branding oil: Stavanger

Stavanger, Norway

Stavanger is Norway's Calgary, in that it is the site of oil companies' head offices for the offshore oil industry.  Once could say that the oil sands were offshore for Calgary as well, as it doesn't have to deal with any of the environmental or social fallout associated with oil extraction.

Stavanger, I read on Science Nordic, is seeking to re-brand itself, acknowledging that the association with oil will not always be positive if climate change continues to threaten our existence.  Evidently, Stavanger is 'historically Norway's teetotallers' town and also the golden buckle of the country's bible belt'.  Its pre-oil industry was canning, but curiously has 'no distinct proletarian culture', unlike Oslo.  I feel as if I am reading all sorts of things between the lines, but can't understand what they mean.  

With neither history nor the proletariat suitable for a modern brand, they are working on Stavanger as an energy town (their italics).  What a surprise.  Calgary's newest brand, coincidentally, is 'Catch the Energy'.  The vagueness of energy: it could mean nuclear, solar, wind, nano-technology, wood stoves – it could even mean people doing a lot of jogging.  It will do well for the future as almost anything can be fitted to it.  

This being Norway, Stavanger, predictably, has a young architecture firm, Helen & Hard, doing beautiful work.

Helen & Hard. Ipark, an office complex for young, innovative companies in Stavanger, 2012From Helen & Hard's description of this project: 'the design concept is based on a simple principle of stacking prefabricated timber elements to create the façades. By horizontally rotating the elements, two spectacular cantilevers are created accentuating the entrances'. 

Norway has trees, we have trees.  Norway has oil, we have oil.  Norway uses wood extensively: Oslo's airport has a large wood egg-shaped bubble hovering over the concourse, the counters in the train stations are wood, the panelling on the transit carriages is wood.  We, on the other hand, do not use wood extensively. I'm pricing spruce and cedar planks to replace my back deck; I am told by every lumber company that I should buy the plastic wood decking instead. 

Louis Edouard Fournier: the funeral of Shelley

Louis Edouard Fournier, The Funeral of Shelley, 1889. Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 213.4cm. The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in 1822 when his yacht was wrecked in a storm in the Gulf of Spezzia, Italy. His body was cremated and his remains later buried at the Protestant cemetery in Rome.  He is watched over here by Trelawny, Leigh Hunt and Byron.  He was 29; Keats had died the previous year, Byron two years later: the Romantic triumvirate, their recklessness with life and limb echoed in the romance we still attach to Kurt Cobain – the dead boy.  Romance is all in the perception of death, not the reality.

-----------------

an interesting read: Richard Holmes on the mythologising of Shelley's death, part of the National Portrait Gallery's Interrupted Lives lecture series in 2004.

Patrick Keiller's London, 1994

I've been waiting to see this again for years, since 1994 in fact:

tents, non-military

Tent City, Coronado, California, 1909

Coronado Tent City, California 1900-1939, started out as tents on the beach, from this 1909 postcard.  Then the tents were given thatched roofs, then by the 1920s half walls, a trolley, a fire department and a police force.  There was a fun fair, concerts, a promenade and a pavilion; the tents had beds and chairs, there were cooking tents, one could rent a palm tent in 1919 for $1 a day, $15 a month.  The half-walled tents were called cottages, they were $23 a week.

Tent City, Coronado, California, n.d.Tents are portable, temporary, lightweight buildings, yes, but they are also vulnerable: to weather, to light and dark, to tearing, to wind.  This community of holiday tents is so different from a campground where one's tent is pitched between RVs with flat screens and the 24-hour hum of AC units.  And so different from a motel, those maximum security cells with permanently locked windows.

Of course there was crime in America in the 1910s and 20s, there were gangs, there were drugs, gambling, prostitution, murders and all the rest, but somehow, like the shift in warfare from entirely military casualties to now mostly civilian collateral damage, Tent City must have been somehow protected by its innocence.  It was not part of an equation of drugs and gang violence which took place in some other battlefield where no one was playing on the beach in their bathing suits.  

It seems civilised, this partition between civilians and violence, both in war and everyday life.  Not sure it exists anymore. 

Tent City, Coronado, California, 1906

Jon Rafman: what google sees

Jon Rafman. Google Street Views, 2010

Jon Rafman. Google Street Views, 2010

I was very sloppy with this post a couple of days ago: got the dates wrong and hadn't thought too deeply about these images.  What I quite liked about them was that they themselves had no meaning: caught by a camera programmed to photograph the street in nine different directions every ten feet or whatever it is, they simply are raw information. 

Jon Rafman chose, out of billions of such raw images, a collection that he ascribed some sort of role to, simply by selecting them.  Many of the people caught in many of the images know they are on camera and act up for it, others don't notice.  There are many traffic accidents that seem to have happened just as the Google van went by.  The stone house and the roadway, above, are simply beautiful ideas, which is why I selected them out of the hundreds on Rafman's 9-eyes.com.  There are so many selection filters one could apply, it turns viewers into search engine filters themselves. Which is of course how we all negotiate our own worlds.

the Empress Hotel

The Empress Hotel, Victoria BC.

The Empress Hotel was built between 1904 and 1906, shortly after the death of the real Empress in 1901.  It was a CPR hotel, Francis Rattenbury the English architect, also the architect of the Parliament Buildings and the Crystal Pool.  Unless one is from Victoria, Rattenbury is better known perhaps for being killed on his wife's instructions, the story told in Terence Rattigan's 1975 play, Cause Célèbre.

The Empress is pinnacled and towered, looming and gothic, now covered in ivy.  One doesn't make architectural criticisms of it because it is such an institution: the archetypal outpost of Empire, like Raffles in Singapore but not so racy: the Empress is famous for tea.  Of course.  This is Victoria.

Next to it was the Crystal Pool where all little Victorian schoolchildren learned to swim up until the 1960s – either there or at Elk Lake in the summer in the Daily Colonist swim classes.  Yes, that was the name of the newspaper.  The Crystal Pool, built in 1925, was a large glass house: no curved pieces, all flat plate glass on cast iron structure, at the time known as the largest salt-water pool in the Empire.  It was a wonderful space for a child – light streamed into the pool, glittered on the water, the palm trees dripped, exotic as any Hockney pool in California.  

This was my Canadian childhood.

Crystal Garden pool. F M Rattenbury and Percy James, architects. Victoria BC 1925

Victoria, Empress

Queen Victoria, 1893

Queen Victoria in 1893.  As she never left Britain, this oriental tent/pavilion was probably in the gardens at Osborne.  She is working on her dispatch boxes. Victoria seems to have been a woman of great passions: she loved her husband to distraction, her groom, her personal muslim servant who taught her Urdu, her Prime Ministers, especially Disraeli and his expansionist policies which led to the second Anglo-Afghan war.  She 'rescued' India from the ruling British East India Company after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, believed in religious freedom for India and other protectorates, saw the empire as civilising and protective.  However, the empire was conducted by governments and ministers who were not always so benign, and the influence of monarchy is constitutionally marginal.

This lovely painting of Victoria at four: a hat in proportions Marc Jacobs has just resurrected.

Stephen Poyntz Denning 1795-1864 Princess Victoria aged four, 1823. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

mail

Royal Mail. series of 50, produced by the Royal Mail in conjuction with Wills Tobacco, circa 1930

When mail was in an envelope, with stamps, delivered by hand no matter where you were or what you were doing, mail delivery scheduled the day, the week, the month; time lags were sometimes great, pictures were rare and precious.  Yet, yet, society functioned, ideas were exchanged, romances grew, news was heard. 

Why must everything be instant now? Maybe that isn't the question.  Perhaps it is something about patience, and lack of it.  It isn't about technology, but something that drives technology.  That progress has always equalled speed: speed of change and literally going faster.  The underpinning of sustainability discussions is the interrogation of 'progress' and whether or not it can still be seen as a postitive, or is it just a pernicious aspect of modernism.  it is an old debate, as old as the enlightenment.  What is surprising is that it can still be made.  

A man's a man, for all that

Not sure who is singing this, perhaps Graham Duncan who put the video together, but it is a gentle version.  compared to Paolo Nutini.  

As this is the week of all things Scottish, can't help think of Nana – Nellie Bruce, born in 1896 in Kemnay, Aberdeenshire and who was brought to Canada at 14 by her family, and for whom even the thought of eating haggis was a shocking insult, it being some sort of horrible boiled sausage thing eaten by peasants in bothies.  Of which, needless to say, she was not one.  

Her mother wept for six months with shock at leaving her little stone village for the wind-swept prairies and forever after quoted great reams of Tennyson and her favourite, Wordsworth's Lucy Gray, mournful and melancholic: 

Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray:
And, when I crossed the wild,
I chanced to see at break of day
The solitary child.

No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
She dwelt on a wide moor,
–The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door!

You yet may spy the fawn at play,
The hare upon the green;
But the sweet face of Lucy Gray
Will never more be seen.

'To-night will be a stormy night-
You to the town must go;
And take a lantern, Child, to light
Your mother through the snow.'

'That, Father! will I gladly do:
'Tis scarcely afternoon-
The minster-clock has just struck two,
And yonder is the moon!'

At this the Father raised his hook,
And snapped a faggot-band;
He plied his work; – and Lucy took
The lantern in her hand.

Not blither is the mountain roe:
With many a wanton stroke
Her feet disperse the powdery snow,
That rises up like smoke.

The storm came on before its time:
She wandered up and down;
And many a hill did Lucy climb:
But never reached the town.

The wretched parents all that night
Went shouting far and wide;
But there was neither sound nor sight
To serve them for a guide.

At day-break on a hill they stood
That overlooked the moor;
And thence they saw the bridge of wood,
A furlong from their door.

They wept – and, turning homeward, cried,
'In heaven we all shall meet';
– When in the snow the mother spied
The print of Lucy's feet.

Then downwards from the steep hill's edge
They tracked the footmarks small;
And through the broken hawthorn hedge,
And by the long stone-wall;

And then an open field they crossed:
The marks were still the same;
They tracked them on, nor ever lost;
And to the bridge they came.

They followed from the snowy bank
Those footmarks, one by one,
Into the middle of the plank;
And further there were none!

– Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.

O'er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.

This too is a Scottish immigration experience.  It isn't all kilts and bagpipes you know.

ravens as witness

Robert Bateman. Young Haida Raven. Lithograph

Quite a few years ago one of the houses on my street was rented by an organisation that re-rented houses to aboriginal families, many of whom oscillate between urban homelessness, remote reserves and multi-family houses.  They were great, setting off in the morning to walk the city, laughing, their clothes carefully tuned to a code unreadable by the rest of us: romantic, moccasined, with dogs and all the time in the day.

The weeping elm in the front yard of this house was occupied that summer by an owl, two ravens and a family of indignant magpies.  I'd never seen an owl in my neighbourhood, and ravens too were new although I'd once seen one in Bragg Creek.  The summer ended badly, with one of the beautiful girls attacking another girl who was carrying on with the first girl's husband.  Bloodied people were carried off in ambulances and police vans.  
The owl went immediately, then the family moved on, the ravens went with them, the house was empty for a couple of years, the magpies stayed.  

Several years later a Blackfoot woman from Siksika First Nation told me that owls announce that a death will occur.  The ravens, continually plagued by the magpies, just sat all summer long, dignified and waiting, and when it was all over, they disappeared. 

Main Street

Independencia Avenue, Chihuahua, Mexico. circa 1960

Vintage Everyday this week has a small collection of Mexican postcards from the 1950s and '60s.  Far from looking like a foreign country, these small town street scenes look like anywhere in Canada of the same era.  Prairie towns such as High River, or Olds, still have a scrappy one- and two-storey main street with cars and trucks angle-parked on both sides.  They look like these postcards, and like lots of little towns in the American southwest today.  

This was thirty years before NAFTA integration; cartoon Mexico of the 1950s was Speedy Gonzales.  And yet, US penetration into both Canada and Mexico was so pervasive that small town morphology in each three countries followed the American frontier model.

Of course the Jai Alai arena, the bullring in Nogales, or the churches are specifically Mexican, but the signage — a mix of constructivism and art deco, the neon, the products, the cars — it all looks like Hastings Street in Vancouver in 1958.

The past is a foreign country and it looks like Mexico.

gabions 2

Gabions at Studland Beach, Dorset

Gabions counter erosion on beaches, usually under soft cliffs such as limestone and sandstone, or they protect roads and paths next to the beach. Lots of them in soft calcareous and slatey southern England: above, Studland Beach in Dorset, tidy genteel gabions made by a masonry culture – they look like dry stone walls.  Below, rough gabions in rough, granitey Scotland.

Duncan Astley. Gabions at Loch Hourn, Corran, ScotlandGabions are transparent to water, but obstruct larger things: sand and rock. A near-perfect solution, water is not thwarted, it comes and goes, but in a diminished way, its force absorbed by the gabion.  The fill would be formless and weak if not held in place by the wire cage which, with the lightest of touch, forms a fighting unit of rubble.

DJ Mehdi, Tonton du Bled

from Chloé Roubert's site: chloecollects.blogspot.com

DJ Mehdi and core-periphery relations

surveillance 2

The Kooples advertising, France, 2011

The Kooples is a French ready to wear company, one of a number that use mass-marketing and manufacturing techniques (cheap off-shore labour for production, point of sale data collection) in combination with luxury market branding (good stores at good addresses, good design).  The image above is from a The Kooples advertisement.  It promotes couples shopping together, rather than shopping as an individual act.  Well fine, whatever.

What is striking about the photographs in this ad is that they are taken from the vantage point of a CCTV camera. And somehow this is made to seem okay.

Coincidently, I just finished reading The Dying Light by Henry Porter, written in 2009, about a very near future, maybe 2012 or so, in which security systems and the corporations that provide them are so embedded in government that they in fact run the government.  Since 9/11 so many civil liberties in so many western countries have been suspended because of anti-terrorist legislation that the right to privacy has been eroded to the point that there is none.  

This has long been Henry Porter's main theme.  After The Dying Light I quickly re-read Remembrance Day, written in 2000 before all this supposedly started. Cell phone technology was key to a complex plot to destabilise the Northern Ireland peace process.  As a document, this earlier book is very interesting: terrorism was still the purview of the IRA and Eastern Europe; Ireland could be understood in terms of retaliation and revenge, Eastern Europe in terms of greed for power.  Nine years later he writes The Dying LIght where terrorism is industrial, based on total surveillance of one's every action, and at the core of British government.  

My father, who was a great reader of a particularly addictive kind of action thriller where a captain (usually) in the British Army came up against all sorts of nefarious plots involving the abuse of power by the brass and/or the secret services, said that one reads novels to find out what is actually going on in the world, not history books, because novelists have a prescience gene; the act of writing is an act of gathering clues and thinking them into a future that the reader will recognise when they read it.  

So, as a reader, I look at The Kooples ad and see an acceptance of the state of surveillance. London has more CCTV cameras than all of Europe – a great help in the almost instantaneous arrest of 3000 people and the charging of a thousand in the August riots, which echoed similar riots in Paris in 2005.  A facebook group was set up to help the Metropolitan Police identify people caught on CCTV with 900,000 members.  Much was made of the tactics of the police, batons and water cannons, and of the causes of the unrest, little was made of how suspects were identified.

Charging anyone from the Vancouver riots is bogged down in too much surveillance footage, including voluntary surveillance from private cellphones.  The Canadian government has, for the first time, posted a most-wanted list on the web, inviting us as citizens to recognise and turn in these people, one of whom was apprehended almost immediately. We are being turned into informers.  And this role is being eased in to our society by images such as the one above, where being watched is normal, cool even.

Nick Cave's Soundsuits

Nick Cave, Soundsuit 1, socks, paint, dryer lint, wood, wool, 2006

Nick Cave, not the singer, but the artist from Missouri who was with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and is now director of the fashion program at the Art Institute of Chicago.  Above, is a Soundsuit.  Soundsuits' references are wide and deep, they are sculptures, costumes, installations.  They are assemblages, they make sounds, they refer historically to various African ceremonial garments.  They appear in performances and in art museums.

I lived in the middle of Kansas for a year, my first teaching gig, and spent a lot of time driving back country roads and finding installations of what was known as folk art then, outsider art now.  What they all had in common is their obsessive convictions and their marginal relationship to orthodox art and architecture – the Watts Towers in Los Angeles were not unlike Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in their mad-builder concentration.  

More recently, Tyree Guyton's Heidelberg project in Detroit has rejuvenated a despairing neighbourhood by saying, your house is yours, make it into something that is you.  And because this is an economically challenged place, such transformations inevitably are done with discarded and then re-found materials: the essence of folk art: all invention, no money.

What is interesting about this and where it comes back to Nick Cave and Soundsuits is that these projects cannot be included under the patronising rubric of outsider art: Nick Cave is firmly in the centre of American art production, and Heidelberg is a well-documented demonstration project of urban renewal that does not involve mass destruction.

Last week Gloria Steinem in an interview on Q  said it takes about a hundred years for a social change to really become an embedded part of the social fabric. Second wave feminism is about 40 years old and so, no, we are not in a post-feminist era, we still have 60 years of feminist struggle ahead.  The civil rights movement in the USA happened in the 1960s, just 50 years ago.  We are only now starting to find work that is  embedded in the orthodoxy of contemporary art discourse: it is not post-racial, for it is so very African American, an identity that is critical to the work.  But it is allowed to take its place within the discourse, and that is new.

Hal Foster on the Shard

But what does it mean?

Hal Foster, who recently wrote The Art-Architecture Complex, talks about Renzo Piano's Shard, a blindingly tall building next to London Bridge station.  It is a post 9/11 tower, cognisant of the National Institute Standards and Technology report into the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers.

That it might be used as a wayfaring marker to orient one's way through the city is such a weak point: this is the language of marketting and branding. London is so dense and its mega-buildings with nicknames so relatively new, one wonders how anyone found their way to work over the last 500 years.

the Wilton Diptych

The Wilton Diptych (c. 1395–99), tempera on wood, each section 57 cm × 29.2 cm. National Gallery, London

The Wilton Diptych has come up a few times recently, on tv and yesterday as I was reading Alan Bennett's Untold Stories.  It is a fairly mysterious small pair of paintings, just 12 x 11" each, hinged, a personal altarpiece for Richard II, painted near the end of his reign.  He was born in 1367 and became king at ten in 1377, deposed in 1399 and died at 33 in 1400 of starvation, the imprisoned last of the Plantagenets.  

Not sure why it keeps popping up in public view all of a sudden unless it is part of a general reclamation of the past that underpins European's problems with multiculturalism.  'They want to change our culture', or our way of life, or our laws, or whatever it is.  I'm sure the British don't mean the culture of binge drinking and football hooliganism, no, it is glorious culture, safely lodged in places such as the National Gallery.  Genius, the series on British scientists introduced by Stephen Hawking, Downton Abbey, the bloody History of Scotland — Britain is intent on reminding itself, on television, just what it was that made it Great.

The diptych is a lovely thing.  On the left panel, the boy king kneels, flanked by his patron saints Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr, both once kings of England, and John the Baptist carrying the lamb of God.  Richard kneels on stoney ground, not unlike Sudbury.  
On the right panel is a phalanx of angels, all wearing Richard's emblem, a white hart lying on the ground.  They, and Mary, stand on a carpet of flowers, their blue robes are Marian blue, the blue of heaven.  Their crowns are English roses, their powerful wings a fractal of feathers on a wing.

Richard's earthly life is being sanctioned by something on a completely different scale.  This is the power of faith, earthly life may be hell, but there's an end to it, and a field of flowers will be achieved.  This encourages endurance; a lack of faith perhaps encourages impatience with an unsatisfactory life in the here and now.
Our touching faith in technology as a solution to the energy crisis is cast as a kind of achievable heaven, but on such a different scale that there will be many generations whose lives are sacrificed while we plan for a future none of us will see.

the north

Terminology, very confusing.  As a child I learned that the difficulty in laying down the trans-continental Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s was crossing muskeg, which swallowed tracks and even whole trains.  This is what happened in the north, which I assumed was in Northern Canada, somewhere in the Northwest Territories, and as with things you learn in grade 8, I never examined it again until this past week in Sudbury.  

It is not that muskeg isn't a treacherous thing, great wetlands that form where there isn't drainage: bogs, full of decaying plant material, trapped moose and train tracks which eventually form peat and I suppose, ultimately coal.  No, the other treacherous thing is the word north.

The northern imagination written about by Northrop Fry, Margaret Atwood, embodied in the Group of Seven and Georgian Bay is not the north I thought it was, The North, north of the provinces.  It is actually western Ontario.   
This came as something of a surprise, given that Sudbury sits at 46°N and has a growing zone of 4b.  Calgary, which no one would consider north at all, sits almost 600km north at 51°N in zone 2b.

In another instance, the Ring of Fire is generally known as the zone of earthquake and volcanic activity that rings the Pacific Ocean, where the Pacific tectonic plate grinds against the North American plate, the Eurasian, Australian and Nazca plates.  In the west we hear a lot about it, especially in Vancouver where all buildings have been essentially rebuilt to earthquake standards.

But in Ontario, Ring of Fire is a mine in the James Bay region where chromium was recently discovered and for which a smelter is planned, much to the purported benefit of First Nations in the area.  It is seen as a revitalisation of Ontario's mining interest and will be introducing Chinese development interests to Sudbury.   I only know this because I watched Steve Paikin's Agenda last night on TVO where there was a debate on whether industrial development or species protection was more important in the north.  Their north.  The wishy-washy conclusion was that we should have both, which means that mining and forestry will proceed with glee and with a few ameliorative concessions to fish, birds and migrating herds. Who do not vote.

It is a different country, Ontario.

Preparing the ground for flatland housing development. Lonely yellow hydrant awaits.  
Anyway, this train of thought was triggered by a new subdivision (above) on a ridge that looks down on Sudbury.  Downtown Sudbury has a problem with drainage, sitting as it does on the bedrock of the Canadian Shield.  Water sits in lakes or in muskeggy wetlands, (they'd be called sloughs on the prairie, bogs on the coast).  In older districts, streets and the little houses lining them in the bottom of the basin in which downtown Sudbury sits, regularly flood, the streets become culverts and swales, the water hasn't got a lot of options.  Thus, new development perched on ridges above the city has a certain appeal.  

Putting in services for new development requires, by convention, that they be underground.  But there is no underground here, it is solid rock, so ground is created in a cut and fill way.  The rock is blasted into rubble and shifted around to make flat sites for houses with the sewer and water safely installed beneath.  
There are a lot of similarities between Sudbury and Yellowknife, where new development does exactly this, rock blasted into coarse gravel for developer houses on cul-de-sacs one could find anywhere in Canada.  Aleta Fowler wrote about this in On Site 14: does one go to the north to live as if one was in a southern Canadian suburb?

Kenneth Hayes has introduced the term geo-cosmopolitanism to the discussion of urban development which, in its rough outlines means being aware of and taking into account the deep geo-logic of place.  The naming is important, we can put geo-cosmopolitanism in all its complexity onto a different way of looking at cities, more deeply rooted in their history, their industries, their place in the world. 

Sudbury

Musagetes Foundation held a Café in Sudbury last week, part of a series of investigations in how artistic thinking, practices and strategies can inform medium-sized cities whose industrial bases are either shifting or leaving.  Rejka in Croatia, Lecce in Italy, Sudbury in Canada.

The Big Nickel: didn't realise this had been a Centennial project, not authorised by the City, independently funded and built by the mining community and originally placed 36" outside Sudbury's city limits.  

The Big Nickel, 1963-4. 30' high, Sudbury OntarioN E Thing's 1969 photograph of an empty billboard in Sudbury.  This one is like the Stanfield fumble: he caught the football a dozen times in a row for a photo-op, fumbled one and of course that is the one they used.  The empty billboard is of course surreal, the empty frame, but only coincidently was it in Sudbury. 

Ian Baxter, N E Thing Company. Sign. Highway 17 near Sudbury, 1969
Sudbury Saturday Night, the girls at bingo, the boys are stinko, Inco temporarily forgotten.  Well, that bit was prescient.  
The Trans-Canada through Sudbury, a channel blasted out of the Shield, chemically blackened by ore-reduction processes that also produce slag heaps.

Kenneth Hayes has written a most amazing essay about why Sudbury even exists.  It is a history 2 billion years old, giant meteor hits the earth and splashes nickel, which may have been in the meteor but may have been deep in earth's core, into a great ring.  Nickel is what hardens steel for stainless steel.  Confusingly, much of the ore is smelted in Norway.  
There are other minerals, copper - lovely pale green river-run pebbles on gravel roads, and iron staining cliffs red when they aren't already black, all this found accidentally when the CPR was going through in the 1880s.  

However, mining requires less people these days, Inco is now Vale (Brazil), Falconbridge is now Xstrata (Switzerland), at the base of the Creighton Mine is a neutrino observatory, there is a new university, Laurentian, soon to have a new architecture school, there is a medical centre with a cancer research component that serves the Sudbury region, there are lakes, there is a fierce re-greening program and there is a hell of a lot of civic pride that appears to rest mainly on the ability to be in a canoe, on a lake, 10 minutes after leaving home.

The thing about stereotypes is that they can act as a protective shield.  The rest of the country can dismiss Sudbury, lodged as it is somewhere in Stomping Tom's 1970s, meanwhile Sudbury has been extremely busy developing itself for better or for ill, almost without attention.  

The swimming-pool blue of a tailings pond. Sudbury 2011

palm print identification

For those who could possibly understand how such things work: a System for Biometric Authorisation of Internet Users Based on Fusion of Face and Palmprint Features.