Tuesday, December 14, 2021

Monday, December 6, 2021

The rear view mirror 2021

Time to look in the rear view mirror, have a look back. And, make no mistake, at my age a guy can look a long way back (said in a George Burns voice).
Early summer 1993 we, a family of three, arrive from North Vancouver. Our daughter is enrolled in Grade 7 at Hammond Bay Elementary, we'll spend the summer exploring the Island in a camper van.
We’d been here only a few days, still living out of boxes, when a long time family friend who had lived here for years invited us to the Civic Arena for Canada Day festivities. Here, our friend introduced us to her friend the Mayor, Joy Leach.
I was to learn later that Mayor Leach’s Council had created Nanaimo’s first Official Community Plan (OCP), the focus of which was “managing urban growth.” The plan included an Urban Containment Boundary. It was to guide Nanaimo in a new direction from the one set by the Wild West real estate development of the “pirate” years of Frank Ney Councils. More on this later…
It’s almost 20 years ago now that, our daughter finishing her studies at VIU and about to move to Victoria, we moved our home and business downtown. We were able to do a renovation on a condo in a great neighbourhood and downtown living still suits us just fine.
Recent years, retirement and COVID restrictions created opportunities to do lots of reading and to start or continue online courses. Standouts over the last year online Planetizen courses on books taught by their authors : Defining Neighbourhoods, University of Chicago Professor of Urbanism Emily Talen and Missing Middle Housing by architect and New Urbanist Dan Parolek.
The most-read blog post this year was Silos, Organized Complexity, Complex Adaptive Systems. The 21st Century city. And related, this popular thread from my Economic Garden Twitter on former Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto Roger L Martin’s book When More is not Better / Overcoming America’s Obsession with Economic Efficiency
Scanning the years since moving downtown: over these years citizen activism saved Colliery Dams Park from destruction; saved Georgia Park on the waterfront from commercial development; forced the Port Authority to abandon plans to privatize the harbour marina; stopped a large, wasteful and risky arena/events centre from being built on publicly owned downtown waterfront land. Wisdom and leadership over these years came more often from civil society than it did from City Hall.
But civil society was unable to save Nanaimo from one poor decision, the unfolding consequences of which are continuing to do harm.
Mayor Leach’s Official Community Plan and its Urban Containment Boundary were under threat 15 years ago, about to begin its first review. At the same time Mayor Gary Korpan's Council was proposing building a conference centre on Commercial Street and new recreation facilities near VIU. Financing these would require a public referendum. The proposals were controversial and they energized a fully engaged public.
The referendum to finance the conference centre and recreation facilities passed by a narrow margin and these projects went ahead.
The Official Community Plan review was under the leadership of the Director of Planning, Andrew Tucker. He was City Hall’s public point person, you would know his name and engage with him often as, for instance, he hosted public discussions on the future of the civic arena and the foundry building on the downtown waterfront. He brought in speakers and held public working charrettes related to decisions to be made in the OCP review including the retention of the Urban Containment Boundary. A well organized local group, The Friends of Plan Nanaimo, added its voice to such groups as the Smart Growth organization and broad public opinion in support of retaining the UCB to better “manage urban growth.”
Behind-the-scenes forces pressuring Council and staff to open for development the southernmost rural lands, then protected by the UCB, included a shopping mall developer working with the Snuneymuxw First Nation and businessmen from Alberta who had been banned by the Alberta Securities Commission for boiler room practices who proposed a golf course resort.
Neither of these projects proceeded but the Council of the day eliminated the Urban Containment Boundary, resulting in, as Planner Tucker agreed it would, a disincentive to develop sites in the city centre and south end neighbourhoods.
There was another consequence, as bad or perhaps even worse. The Director of Planning, Andrew Tucker was, there’s no other way to explain it, gagged then eventually squeezed out not to be replaced.
We may be the only medium-sized city in the country without a chief planner. With the position and—importantly—the role of the chief planner, the point person between citizens and City Hall eliminated, power was consolidated within our City Hall to a small group of men, senior managers, who play with our city like it was their private board game. The public’s business as a consequence is no longer done in, well, public.
This consolidation is now so entrenched I fear that our current Council and most citizens have come to see it as the norm, as just “how things are.” But as I’ve tried to sketch here the current situation is the result of specific decisions made by powerful but unelected men. It was ideological in nature, Neo-conservative if you like.
Public institutions have survival instincts, they tend to the conservative, they self-protect. This is as it should be, we need our public institutons to be sturdy, but a tipping point was reached here over these years, a point where not the city but City Hall itself, the institution, became dominant.
Local government should be able to bring a countervailing force to this power dynamic. How can a small group of people (generally, and as currently, good, well-meaning people) confront and moderate the powerful complex technocracy of City Hall?
Councillors have to recognize that senior staff are not their colleagues. We’ve assigned them a very difficult task: demand on our behalf that this multi-layered complex institution be responsive, innovative and creative and able to pivot quickly to citizens’ needs when circumstances change. And be prepared to force needed organizational changes if it falls short. This organizational and cultural change in our City Hall, difficult as it may be, is what we require this Council to demand of its City Manager. History will determine the success or failure of this Council by whether or not they find the courage.
And with that, Nanaimo, as the last month of 2021 counts down, and in the voice Edward R. Murrow I say to you, “Good night and good luck."

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Sunday, November 28, 2021

This week 9 years ago I walked the Village at South East False Creek...

A Flâneur Around False Creek

Originally posted at The Sidewalk Ballet, Monday, December 3, 2012. At last, this week, an opportunity to wander False Creek and in particular the new neigbourhood  on its south shore, the Athlete's Village. As a Vancouver expat it's quite an experience to descend from the Canada Line station in Yaletown and travel under False Creek (!) and connect with the new Village neighbourhood that has had such well documented birthing pains. 

Both North (where I have had opportunity to explore over the last couple of years) and South False Creek neighbourhoods are distinguished by terrific attention to public space. Especially a delight it seems to me in the now established NEFC is the attention to the smaller public spaces that link the street grid with the sea wall and parks and playing fields. Evidently these were successfully negotiated with the developer, mainly Concord Pacific and where a condo tower blocks access to the seawall with "private property" notices, you really appreciate these charming squares and small parks. In contrast to the Village, these spaces have an old-world formality which contributes a groomed and ordered neighbourhood atmosphere.

The public space in the new Village neighbourhood by comparison is wild and wooly — and wet, featuring a swampy wetland area quite popular with ducks. As you enter from the west you pass a community garden — "No picking. Please respect our food" — and a wonderfully chaotic enclosed dog run — from a Great Dane to a silly little thing that would fit in a purse and every size and variety in between and owners visting and trying to maintain some sort of order.  The peaceful formality of the north shore is welcome, but the public space and landscaping in the Village creates a distinctive, earthy ambience.

 The main square is now enlivened by an upscale food store, brew pub, drug store and cafe, anchored by the Salt building restoration.

Friday, November 26, 2021

Dallas Square

Renderings album

Thursday, November 18, 2021

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Monday, November 15, 2021

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

It’s the job of a public square to serve practical purpose 24/7, to be a connector within the network of people moving @ 5kph, to provide rest and respite, to be a place of sociable gathering. These achieved, add programming, but no amount of programming will achieve these synergies. http://nanaimocommons.blogspot.com/2021/10/draft.html

Wednesday, November 3, 2021

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Krall Space offers a unique design challenge


Diana Krall Plaza offers a unique design challenge. A new proposal, an initiative headed by Dave Witty, former VP Vancouver Island University, former dean of the University of Manitoba Faculty of Architecture, was recently presented to council. There’s detail and a request for public comment and input on the project's website ReEnvision Diana Krall Plaza.
The design teams have come up with some exciting ideas, working within set guiding design principles. Witty has stressed attention to connections and linkages and engagements with the surrounding context of buildings and uses. As he’s quoted in a news story, “It’s about recognizing that Diana Krall Plaza will only work if we do something with it, one, but connect it to beyond its own site. If it’s left to be an island unto itself, it will not do what you need it to do."
The guiding design principles are especially good. All are important but some would have to be built on others. Standouts : connections and linkages; and engagement with surrounding existing and planned buildings (and of course those buildings’ all important uses). Get those right, Holly Whyte would advise, and the others can be added.
Diana Krall Plaza was on my mind when I recently re-read Ch5 The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Uses of Neighbourhood Parks. I made some notes in this Twitter thread.
A public park is “the creature of its surroundings and of the way its surroundings generate mutual support from diverse uses, or fail to generate such support.” https://twitter.com/NanaimoCommons/status/1148650254922743809
From comments I've submitted to ReEnvision DKP : Perhaps I missed it but I didn’t see in the Charrette or the forum ideas the importance of the Port Theatre’s second stage with a lobby off the plaza. Importance of lively activation of the east side parcel is stressed—quite rightly! 
Jacobs, Whyte, Gehl, Project for Public Spaces, Speck and so many others with an accumulated wealth of knowledge of the workings of a public square identify the edges as often the pubic square’s most important space. Connectivity enhancements can be made east, west, north, and south here.
Yes to pedestrianizing Wharf Street. It will need its own distinct identity and connectivity to the waterfront but can add to the success of a redesigned main plaza. A new building where the parking lot is now behind the arts building (a new enlarged public gallery perhaps or artist live/work lofts) will bring needed eyes onto the plaza. I’m remembering years ago architect Roger Kemble sketched a plaza here, an oasis. Maybe I can find a copy of his drawing. (Photo from the Downtown Urban Design Plan)



The new hotel will also bring eyes onto the plaza, making it safer and having even greater utility, and a glassed exterior elevator onto the plaza here should be considered. Personally, I always see a pedestrian overpass as a lost opportunity to create walkable urbanism at the street level. I wouldn’t want to see one across the newly upgraded and now much safer, Front St.
And a thought about the importance of an interior view of the plaza from Commercial (I’m sure everyone has seen former NYC chief planner Amanda Burden’s Ted Talk about public space, in particlular what she had to say about Paley Park) : a dramatic green-wall the entire expanse of the Port Theatre’s proscenium wall. This one’s in Madrid at the Herzog + Meuron designed CaixaForum.

Tuesday, October 26, 2021

Sunday, October 10, 2021

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Community building initiatives
we should have been working on
over the last [three] years

Wednesday, September 29, 2021

Urban design has to come first

Sunday, September 26, 2021

This intersection is the nexus,
the epicentre, of urban Nanaimo

This, where Commercial Street meets Terminal Avenue, this is the most important intersection in Nanaimo. Seriously.
Consider : from this crossroads to the west you are connected to Vancouver Island University; the Terminal-Nicol corridor connects you north and south right to the city limits; and east to Commercial (our Main Street) to the conference centre and the new hotel and beyond to the brilliant multi-use intensity of the harbour.
All paths, by foot or wheelchair, bike or scooter, car or truck, and even under some circumstances teams of dog sleds, lead to and converge right here at the corner of Commercial and Terminal.
This intersection is the nucleus, the epicentre, of urban Nanaimo.
A strong architectural statement is needed here that speaks of pride of place at the epicentre of urban Nanaimo.
From the VIU campus to the west, from the city limits north and south, from the bustle of activities at the harbour and throughout downtown, all points lead to and coverage at this intersection. The epicentre of urban Nanaimo.

Friday, September 24, 2021

Our downtown has a problem.
A highway runs through it.

Downtowns have had a rough ride the last few years. They could use some love.
Nanaimo’s downtown is our front door. We’re a harbour town, a deep sea port with winding streets and a street grid that fans out from the harbour to the surrounding neighbourhoods.
Downtown is home to a concentrated mix of activities, public and private. A dynamic mix of retail shops and cafés, professional and industrial services, culture and the arts and is home to thousands.
At the time of the 2016 Census its population was about 5,ooo people. Hundreds of new homes have been added since then. The 2016 Census also told us downtown was more densely populated than any other area of the city; the population a little older, with somewhat higher levels of education and, as with other Census areas in the city centre, a little poorer.
❖
In Europe it might be called the High Street, in North America, Main Street. In Nanaimo it's Commercial Street, our best street, with a great mix of shops and offices, public and private art galleries, museum, conference centre with direct access to the City Council chamber.
Another thing our downtown has going for it: good bones. You hear this term often when towns and cities consider revitalization. It’s in the street grid, the geography, the topography, the good mix of building ages and types. That sort of thing. Nanaimo’s downtown has an abundance of very good bones.
Cities across Canada are searching for ways to “build back better” as they emerge from the crises still being caused by the COVID pandemic. Our downtown is ready to emerge as the livable and lovable 21st Century urban centre we know it can be.
It’s time we took what is now a highway that runs through our downtown and transformed it into a modern city boulevard. Traffic-calmed and made safe and inviting for all citizens, it can be woven into the fabric of downtown life where now it forms a hostile barrier.

Thursday, September 23, 2021

Sunday, September 12, 2021

Thursday, September 2, 2021

From The Walkable City by Jeff Speck

The modern world is full of experts who are paid to ignore criteria beyond their professions.
The school and parks departments will push for fewer, larger facilities, since these are easier to maintain—and show off. The public works department will insist that new neighbourhoods be designed principally around snow and trash removal. The department of transportation will build new roads to ease traffic generated by the very sprawl that they cause. Each of these approaches may seem correct in a vacuum, but is wrong in a city…
Three issues—wealth, health, and sustainability—are the three principal arguments for making our cities more walkable.

Saturday, August 28, 2021

Our City Hall has indicated it's ready to make investments in transit and urban public space. Good news! Plans released so far however suggest we have a problem...

The City has recently purchased a property of strategic importance in our downtown. There are indications also that our City Hall is ready to make important investments in transit and urban public space. Good news!
The newly purchased site is inherently urban in nature, more so perhaps than any other property downtown. It fronts the Terminal Avenue inter-city highway and is at the corner of the highway and Commercial Street, Nanaimo’s Main Street.
There is great potential here to repair much of the harm done by the highway to our downtown and to establish the urban design standards and specifications (building setback, build-to line, sidewalk width, the street wall, street trees etc ) that are laid out in our Downtown Urban Design Plan and Guidelines. There is potential here too to leverage improved connectivity by redesigning the intersections where Commercial Street and Esplanade meet the highway.
City streets create value, build community. Urban highways do exactly the opposite. All good urban design starts with the street and the most valuable part of the urban street is the street corner, the crossroads. (The corner bar, the corner store…)
The site itself all but dictates highest and best use. It needs a human scale streetscape, a safe inviting environment for people of all ages and abilities travelling at about 5kph. It needs to support the diversity of activities that make downtowns downtown.
The City may have secured this property however to create a public plaza and a transit exchange here. This would be a regrettable mistake, a lost opportunity. Renderings of plans released to date raise concerns that the highway environment would be not repaired but made worse by buses on open asphalt. And a public plaza with an uncalmed highway at its edge would fail.

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

Everything marked on this photo will be either enhanced or diminished by decisions made now in regards to the Terminal Avenue- Nicol Street highway

These, marked in the picture below, are either in-play or in-need in downtown Nanaimo. None are independent, one of any other, they are all interrelated and interdependent. This is particularly true when it comes to the Terminal Ave - Nicol Street inter-city highway. Under Provincial Government jurisdiction, this urban highway forms a barrier between our south end neighbourhoods and a barrier between the east and west neighbourhoods of our downtown core.
Everything marked below on this photo will be either enhanced or diminished by decisions made in regards to this highway.
These and the urban design of the public realm, the traffic calmed streets, the street trees, street furniture and lighting, parks and neighbourhood squares, the diverse mix of uses, are also interdependent. Synergistic urban design that weaves it all together, the glue you might say. Nanaimo needs to commit to this principle and hire a proactive chief of planning and urban design to head up an empowered department, one decentralized to neighbourhood planning offices.
1. City owned downtown waterfront lands; 2. Port Place shopping centre; 3. Marriott Hotel; 4. Diana Krall Plaza; 5. Commercial Street; 6. Dallas Square; 7. Georgia Park; 8. Terminal-Nicol Highway; 9. Howard Johnson Hotel site; 10. Mill Street residential; 11. Caledonian Clinic site residential; 12. Telus site residential; 13. Island Corridor rail; 14. School District owned redevelopment site; 15. City owned 500 block Terminal site.

From the Downtown Urban Design Plan and Guidelines : Originally a tidal ravine along its southern extent, Terminal Avenue became the main route through downtown Nanaimo and part of the Trans Canada Highway in the 1960s. With the construction of the Nanaimo Parkway, the role of Terminal Avenue is changing. The design of Terminal Avenue with its unique curving geometry, continues to act as a barrier that disconnects the Old City from the downtown core and the waterfront. However, any proposed design changes to the streetscape will require extensive consultation with the road's current authority, the Ministry of Transportation.
Urban Design Strategies : Terminal Avenue is a major gateway to downtown Nanaimo, both from the north and south approaches. Emphasize on-street parking, which is required to ensure viability of ground-floor commercial. Recommend traffic-calming road design for 50 km/hr.
Street trees are to be located between every 4 on-street parking stalls. Sidewalk widths should be increased. Traffic patterns would be maintained but calmed by the proximity of trees and buildings at the setback/build-to line. Traffic bulges at intersections would be employed to reduce crossing length and further calm traffic. (A treed boulevard in the centre of the right-of-way would preclude on-street parking.)

Thursday, August 19, 2021

Synergistic urban design

Friday, August 13, 2021

Indy Economics & Blue Line: Dollars and $ense Development Patterns

Tuesday, August 3, 2021

Sunday, August 1, 2021

Jane Jacobs. Downtown is For People Fortune Magazine 1958

The pedestrian’s level : Let’s look for a moment at the physical dimensions of the street.
The user of downtown is mostly on foot, and to enjoy himself he needs to see plenty of contrast on the streets. He needs assurance that the street is neither interminable nor boring, so he does not get weary just looking down it. Thus streets that have an end in sight are often pleasing; so are streets that have the punctuation of contrast at frequent intervals….
Narrow streets, if they are not too narrow… and are not choked with cars, can also cheer a walker by giving him a continual choice of this side of the street or that, and twice as much to see. The differences are something anyone can try out for himself by walking a selection of downtown streets.
Text : Downtown is For People. Jane Jacobs, Fortune Magazine 1958. Drawings Léon Krier

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.

Tuesday, April 27, 2021

On this day, 2018

New waterfront public space at the Patkau Architects designed Polygon Art Gallery in North Vancouver. Here the sea walk and rippling seating. Public area extending into the harbour almost complete. Connects to the Quay Market, the Seabus, and the bus interchange.

Three years ago today I took the SeaBus across Burrard Inlet to North Vancouver to see the new art gallery and seaside...

Posted by Nanaimo Commons on Tuesday, 27 April 2021

Monday, April 26, 2021

#PlaceMaking

True and false diversity, by Léon Krier

Friday, April 23, 2021

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Silos, organized complexity, complex adaptive systems. The 21st Century city

The age of the siloed credentialed specialist is coming to an end.
“Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North American universities.” Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead
There is a common thread that runs through much contemporary writing and thinking about economies, organizations, and cities. From Jane Jacobs to, most recently, author, economist, former Dean of Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Roger L. Martin.
Martin's new book When More is Not Better: Overcoming America’s Obsession With Efficiency, studies the system failures caused by applying machine-thinking solutions to complex-adaptive-system problems.
Jane Jacobs' arguably most important insight into the workings of the city appears in the last chapter of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It is that cities are systems of organized complexity. "The variables are many but are not helter-skelter; they are interrelated into an organic whole.”
Former Vancouver chief planner Brent Toderian in this 2015 Planetizen essay Better City-Making Means Breaking Down Silos—Here's How (to get a more holistic approach to city-building) recounts "the story of the NASA janitor being asked by President Kennedy what his job was, and the janitor giving the answer "I'm helping to put a man on the moon.””
The thread that runs through this thinking, is that human systems (the economy, the city) are adaptive systems like the life sciences. And that if we stubbornly persist in applying solutions to complex adaptive systems that would be appropriate only to machines, we will fail, often we will only compound our problems.
Organized complexity ("The variables are many but are not helter-skelter; they are interrelated into an organic whole.”) silo breaking ("I'm helping to put a man on the moon.” ) and the complex adaptive system ("theory-based approaches will produce deeply flawed outcomes") share an ethos. They counter, as architect and urban designer Ken Greenberg says, the neo-conservative ideological trend of recent decades, “beggar thy neighbour policies [that] inevitably lead to a race to the bottom and impoverishment of the public realm and public services."
And here the point is made yet again by Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn in his blog post “Do You Want to Know What Works?
"Those administering the complicated pattern — the technical professionals — quickly become obsessed with growth and the inputs (capital) necessary to create accelerating levels of growth. They become trapped in what we’ve called the Growth Ponzi Scheme as liabilities mount over time. Those administering the complex pattern—a co-creation of citizens and humble professionals—obsess over feedback as a way to discern what they should do next. They are seeking stability through the continual harmonizing of many competing objectives, one of which is growth (though not the only one)." — Charles Marohn

Wednesday, April 7, 2021

Transformative Placemaking :
The Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking

"In the last several decades, the pendulum has begun to shift back, as there's greater demand for certain urban attributes: proximity, density, and walkability."

Monday, March 22, 2021

Only 30 minutes of walking a day...

@WalkBoston

Saturday, March 20, 2021

An “Innovation Campus” on school district property at Selby St + Franklyn St.

Structure at centre of the zocolo is placeholder for large colourful public art sculpture by Snuneymuxw artists.

Wednesday, March 10, 2021

City-builders and change-makers

Vancouverism by Larry Beasley. UBC Press 2019 —
"When I say “we” in this story, I will be talking about Ann McAfee and myself and our band of planning professionals, along with the other professionals in all the departments that make up the City, because we were always on the front lines together — often fighting a very hard fight. I will also be talking about our political masters, particularly those who sponsored the innovations. For me, close allies were Councillors Gordon Price and Jim Green, and Mayors Gordon Campbell, Philip Owen, and Larry Campbell. They were intelligent leaders, who often showed courage in their embrace of what we suggested. But the “we” will also include the developers and private design professionals who were constant collaborators, as well as the citizens who threw their hats into the ring to take part in what we were doing.
Of course, we were all led by the chief of the City — known humbly as our city manager. Our generation was very lucky to have extraordinary, even brilliant, leaders in Ken Dobell and then Judy Rogers, who built on the legacy of the genius who preceded them, Fritz Bowers (I mean that seriously, he was a Mensa)."
UBC Press | Vancouverism By Larry Beasley (emphasis mine)
I first saw Vancouver on an early Spring day in 1971. I walked across the Hastings Viaduct, demolished a year or two later. It was a mill town. False Creek was home to a working cooperage (Sweeney’s), mud flats and sawdust burners. I loved it, joined thousands of my generation and settled.
South East False Creek was about to become, throughout that decade, an influential model of waterfront industrial lands repurposed as a mixed-use, mixed-income, pedestrian oriented urban neighbourhood. My group of friends gravitated to this new waterfront community and enthusiastically took to the adjoining Granville Island Public Market area and its intense mix of new uses with traditional industries and small trade shops.
Among my group of friends happened to be the daughter of City Manager Fritz Bowers. Meant little to us then but serves now as a point in time from which to examine how this visionary, transformative False Creek redevelopment came to catalyze the maturing of a mill town into a confident Pacific Rim city.
A number of historic global forces acted on the development of Vancouver over subsequent decades. The 1986 World’s Fair, the return of Hong Kong to China, the Winter Olympics, the arrival of highly mobile global speculative investment capital. It’s clear also that the mill town of 1971 had in it inherent qualities—of geography, culture and climate—that would at some time attract the country’s and the world’s attention.
These forces and natural gifts were harnessed by the vision and ambition of a succession of city managers and progressive departments of planning and urban design and courageous political leaders, among them those mentioned by author Beasley above.
Read more »

Saturday, March 6, 2021

The Nanaimo we know today is the result of a transformative change, actions taken by a particular council and a...

Posted by Nanaimo Commons on Saturday, 6 March 2021

Friday, March 5, 2021

City Hall and the City

city hall by ProSymbols from the Noun Project
“It is probably the last conversation like this the seminarian and I will have. After his ordination, particular friendships with women will be discouraged. I understand why, but in a wider sense, it is frightening. If you are not friends with women, they are theoretical to you.”
This is from Patricia Lockwood’s brilliant memoir “Priestdaddy.” Circumstance has required she and her husband retreat to her parents’ house for a few months. Her eccentric father is, a rarity, an ordained Catholic priest, married with a family.
With apologies to Ms Lockwood, I’ll appropriate this passage as a useful metaphor for things that ail the relationship between citizens and their City Hall.
If City Hall distances itself from the messy, dynamic city, if it is not in every sense a friend of the city, the city becomes to it theoretical, a remote thing, seen only on computer screens, in technical reports and planners’ arcane zoning codes.
We everyday citizens observe every day that the city is very much not theoretical. We observe that City Hall seems often uncomfortable with the city, even afraid of it. City Hall often struggles frustratedly to get the dynamic ever-changing city to fit inside its decades old fixed “plans.”
"Political leaders “need to understand they are operating in a complex adaptive system.. they should write the need for revision into every piece of legislation.” Roger L. Martin
"Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity, like the life sciences...  The variables are many, but they are not helter-skelter; they are “interrelated into an organic whole.” The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs. Ch21 The Kind of Problem a City is. City Hall and the City @Medium

Wednesday, March 3, 2021

"An entrenched status quo is one tricky, slippery adversary, its self-preservation instincts and reflexes formidable..."

On the wily resourcefulness of the status quo. Medium https://frank-k-murphy.medium.com/on-the-wily-resourcefulness-of-the-status-quo-3839aacbbb6e

Posted by Nanaimo Commons on Wednesday, 3 March 2021

Tuesday, March 2, 2021

Systems of Survival. A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics.
Jane Jacobs, 1994

Retired publisher Armbruster invites 5 friends and colleagues to discuss something troubling him: that “the web of trust [and honesty] upon which so much depends, is in a deplorable state.” He opens with an anecdote about taking a consulting fee he’d been paid in Hanover Germany to a local bank for transfer to his home bank in New York City. He realized later he’d turned over to a stranger a sum of money in return for a piece of paper written in a language he couldn’t understand and that he no concern that the funds wouldn’t be in his home account when he needed them. From this observation of unquestioned trust he also notes widespread and well known examples of “chicanery and avarice” and examples of every day folks “conspiring with dishonesty when it seems to benefit them.” Read more : Systems of Survival. A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics. Jane Jacobs, 1994

Saturday, February 27, 2021

The neoconservative trend to centralization — “efficiency” — stands in the way of the 15 minute city. Start with City...

Posted by Nanaimo Commons on Saturday, 27 February 2021

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

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