Vancouver Council approves car-free sundays in four neighbourhoods
“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.”
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 years? They’ll be doing the whole thing at home via twitter (in tab-one) while they troll the bike forums and run local youtube comments through some algorithm to determine civic policy.
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 supporting software they use and create;
WHEREAS the total value of public data is maximized when provided for free or where necessary only a minimal cost of distribution;
WHEREAS when data is shared freely, citizens are enabled to use and re-purpose it to help create a more economically vibrant and environmentally sustainable city;
WHEREAS Vancouver needs to look for opportunities for creating economic activity and partnership with the creative tech sector;
WHEREAS the adoption of open standards improves transparency, access to city information by citizens and businesses and improved coordination and efficiencies across municipal boundaries and with federal and provincial partners;
WHEREAS the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) is a not-for-profit society created as a partnership between local government, provincial government and major utility companies in British Columbia to share and integrate spatial data to which 94% of BC local governments are members but Vancouver is not;
WHEREAS digital innovation can enhance citizen communications, support the brand of the city as creative and innovative, improve service delivery, support citizens to self-organize and solve their own problems, and create a stronger sense of civic engagement, community, and pride;
WHEREAS the City of Vancouver has incredible resources of data and information, and has recently been awarded the Best City Archive of the World.
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT the City of Vancouver endorses the principles of:
- Open and Accessible Data - the City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible while respecting privacy and security concerns;
- Open Standards - the City of Vancouver will move as quickly as possible to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps, and other formats of media;
- Open Source Software - the City of Vancouver, when replacing existing software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT in pursuit of open data the City of Vancouver will:
- Identify immediate opportunities to distribute more of its data;
- Index, publish and syndicate its data to the internet using prevailing open standards, interfaces and formats;
- Develop appropriate agreements to share its data with the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) and encourage the ICIS to in turn share its data with the public at large
- Develop a plan to digitize and freely distribute suitable archival data to the public;
- Ensure that data supplied to the City by third parties (developers, contractors, consultants) are unlicensed, in a prevailing open standard format, and not copyrighted except if otherwise prevented by legal considerations;
- License any software applications developed by the City of Vancouver such that they may be used by other municipalities, businesses, and the public without restriction.
BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED THAT the City Manager be tasked with developing an action plan for implementation of the above.
Harvest Green challenges the status quo of how energy and food is produced and delivered in our city, neighbourhoods, and individual single-family homes. Mobile nomadic prefab laneway homes (‘ModPods’) are proposed to provide adaptable affordable housing for the city that will also offer sustainable energy and urban farming infrastructure for the immediate home as well as the city at large.
More on Vancouver’s FormShift challenge at Tyee.
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 achieve LEED Gold designation and incorporates significant green building technologies. Among them: natural daylighting, seawater heating and cooling, natural ventilation, and on-site blackwater treatment and desalinization systems that will reduce potable water use by as much as 60-70 percent (compared to similar-sized convention centers).
Another admirable detail: the center was designed to link visually and literally to the existing waterfront, providing usable public space instead of just swallowing it up. It adds 130,000 square feet of new waterfront promenade, and 120,000 square feet of new public plazas that flow into Stanley Park, Vancouver’s well-used waterfront gem.
More at Worldchanging.
