Pilot Project That Tackles Homelessness is Saving Money, Too - The Globe and Mail

HEATHER SCOFFIELD

Toronto— The Canadian Press

Published Monday, Dec. 26, 2011

 The federal government’s response to the Attawapiskat housing crisis may well have underscored Stephen Harper’s reputation for his hard line rather than his heart, with his focus on the aboriginal reserve’s financial problems, not its social ones.

From The Melbourne Urbanist ― Do Great Buildings Make Great Cities?

New York has some great buildings because the city is great. Athens has the Parthenon because it was a great city, not the other way around. Bilbao doubtless has many virtues, but I haven’t heard it described too often as one of the world’s great cities just because its got a Guggenheim.

Do great buildings make great cities? « The Melbourne Urbanist

From Sustainable Urban Neighbourhood Network: Vancouver Historic Quartiers blog

Gassy's Town

Prior to the coming of the railway, Gastown was as a one-street commercial district serving the Hastings Mill population, and all who came either along the bridge built over False Creek from New Westminster, or by boat to any of its rickety floats. With the location of the first railway station immediately to the west, and the extant condition of the surrounding land as a timbered wilderness, Gastown became the first beneficiary of the energy and development forces unleashed by the new enterprise.

Read more at SUNN: Vancouver Historic Quartiers

From Gordon Price's Price Tags blog —Rybczynski in Surrey

Ivy-covered walls and green lawns have traditionally been the hallmarks of campus life, so the juxtaposition of study halls and stores comes, at first, as a shock. While universities often talk about coming down from their Ivory Towers, there is usually an arm’s-length relationship between the academy and the world of commerce—even college bookstores are generally relegated to the campus fringe. But why should students be isolated from everyday life? Or vice versa? The longer I walked around Surrey Central City the more convinced I became of the profound correctness of this innovative solution.

Rybczynski in Surrey: “Profound correctness” « Price Tags

ANATOMY OF A SLUM
Why Did Antwerp’s Immigrant Ghetto Get So Bad? - The Globe and Mail
DOUG SAUNDERS

Antwerp, Belgium— 

From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Saturday, Dec. 17, 2011 8:00AM EST

It is an early Saturday evening on Handelstraat, a busy and somewhat dishevelled boulevard in the north of this historic Belgian port city, its sidewalks lined with outdoor cafés and tea shops, fish restaurants, butchers and bakeries, all of them buzzing with customers. It's a typical European street scene, except that most of the people have olive-coloured skin, many women sport head scarves and the throaty sounds of Arabic and Turkish mix with brusque Flemish.

Read more...

Lisa Rochon in The Globe and Mail

 Gi-Da-Gi-Binez Youth Centre

LISA ROCHON

The Cornerstones of a Better Attawapiskat

LISA ROCHON |

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Dec. 16, 2011 

"The arrogance and gloss of a top-down bureaucracy, ruled by paternalistic machinery, was nowhere to be found. Instead, there was a willingness to sit down, and start with the basics..."

The cornerstones of a better Attawapiskat - The Globe and Mail

From The Pop-Up City blog— IKEA Off-the-Shelf Urbanism

Will the new era of architecture be the era of IKEA urbanism? IKEA has proposed to build a complete neighborhood in East London. The Swedish furniture giant tries to implement its ideas and concepts in new fields of knowledge and urbanism. After its injection of each single family’s interior with cheap design furniture and the introduction of the IKEA standard house by daughter company BoKlok, it seems to be time for a complete IKEA neighborhood, reports the Huffington Post, LandProp — also part of the IKEA group — is planning to build a neighborhood of 1,200 houses, shops, cafés and a 350-room hotel.

Read more: IKEA Urbanism: A New Era In Urban Design? — The Pop-Up City

From Changing City Updates blog

The system, which has been trialed in the UK, is claimed to produce 20 times the yield of field crops, using a fraction of the space and 92 percent less water. 

This isn’t our usual development proposal update – 635 Richards is a parkade, owned by the City of Vancouver. Vehicles seldom bother to drive all the way to the top – but by the middle of 2012, when they do, it will be to collect a crop of lettuces. VertiCrop™ a Vancouver based company whose invention was one of Time Magazine’s top 50 best inventions in 2009 plan to build a legal grow-op on the roof. The system, which has been trialed in the UK, is claimed to produce 20 times the yield of field crops, using a fraction of the space and 92 percent less water.

The company claim the vertical growing system will produce 95 tonnes of fresh vegetables a year, equivalent to a growing area of 16 acres. Assuming the project proceeds, the 6,000 sq ft facility will be covered in a fluoropolymer greenhouse.

Vancouver, A Walking Passion Story —The Little Metropolitan Area that Could

Gordon Price, Director, The City Program, Simon Fraser University addressing the 12th annual Walk 21 Conference in Vancouver in October.

Accompanying slides here: 

From Michael Geller's Blog: Priority Number One: Housing Affordability

On Monday, the new Vancouver City Council was sworn in, and in his inaugural address, the Mayor focussed on his goal to create affordable housing for all. He proposed a 'blue ribbon Task Force" to examine various solutions, including 'leveraging' city owned lands....

Michael Geller's Blog: Priority Number One: Housing Affordability

Michael Geller on housing affordability with links to stories in the Sun and Strait and Frances Bula's blog.

Charlie Rose — A Conversation with Architect Moshe Safdie

Aug 23, 2011 Moshe Safdie and Charlie Rose discuss the challenges facing contemporary architecture, as well as individual projects and the thinking behind them.

Safdie Architects 
Charlie Rose interview

The Lincoln Centre Myth

From Roberta Brandes Gratz  The Battle for Gotham — New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs

Credentialed experts often attribute urban regeneration of any kind to the official plans and developments of the day. Most planners and government officials and observers don’t give credence to the gradual block-by-block and business-by-business improvements that mark organic incrementalism. They can’t recognize it until it is full-blown. They insist that ad hoc change is insignificant. They are wrong on all counts. One needs to recognize the often small precursors of positive change to understand its emerging appearance. The precursors were in abundance on the West Side, as all the gradual changes already mentioned indicate.

_______________________

Visitors, whether from other neighborhoods or out of town, are never enough to spark rebirth.

Local residents and businesses do the spade work, re-energize a place or district, give a place character, and make visitors comfortable.

Visitors follow locals in the process; they are never catalysts for the rebirth process.

Years later, after [New York's] Upper West Side had turned dramatically upscale, many of those visitors came there to live, too.

_______________________

... a key Jacobs principle:

Cultivate your constituency rather than trying to persuade your opponents.

"You could spend all that energy on trying to bring reason to Robert Moses, or people like him, showing him how he was harming the city, And you would waste it all because his idea of improving the city is really to wipe it out and start over with big projects." (Jane Jacobs)

What Vancouver Means to Josh

What Vancouver Means to Me from Lewis Bennett on Vimeo.
Thanks to Gordon Price's blog Price Tags

TAVERNA from Hein Lagerweij on Vimeo.

...for everyone who wants to know what a good public space intervention is.

In April 12-17 2011, FOUNDation projects was part of the Public Design Festival in Milan. Esterni invited us to come back with a new project that built on the previous Foundation projects. 

We built an open air bar, from found waste material. During the festival we served fresh soup, bread and drinks in order to create a meeting place that gives a colourful glimpse into the neighborhood and its people. The project is called Taverna.

From The Tyee – A Bohemian Vancouver, Lost and Found

Café Men. Photo taken in Vancouver in 1972 by Curt Lang.

More than a biography, At the World's Edge is a detective story in which [author Claudia] Cornwall investigates a man, and a kind of life, she deems elemental. The author knew Lang in his later years and, she being a gifted reporter, decided to go back and gather his story in order to retrieve glimpses of a Vancouver that now is all but polished from view.

The Tyee – A Bohemian Vancouver, Lost and Found

Jane Jacobs Medal: 

The Rockefeller Foundation:

Jane Jacobs changed the way we think about cities and urban planning. Learn more about Jacobs, her principles, the Jane Jacobs Medal and its recipients...

Read more...

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