June 2009
7 posts
Watch-
From Vinay Gupta: Simple Critical Infrastructure Mapping - Understanding Vital Systems and How They Keep You Safe
Retail Infrastructure
Canada has four times more retail space per capita than any European country; second only to the US.
What are we going to do with it?
The CRTC and Conservative government have for the most part adopted a do-nothing approach. Allowing Bell Canada and others to continue throttling the Internet and limit competition leaves Canada behind in terms Internet speed, cost, and access. Allowing big telecoms to become Internet gatekeepers is bad for free speech, bad for consumer choice, and bad for the innovation economy.
While the...
“International development aid should more and more take the form of freely and...”
– Herman Daly, From a failed growth economy to a steady-state economy
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Vancouver Council approves car-free sundays in... →
“Council also approved a new program called Summer Spaces, which will close four neighbourhoods — Collingwood, Mount Pleasant, Gastown, and Commercial Drive — to vehicle traffic on several Sundays each summer.”
“It’s the commitment to the lightweight nature of the web, to real-time, to...”
– Tim O’Reilly on an open source, open protocol Google Wave. (via Tyler)
May 2009
18 posts
The "Uncreative Class" →
“Not everyone can afford to move and the poorest are left behind amidst urban blight and neglect. What do we do about the immobile? What do we do with cities that are net losers of the “creative class”? For this so-called creative brand of capitalism, the uncreative are someone else’s problem. As Florida says, “We need to be clear that ultimately, we can’t stop the decline of some places,...
Krugram on Cities and the Future
From the preeminent economist Paul Krugman, The future is not what it used to be:
I’m in Hong Kong right now; as always, I’m just awed by the way the city looks. And this time I think I’ve figured out why it’s so appealing.
Hong Kong, with its incredible cluster of tall buildings stacked up the slope of a mountain, is the way the future was supposed to look. The future — the way I learned it...
Three Examples of How to Achieve Equity While... →
Three of Portland’s best examples of affordable, green buildings: Central City Concern’s Richard Harris Building, Reach Community Development’s Station Place Tower and the Turtle Island Development LLC’s Sitka Apartments.
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At the Vancouver Observer: Breaks, Banners and BlackBerries at City Council Meeting.
From Jon at Beyond Robson:
Boredom, breaks and blackberries distract from the powerpoint at the latest city council meeting. Since I can’t throw an emoticon in this post you’ll just have to imagine the little yellow face rolling its eyes. Can you picture what these meetings will look like in 20...
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Text of Vancouver's "Open Source" Motion
MOTION ON NOTICE
Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source MOVER: Councillor Andrea Reimer SECONDER: Councillor
WHEREAS the City of Vancouver is committed to bringing the community into City Hall by engaging citizens, and soliciting their ideas, input and creative energy;
WHEREAS municipalities across Canada have an opportunity to dramatically lower their costs by collectively sharing and...
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"Ottawa's lack of vision may derail... →
A second daily passenger train between Seattle and Vancouver might fail if Canada Border Services continues its plan to outsource government costs to Amtrak.
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Biden Touts Green Cities Amidst Parking Lots →
The reason our carbon emissions are so out of proportion to our population is largely because of this disastrous mode of urban/suburban development. As I note in my new article on suburban planning, transportation accounts for 32 percent of total CO2 emissions in the U.S. — the most of any end-use sector. Americans use cars for almost 90 percent of all their trips, compared to 58 percent in the...
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re: urban ditches
Apparently they are common in Etobicoke, a former suburb of Toronto. Peter Kuitenbrouwer, who is walking across Toronto, wrote about them in his Post column today:
On York View Drive, which runs east-west just north of the Queensway, one-storey brick bungalows line the road, pockmarked by stone or stucco-faced infill monster homes that stick out like sore thumbs. The stout oaks and maples...
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Global Warming May Exceed Infections as Health... →
Global warming is the biggest public health threat of the 21st century, eclipsing infectious diseases, water shortages and poverty, a team of medical and climate-change researchers concluded.
The phenomenon will be felt first in the developing world, further burdening a population already in crisis from food shortages, said the report from University College London that was published today in The...
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Canadian consumers 2nd-worst in environmental... →
And no, it’s not because we’re cold and big.
Canadians lost points due to their preference for car ownership and large houses, compared to other surveyed countries, the report said. Eighty-six per cent of Canadian respondents owned a car or truck (compared to 74 per cent across all surveyed countries) and more than half of Canadian homes have more than seven rooms — well above the 19...
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
– Edward Abbey
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NYT - As Storefronts Become Vacant, Ads Arrive
Can a city's "design culture" be deliberately... →
From Vancouver’s Brent Toderian
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Watch
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A vision of urban food in 2020
Via Green Futures:
By 2020, two-thirds of the world will live in cities, often sprawling megalopolises. Growing populations will put further pressure on land already degraded by over-farming and desertificaion. Given that we are always only a few meals away from anarchy, how will we feed these cities?
There is a strong possibility that – two and a half centuries after the start of the...
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“Since governments and business will not make the required investments in energy...”
– Long term decline of energy economy since 2005
April 2009
17 posts
Livable Streets 101 →
Interactive walkthrough from GOOD Magazine. (via jlabryan)
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As a follow up to this article on technology and policing, Vinay Gupta points us to this quote from the inventor of “kettling,” an anti-demonstration tactic heavily used at the G20 in London.
There is little doubt that the occupational self-image of the police is that of “crime-fighters” and that this is not just a distortion of what they do, it is virtually a collective delusion. A...
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Is Project PUMA really the future of urban... →
Segway and some company called GM unveiled the Puma, or “Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility” vehicle. It is a two-wheeled, one person, electric pod
I am not impressed. These designs are the pathetic death throes of a dying industry. Private vehicle transportation in an urban environment has got to go.
While there MAY be a place for such vehicles in a transit ecosystem (and...
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Travel Demands Are A-Changing →
Politicians and planners be warned: you will now be judged according to your ability to improve walking, cycling and public transit services.
WatchOn indoor productivity and plants.
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Vancouver Convention Centre
Julia Levitt writes about the new Vancouver Convention Centre at Worldchanging. Once completed, it will have, at six acres, the largest non-industrial green roof in North America. It will be a habitat for 400,000 native plants and grasses, birds and bugs, including 60,000 bees.
The building, designed by Seattle-based LMN Architects, in collaboration with Vancouver firms MCM and DA, is expected to...
Body mass and urban space closely linked →
A new study from the University of British Columbia shows people who live within a kilometre of a grocery store are half as likely to be overweight, compared to those living in neighbourhoods without grocery stores.
The study shows that old-style urban planning that mixes retail with residential zones gets people out of their cars, onto the sidewalks, and helps them keep their weight down.
The...
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1BOG: one block of the grid →
We are a [US] nationwide, community-based program that organizes residents locally and negotiates group discounts with solar energy installers, using a comprehensive vendor selection process. As a group we are more knowledgeable about solar, more powerful, and we can make a difference.
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The Future of Unemployment →
If the aim is to avoid unemployment hardening into social exclusion, perhaps part of the answer is a softening of the distinction between employment and unemployment? Or, to put it another way, does the fact that fewer of us will have “jobs” in future mean that more of us have to be “unemployed”, in the sense of having nothing to do and being unable to support ourselves?
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celebrity gossip site TMZ begins stalking... →
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disaster experts are taking twitter seriously. →
“How Twitter has been used to spread information during past disasters — natural and otherwise — has caught the attention of disaster specialists inside and outside government, from the earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province to the Australian brush fires to the plane crash in the Hudson River to the Mumbai attacks.”
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Alex Steffen calls for a transparency revolution →
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open source health care →
“Imagine, for example, a cooperative clinic at the neighborhood level. It might be staffed mainly with nurse-practitioners:
they could treat most traumas and ordinary infectious diseases themselves, with several neighborhood clinics together having an MD on retainer… for more serious referrals.
they could rely entirely on generic drugs…
their standard of practice would focus...
the open source city
the open source and peer-to-peer movement is changing things. it is changing cities.
it is, all at once, making them
participatory
responsive
resilient
dangerous
chaotic
diverse
i am going to follow this and write about it.