs with thin walls and no grab bars.

I am very impressed with Kas Bordier’s Longevity Architecture website. After reading about all these billionaires, it is a pleasure to read her essay on The Equity Question, where she makes the point that everyone should have these benefits.

“If the evidence is correct (that indoor environmental quality measurably affects cognitive function, disease risk, sleep quality, and biological aging) then the distribution of building quality is, in effect, a distribution of health. And that distribution is profoundly unequal.”

And her conclusion, which I agree with:

“The challenge for longevity architecture is to resist the temptation of exclusivity. If the discipline serves only those who can afford it, it will have failed its most important test. The measure of its success is not the quality of the best buildings, but the quality of the average ones.”

But when I look at the longevity lessons translated into the finished interior shown on her site, I am worried that it all sounds lovely but does not reflect the hard reality: this is a dangerous design, one giant beige trip-and-fall hazard. Being a billionaire doesn’t protect you from that; ask Ivana Trump. It is the antithesis of longevity architecture and design.

A recent article in Better Homes and Gardens asks, Is Minimalism Back? It talks to three designers who say things like “To keep your minimalist space from looking boring, add layers. “It is a must,” says [designer Meeshie] Fahmy. “Think knit or chunky throws on the sofa, pillows with texture, and a light neutral pattern for interest.”

BHG then shows an image of a kitchen with a gas stove, a wood floor, and a loose rug, at which point I got the sense that they really don’t know what minimalism is, where it came from, and why it is so important now, a hundred years after it started.

Minimalism is defined by Architizer:

“Minimalism emerged in the mid-20th century as a reaction against the ornamentation that characterized earlier 20th-century architectural styles, such as Classical Revival and Art Deco. It reduces architecture to its basic forms, embracing the “less is more” principle that architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe popularized. Minimalism focuses on clean lines, simple forms, and minimal ornamentation, allowing for spatial clarity.”

But it was not a style; it was a prescription for healthy buildings in a time when tuberculosis was rampant, scientists had figured out what causes it, but had no drugs to deal with it. Biatriz Colomina writes in X-Ray Architecture:

“Modernity was driven by illness… Nineteenth-century architecture was demonized as unhealthy, and sun, light, ventilation, exercise, roof terraces, hygiene, and whiteness were offered as means to prevent, if not cure, tuberculosis.”

Paul Overy wrote in Light, Air and Openness:

“Dirt and dust harboured germs that must be destroyed by fresh air and sunlight. Homes should be cleaned thoroughly every day, and windows and doors opened each morning to let in the sun and air, to destroy the germs. Heavy drapes and curtains, thick carpets and old furniture with decorative features that harboured dust and microbes should be thrown out and replaced with simple, easily cleaned modern furniture and light, easily washed curtains.”

This was the start of minimalist design. As Columbina notes, white walls, expansive glass, clean lines, and the absence of ornament were all medical protocols derived from tuberculosis sanitaria before they became iconic modernist and minimalist architecture and interiors.

So you don’t want chunky throws on the sofa or layered pillows with texture. In fact, you don’t want sofas; Miës van der Rohe designed lightweight tubular furniture which could be “easily moved by anyone and because of its sled-like base it can simply be pushed across the floor.” He wrote:

“It therefore promotes comfortable, practical living. It facilitates the cleaning of rooms and avoids inaccessible dusty corners. It offers no hiding place for dust and insects and therefore there is no furniture that meets modern sanitary demands better than tubular-steel furniture.”

Kitchens, in particular, should be designed like hospitals. One architect noted in 1933:

“The kitchen should be the cleanest place in the home, cleaner than the living room, cleaner than the bedroom, cleaner than the bathroom. The light should be absolute, nothing must be left in shadow, there can be no dark corners, no space left under the kitchen furniture, no space left under the kitchen cupboard.”

Hence my complaint about the kitchen in BHG- if you care about health, you don’t have gas. If you care about cleanliness, you don’t want a wood floor and a rug.

Minimalism is all about health. We now know about the dangers of particulates, so we don’t want carpeting or stuffed furniture where PM2.5 can settle and be resuspended when we sit or walk on them. One study found that babies crawling on carpets were inhaling 8 to 21 times as much fungus, particulates, or bacteria as a person walking. “Crawling induces resuspension of floor dust from carpeted flooring, creating a concentrated and localized cloud of microbial content around the infant.”

You don’t want all those cushions and pillows and throws, often made of synthetics. Another study found “Indoor airborne microplastics represent emerging pollutants of fast-growing concern that are especially important as potential invaders of the human respiratory system, reaching the alveoli of the lungs and finally entering the circulatory system and other tissues.”

Then there are bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites- and the rise of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). The World Health Organization says, “Antimicrobial resistance is outpacing advances in modern medicine, threatening the health of families worldwide.” Designers forgot about fighting disease with design when antibiotics were introduced, but it’s time to remember all those minimalist tricks.

“WHO estimates that bacterial AMR was directly responsible for 1.27 million deaths in 2019 and contributed to nearly five million deaths globally. Without action, experts warn, resistant infections could cause an estimated $3 trillion in global GDP losses per year by 2030.”

Our minimalist and modernist heroes were dealing with tuberculosis, and we have to worry about this too. Drug-resistant TB is on the rise. And thanks to the anti-vaxx movement, other diseases that we thought were beaten are coming back with a vengeance.

Dealing with AMR means giving bugs no place to hide, having surfaces that are easy to clean, and having furniture that’s easy to move.

Of course, there are many other, important things to worry about if we are going to design healthy buildings, including ventilation, insulation, comfort, light and air. But we have to re-learn the lessons that Duiker, Bijvoet, Aalto, Chareau, Miës, Neutra, and Le Corbusier taught us: minimalism is not so much a style as it is a prescription for healthy interiors that don’t harbour PM2.5 from wildfires or bacteria we don’t have antibiotics for, or microplastics and PFAS that float into the air every time we sit down on that fluffy sofa.

And we must never forget my favourite theory of everything: the vast number of aging baby boomers need minimalism. Studies such as Fine Particulate Matter Air Pollution and Lung Function Among U.S. Older Adults “highlight the negative impact of PM2.5 on older adults’ lung health.” Aging lungs are subject to cellular senescence. “Many of these age-related changes can impair the normal function of the respiratory system and its capability to respond appropriately to potential pathogens that are encountered daily.” This is why older people are more susceptible to pneumonia, flu, and COVID.

One designer tells BHG, “Often, when a homeowner chooses minimalism, the warmth and soul that come with a more expressive and personalized aesthetic get lost.” A hundred years ago, designers didn’t want much warmth and soul. They wanted a different aesthetic, as described by Paul Overy: “designed not only to be easy to clean but to appear to be spotlessly clean- potent visual symbols of hygiene and health.” I suspect this kind of extreme minimalism will be making a comeback.

I have been banging on about gas stoves for years, covering study after study replete with statements like “The long-term exposure to NO2 in American households with gas stoves is high enough to cause thousands of deaths each year.”

However, a new study, Asthma Control Before and After Changing Gas Stoves to Electric Stoves, led by medical researcher and physician Ashwini Sehgal of Case Western Reserve University, is worth noting because of its elegant simplicity.

Sehgal and his team went into 85 houses with gas stoves where children were known to have asthma, and replaced the stoves with all-electric induction models. Bingo: pull out one and replace it with the other; what could be more straightforward? This was not cheap; many of the houses needed electrical upgrades. They also installed monitors to track particulates as well as nitrogen dioxide, because particulates can exacerbate respiratory problems and are produced while cooking with either electricity or gas. The results after three months were striking: Sehgal writes in The Conversation:

Improvements in asthma symptoms following stove change were similar to – or even greater than – those reported in clinical trials of commonly used asthma medications. On average, participants went from having moderate asthma symptoms to having mild symptoms. Emergency room visits and hospitalizations for asthma fell by 70%. Missed days of work or school because of asthma dropped by about 80%. At the same time, indoor levels of nitrogen dioxide decreased by 70%.

The study was originally going to be much larger, but the funding was cut by the Trump administration. Sehgal tells the Guardian: “We had completed the project at fewer than 100 households. As a result, over 1,100 households were unable to benefit. We also had to lay off about 20 project staff.” Sehgal acknowledges that the small sample size is a problem.

“It is worth noting that our study included a relatively small number of participants and followed them for only a few months. The findings may not apply to people with milder asthma symptoms. We also did not include a comparison group that kept their gas stoves.”

The gas companies and the politicians they pay for keep saying that cooking with gas is up there with god and guns, and claim that people prefer it, but Sehgal asked the study participants what they thought of induction vs their old gas stoves, and “Nearly all – 98% – said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their electric induction stove, compared with only 41% who felt that way about their gas stove.”

The study also notes the wider connection between gas stoves, natural gas consumption, and climate change, which I thought was pretty brave in these times when you are not allowed to say such things or lose all your funding. I suppose they had no funding left to lose.

“Because natural gas is a fossil fuel, using gas stoves also contributes to climate change. Burning natural gas generates carbon dioxide, which is the main driver of climate change. In addition, unburned natural gas (mostly methane) escapes from leaks and incomplete combustion and is a potent greenhouse gas. Therefore, replacing gas stoves with electric stoves can help mitigate climate change, especially if the electricity used to power electric stoves is obtained from renewable sources such as wind or solar power. Climate change itself has adverse pulmonary effects, for example, from longer pollen seasons and exposure to wildfire smoke.”

But talking about climate change will never get anyone to switch from gas to induction. Neither will we be able to convince many gas users that cooking with induction is better; it’s hard to change ingrained attitudes and habits. I wrote about this earlier:

However, health and wellness are big these days. Maybe a study like this will move the needle. Perhaps architects, designers, and others will finally get involved; as Sehgal concludes, we all have a responsibility here.

“Physicians may also want to ask asthma patients about the use of gas stoves and educate them about potential harms. And builders, landlords and restaurant owners may want to think about the types of stoves they install, as that may be a consideration for the future buyers, renters and employees who will cook in their kitchens.”

I have had a bad cold for a few days and am having trouble concentrating, but it is an important day in my calendar: the anniversary of the kitchen debate between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon in 1959. I even drink my coffee from a commemorative mug. I wrote about it on the 60th anniversary in 2019; From the Treehugger post:

On this day in 1959, Richard Nixon debated Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in what is probably one of the world’s most famous kitchens. Nixon claimed it was a typical American kitchen in a typical American house; Khrushchev thought it was ridiculous and extravagant, and that American priorities were all mixed up.

Both leaders argued for their country’s industrial accomplishments. Khrushchev stressed the Soviets’ achievements in developing “things that matter” rather than luxury. He sarcastically asked Nixon if there was a machine that “puts food into the mouth and pushes it down”.

As Justin Davidson explained in a 2011 article for New York Magazine, a young press agent for a real estate developer, William Safire (later a Nixon speechwriter and New York Times Columnist) convinced the State Department that his client’s design would be a great example of a typical American kitchen.

The developer—at the behest of the State Department—hired the designer Raymond Loewy and his architect, Andrew Geller, to pry the building apart along a central corridor (hence the name “Splitnik”).

Loewy was one of the greatest industrial designers of the century, and Andrew Geller went on to become the “Architect of Happiness”- read Alistair Gordon’s obit. This kitchen had a serious pedigree.

Now you can write this all off as the story of two men who probably couldn’t cook, standing in a kitchen designed by men who were building propaganda rather than a working kitchen, but there is more to it than that. Khrushchev wasn’t impressed; in fact, he was appalled. As Madeline Roache wrote in Time Magazine:

“Much as he wanted to out-produce his rival, Khrushchev was not sold on the ideology behind the American home. As the politicians toured the American model kitchen, Nixon pointed at a dishwasher and said, “In America, we like to make life easier for women.” Khrushchev retorted, “Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under Communism.” The Soviet leader implied that “these machines were only trapping women in the home,” says food historian Bee Wilson.

In his autobiography, Khrushchev remembers, he complains about the small appliances that filled the kitchen, starting with “an automatic device for squeezing lemon juice for tea.”

“What a silly thing for your people to exhibit in the Soviet Union, Mr. Nixon! All you need for tea is a couple of drops of lemon juice. I think it would take a housewife longer to use this gadget than it would for her to do what our housewives do: slice a piece of lemon, drop it into a glass of tea, then squeeze a few drops out with a spoon. That’s the way we always did it when I was a child, and I don’t think this appliance of yours is an improvement in any way. It’s not really a time-saver or a labor-saver at all. In fact, you can squeeze a lemon faster by hand. This kind of nonsense is an insult to our intelligence.”

Richard Nixon also wrote about the Kitchen Debate in his book Six Crises:

He went into a harangue on how American capitalists build houses to last only twenty years, and Soviets build for their children and grandchildren. He went on and on, obviously determined to deny the American know-how he saw so plainly in front of him:

“You think the Russians will be dumbfounded by this exhibit. But the fact is that all newly built Russian houses will have this equipment. You need dollars in the United States to get this house, but here all you need is to be a citizen. If an American citizen does not have dollars, he has the right to buy this house or sleep on the pavement at night. And you say we are slaves of Communism!”

The Soviets thought about kitchens differently. After the revolution, as I noted in my post, the women who thought that homes shouldn’t have kitchens, the People’s Commissar for Welfare, Alexandra Kollontai, complained,

“Capitalism has placed a crushing burden on woman’s shoulders: it has made her a wage-worker without having reduced her cares as housekeeper or mother. Woman staggers beneath the weight of this triple load.”

Kollontai wanted to abolish private kitchens, but in the end they got tiny efficient kitchens modelled after Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen. The debate also took place at a time when only 38% of American women worked outside the home, mostly in “pink collar jobs.” In the Soviet Union, almost every woman worked; 41% of engineers were women, compared to just 2% in the USA.

As Roache noted in Time:

In August 1959, Marietta Shaginian, a Soviet journalist from the Russian newspaper Izvestiia, wrote that the ideal kitchen was nothing more than a “gilded cage.” She called it “ideologically inappropriate” because it was designed not to help the working woman achieve self-realization but to compensate the middle-class ‘‘professional housewife’’ for her lack of a place in the public arena.

Or as Rose Eveleth wrote,

During World War II, American women found footing outside the home, and as the Cold War started to ramp up, the country became obsessed with innovation and automation. These future visions straddled that awkward set of goals: kitchens that were efficient and innovative enough to give women the free time they wanted, but wrapped in narratives that ensured that this time was spent not working, but rather doing wifely things like cleaning the rest of the house, sunbathing, and playing tennis.

Sixty-seven years later, I think time has shown that Khrushchev won the debate. American houses don’t last much longer than twenty years, and thousands are sleeping in the streets. Women are no longer trapped in their gilded cages, but as Kollontai noted, capitalism “made her a wage-worker without having reduced her cares as housekeeper or mother. Woman staggers beneath the weight of this triple load.” We are buried in small appliances, and our kitchens have become vast displays of wealth and status rather than efficient tools for cooking.

But also, sixty-seven years ago, two leaders could meet face-to-face and have an intelligent conversation that still resonates. I will give the last word to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev:

In the middle of the worst of the smoke a few days ago, The Beaverton, Canada’s version of The Onion, ran a story titled Doug Ford vows to fight wildfires by building as many new spas as necessary. It’s funny because as Ontario burns, Premier Ford is cutting funding for firefighting while spending billions to redesign Toronto’s waterfront for cars and planes, including a monster spa that nobody wants. See:

It’s not funny because Premier Enbridge is doing everything he can to put more Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere, CO2 that’s causing the climate change that’s exacerbating the droughts and the heat that contribute to forest fires. He builds highways, raises speed limits, promotes sprawl, pipelines, and expanding natural gas distribution.

He is contributing to a situation where the only alternative may be to live under glass, if you can afford it. And a future like this is not a joke.

It’s similar to people realizing that the movie Idiocracy was looking more and more like a documentary; The Beaverton is looking more and more like one of the futures described in a 2019 report from engineering giant ARUP: 2050 Scenarios: four plausible futures.

The worst scenario was the Extinction Express, where we have “large-scale smog dome projects for commercial and wealthy residential areas” just like Doug Ford is building on the Toronto waterfront, and The Beaverton extrapolates to across the province. From the ARUP scenario:

“Natural resources that were previously taken for granted and considered basic human rights – such as water, air, ozone, land and the oceans – are now genuine commodities. Water sources are highly regulated with restricted access; corporations now hold a monopoly over the majority of the global water supply. Those who can’t afford to pay for the premium cost of water must rely on localised, often contaminated water sources. Similarly, clean air is accessible only to those who can afford it. Large-scale air domes have been erected over many of the world’s most prominent cities, including Shanghai, Delhi and London, to create safe havens for some segments of their populations. Individuals restricted from accessing air domes experience increased rates of asthma and lung cancer that go largely untreated.”

ARUP’s prediction is for 2050, but none of this seems out of line today. They did not foresee the dramatic accelleration caused by the US government.

“Isolationism has been on the rise for years, and society is driven by a fear of the ‘foreign’ and ‘different’. This has been exacerbated by an unheralded number of climate refugees. Europe was the first region to implement an immigration cap and put in place asylum bans and is the driving force behind ‘solving’ the migration crisis through the modernisation of refugee camps – city sized camps on remote islands and in desert areas to house the world’s poorest, far away from the rest of society. Those who live in these camps refer to them as ‘controlled hells’.”

Nor did they foresee Artificial Intelligence, but they seem to have anticipated its effects:

“Previously high-income, high-status tech work is widely automated, and the world has seen a resurgence in low-paying service jobs, with the lower classes, the majority, scrambling for any work. Food and resource processing take place in industrial factories where workers have little protection and few rights.”

It is a world where there is a “stark division between the have-lots and the have-nots,” as we see in Doug Ford’s Ontario and Donald Trump’s USA. And who are the have-lots? Who wins in this world? Who is driving it? Mainly the fossil fuel industry, and the politicians and others who refuse to make the connection between our problems with heat, air, water and wildfires and climate change.

In 2023, the last big fire year, Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles (also my MPP) asked Doug Ford about climate change:

“We are in for probably the most severe fire season our province has ever experienced, and people are quite rightly worried for their immediate future and whether this is the new reality. Does the Premier acknowledge that the climate emergency is making this fire season significantly worse?”

Ford’s answer: “I’m actually in shock that the Leader of the Opposition is politicizing wildfires. It’s staggering, really. But nothing surprises me with the opposition.”

HEATED

The fossil fuel money behind the GOP’s wildfire blame game

If you, like me, felt angry, sad, and helpless as explosive Canadian wildfires blanketed parts of the United States in smoke this past weekend, it may be heartening to know that most Americans accept the reality of …

Read more

a month ago · 136 likes · 7 comments · Emily Atkin

Now we have the entire Republican Party in the USA politicizing wildfires and blaming Canada. Emily Atkins writes in Heated:

“Every GOP lawmaker who’s spoken up about last week’s air quality crisis has squarely blamed the wildfires’ intensity on poor Canadian forest management, and left out the climate component entirely.”

She continues, “that’s for one simple reason: They are completely bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry.” Atkins concludes:

“Fossil fuel money is an immensely powerful, intensely corrupting force in American politics that limits not only what conversations we can have about massive problems, but what we can do to solve them. It is uncontroversial in the scientific community to say that climate change is intensifying these explosive wildfires, particularly in the Canadian boreal forests. And yet, politically, we cannot do literally anything about it, because calling attention to climate change would require drawing attention to the industry primarily responsible. And that can’t happen. Because money.”

Fossil fuel money poisons Canada too. Cities and towns in Alberta can burn to the ground in wildfires, but nobody will acknowledge that it is climate change; that would be politicizing the weather. Instead, we will fight over air conditioning and forest management.

The Beaverton was trying to be funny, but they weren’t far off the mark; it may well be that soon, the only place we can go in summer to beat the heat and the smoke, if we can afford it, is one of Doug Ford’s domed pleasure palaces, after parking our air-conditioned SUV in his massive parking garage. He is certainly doing everything he can to make it more likely.

Building smog domes for the wealthy, as ARUP predicts in their Extinction Express scenario, would make perfect sense in Premier Enbridge’s grifty, fossil-fueled world.

I recently discovered a wonderful post by journalist Stephanie Nakhleh titled The Death House, explaining why so many people plan to leave their homes feet first. “Somehow, weirdly, the single-family home has morphed from a place to raise kids into a place to die. It has become the death house.” She even quotes me in it, which is much appreciated.

I have often written about the problem of older people being stuck in what I will now call “death houses” after they lose the ability to drive, and this spring I was working on an article about it for a major publication. I could not complete the article for personal reasons, but I published the first part, introducing the concept of drivespan and discussing testing here last week, and inspired by Stephanie, I publish the balance of it here.

Part II: The question isn’t “how do I age in place”; it’s “How do I get out of this place?”

That’s my late mother-in-law’s house in a Toronto suburb. I thought it was a brilliant plan- a tight, efficient sidesplit on a lovely cul-de-sac. Spouse Kelly says it was a great place to grow up. Joyce did not want to leave, but once she reached the end of her drivespan, Kelly had to go out there regularly and take her shopping and to the bank and to the doctor. Eventually she reached the end of her healthspan, and had to pick which floor to live on- the middle one with the kitchen or the upper one with the bathroom. Kelly was driving out daily. Finally, Joyce moved out far too late, and her lifespan ended a few months later.

We don’t talk enough about drivespan. Daniel Foley’s 2002 study, Driving Life Expectancy of Persons Aged 70 Years and Older in the United States concluded that drivers over 70 can expect to drive for eleven more years, and then men will likely be dependent on alternatives for seven years, women for ten. Nobody is planning for this gap.

Some people plan for “aging in place” by moving to houses with single-floor living, exacerbating the problem by developing “bungalow leg”, a British term for the weakening of leg muscles that comes from living without the challenge of stairs. Others move to retirement communities where the houses have giant garages to accommodate vans, but have Walkscores of zero.

I got in so much trouble writing about an AARP study, Building for the Future: Creating Homes and Communities for Aging Well, and calling boomers clueless, but 72% of Americans want to stay in their own home forever and are expecting to make bathroom and other modifications to make it easier and safer. Meanwhile, there is no mention at all about the most significant and dramatic change in their lives: the ability to drive.

This is in a country where, according to HUD and census data, 73% of Americans live in suburban and rural communities, where it is difficult to live without a car. The problem isn’t going to be “How do I age in place?”; it is going to be “How do I get out of this place?”

Almost nobody is thinking about this. According to a University of Michigan study, “less than half of these older drivers have made a plan for a time down the road, when changes in their health might make it less safe for them to drive. Even fewer know they could create a formal plan for stepping away from the driver’s seat when the time comes. And very few have talked with a health care provider about driving as it relates to their health.”

Nobody thinks it is going to happen to them

A lot of baby boomers are fit and active these days, but as Camilla Cavendish noted in the Financial Times, there are different kinds of old.

“The ‘Young-Old’ are very active and healthy and productive — totally different from 30 years ago,” says Professor Takao Suzuki, professor of gerontology at Tokyo’s JF Oberlin University, who defines Young-Old as 60 to 75 — or older. “The World Health Organization defines ‘old’ as 65, but as gerontologists, our main concern is with the ‘Old-Old’, who are very different.” – These are our leading-edge baby boomers.

The young-old feel even younger than they are; a British survey found that “Eight in 10 said they feel mentally younger than their actual age and 56% feel physically younger. “60-year-olds typically think their mental age is 42.” These unrealistic assessments of our own capabilities set us up for failure when the problems of being old-old catch up with us.

A 2020 study, Older Adults’ Expectations about Mortality, Driving Life and Years Left without Driving, notes the problems that occur when people are forced to stop driving: “those who engage in driving reduction and cessation experience not only mobility loss, but numerous adverse health outcomes, including higher prevalence of depression, decreased functional outcome, earlier admission into institutional care, and even mortality.”

However, they often don’t have a choice:

“Across the United States, older adults’ tendencies toward continuing to drive are reinforced by the lack of transportation options available to supplement or replace driving. Drivers in smaller cities, suburban settings, or rural areas have limited access to mass transportation and providing alternative transportation options presents greater challenges.”

And they don’t like buses.

“Throughout most of the U.S., most older drivers prefer to drive themselves or be transported in a personal vehicle, even when public transportation is available. As a result, driving is synonymous with personal transportation mobility, and driving cessation is associated with loss of independence combined with becoming a burden to family and friends.”

Our cities and suburbs are not designed for this

We don’t have the kind of housing we need. According to The Forgotten Middle: Many Middle-Income Seniors Will Have Insufficient Resources For Housing And Health Care:

“We project that by 2029, there will be 14.4 million middle-income seniors, 60 percent of whom will have mobility limitations and 20 percent of whom will have high health care and functional needs. While many of these seniors will likely need the level of care provided in seniors housing, we project that 54 percent of seniors will not have sufficient financial resources to pay for it.”

Sara Joy Proppe wrote in Strong Towns:

“By designing our cities for cars, and consequently neglecting our sidewalks, we have siloed our elders in several ways. Not only does an inability to drive confine many seniors to their homes, but corresponding busy roads and inhumane streetscapes add to the isolating effect by also limiting walkability.”

Rachel Quednau also writes in Strong Towns about how to solve this:

· Make cities safe and easy to get around without a car.

Quenau calls for slowing down cars, but we also need serious implementation of Vision Zero, better walking infrastructure and maintenance. We need much wider sidewalks and separate, wider lanes for bikes and the new age of electric mobility.

· Create housing options that work for people of all ages and abilities.

Most cities in North America have a zoning monoculture, pretty much prohibiting anything but single-family dwellings, setting minimum house sizes, banning backyard housing and tiny homes. But if people are going to be able to stay in their neighbourhoods, we’ll need a variety of housing types.

· Build communities that give people purpose and meaning.

This is really the natural result of 1 and 2; instead of being trapped in the house in front of the TV, people can get out, go to a library or a club, or walk to a store. As Quenau concludes, “By building our cities at a walkable, human scale, with different housing options and stores, gathering places and resources nearby, we create a foundation for people from ages 1-100 to live happy, healthy lives now and in the future.”

But this isn’t happening; as Matthew Lewis of California NIMBY notes,

“What makes this a crisis rather than just a planning problem is that the very people who are going to be most harmed by car-dependent land use are the ones who have spent decades fighting any alternative to it. Go to any city council meeting about housing, any public protest about a bike lane or a transit line, and you will see the same cohort every single time. I know public meetings are a terrible measure of a population’s actual preferences — the people who show up tend to be richer and whiter than the population at large. But the pattern is so consistent it’s hard to dismiss.”

Self-driving cars won’t save us

Every time I write about this subject, people tell me that autonomous vehicles are the answer. AARP has studied this and concluded that older adults will miss out on this so-called mobility revolution.

“Those who have more limitations (physical, cognitive, multiple disabilities, financial, technology access/understanding) or certain specific needs (transportation that accommodates mobility aids, low-income, rural location) often do not fit into current new mobility business models.”

Conclusion: You can’t argue with demographics

When you mash the demographic data from the Census with the drivespan projections from Foley and Vivoda, you get a 20-year rolling wave starting about now, when the oldest boomers are turning 80. Medication loads are increasing, as is MCI, and along with the proprioception and the possible five-fold increase in crashes. This is the first crisis on the roads.

The second crisis intensifies when the oldest boomers reach 83 in 2029, and the leading-edge boomers enter the old-old stage, when they can no longer drive. By the early 2030s there may well be between 8 and 12 million Americans living in car-dependent communities who are past their drivespan. That’s more than the population of New York City, except New Yorkers have subways and Citibikes.

What we have to do now:

Testing reform

I covered this in my last post.

Vehicle design

Consumer Reports, AARP, and Progressive all recommend that older drivers get SUVS. “Based on safety studies, SUVs are generally better for older drivers than cars. Vehicle weight and size are important factors in predicting survival in a crash.” Yet the IIHS found that SUVs are about 45% more likely to kill pedestrians than smaller cars. We should worry more about the people outside of the cars. It would also make sense to make Intelligent Speed Assistance (the new smart speed limiters) mandatory.

Walkable communities, transit, micromobility lanes

Matthew Lewis concludes:

“The solutions exist and we know what they are. We need dramatically more infill housing — with elevators, because elevator reform is the new zoning reform — in walkable areas, so that people have somewhere to go when they can no longer drive. We need to make driving more expensive and more difficult past a certain age through insurance and relicensing requirements. You can’t just do one of those things. Building the housing without changing the incentives won’t work, because too many people in this cohort are so set in their ways that they will refuse to leave their four-bedroom suburban houses, regardless. You have to make the housing cheaper in walkable areas and make the driving more expensive and harder to do simultaneously.”

The demographic reality is inescapable: We are going to have millions more older drivers with diminishing capabilities, in cars that are too big and too dangerous to everyone around them, in cities and suburbs where it is too easy to drive too fast, where there are few satisfactory alternatives to driving, governed by politicians who don’t have the nerve to do anything about it. It will not end well.

I am lucky, hiding in a cabin near Dorset, Ontario. My family in Toronto has it much worse; the particulate levels from forest fire smoke are higher there, and the temperatures are hotter.

I am also angry. Entire towns are being burned off the map in Northern Ontario by these fires, which, as Toronto city councillor (and former environmental lawyer and activist) Dianne Saxe says, can be attributed to climate change, which will be exacerbated by fossil fuel development.

Meanwhile, our Prime Minister Mark Carney, who, according to David Suzuki, “knows more about climate change than any other prime minister we’ve ever had, still is talking pipelines and has never stopped talking pipelines.” In his book Values, Carney wrote about stopping climate change:

"The importance of this goal cannot be overstated: the task is large, the window of opportunity is short and the risks are existential."

But then he became Prime Minister of a country where almost 25% of its export revenue comes from fossil fuels, 85% of which go south to the USA which is in shakedown mode, and are mostly from Alberta, which is talking separatism, driven by USA right-wing support. It’s a tough spot to be in with tough choices to be made, especially when Carney writes in his book:

"Climate change is the ultimate betrayal of intergenerational equity. It imposes costs on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentives to fix."

Well, Mr. Prime Minister, how’s this for a direct incentive? The country is burning. People are dying, and a lot more are going to die because of the massive increase in PM2.5 pollution.

A study Long-range PM_2.5 pollution and health impacts from the 2023 Canadian wildfires found that an earlier summer of forest fires caused 5,400 acute deaths in North America and 64,300 chronic deaths in North America and Europe. “Our results highlight the far-reaching PM_2.5 pollution and health burden that large wildfires can have in a single year.”

The acute deaths are mostly cardiac-related deaths that happen within a few days of a PM2.5 spike, or exacerbating COPD. The chronic deaths come from longer-term exposure.

We have had heat waves, droughts, and forest fires forever in Canada, and humans have been inhaling PM2.5 since we domesticated fire. The boreal forests depend on fires to regenerate. But what is natural and our current conditions are very different things. The long-term trend towards reducing PM2.5 emissions, from less coal being burned, cleaner cars, and less smoking is being reversed because of fires.

I have written numerous posts about the dangers of PM2.5, which are downplayed or ignored by the fossil fuel industry and the EPA, but every year, the news gets even worse; since I last wrote about particulates, new studies have found:

Exposure to Wildfire Smoke May Be Linked To Increased Risk of Developing Several Cancers. Exposure to wildfire smoke was associated with a significantly increased risk of lung, colorectal, breast, bladder, and blood cancer, according to results from a study presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2026. “For the general public, the key message is that wildfire smoke is not only a short-term respiratory or cardiovascular concern—chronic exposure may also carry long-term cancer risks,” said Wu. “Notably, increased cancer risk may occur even at relatively low levels of wildfire smoke PM_2.5 commonly experienced by general populations.”

Or how about babies?

Wildfire smoke exposure during pregnancy has been linked to adverse birth outcomes, including preterm birth, low birth weight, small for gestational age, and fetal growth restriction. Research published in Lancet Planetary Health found that wildfire smoke exposure during pregnancy was associated with significantly elevated odds of preterm birth across multiple U.S. studies. PM2.5 can cross the placenta, and the chronic oxidative stress produced by smoke exposure can disrupt placental blood flow and fetal development.

But the people hit hardest by PM2.5 are older people with compromised hearts and lungs. One study, Association of Short-term Exposure to Air Pollution With Mortality in Older Adults, found that among older people, “short-term exposures to PM2.5 and warm-season ozone were significantly associated with increased risk of mortality.” with a risk increase of about 1.4% per 10 μg/m³ spike.

Prime Minister Carney, how can you say “the current generation has no direct incentives to fix” climate change? Many who voted for you are hurt or dying from heat and smoke. That seems like a pretty big incentive to me.

This past Saturday, 11 July, there was a gang shootout during a street festival near our home in a mostly white, upper-middle-class neighbourhood where these things don’t often happen. Two young men who apparently were known to each other were killed. Today, three days later, the news coverage is still wall-to-wall. In a Toronto Star article titled Toronto’s streets are where we celebrate. Must we give that up to feel safe? Edward Keenan noted, “Police Chief Myron Demkiw said the St. Clair incident was “heartbreaking and unacceptable.” Prime Minister Mark Carney was horrified.

Mayor Chow said the “pain caused by senseless gun violence is unimaginable” and “casts a long shadow of fear and anger and sadness.” Ontario Premier Doug Ford tweeted, “I am devastated by the senseless violence at the Salsa on St. Clair Festival that has claimed two lives and injured others.” Edward Keenan’s article aggravated me because Toronto streets are not where we get to celebrate other than rare occasions; they are where cars get to drive fast, and the street celebrations become fewer every year. However, Star columnist Rosie DiManno, who often makes my blood boil, sent me over the top:

“You might say that Toronto woke up on Sunday as a wounded city. But that isn’t really true. It merely, maybe, flinched. Except for the neighbourhoods directly impacted, traumatized by what they saw and heard, and those who will now be collecting their dead, the metropolis goes on about its business, as it must. Inured to gunfire, as it has become hardened, deafened to the constant cacophony of violence.”

A day earlier, on Friday, 10 July, a man and a woman were standing on a street corner in suburban Toronto. According to The Star,

“Toronto police said in a news release Friday evening that a 79-year-old woman driving a purple Toyota westbound on Lawrence Avenue East allegedly ran a red light at the intersection of Birchmount Road. The driver of the Toyota collided with a grey Mitsubishi heading south on Birchmount, and a man, 64, and a woman, 61, were struck as they stood on the north-west sidewalk, the news release said. Both pedestrians were pronounced dead at the scene, police said.”

There are no tweets from Mark Carney, Doug Ford, or even Olivia Chow. There is not even a statement from Police Chief Demkiw; just a comment from an inspector saying “What we’re working on right now is just compiling all the information.” The Star concludes: “The victims’ families have been notified, police said Friday night, adding that it is not yet known if charges will be laid.”

After the weekend’s carnage, we have so far this year 13 deaths by guns, and 14 pedestrian deaths by drivers of cars. This is why I get so mad at Rosie Dimanno; she writes “Inured to gunfire, as it has become hardened, deafened to the constant cacophony of violence.” Such dramatic language, but we are beyond inured when it comes to pedestrian deaths, beyond hardened and deafened. We are catatonic and accepting.

Two completely innocent bystanders standing on a corner, gone in a second, and it doesn’t even get a followup story- who are they? Why did this happen? Why are there no charges laid immediately when someone blows through a red light and kills people? Why are there no speed cameras? (Oh right, Doug Ford ripped them out)

Why is nothing done to make intersections like this safer for pedestrians? According to Thegreenline,

“According to Vision Zero, Toronto’s plan to eliminate traffic-related deaths and serious injuries in the city, Scarborough has “the highest ratio of collisions resulting in pedestrian fatalities [31 per cent], compared to 20 per cent in other districts.”

I do not mean to downplay the deaths of two young men on St. Clair Avenue, but they evidently knew each other and were carrying guns. Two completely unknowing and innocent people killed while just standing at a street corner minding their own business should cause far more outrage. Fourteen deaths by driver should cause as much anger as thirteen deaths by shooter, but it doesn’t.

There has been over a hundred years of this, documented by historian Peter Norton and Jessie Singer in her book There are no accidents.- they both note how the industry has downplayed the design of vehicles or roads and convinced everyone that when someone is killed or maimed, it is an unavoidable accident, rather than the fault of the design engineer or the driver. You can only shake your head and say, Oh well, it happens. The language we use is a big part of it.

Streetsblog has often complained about how politicians “decry gun violence, but are ok with traffic violence,” which many believe should be the term we use instead of accident or even crash. LAist explains:

Across the nation, activists have been using a term other than “accident” to emphasize the death toll in local streets and in cities: traffic violence. “Getting hit by a car and being severely injured is a violent act,” said Madeline Brozen, deputy director for UCLA’s Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. “That really understands how it’s personally affecting people and is... part of trying to change the language around this to really help highlight the severity of what’s going on.”

Unlike many in the USA, we are not used to lots of guns in our cities, and shootings happen at a fraction of the rate that they do south of the border, and they are even rarer in nice middle-class areas. So this shooting is big news.

However, way more people die because of traffic violence. In 2023 in Canada there were 1964 road deaths and 289 firearm homicides, a ratio of 7 to 1. There were 298 pedestrians killed by drivers, more than were killed by shooters, but guess which one gets all the attention.

I am angry and upset that my kids and my neighbours were put at risk because of gun violence in our quiet and polite neighbourhood. But I am outraged that two completely innocent people have been killed by traffic violence, and nobody seems to care at all.