Sunday, December 11, 2022

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

Thursday, November 10, 2022

An imaginary building in the OCQ

An imaginary building. On the corner of Fitzwilliam and Selby in the OCQ. This is an odd shaped, City owned site. Here imagined : storefronts on Selby, 3 storeys of offices, parking at grade, 20 apartments, shared rooftop terrace.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about working with non-profits and co-ops to get affordable housing built on City owned properties. Sites like this one, especially in our most walkable neighbourhoods, should be seeing this kind of development and with real urgency.
The private sector has, not surprisingly, expressed confidence in our city last few years. From Wallace St to the Millstone and along Chapel St in the core there are proposed multi-family and commercial projects that could result in almost 2000 new households downtown. There’s little in evidence, especially downtown, of our City Hall's corresponding investment in the public realm. A false economy, self-defeating.
The private sector faces rising costs for materials + labour, steadily increasing financing costs, strong possibility of a recession. It may be less able over the next few years to build large ambitious projects. The public sector—our City Hall—needs to make bold generational investment in our downtown now. Time for public investment to lead not follow.
Downtown improvement ideas floated over the last few years seem to have had their origins in “stakeholders” exclaiming in meetings, “You know what I think would be neat…” Nanaimo seems protective of its parochial amateurism. What’s required now is an RFP, an open competition, to attract teams of some of the best, most proven architects, urban designers, technical specialists, and landscape architects to create a visionary, comprehensive downtown plan, a plan to maximize public and private investment.
A public development corporation is likely the key to making something like this happen. Granville Island in Vancouver, Pike Street Market in Seattle and The Forks in Winnipeg are examples of city-building projects created by publicly owned development corporations. See (index) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B--aoLeZtOaudHpqTFA2QnJRX0U/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-0bIW9z10SIwfgS0YOCi4YQ

Saturday, November 5, 2022


Wednesday, November 2, 2022

Thursday, October 27, 2022

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
William H. Whyte

Sunday, October 23, 2022

Friday, October 21, 2022

Tuesday, October 18, 2022

A disengaged and uninterested citizenry.
This is not apathy but something much worse

About three weeks before the election here of Mayor and Council I predicted an historically low voter turnout. I had reason to be concerned...

✦ A public institution — and here I’m thinking of the municipal civil service, the administrative, technocratic, and bureaucratic arms of our City Hall — develops over time a culture and values unique to it. This is as it should be.
We need our civic public institution to be solid, to be there when we need it. Accordingly, its values tend to be inward looking, they tend to the conservative: stability and security are valued more highly than risky innovation and creativity.
The democratically elected legislative body, Mayor and Council, has a culture and values unique to it and these values differ sharply from those of the civil service. The governing body’s values in a democracy are inherently outward looking, they lean to broad based social equity, to innovation and creativity.
While the municipal civil service risks the perils of “groupthink,” Mayor and Council need to embrace something closer to “design thinking.”
The public institution’s values have developed over decades. A new City Council has only the early months of its term to establish its core values. This is a problem, especially if, as I’ll argue has happened here in the recent past, a new Council adopts the values of the public institution.
The result appears to be a kind of hybrid governance model, a co-governing which is worrisome. There are no employment contracts that include a seat at the table of the democratically elected legislative body. Only successful election provides that.
Our new Council needs to reset the relationship between it and the civil service. It needs to empower itself to do this and we need Council to do this on our behalf.
The status quo has not delivered the innovation, the agility, we have needed over the last years of historic crises, health and humanitarian, economic and environmental.
Our new Council finds itself in a time of alarmingly low citizen engagement. A disengaged and uninterested public. (A decline in voter turnout from 40.8% to 24.5% isn’t apathy, it isn’t just people staying home. It alerts us to much greater and deeper problems that we must not sweep under the rug.)
It’s my contention that this is the consequence of recent years of an inward-looking municipal culture that valued business-as-usual stability over the bold innovation and action that these crises demanded.

Sunday, October 9, 2022

That was then... (Oct 9, 2018) This waterfront site 4 years later joins other development sites across our downtown sitting idle

Saturday, October 8, 2022

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

Thursday, October 6, 2022

207% increase in Nanaimo households
where 3 or more incomes are paying the bills, between 2016 and 2021.

Tuesday, September 6, 2022

Thursday, September 1, 2022

Coded xenophobic language

Saturday, August 20, 2022

Jane Jacobs on social capital.
Dark Age Ahead, 2004

Wednesday, August 17, 2022

Social capital builds a city's wealth of livability

Consider the public library: equitable, open to all; innovative, changing constantly as the city changes and as technology changes. Consider the recreation centre, the public aquatic centre, city parks and urban squares. Consider the art gallery, performance spaces, the public theatre that houses the symphony. Consider the university campus and the public school system.
These are examples of one of the two spheres within a city’s public realm; they are examples of the city's social infrastructure. They nurture and create a city’s social capital. Social capital (a concept commonly used to measure people’s relationships and interpersonal networks) builds a community’s wealth of livability.
The other sphere is the important public works mechanics of the city. The administration, the engineering, the land use planning. The day to day physical infrastructure we rely on to keep the city's systems working in every practical way.

"Social infrastructure is crucially important, because local, face-to-face interactions – at the school, the playground, and the corner diner – are the building blocks of all public life.” Sociologist Eric Klinenberg

Let’s call the two spheres Social Infrastructure and Public Works Infrastructure. They are interdependent but very much one is unlike the other when it comes to thinking about their problems and about investments in them. The creation and maintenance of Public Works Infrastructure benefits from a mechanistic approach while the creation and maintenance of Social Infrastructure requires a holistic approach, design thinking. It’s important we don’t use the techniques and the mindset of the former to think about investing in and solving the problems of the latter.
Social capital is in measurable decline in North American cities. In Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam found that car-dependent suburbanization was, as Jeff Speck says in his Walkable City Rules (Ch5 Sell Walkability on Community) the most predictive measure he could find of this decline. Putnam: “each ten additional minutes in daily commuting time cuts involvement in community affairs by ten percent—fewer public meeting attended, fewer committees chaired, fewer petitions signed, fewer church services attended, and so on.”
A city is a complex adaptive system. Former Dean of the UofT Rotman School of Management, Roger L. Martin’s latest book studies the system failures caused by applying machine-thinking solutions to complex adaptive system problems.
Nanaimo’s future as a growing urbanizing small city, the centre of a mid-island regional economy, that attracts talent and investment, and retains its young adults, depends not so much on our physical infrastructure but absolutely on our social infrastructure. Our equitable, inclusive, livability.
While our City Hall administration is well-equipped to maintain our physical infrastructure, it falls to our elected body, councillors and mayor, to ensure public investments in the highest level of quality social infrastructure, the city’s holistic and humanistic “urban design.” Council can achieve this by instructing the city manager (CAO) to appoint a Director of Urban Design and Planning and instruct her to work directly and closely with Council to achieve its social infrastructure goals. A downtown campus of Vancouver Island University should be a high priority, part of a new urban design plan for the city centre from the harbour to the Parkway.

Tuesday, August 16, 2022

Commitment to human rights should be
the organizing principle of cities

Sunday, August 14, 2022

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

Urban Nation: Why We Need to Give Power Back to the Cities to Make Canada Strong

Urban Nation: Why We Need to Give Power Back to the Cities to Make Canada Strong offers some suggestions for the badly needed reform of municipal government.
The author is Alan Broadbent, Chair of the Canadian Maytree Foundation, which identifies itself as “committed to reducing poverty and inequality in Canada and to building strong civic communities.”
Among the Maytree Foundation’s initiatives is Ideas that Matter which is based on the wide-ranging ideas and principles of Jane Jacobs.
Political Parties – Most cities in Canada do not have a party system. Adding a party system could help local officials articulate policy, and make the system more comprehensible to the electorate. It could also make consensus easier to obtain because of party discipline – but this is a double-edged sword. If party discipline is too strict, it could prevent a diversity of opinions from reaching council, or limit the influence of local councillors.
Mix of Ward and City-wide Councillors – In Vancouver, councillors are elected city-wide, and the electorate votes for their top 10 candidates. In most other cities candidates are elected by a ward and only mayors are voted city-wide. There are pros and cons to both approaches. A mix, where some councillors are elected to represent local issues, and others are elected with the views of the entire city in mind, would likely result in a stronger city government.
Strong(er)-Mayor – Canadian cities are governed by a “weak mayor” system. In most cities, the mayor is the only member of council elected by the entire city. Once elected, they have to negotiate with the councillors of each district or ward. While this arguably provides more opportunity for individuals to have their views expressed through their councillors, it also make it difficult to pass city-wide initiatives.
In cities like New York, London or Chicago, the mayor has substantially more powers than the councillor, and the office has a budget for staff that mirrors that of provincial and federal ministers. They can make appointments to key council committees and senior positions in the public service. They can also prepare annual plans and budgets, subject to approval of council.

Thursday, July 21, 2022

Saturday, July 16, 2022

Occupied dwellings by structural type (%). Comparing Nanaimo (CY) and Victoria (CY). Source: Statistics Canada 2021 Census

Friday, July 15, 2022

Nanaimo (CY) Median Total Income of Household 2020 ($) by Census Tract. Source: Statistics Canada 2021 Census.

Sunday, July 10, 2022

Ranked : Canada's best small cities (thread)

Friday, July 1, 2022

Our civic insecurites on display

Friday, May 20, 2022

Nanaimo has failed to retain
and to attract Millennials

Friday, May 13, 2022

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

Monday, May 2, 2022

Between the 2016 and 2021 Census the percentage of one-person households increased a little city-wide and decreased a little downtown (Census Tract 9380015). Over 50% of downtown households are one-person households : 55.1% in 2016, 53.1% in 2021.

Friday, April 29, 2022

Retirement city

Thursday, April 28, 2022

Cities large and small are finding with young families priced out downtowns are becoming retirement villages. Not a good trend.

Monday, February 14, 2022

Population growth in our downtown was a mere 495 people in the 5 yrs between the 2016 and 2021 census, about 290 households or 58 homes per year. This is shocking.

Friday, February 11, 2022

2021 Census of Population. Nanaimo (CY)

2021 Census data released this week shows that between 2011 and 2021 Nanaimo’s population grew by 16,000 to 99,863.
The pace of growth increased somewhat between 2016 and 2021, totalling 9,359, or about 1,800 people a year: about 4,000 households, as defined by Statistics Canada, an average of 800 households a year. This works out to a household size average of 1.17.

Saturday, February 5, 2022

Saturday, January 22, 2022

Saturday, January 8, 2022

Podcast : Building Strong Towns
with Chuck Marohn

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