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.

Jason Hickel, author of Less Is More, wrote a great article advocating for universal public services as a way forward for a just transition. His underlying point is that when we privatize these essential services and goods, people need more money in order to afford them. This keeps them in jobs creating even more things that puts extra strain on our natural resources. His solution is to ‘decommodify’ these essential goods - to which he includes healthcare, education, housing, transit, nutritious food, energy, water, and communications — and eliminating artificial scarcity.

“Right now it is impossible to take even obvious steps toward climate mitigation (such as scaling down fossil fuel production or other destructive sectors), because people in affected industries would lose access to wages, housing, healthcare, etc. No one should accept such an outcome. With universal services and an emancipatory job guarantee, we can protect against any economic insecurity and guarantee a just transition. There is no necessary contradiction between ecological and social objectives. The two can and must be pursued together."

His ideas are worth engaging with, mainly because we need to take seriously the limits of something like green capitalism as a solution. This is a compelling vision of a society that seeks the welfare of all alongside the welfare of the planet. He ends by suggesting that these demands should be part of a united climate and labour movement.

I agree.

Working on the final essay of my much delayed MDIV this week. One of my favourite things about writing is going down rabbit trails on ideas and concepts that are only tangentially related to the topic. It does make my process quite a bit longer but I find I come across so many fascinating ideas.

This morning I’ve been doing a bit of a deep dive into family-work conflict theory. This is when the energy, time, or behaviourial demands of work comes into conflict with your family (source). It seems that for a long time these were two spheres with not a lot of overlap in terms of academic research; however, as women increased in the workforce, more attention began to be given to this conflict. This is largely due to the way in which women’s roles in these two spheres tended to overlap with simultaneous demands on them from both.

What is most relevant to my research is the way in which work-family conflict relates to an overall sense of wellbeing. Studies show that,

“Workers who are satisfied with and engaged in their jobs, who can manage the daily stresses of work, and who are able to integrate their work with the rest of their life are happier and more productive."(Source)

Stress, on the other hand, is highly tied to work hours and when the demands of the job bleed into other areas of life. When that balance is thrown off, workers report higher stress which can lead to “psychosomatic symptoms, depression and other forms of psychological distress, use of medication, alcohol consumption, substance abuse, clinical mood disorders, clinical anxiety disorders, and emotional exhaustion.”

This is sort of the central point this paper will be exploring, one’s work life is directly related to the wellbeing of your whole life. Thus, advocating for better work for everyone raises the wellbeing of the whole society. As I will be arguing, this is something churches should take seriously in order to better care for people - as both individuals and families.