Granny ghettos

Wherever you look in Warsaw, you’re liable to spot an elderly man or woman trudging along the sidewalk or sidling onto the subway, cane in one hand, grocery bags in the other.

Observing this, Magda pointed out today that there seem to be a lot of old people out and about in Warsaw, more than back home in Vernon or Kamloops. I’m not so sure but there does seem to be something there. As compared to Warsaw, in Vernon, which has a very healthy (if that is the right word) pacemaker-per-capita ratio, the elderly seem less visible.

Why? I have a couple theories. One, there are simply more pedestrians here, ourselves included, than back home where more people drive. More pedestrians mean more old pedestrians. My second theory, I think, is more interesting and perhaps worthy of further investigation.

In Warsaw, the elderly seem to be rather spread out. The hundreds of apartment blocks provide plenty of housing (some reasonably priced, some not so much) for the elderly all around the city. Those apartment blocks are also home to young families, teenagers, professionals and kindergartents.

In Vernon, however, elderly populations are very much confined to certain neighbourhoods. Granny ghettos, if you will. They live, play and go for walks within their closed communities, in their courtyards and, in downtown Vernon, between their apartment buildings, the Schubert Centre and Safeway. The result is a more age-homogenized population.

It is also, as Tom Lancaster, the man in charge of Vernon’s OCP, told me a couple years ago unhealthy for cities.

“You need the vibrancy of youth, you need the vibrancy of children, you need the whole spectrum and I think for a long time we’ve developed cities where we segregate people of the various age groups,” said Lancaster.

“It doesn’t work. You’ve got to mix all these things together to the point where older folks are no longer walking down the street and are afraid of the youth because they don’t live by them or youth are not going around making jokes at the expense of older folks or you don’t have people complining about the noise of young children bouncing a ball on the street.

“It’s ridiculous,” Lancaster said of gated age-restricted communities. “Part of life is all the different age groups and we need to wrap our minds around that.”

Maybe rain isn’t so bad

Before we leave for the internet-less Polish hinterland tomorrow, a quick thought:

While I’ve been complaining about the rain here in Warsaw, including the fact that what little  snow we got a couple nights ago was quickly melted by the drizzle, a check on the ol’ Weather Network website put my mind at ease today.

When I first saw that it was -28 in Vernon (with a windchill of -34), I honestly wished I was there. The cold weather always makes the indoors feel warmer and there is sort of an under-seige atmosphere that is, in a sick little way, fun. But then I remembered the fact that if I was back in Vernon, I would likely be working tomorrow, when the temperature will remain in the minus-teens, apparently. By work, I mean taking photos while driving around in a car in which the heater only works in the summer. By the end of the day my fingers would begin to resemble grape popsicles.

So if we don’t have a White Christmas this year, maybe that’ll be okay.

There be fish in those waters

Great story in the Kelowna Capital News by Kevin Parnell on rainbow trout in Okanagan Lake. Just don’t try and get steamrolled by a speedboat:

When you look at the gong show that is boating on Okanagan Lake, it’s tough to picture an angler sitting in an aluminum boat, trolling his lure or fly. There’s just not that much room.

But in the shoulder seasons of early spring and late fall, when the cigar boats are locked up for another season, there is some excellent fishing to be had on Okanagan Lake.

Rainbow trout weighing upwards of 10 pounds are not out of the ordinary. Twenty-pounders plus are said to lurk in the clear, cold waters.

“It’s a tough lake to fish but it can be very rewarding,” said Rod Hennig, the owner of Rodney’s Reel Outdoors, a fish guiding service that has been in operation for three years.

The three Rs

Every time I throw a bottle or crumpled up box in the garbage I get the heebie-jeebies. In Canada, it costs you money to throw away bottles and is at least frowned upon not to recycle one’s cardboard boxes and the like. Here, there don’t seem to be many options for city dwellers who want to recycle. Like in England, the common course of action is to simply dump them all in the same bag as one’s food clippings and plastic waste and throw it on top of the dumpster.

Not everywhere though; at one home where we stayed for a week or so, the garbage can had seperate compartments for composting, paper and waste. Of course that home, like another we stayed at, had a garden and thus space for a compost pile. Most houses in the city don’t have such options and there is no blue bag program here. (Of course I’m not sure if even Kamloops has implemented such a program yet. Whenever I talk about the program to non-Vernonites, I’m constantly surprised to realized that Vernon is actually ahead of the curve on something.)

In Germany cans and bottles include a deposit in the price, like in Canada. That idea hasn’t yet hit Poland so until we find some place to take our bottles, were adding to the giant trash heap.

All of which raises some questions. I’m an environmentally-concerned person as it is, but I don’t always think about the environment as I go about my day-to-day activities. Sometimes I pollute more than necessary, sometimes I waste energy because of sheer laziness. I did the same back in Canada. Partially because of this, I’d been of the opinion that there needs to be pocket-book incentives to get people to act environmentally responsibly.

But, if I so compulsively want to put cardboard into a seperate bag that does not benefit me financially, what does that mean? Sure I think it’s important to recycle, but given my willingness to waste in other facets of life, it surprises me how buil- in my urge to recycle a milk jug is. The reason, I think, is pure habit.

Squishing a milk jug and putting it in a bag is now a habit nurtured by years of repetition but also by recycling cans and bottles. Slowly the habit expands and you begin adding more to the bag just because it’s there and easy to use.

How this applies to the larger world and specifically the battle against climate change I don’t know. But using sheer force of habit to encourage change is something that needs to, and I know is, being considered.

This also reminds me of a theory out there that people can be “nudged” to do the right thing through minor public policy urgings.

From Slate:

The real trick to understanding how to approach Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, the new book by Cass R. Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler, lies in recognizing the limitations of your inner Homer Simpson. In the authors’ view, your whole brain is a civil-war zone between your “automatic system” (the rapid, intuitive, reptilian part) and your “reflective system” (the slow, deliberate, self-conscious part). Behavioral economists take the position that snap judgments formed by your Homer Simpson brain are often quite terrible ones, which go on to have enormous consequences in your financial, physical, and emotional life. Like Homer, we use all sorts of mental “heuristics” or cognitive “rules of thumb” that are flawed, which is why we pay for magazine subscriptions for years after the three-month “free” trial ended (“status quo bias”) and why we buy lottery tickets (“unrealistic optimism”).

Passing winds

After being tipped off by a kind comment, I’ve been reading up on ventilation corridors, the theory behind which is apparently why there are large stretches of park land in urban Warsaw. The idea behind such corridors is to allow air to move freely around an urban centre by marking off stretches of city from development.

I may have that wrong, as I may have everything else wrong in this blog posting. My key source of information, after all, is google. But it seems ventilation corridors are coming back in style with sustainable development leading the charge for such greenways. I’ll tack on below a few paragraphs I’ve found around the net and I’ll probably return to this subject in the future, once I know more.

From the climate booklet for urban development of a German province (or state?): Italics are mine.

The climatic and air-hygienic perspective recommends encircling development with as much green space as possible as well as crisscrossing it with green corridors oriented to topographic features (e.g. ventilation passages; air induction corridors) and thus support air exchange.

Urban sprawl from numerous developments strewn across the landscape as well as the emergence of disruptive belts of built-up areas, e.g. through the convergence of neighboring communities, are to be avoided. Urban development must be accompanied by close, large fresh- and cold-air production areas and ventilation corridors.

The development of commercial and industrial enterprises should ensure that the residential areas in the immediate vicinity do not suffer from heightened emissions resulting from the local wind patterns.

Vernon residents may be interested in the following (from the same site):

Hillsides in extended built-up areas, should remain undeveloped, especially when development exists in valleys, since intensive cold- and fresh-air transport occurs here (however, development on southern hillsides is desirable from an energy conservation perspective – see also Chapter 3). The same is valid for gullies and ridges along these hillsides.

Saddle-like topographies on the backside of mountains serve as air induction corridors and should not be developed.

Turtle Mountain would seem like the epitome of a “saddle-like topography” while The Rise is built on a south-facing hillside and could be environmentally palatable if the houses were built with energy conversation in mind (I doubt they were. Otherwise we would have heard about it.

Creating ventilation corridors in Vernon, which lies in a valley, would seem both very helpful from a livability perspective and nearly impossible, given the lack of land.

Trains, trams and automobiles

Magda pointed out today that, despite substantive mass transit here in Zagreb, the roads are still crowded and congested. These roads, were there to be no mass transit, would be absolutely clogged and unnavigateable. It got me thinking, though, in Vernon, politicians build roads to try and meet today’s or, hopefully, tomorrow’s transit needs.

But if instead of expanding roads, cities and towns expanded mass transportation, there’s a good chance it would have just as big an effect on transit problems while being more sustainable both economically and environmentally.

An example would be the new bus to UBC-Okanagan, which is undoubtedly a good idea. At around $70,000 a year, it’s fairly cheap. If you consider that the widening of 25th Avenue took probably 30 to 40 times more than that (I’m guessing, but judging by road works in Armstrong and area I don’t think I’m too far off). You could probably throw a whole lot more buses on the road, increasing service levels and, hopefully, increasing riders and decreasing traffic.

Just a thought.