As the year draws to a close, reflection is an important rite of passage: celebrating, mourning, learning, and letting go. 2017 has not been the sort of year in which gratitude is the obvious emotion of choice on many levels. Yet the act of searching for what is beneficial, transformative, and noteworthy helps process through troubling challenges. Year end is a time of accounting for profits and losses, and making sense of what went right and what didn’t. In the city and town planning realm that we discuss here, that often comes down to comparing if our words line up with our actions. Continue Reading
December 19, 2017 | 4:01 pm
Year End Reflections: Gratitude for Livable Places
December 13, 2017 | 4:25 pm
The Sidewalk to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions
Sometimes all the right people seem to be at the table, all singing from similar hymnals, and all seemingly focused on transcending growth-as-usual and yet, still, the results fall flat.
Today we look at one of those times.
November 29, 2017 | 5:11 pm
Storytelling Part II: Getting to Getting Things Done
First a review:
In a post last month, I made a pitch for organizing community storytelling around getting stuff done. I acknowledged how hard it is to do that in the current political environment, which is increasingly an arena of competing tribal identities and mutually exclusive convictions:
A community that has struggled to identify and assert shared values and hopes for the future isn’t likely to provide a great context for storytelling, especially when it comes to big, ambitious ideas. Chances are, people with their own stories of disappointment and frustration, buttressed by the experience of past efforts, will have a hard time imagining their roles in a new story or see the ambitions it describes as realistic.
November 8, 2017 | 3:05 pm
Watch Your Words: Building support for walking and biking infrastructure
In my last post, I looked at the difficulty of getting things — like walking and biking infrastructure — done and how the manner in which we measure our accomplishments makes all the difference. Not just towards building momentum but towards building community.
In short, it’s all about baby steps.
But let’s say you’ve now taken some of those baby steps. Using my previous example, let’s say you got a bike lane installed. My guess is that, among your most ardent champions and supporters, no one’s looking to stop there. You’re looking for more. More routes, more options.
That’s where things start to get tricky.
September 7, 2017 | 1:26 pm
A Hurricane Response Lesson: Disrupt the cycle of futility
Those of us who spent extended time in coastal Mississippi and Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 are watching the weather and reading the news with a serious case of Groundhog Day. It’s rescue-recriminate-rebuild-repeat. Over and over again.
August 23, 2017 | 1:47 pm
Ignorance was Bliss: How my urban learnin’ almost ruined everyday places
It strikes me that in the time since I originally wrote this piece a whole new slew of young urbanists have come of age, many now having similar experiences. It’s my hope that they too will find a comfortable balance between the ideal and the workable — not to excuse incompetence but to encourage and develop excellence. Urbanism is, after all, a long game.
For more than 15 years I’ve been hanging around with a pretty interesting collection of traditional architects, planners and urban designers. That’s my job. Taking their inherent disciplinary wonkdom and simplifying it for wider appreciation. Doing so means I’m frequently on the sidelines as they work, and a consistent witness to their application of accumulated wisdom to all manner of challenges currently ill served by modern solutions.
That’s put me on the receiving end of something of great professional value. And equally great personal annoyance:
An understanding of what makes great places great.
July 26, 2017 | 2:46 pm
Land Use: Preserving the rural landscape with agrarian urbanism
As the harvest starts to come in here in Manitoba and conversations with my farming friends point to a good yield, I’ve been thinking about how to preserve these lands. Rural communities are often the ones with the greatest constraints, especially when it comes to finances. Without federal support, holistic zoning reform in agrarian places is rare. This, coupled with perverse incentives in lending practices, leaves some of the most valuable assets in North America – highly productive farm lands – with the least resources available for land use reform to protect them.
Continue Reading
July 19, 2017 | 3:00 pm
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow, Here the Day After That
They may not be new but I was recently introduced to a series of comics by English artist Grayson Perry taking on the world of creative arts, particularly one entitled “Gentrification.”
The tale is familiar. Old industry fades, artists take possession of the infrastructure, ragtag commerce blossoms and, ultimately, evolves into something only fleetingly reminiscent of what it once was. Laid out by Perry, it’s biting and funny stuff that deftly pushes all the cynical buttons we’ve adopted as self-defense mechanisms against a world in a constant state of flux.
June 27, 2017 | 2:13 am
Downtown Winnipeg Minecraft Lounge
Last summer in Winnipeg, me, my mother, a couple of my friends (Juca Shanski-de-Aquino and Weldon Scott), and the Downtown Winnipeg BIZ put together a Minecraft lounge. Now some of you have probably already read a blog last year that my mom wrote about this same Minecraft lounge. Her blog also included a piece about Pokémon GO, so this is the same thing from a different point of view (and no Pokémon GO). Continue Reading
May 30, 2017 | 12:01 am
Beuvron-en-Auge: 15th century town planning stands the test of time
Every month or so, we add to our collection of lessons from livable places. These are the neighbourhoods where walking the streets and looking carefully at the urban forms provide insights into what makes for lovability over time. Today, I’d like to consider Beuvron-en-Auge, deemed one of the most beautiful villages in France by Les Plus Beaux Villages de France. In the heart of cider country, the half-timber construction and picturesque Norman streets suggest a timeless beauty that belies the recent struggle for historic preservation and restoration. Continue Reading
