Articles tagged with: Phillip Mackintosh

• Learn about issues of migration, mobility at upcoming public symposium

  Wednesday, October 19, 2022 | By Samantha Morris

  FROM THE BROCK NEWS | WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2022 | by Amanda Bishop

  

  Movement and Mobility is an interdisciplinary, virtual symposium taking place on Wednesday, Oct. 26 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. All members of the Brock and wider communities are welcome to attend. (Photo by Al Elmes on Unsplash)

  Researchers from across Brock University will share insights on migration, immigration, movement and the mobility of people, things and ideas at a virtual public event next week.

  Hosted by the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Social Justice Research Institute (SJRI), the Movement and Mobility Symposium will feature six presentations from faculty, staff and student researchers in Geography and Tourism Studies, English Language and Literature, Education and Sociology at Brock.

  Presentations include:

  • “Education is my only carriage — it was not an easy road” by PhD student Denese Brown-Bell (MEd ’18)
  • “Road infrastructure, mobility and gendered subjectivities in Shimshal, Pakistan” by Professor Nancy Cook and Professor David Butz
  • “Contradictory mobility: child self-protection and automobiles in interwar Toronto’s Globe” by Professor Phillip Gordon Mackintosh
  • “Reflections on mobility and the 2021 photos of the Mounted U.S. Border Patrol” by Associate Professor Gale Coskan-Johnson
  • “Developing decolonial aesthetics with migrant domestic worker creative communities” by Assistant Professor Julie Ham
  • “Displacement and belonging in Canada: reconciliation through research, knowledge translation and the arts” by Faculty of Education Research Officer Snežana Obradović-Ratković, Professor Kari-Lynn Winters and Assistant Professor Catherine Longboat, with Associate Professor Spy Dénommé-Welch of Western University

  Associate Professor and Interim SJRI Director Tamara El-Hoss says the event is inspired by the current political climate.

  “Issues of mobility, displacement and migration are at the forefront of populous movements on all sides of the political spectrum,” says El-Hoss. “I look forward to hearing a diverse range of perspectives on these urgent and necessary questions from the presenters at the symposium.”

  The free public event is the latest in the Social Sciences Symposium Series, which aims to showcase the variety of work being conducted by faculty and student researchers across Brock’s Faculties to uncover an array of perspectives and foster potential synergies and collaborations. It is also the second symposium to be co-hosted by SJRI.

  Dean Ingrid Makus of the Faculty of Social Sciences expressed delight at partnering with SJRI for another event after the success of last year’s Social Justice and Community Collaboration symposium.

  “Our Symposium Series is designed to give the wider community a glimpse of the breadth of research and insight being carried out by Brock’s researchers on many of our society’s most pressing issues,” says Makus. “We are thrilled to partner with the SJRI once again to stage an event that promises to be engaging and enriching for all who attend.”

  Movement and Mobility: A Virtual Symposium will be livestreamed on Lifesize Wednesday, Oct. 26 from 10 a.m to 1 p.m. Everyone is welcome to attend, but advance registration is required.

  STORY REPOSTED FROM THE BROCK NEWS

  Tags: David Butz, event, Faculty of Social Sciences, geography, Human Geography, Phillip Mackintosh, research
  Categories: News

• Public symposium to share Brock research on mental health

  Tuesday, April 20, 2021 | By Samantha Morris

  FROM THE BROCK NEWS | by Amanda Bishop

  

  Faculty, student and staff presenters from across Brock University will explore various aspects of mental health during a virtual public symposium on Tuesday, April 27.

  Mental health, including during the pandemic, will be discussed by Brock researchers from across the University at a public event next week.

  Perspectives on Mental Health, a free online symposium, takes place Tuesday, April 27 from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m.

  The interdisciplinary event will feature faculty, student and staff presenters from the Departments of Child and Youth Studies, Geography and Tourism Studies, Education, Health Sciences and Nursing, as well as the Student Wellness and Accessibility Centre.

  Researchers will offer their perspectives on a wide array of topics related to mental health, including:

  • experiences of nature for Canadian youth
  • perceptions of weight and bullying among adolescents
  • social and emotional learning in elementary schools
  • an urban mental health crisis at the turn of the 20th century

  Several of the presenters will focus on the various effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on youth, including:

  • the benefits of dog-walking to relieve pandemic stress in young people
  • perfectionism both before and during the pandemic
  • transitioning from high school to university during the pandemic
  • impacts of youth mental health on families

  Details on the presenters and a full list of presentations with descriptions are available online.

  Perspectives on Mental Health kicks off a new interdisciplinary symposium series hosted by the Faculty of Social Sciences. It is intended to create more opportunities for members of the Brock and wider communities to learn about research and activities happening across the University related to various themes.

  Ingrid Makus, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, is eager to welcome visitors to these events, which are intended for a non-expert audience.

  “With this new series, we hope to explore topics from multiple perspectives,” says Makus. “This inaugural event, Perspectives on Mental Health, offers audience members and participants alike a unique opportunity to consider the theme of mental health through a variety of lenses.”

  Everyone is welcome to attend the live event. Registration is required. A link to join via Lifesize will be sent following registration.

  FROM THE BROCK NEWS

  Tags: event, Faculty of Social Sciences, Phillip Mackintosh, research
  Categories: News

• New book chapter explores the historical micro-geography of liberal urbanism in Toronto’s Brunswick Avenue neighbourhood

  Monday, January 11, 2021 | By Samantha Morris

  Dr. Phillip Mackintosh has published a new chapter in the book Micro-Geographies of the City, 1750-1900 titled “Liberalism underfoot: A micro-geography of street paving and social dissolution – Brunswick Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, 1898–99”.

  This chapter defines liberal urbanism in the context of Toronto’s paving problem and the universally unpopular local improvements by-law, devised to rehabilitate and ultimately capitalise the modern city. It focuses on the particular case of Brunswick Avenue and how Brunswickers’ perturbations of choice dismantled community good will. The four blocks of Brunswick Avenue between College and Bloor underwent two phases of pavement installation from 1880 to 1900. The first stretch, from College to Ulster, laid a cedar block roadway in 1882, which had an expiry date of 1892. Property owners tolerated their spent cedar roadway for four years and then purchased an asphalt surface in 1896, built by contractor David Chalmers in October 1896. Curiously given the snooty reputation of the homeowners in that section of Brunswick the same neighbourhood wanted only a plank sidewalk on the west side of their new asphalt pavement despite the city engineer recommending brick.

  Read the chapter and full book here.

  Citation:

  Phillip Gordon Mackintosh (2021) Liberalism Underfoot: Paving and Social Paradox—Brunswick Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, 1898. In Alida Clemente, Jon Stobbart & Dag Lindstrom eds, Micro-Geographies of the City, 1750-1900. Research in Historical Geography Series, London: Routledge.

  Tags: book, book chapter, geography, historical geography, Human Geography, Phillip Mackintosh, research, Toronto
  Categories: News

• Build it and they will ride: Bicycle geography lessons for Toronto

  Tuesday, December 18, 2018 | By Samantha Morris

  REPOSTED FROM THE CONVERSATION 
  December 17, 2018 | By Phillip Mackintosh

  To paraphrase urbanist James Howard Kunstler, Toronto city council is sleepwalking into the future. While 21st century Toronto’s shift to multi-modal transportation (public transit, automobiles, feet, bicycles, motor cycles, scooters, and skateboards, among others) is already under way, council stubbornly resists its formal implementation.

  We see the catastrophic results of city council’s inaction — negligence — every week. On Nov. 1, 2018, there were 16 vehicle/pedestrian collisions. This echoed another terrible 24-hour period in October of 2016, when 18 people were struck by motor vehicles. And still another in 2015, with 15 collisions in one day.

  Fatalities have risen from an average of 47 per year (2005-12) to 64 per year (2013-16), a consequence of the increase in people on automobilized streets. So far in 2018, 38 cyclists and pedestrians have died on Toronto streets.

  Part of the problem is that too many city councillors have repeatedly voted against bicyclists, bike lanes and multi-modality in general. One infamous and intractable (and now turfed) councillor said, “I do not believe bicycles should be on roads at all.” How odd. This is not what city councillors thought a century ago.

  

  An early attempt to envision multimodality, by the Toronto Civic Guild (Civic Guild Bulletin, Vol. 1 (June 1912): 10). Toronto Civic Guild, Author provided

  The ‘bicycle-friendly’ council

  At the beginning of the 20th century, Toronto city council embraced bicycles and their riders. City councillors worked with city engineers, bicycle clubs and the Canadian Wheelman’s Association (CWA) to pave streets with asphalt, organize cinder bicycle paths, pave and maintain the so-called “devil strips” (narrow strips of roadway between the opposite running streetcar tracks) and fix the interminable pot holes in the city’s ubiquitous cedar block roads. Council did this to encourage bicycling in a city where “tides of cyclists” used the streets. City councillors, many of whom were cyclists themselves, passed bylaws regulating cycling in 1895. These councillors appreciated that “the thousands of bicyclists of (the) city will hail with pleasure any move on part of the Council” to make the streets accessible to them.

  Why and how does the present city council not see the urban social geographic and economic utility of the bicycle? Likely because it needs a lesson in transportation geography — and it can’t get one soon enough. So here’s a simple, introductory concept: Build it and they will come.

  Traffic generation

  In 1900, Scribner’s magazine published a typically dry civil engineering piece by William Barclay Parsons, the chief engineer of the New York Rapid Transit Commission. In the article, Parsons imparted this transportation planning gem:

  “Whenever a new line has been built in New York, although the first effect may have been — but not always — to draw traffic from a parallel and near-by road, such withdrawal has been but temporary; and in a short time the natural growth of the city, stimulated by the new means of transportation offered, has been sufficient to provide requisite traffic for the new line and increased traffic for the old ones.”

  In other words, each time Parsons built a new subway line, he generated traffic on all the lines.

  This observation was not exclusive to Parsons. In his well-thumbed “Street Pavements and Paving Materials: A Manual of City Pavements” — also published in 1900 — Canadian road engineer George Tillson made a similar contention. Writing about the practices and problems of road paving, he insisted that:

  “It must be remembered that when any one road is selected to be made into a thoroughfare, traffic will be immediately diverted to it and the wear of the pavement abnormally increased.”

  For Tillson, the principle was: Pave it and they will come.

  American road-builder Robert Moses learned these same lessons through his automobility experiments in mid-20th century New York. He intuited that what Parsons was really talking about was traffic generation: the idea that a public transit line or, in his case, a highway, is constructed to increase traffic volume.

  Every time Moses built a road or bridge, traffic invariably choked it, and he would have to build another. This was intentional and he admitted it. As he said:

  “We wouldn’t have any American economy without the automobile business. That’s literally true… this is a great industry that has to go on, and has to keep on turning out cars and trucks and buses, and there have to be places for them to run. There have to be modern roads, modern arteries. Somebody’s got to build them …”

  So Moses and his road-building acolytes did, creating the automobile economy in the process.

  The transportation geography principle that Toronto Council must learn is this: build public transit and you will increase the demand for public transit routes and increase ridership. A public transit culture and economy will follow.

  Choose instead to build roads, and the principle remains the same: you will increase the demand for roads, and increase drivers and driving culture, resulting in an automobile economy.

  It works for bicycles, too…

  

  A cyclist rides past as workers lay down streetcar tracks at the Toronto intersection of Broadview and Queen. June 12, 1918. Arthur Goss/flickr, CC BY

  As Toronto undertook the arduous and contentious process of paving its streets with asphalt in the 1890s, the bicycle population swelled. The CWA estimated…

  Continue reading on The Conversation.

  Tags: geography, Human Geography, Opinion, Phillip Mackintosh, Transportation
  Categories: News

• Phillip Mackintosh nominated for Heritage Toronto award

  Thursday, October 25, 2018 | By Samantha Morris

  BY JEANNIE MACKINTOSH

   

  

  Newspaper City: Toronto’s Street Surfaces and the Liberal Press, 1860-1935 by Associate Professor of Geography and Tourism Studies Phillip Mackintosh is nominated for the 2018 Historical Writing award from Heritage Toronto.

  Associate Professor Phillip Gordon Mackintosh’s Newspaper City: Toronto’s Street Surfaces and the Liberal Press, 1860-1935 is nominated for the 2018 Historical Writing award from Heritage Toronto.

  This nomination “recognizes the importance of the history of Toronto’s streets, especially at a time of rampant condo development,” says Mackintosh, of Brock’s Department of Geography and Tourism Studies.

  Mackintosh says he “would love suburban politicians to read it to get some historical context for the continuing problems of automobilism on Toronto streets.” The “Fatal City” chapter, which he says was “horrific to write,” looks at Toronto’s engagement with the car and its catastrophic consequences for the city’s children. “The legacy of municipal inaction regarding pedestrian and cyclist safety reflects in the deaths we’re seeing now,” he says.

  Newspaper City, in part, tells the story of how the editors of Toronto’s liberal newspapers campaigned to pave the streets in an effort to modernize the city. But property owners by and large resisted the city’s mania for asphalt, intuiting that speeded-up streets would harm their children.

  On another level, the book reveals the challenges inherent in using newspapers as primary sources in historical research. After all, newspapers at the turn of the last century, like those of today, had agendas of their own. In Newspaper City, Mackintosh cautions that researchers must be alert to historical newspapers’ inherent but inconspicuous flaws.

  The Heritage Toronto Awards celebrate extraordinary contributions to the conservation and promotion of Toronto’s heritage. The 2018 Historical Writing award, which recognizes English language works of non-fiction, will be presented on October 29.

  Tags: awards, book, geography, historical geography, Human Geography, Phillip Mackintosh
  Categories: News

• Phillip Mackintosh’s Newspaper City nominated for Heritage Toronto award

  Thursday, October 11, 2018 | By Samantha Morris

   Phillip Mackintosh’s Newspaper City: Toronto’s Street Surfaces and the Liberal Press, 1860-1935 has been nominated for a Heritage Toronto book award for Historical Writing.

  Newspaper City tells the story of how the Toronto Globe and Toronto Daily Star campaigned for surface infrastructure improvements as liberal editors saw this as the leading expression of modern urbanity. This book traces the opinions expressed in news articles over 75 years to understand the conflict between newspaper editors and property owners who resisted paying for infrastructure improvements.

  Winners will be announced at the 2018 Heritage Toronto Awards Ceremony on Monday, October 29, 2018.

   

  Tags: awards, book, geography, Human Geography, Phillip Mackintosh, research
  Categories: News

• MACKINTOSH: Death by street – Toronto’s ongoing problems with the automobile

  Wednesday, August 15, 2018 | By Samantha Morris

  

  Banning cars is one way to ensure pedestrian and cyclist safety on city streets. Andrew Gook/ Unsplash

  Phillip Gordon Mackintosh, Associate Professor of Geography and Tourism Studies at Brock, wrote a piece recently published in The Conversation about pedestrian and cyclist deaths and injuries in Toronto’s busy streets.

  Mackintosh writes:

  It seems every day, another pedestrian or cyclist is injured or killed in Toronto. In this respect the city is living a historical déjà vu: interwar Toronto (1919-1939) witnessed similar numbers of walkers and bikers — especially children — dying on its streets by the same cause: Automobiles.

  Yet, like their earlier cousins, today’s Torontonians hear the same platitudes voiced by police and community leaders: Cyclists and pedestrians must actively defend their own self-interests. In other words, cyclists and pedestrians must ultimately construct ways to protect themselves — by themselves — on thoroughfares full of dangerous motor vehicles.

  How odd that in 2018 the best Toronto’s policymakers and enforcers can do is to rehash a century-old idea that in practice failed catastrophically in the past? Historical fatalities involving children give us a glimpse into Toronto’s remarkably unimaginative approach to the street.

  Toronto’s leaders alone created this intolerable street-policy circumstance. Their virtual indenture to the car since the 1910s effectively renders them policy-impotent.

  Continue reading the full article here.

  Tags: Cycling, Opinion, Phillip Mackintosh, Transportation
  Categories: News

• Policy-makers tune out Toronto’s human roadkill

  Thursday, August 02, 2018 | By Samantha Morris

  From The Toronto Star
  Sunday, July 29, 2018

  By PHILLIP GORDON MACKINTOSH
  Opinion

  To read relentless news of pedestrian and cyclist deaths and injuries in Toronto is to relive the city’s early 20th century past.

  We see the same cause of the tragedy (motor vehicles), hear the same heartfelt condolences, and note the same bromide from constable, politician or lobbyist: cyclists and pedestrians must attend vigorously to their self-interest on hazardous streets.

  Crossings at Maclennan Ave. were labelled death traps when this picture was taken in 1937. Traffic officers were stationed at the bottom and top of the hill to make sure schoolchildren crossed — or dashed across — safely. (EI SCAN)

  It never occurs to anyone that such platitudes have been rehearsed by civic leaders for over a century.

  To be fair, they have no other words. Automobilization in Toronto since the 1910s has rendered the city’s community leaders virtually speechless. Why? Because there is only one — impossible — public policy to effect pedestrian and cyclist safety on streets dominated by motor vehicles: automobile prohibition. With prohibition as a workable policy left permanently “off the table,” what else can our leaders say?

  Torontonians have long felt the threat posed by automobilization, watching the slaughter on roadways and sidewalks. A century ago, children died by the dozens at the wheels of motorists (90 were killed between 1919 and 1921).

  The pedestrian and cyclist carnage continued through the 1920s and 1930s. Children especially were imperiled. City newspapers gruesomely described how motor vehicles flayed, crushed and dragged children to death.

  It wasn’t always thus. Before the First World War, street traffic consisted primarily of walkers, slow-moving streetcars and horse traffic. Yet, by the end of the war, as motor vehicle ownership increased, collision statistics had risen precipitously.

  Drivers ran through intersections, failed to yield to streetcars and riders, jumped curbs, drove on both sides of the road and cut off or bumped cyclists. Importantly, pedestrians could not yet accurately assess the time and space compression of fast-moving cars, or the emerging danger of an automobilizing environment.

  Throughout the 1920s, the city’s irresistible opportunities for work attracted migrants, further swelling the numbers of pedestrians on the streets. Alas, pedestrian populations and automobile ownership ballooned simultaneously, neither constrained by countervailing public policy.

  Compounding the situation, the automobile was seen as an excellent “vehicle” (as it were) for economic prosperity, enlivening the urban imaginations of Toronto’s politicians and business people.

  Newspapers promoted it as the “perfect machine” and “the chariot of prosperity.” The car “had achieved its rightful prerogative over all other methods of transportation.” Such hyperbole propelled the automobile into an actual, lethal conflict with traditional street users, including carefree children on their ancestral playground.

  So, what did policy-makers do to stop cars from killing children on the streets? Nothing, despite deputations to City Council by the Toronto Playground Association in 1920, and a 1928 motion by Alderman Pearce to ban automobiles from streets where children played. In every year between 1927 and 1934, dozens of toddlers died horribly in the streets.

  The closest that leaders came to policy was encouraging drivers to be careful, and admonishing pedestrians that “The Game of Walking Has Been Speeded Up.” This meant persuading children (including preschoolers who simply strayed onto streets chasing butterflies, blowing whistles or pushing doll prams) of “the necessity of guarding against accidents by abstaining from contributory negligence,” as the Ontario Safety League put it.

  This is why we look both ways before crossing the road — a solitary “policy” legacy of a history that systemically privileged automobiles above pedestrians and cyclists in the urban hierarchy.

  Closely connected to looking “up and down before crossing the road” is an official predilection to blame pedestrians, cyclists and children for the horrors that befall them. To blame automobiles would be to confront them in policy. That won’t happen.

  Call this what it is: political negligence. Any pedestrian or cyclist can tell you how to save lives in Toronto. Put severe restrictions on automobile use in pedestrian- and bicycle-heavy city neighbourhoods. This won’t happen, either.

  A century ago, Toronto wouldn’t enact policy to prevent “the needless mangling of little ones,” those innocent “little tots of the streets” who died by the hundreds. Don’t expect policy-makers in 2018 to protect our adult bicyclists and pedestrians, equally precious, yet regarded by many as wilful and intrusive nuisances.

  Phillip Gordon Mackintosh is associate professor of Geography at Brock University, and author of Newspaper City: Toronto’s Street Surfaces and the Liberal Press, 1860-1935.

  Article reposted from The Toronto Star.

  Tags: Opinion, Phillip Mackintosh
  Categories: News

• Congratulations to Adam Fischer on the successful completion of his MA in Geography thesis

  Tuesday, July 24, 2018 | By Samantha Morris

  

  Pictured from left to right: Dr. David Butz (Graduate Program Director); Dr. Phillip Mackintosh (supervisor); Adam Fischer; Dr. Chris Fullerton (committee member); and Dr. Alan Walks (external examiner, University of Toronto).

  The Department of Geography and Tourism Studies would like to extend congratulations to Adam Fischer and his committee for the successful defense of his Master of Arts in Geography thesis entitled ‘A Domestic Geography of Money: How Mortgage Debt, Home Prices and Toronto’s Condominiums “Prop Up” the Canadian Economy’.

  Adam’s research was supervised by Dr. Phillip Mackintosh, and committee members, Dr. Jeffrey Boggs and Dr. Christopher Fullerton. Many thanks to External Examiner, Dr. Alan Walks (Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto).

  We wish Adam all the best for his future endeavours!

  Tags: Chris Fullerton, David Butz, graduate studies, MA Geography, Phillip Mackintosh, thesis defense
  Categories: News

• MA in Geography thesis defence scheduled for July 24: “A Domestic Geography of Money” by Adam Fischer

  Monday, July 09, 2018 | By Samantha Morris

  Adam Fischer will defend his MA thesis titled “A Domestic Geography of Money: How Mortgage Debt, Home Prices, and Toronto’s Condominiums “Prop up” the Canadian Economy” on July 24, 2018 from 12:00pm to 2:00pm. The defense will take place in MC C-407 and is open to the public.

  Adam Fisher’s Examining Committee includes Dr. Alan Walks from the University of Toronto (External), Dr. Philip Mackintosh (Supervisor), Dr. Jeffrey Boggs (Committee Member), and Dr. Christopher Fullerton (Committee Member).

  Tags: Chris Fullerton, Ebru Ustundag, graduate studies, Jeff Boggs, MA Geography, Phillip Mackintosh, thesis defense
  Categories: Events