Finally got a used copy of Bernadette Devlin's memoir and started reading it over the weekend. I'm just getting started and I'm sure more notes and reflections will come. However, a couple things stood out that I wanted to briefly comment on.

In the forward she acknowledges the protest movement in Northern Ireland of which she is just one small piece. Of her generation of struggle she writes, "we were born into an unjust system; we are not prepared to grow old in it." I love that. It captures both the bigness of the problem as well as the hope needed to keep going in resistance to it. This is the sort of mantra I want for parenting as well; teaching my kids that the world they have inherited is not their mess but it needs to be their fight. And to root themselves in the history of struggle that came before them, people just like Bernadette.

Another thing I wanted to draw attention to is the way she specifically points to her religious upbringing as what helped radicalize her. She writes,

"If it hadn’t been for the fact that I had an essentially Christian background from my mother, poverty would have made me bitter rather than socialist."

There are many, MANY good reasons to turn away from Christianity - both in its present and historical expressions, and I fault no one for doing so - however, there is also a strong legacy of struggle and justice within it. This again speaks to the sort of tradition that I want to raise my kids in. Not the forms of it that are tied to capitalism and colonialism, but to seek truth in the saints who fought for justice on behalf of the most vulnerable and oppressed. This is, in my opinion, the only kind of faith worth having.

There is always a subjective nature to happiness.

I've been reading a book that explores the relationship between happiness and the built environment, basically asking whether or not how we design and build cities can contribute to the happiness of people who live in them. The author suggests that studies have shown that people are able to accurately describe their feelings of happiness; meaning, when someone says they are happy, they usually are.

The reason this matters in the context of the book is that it cuts against some of the market logic that happiness is best determined by analyzing how people spend their money. People will spend their money for many reasons, not all of them because it's what makes them happy. This squares with the theory that increased consumption actually has a point in which it no longer brings real happiness.

It also means that even though people might accurately describe how they're feeling, they may not really understand why. Market logic takes advantage of this by promising a feeling that people only know when they've achieved it. Consumption might bring fleeting pleasure, but it does bring lasting happiness.

Understanding the role that individual, subjective experiences of happiness play is important; but we also need to go further in understanding the various factors that can contribute to a long-lasting experience of happiness across an entire population.

Been reading a bit about Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, who attempted to change the trajectory that the city was on. Throughout the 20th C, Bogotá had become dominated by private vehicles and had privatized much of its public space. Peñalosa believed that cities could inspire happiness if they were planned for people, rather than cars. During his time as mayor he scrapped highway expansions, installed bike paths and public parks, put in a highly ambitious rapid transit system, increased gas taxes, and began to ban cars from the city centre.

Of course not all of these changes were readily accepted by the public and certain demographics pushed back. But he held to a conviction that we don't have to just give in and do things the way they always have been. Cities can be whatever we want them to be.

“A city can be friendly to people or it can be friendly to cars, but it can't be both.” -- Peñalosa

It's amazing how easily we acquiesce in our planning to car centric thinking. We look at busy streets, backed up traffic, drivers making unsafe decisions, and think we can solve this by adding more infrastructure for private vehicles. Give them more lanes, make it so they don't have to wait at lights, make parking more available. The results of this are always the same: if you make streets better for cars, more people will drive on them. We need to fight this impulse. Instead of making things easier for drivers, make them harder. De-prioritize the convenience of private vehicles and invest in helping people get around in other ways.

In every way this makes a city better.

Been consuming a bunch of Sinead O'Connor content over the last few days. She was such an absolutely remarkable spirit and it's tragic to see her gone. But I came across this interview with Alyson McCabe, who recently wrote a book about why Sinead O'Connor matters. It was a really good conversation but there was something that stood out to me. At one point McCabe said that Sinead O'Connor had almost no career self-preservation. Repeatedly she would let her ideals and her values override the conventional wisdom for celebrity success.

In an interview that O'Connor did in 2021, she herself said,

“I don’t define success by how much money you make. I define success, personally, by [asking myself] did I keep the contract I made when I made my holy communion and my confirmation? Which was to stay true to the very Christian beliefs that were drilled into me by the Catholic Church, which were the rejection of the material world in favour of truth. So I was just being me. I was just being a punk.”

As someone who has at times had a similar lack of career self-preservation because of my ideals, I resonated with all of this. I had a mentor who used to say, don't smoke your own supply. That is, don't buy into the hype of what people say about you -- good or bad. This seemed to be what Sinead O'Connor lived by. Do what seems right to you based on the values you try to live by, not aligning yourself to other people's expectations. That's not to say you shouldn't reflect on those values often, but let that be your measure of success; not status or money or whether or not people who don't even know you liked what you did.

Anyways, she was wonderful and I'm really trying to track down a copy of her Sean-Nós Nua album.

Listening to one of my current favourite podcasts, the Urbanist Agenda, today and they had a really good conversation around the benefits and values of townhouses (or row houses). Its a form of housing that often gets a really bad reputation here in North America but shouldn't be overlooked.

A couple of the clear benefits they mention are:

• Significantly less house maintenance;

• Reduced heating costs (due to shared walls);

• Achieve a remarkable amount of density (which leads to better walkability);

• Can do mixed development properly and add small businesses onto the corners;

• Great cross drafts for cooling;

• Easily sectioned into apartments;

• Residents still get an entire home with multiple floors.

I remember when we lived in Stouffville some of my favourite builds were a street over from me. It was a row of town houses with the garages behind them. This allowed for the entire house to be used for living (no wasted space with a garage) and also created a nice framing in of the backyard. It's a style popular in the cities but should maybe make a stronger comeback in suburbia. It's definitely time to let the detached, single family home dream die and townhouses might just be the best way forward.