Economic Development
[Holiday Leftovers] Confessions of a Former Sprawl Addict: Speed Humps on the Road to Recovery
[Originally run Sept. 17, 2010] Hi. I’m Hazel and I was a Sprawlaholic. If you’ve been reading awhile you may recall that, with the loving help of my friends and family, I went cold turkey, dumping life in a Florida subdivision for the intense urban charms of downtown Winnipeg. It was a life-changing move with…
Read More[Holiday Leftovers] Confessions of a Former Sprawl Addict
[Originally run Jan. 15, 2010] Hi, my name is Hazel, and I’m an addict. For the last 25 years, I’ve been addicted to a string of takers. Time-draining, money-grubbing, fat-building, resource-depleting, toxic machines. For the last 18 months, I’ve been clean. Ever since our move to Canada. And this last weekend, I realized I may…
Read More13 Ways to Kill Your Community
Not so long ago, fellow urban scribe and recently elected mayor of Concrete, Washington, Jason Miller, recommended the book, “13 Ways to Kill Your Community.” The timing was fortuitous. For a while, in an ongoing series of internal conversations, I’d been wrestling with a fundamental question of human nature: Are people basically good, with periodic…
Read MoreRichard Florida on Technology, Talent, and Tolerance
Last Friday, I attended an inspiring Richard Florida luncheon put on by the Winnipeg Chamber, and can’t resist sharing the high points with you. Technology, talent and tolerance are essential to fostering creative cultures. When we talk about the creative class, we aren’t talking about some rarified, exclusive group of people. Every human is creative.…
Read MoreIndustry, Infrastructure and Intermodalism—Still Mixed Up on Special Districts?
In her September 2011 blog, Special Districts Getting All Mixed Up, Hazel Borys questioned why we treat large format areas with distinctive uses, such as manufacturing or aviation, as “special” to the point of exclusion from our efforts to integrate all urban land uses and activities into a spatially coherent whole, ending with an inspiring…
Read MoreZoning Our Way to HOA Insanity
I’m big on local. Not because I hate Walmart and 3,000 mile Caesar salads but because, as I see it, communities built on human-scaled, interdependent systems are better suited to taking on the challenges and opportunities presented by time. That’s why, when it comes to the decisions that most directly impact day-to-day quality of life,…
Read MoreHere Comes Chaos: David Lynch sketches the landscape
If I’d been paying better attention (which is how I start a lot of sentences these days), I could have begun my reeducation in the ways things work in 1986. That’s when film director David Lynch gave us Blue Velvet. Back then, the way Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini embraced Lynch’s sex and violence mash-ups…
Read MoreCNU21: Insights and Highlights from Salt Lake City
Git ‘Er Done | Hazel Borys This year’s CNU was all about doing again, unlike the past few years where we’ve focused on stop-gap measures to redirect our investment choices to more resilient patterns. Looks like they might be starting to pay off. Still, we have plenty of hard work ahead to remove both legal and financial hurdles.
Read MoreComp Planning Off the Beaten Path
I tend to take the road less traveled. For whatever reason, conventional approaches have never interested me. And the process I came up with for my city’s comp plan was no different. Why? Well, first off, conventionalism leads to….. “BORING!” (Yell it out like no one can hear you!)
Read MoreWays to Fail at Form-Based Codes 04: Don’t Capture the Character
The other day, I was riding my bike from a deeply walkable, bikeable neighbourhood to a more auto-dominated environment, and I was struck again by the tactile response when you’re walking or biking through this change. In the walkable neighbourhood, fellow cyclists were in the streets or in bike lanes, mixing safely with the traffic-calmed…
Read More