Monday, July 26, 2021

Google Earth Timelapse
City of Nanaimo 1984 - 2020

Best viewed full-screen : Google Earth Timelapse. City of Nanaimo 1984 - 2020

Thursday, July 22, 2021

Sunday, July 18, 2021

Saturday, July 17, 2021

Like it or not, climate activists are
urbanism advocates now

Most of what I need day-to-day is within a 5 minute walk, everything I need day-to-day is within 15. My home shares 2 walls with my neighbours. I seldom drive, my heating bill is small. My carbon footprint is a fraction of yours.
Photo by Henry & Co. on Unsplash
"Canada’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions during most years, accounting for a quarter of the carbon we put into the atmosphere, is transportation… Heating of buildings—especially single-family homes—accounts for another 12%.” @DougSaunders
#WalkableCity: How Downtown Can Save [Your City] One Step at a Time. A General Theory of Walkability. @JeffSpeckFAIC

 


All of which is to say that it’s in land use — the tough decisions around and the urban design of land use — that municipal governments are uniquely positioned to make meaningful contributions to the reduction of harmful GHG emissions.
The climate activists currently on our city council may never be closer to the opportunity and the power to take historic and courageous actions.
Only municipal government can make the transformative changes in local transportation and neighbourhood design and intensification that create environmentally and economically sustainable 15 minute neighbourhoods.
Surely this clarifies the task for the climate activists now sitting at the decision making tables.
We can and should recycle, ban plastic bags of course but it has to be said by comparison those actions are drops in the proverbial bucket, little more than performative gestures.
So if we follow this line of thought—40% of GHG emissions are from transportation and building heating; and that jurisdiction + authority over these rests almost exclusively with municipal governments—what are the bold and courageous actions climate activists on council can take?
Well, thanks for asking! Creating less car-dependent and more compact neighbourhoods is a function, in part, of planning and urban design. Council climate activists need an ally in this area and should insist the city manager hire an experienced 21C chief planner, a proven change-maker.
This new chief planner should be empowered to revitalize the department and decentralize it into neighbourhood planning centres. From here genuine street-level conversations can be held with a broad inclusive range of Nanaimo citizens. A city plan process has to be a conversation in a meaningful way. Conversations are dangerous, they might lead in directions that the risk-and-innovation-averse status quo powers at the heart of our City Hall fear. That’s precisely why it’s important to have them.
The current city plan review (Reimagine Nanaimo) is top-down and based on the one-way communication of an online survey (city planning isn’t market research).
This is the opposite of the public conversation we need to be having and it now proceeds behind closed doors led by an anonymous in-house “team.”
This approach has been thoroughly discredited by just about every other city in the country and the plug should be pulled on this immediately and with urgency until a new director of planning and urban design is in place.
So… that’s the challenge and the opportunity. Are our climate activists up to the fight? That’s the question.

Wednesday, May 12, 2021

City streets create value, build community. Urban highways do exactly the opposite.


Wednesday, May 5, 2021

City plans from sometimes decades ago written for a long-ago city, a city with little in common with the one we live in today

Photo: Kari Shea on Unsplash
Very often when new city councillors are first elected they post a picture of the stack of technical reports and comprehensive plans that they’ve been given to read by city staff.
The picture is meant to convey how complicated and technical the city is and how eager the new councillors are to learn the ropes.
My reaction invariably is what an aggressive thing this is for city staff to have done.
I'll admit I’d love to see a new councillor straighten an arm across the surface of the desk and with one swipe send all these plans and reports flying.
I don’t question that city staff are skilled professionals, hard working, and good people. This is not a criticism of personal behaviour but it is a criticism of institutional behaviour.
New councillors learn quickly enough that city staff over the years have spent a great deal of time and energy making plans and writing reports. Plans and reports for the most part written sometimes decades ago by people and for purposes long forgotten, often written for a long-ago city that has little in common with the one we live in today.
Plans that are too often created by departments isolated within their own silos, "each wielding their position & rules like a veto power,” as former Vancouver chief planner Brent Toderian says in an essay linked in the recent blog post Silos, organized complexity, complex adaptive systems. The 21st Century city.
City hall and the city itself, being made up of human beings and working within continually changing circumstances, are by definition complex adaptive systems, what Jane Jacobs identified as systems of organized complexity, “the variables are many but are not helter-skelter; they are interrelated into an organic whole,” they are interdependent.
No city plan should be on the books that has not had robust external review within an at most five year time span.
Political leaders and senior management “need to understand they are operating in a complex adaptive system, they should, rather than thinking that they can make master strokes that fix problems, [they should] keep on tweaking and improving, they should write the need for revision into every piece of legislation,” author, economist, former Dean Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Roger L. Martin.
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