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
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