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Christopher Hume on The Nature of Things

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interchange42

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Living City: A Critical Guide

The Nature of Things
Airing: Thursday February 5 at 8 pm on CBC-TV
What's wrong with Canada's cities? What's right? Award-winning urban affairs columnist Christopher Hume takes a cross-country journey to explore the sustainability, viability and liveability of Canada's population centres.
 
I only managed to watch Halifax/Montreal/Toronto before I had to leave, but it was somewhat interesting in my mind. Parts of it, like taking the train cross Canada, were a bit much (who takes the train Halifax-Montreal? Nobody.) From what I saw, it hardly broke any boundaries or presented anything that Hume's regular readers wouldn't have already heard. I was disappointed Hume never left "downtown" Toronto. If you are going to do a show on Canada's cities, it would be worth going north of Bloor to see what the issues are. NYCC, for instance, could easily mesh with at least some of his themes about reclaiming the suburbs, but it might as well have not existed.
 
Whoaccio said:
I only managed to watch Halifax/Montreal/Toronto before I had to leave, but it was somewhat interesting in my mind. Parts of it, like taking the train cross Canada, were a bit much (who takes the train Halifax-Montreal? Nobody.)
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Going to school in Halifax, a lot of my friends would take the train from Toronto to Halifax (or vice versa). It was cheaper when you were travelling with a ton of stuff (the airlines in Halifax loved soaking us for excess baggage weight at the end of the year), the trade off was the 30+ hour ride (though even that was apparently fun, since you were traveling with other university students)
 
I saw the episode. I thought he was a little harsh on Toronto and relatively easy going on Halifax and Vancouver. Yes, TO's got it's fair share of issues but he gave very little credit to efforts like Transit City and MO2020 or the greenbelt.

I am also surprised that he left Ottawa out of the show.
 
If he were to go on about Transit City, I'd either laugh or cry.

I only saw this from Winnipeg (talking about the Manitoba Hydro building and its energy conservation and how the extra 2000 employees was to help downtown) through to Vancouver, entirely by accident. I don't know how he was able to get from Winnipeg to Calgary by train, while not mentioning Edmonton. He was hard enough on Calgary, though saying the centre city had potential, and praised the LRT (saying Calgary was doing great with transit, as if the LRT was all that could matter). Vancouver was a love-in.

I found the Hydro building to be the most interesting part.
 
ShonTron said:
. I don't know how he was able to get from Winnipeg to Calgary by train, while not mentioning Edmonton.
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Odd how Edmonton was avoided, even if he evidently must have visited it, or something (the diagram showed his train going from Jasper)
 
Yet another reason to pack those bags Brandon!

I didn't find Hume too hard on Toronto. Toronto received the longest segment and a huge amount of praise from Hume saying something like "an indisputed world city." He did seem frustrated by Toronto's lost generation of infrastructure building (and who isn't?) and excited by the recent cultural projects that have come to completion.

I think he was hardest on Calgary personally.
 
an excellent program, with some good old toronto bias (we are awesome after all). gotta love david suzuki and the nature of things. it's interesting, i always make sure to read hume's columns in the star and he always strikes me as heavily pretentious and harsh, albeit, necessarily so. however in interviews, he seems much more approachable and relaxed.

good old cbc, they never let you down. well, at least when it comes to documentaries, news coverage and sports. their drama has been suspect over the years.
 
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