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This is how I learn things!
August 6, 2007 Young women in their 20s and 30s in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Boston, Chicago and Minneapolis make more than young men. In New York, they earn 117% of men, in Dallas 120%. Women in these age categories nation wide only make 89% the wages of their male counterparts.
Major cities across Canada and in many other countries suffer from decaying infrastructure and a lack of funds. While provincial or state governments as well as federal governments have strong taxation powers to extract money from citizens (income tax, sales tax, etc.), cities typically are more limited. Property taxes and occasionally some sort of tax on gasoline sold in the city often comprise the only fundraising measures available besides asking for handouts from other levels of government.
However, if the national economy depends upon the economic health of major cities, then it would be wise for federal and regional governments to support cities.
This is precisely what the Conference Board of Canada (an independent economic and policy research organization) argues in their recently released a study entitled "Canada's Hub Cities: A Driving Force in the Economy."
They state that economic growth in smaller communities across the country strongly correlates to solid growth in the hub city. The Conference Board identified nine such hub cities in Canada. If you want to support all communities, they argue focusing policy efforts and boosting support for the 9 hub cities.
In their study they examined whether Canada's three largest cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver) played super-hub roles nationally, and they do not. Increasing support for Toronto apparently will not help people in Moose Jaw.
This study provides further evidence of the new city-state dynamic emerging. 
Nation-states are no longer the engines of economic development, according to new research -- instead it is the Megalopolis. Richard Florida of Rise-of-the-Creative-Class fame has taken on the task of understanding the role that clusters of cities play in the global economy. The preliminary results are fascinating.
September 25, 2007 Strategies to work around US immigration policies are starting to become more creative, and bizarre. An author at CEOs for Cities is reporting that a consultant speaker at the Mayor’s Hemispheric Forum this week will advocate that the best strategy to revive Detroit is to partner with Windsor, Ontario Canada. The logic goes, apparently, that because of a shortage of H1-B visas allowing skilled foreigners to live and work in the USA, cities like Detroit cannot re-energize their economies and shift the business base further into the knowledge economy. Therefore, under this theory, US companies should set up partner operations in nearby Canadian cities, as it is much easier for the talented to immigrate to Canada. The recent announcement of Microsoft’s new Vancouver-area operation (a 2 hours’ drive north of its Redmond Washington headquarters), is cited as an example.
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This map focuses on the Cascadian urban corridor, or “megacity,” formed by the expansion of the cities of Vancouver, Seattle and Portland. |
Cascadia Calling Gudrun Will revisits a 21st-century region VICTORIA, 2013—Visualize, if you will, the flagpoles on either side of the entrance to the Parliament Buildings. They once flew the Province of British Columbia’s trusty colonial standard, but now, according to the latest edict issued by the Prefecture of British Columbia, they fly Cascadian colours. Fluttering in the breeze coming off the Inner Harbour (quite balmy with the advance of global warming), the newly installed banners are dominated by wavy blue-and-white stripes representing the Pacific Northwest's definitive features: its oceanside position and string of white-capped mountains. In the flags’ upper left, fields of deep green and crimson honour the region’s lush evergreens and underlying tectonic fire, joined together by the golden rays of a setting westerly sun. A pinecone, symbolizing rebirth, nestles in the sun’s core. Sound far-fetched? Don't laugh—the idea of some kind of Northwest Coast regional collaboration, or even unification, was widely discussed during the 1990s as a plausible scenario for the early 21st century. Now that we've entered that new millennium, the question is where this imagined future went. Was it mothballed for a more auspicious time, or has it snuck into our daily reality? Certainly the concept of Cascadia, either as a political/trade entity or a symbolic movement, has been around ever since Lewis and Clark explored the West. Reasons are plentiful; anyone travelling through the region today would have to be sensorily deprived not to perceive the affinities of the coastal rainforest environments and their Asian-inflected populations.
"Oregon came into the American sphere of influence in the 1790s when Captain Gray discovered the mouth of the Columbia River. Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore Oregon in 1804, but he saw it possibly developing into a parallel, independent Republic of the Pacific, rather than a part of the United States."
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These superlative weapons gave the Muslims a great advantage, and their blacksmiths carefully guarded the secret to their manufacture. The secret died eventually died out in the eighteenth century and no European smith was able to reproduce their method.
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