#doug saunders

[between-stars-and-waves]

There’s no migration crisis - the crisis is political opportunism

Numbers in the United States and the European Union are at low levels and dropping, as are crime rates

[brandondonnelly]

Spaces between buildings

Doug Saunders recently published a great piece in the Globe and Mail about the “the dead spaces between buildings” and the architectural revolution that is taking place from Mexico City to Toronto to solve this underappreciated problem.

The example in Mexico City is that of the San Pablo Xalpa public housing complex where architect Rozana Montiel transformed the underutilized spaces between the apartment buildings into vibrant “common-unity” spaces. 

This meant removing 95% of the fences and gates that had previously been erected as safeguard against the unsavory people and acts that were taking place in these open spaces.

The underlying goal was to try and address the socioeconomic decline that had taken root in Mexico’s public housing complexes. And there was a sense that part of the problem was simply their physical design.

Of course, this is partially about trying to correct the failures of post-war planning. But I think this conversation around the “spaces between buildings” shouldn’t just be a corrective one. It can be broader than that.

[canadianauthors]

Doug Saunders

Books include The Myth of the Muslim Tide and Arrival City.

@DougSaunders | Twitter

[porterdavis]

This too shall pass

“The U.S. Supreme Court had never, until 2008, suggested even once that there was any such right. Warren Burger, the arch-conservative Supreme Court justice appointed by Richard Nixon, in an interview in 1991 described the then-new idea of an individual right to bear arms as “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”  Doug Saunders, Globe and Mail

[mediamattress]

“I think it’s a bit unfair that I have to be multicultural, while you get to be whatever you want to be.” That was said to me a few days ago, with an ironic smile and no trace of anger, by a young, dark-skinned woman in a hijab who spoke with a more pronounced Canadian accent than mine. I mention this not because her words surprised me, but because they have become so familiar. Over the past couple of years, when I have found myself hearing sharp criticism of multiculturalism in this country, it is very often coming from a Canadian-born child of religious-minority immigrants. “Multiculturalism was fine for my parents’ generation,” a Bangladeshi-Canadian radio producer told me, “but I have no use for it – it just makes me feel like a second-class Canadian.”

Doug Saunders, "Immigrants' children find multiculturalism obsolete" (The Globe and Mail)

[justbeingseriouslysocial]

Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU is the new Time Magazine giving Man of the Year to "You, the reader."

Doug Saunders

[nprfreshair]

By the time the Republican leadership race took place in 2011, early 2012, four or five leading candidates including people like Newt Gingrich were willing to say things like, 'There is a stealth Sharia, there's a stealth plot among Muslim immigrants and their offspring in the United States to impose religious law upon the country.' This suddenly had become something that you could say in polite society, in political circles and so on, in Congress in the United States. And I should say that Mitt Romney has never apparently subscribed to or spoken of these ideas, so luckily, perhaps because he's himself from a religious minority, free from that.

- Doug Saunders on The Myth Of The Muslim Tide