That Justice Charles Hackland found Mayor Rob Ford in violation of the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act and ordered him removed from office bodes well for a more progressive Canada. [ Read the full text of the decision here. Thanks to Torontoist for posting the document. ] For the past
Continue readingTag: urban
Walking Turcot Yards: New Mural In Ville Emard
Murale de l’Arche Montréal : un projet inspirant qui réunit des graffiteurs et des personnes ayant une déficience intellectuelle New mural at 6115 Jogues, looks to be on the side of the presbytery of St-Jean-Damascène. Before And After And here is the city blurb. Montréal, le 6 novembre 2012 –
Continue readingThings Are Good: Singapore Opens Vertical Farm
Sky Green has opened the world’s first vertical faem in Singapore and it’s well beyond a proof of concept. The functioning farm produces one ton of food every other day! This new farm will hopefully encourage more urban vertical farming to increase local food consumption while cutting down on expensive
Continue readingIlluminated By Street Lamps: Employment Redistribution: The Case For A Bigger Bureaucracy
Let’s recap: Unemployment rates are stagnant. and Living in this country is much more expensive than, say, 30 years ago. Coins are property of the Royal Canadian Mint And with this as a backdrop, the federal and Ontario governments (see: page 8 of the linked paper on post-secondary education reform)
Continue readingThings Are Good: In the Future Cities will be Sharing Centres
Urban centres are already more efficient than their surrounding suburbs and this looks like it will continue for the foreseeable future. Due to the close proximity of people in cities it allows for local sharing projects that can greatly reduce waste awhile increasing access to things we think we need.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Volet Vegetal – Simple Urban Gardening
Space for a small garden can be hard to find for a lot of people in urban areas. Some French designers have modelled a new way to hang a garden from a window. Their design is simple and provides people with an easily accessible garden space and as a bonus,
Continue readingThings Are Good: Paris Revitalizes the Seine for People
Paris is continuing it’s transition to be more people-focused. The city has a great plan to gut its highways in the city along the Seine and replace them with bike lanes, pedestrian walks, and cultural spaces. It’s bound to make a city known for its romantic appeal even more lovely.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Charlottetown Transforms a Street for People
Residents of Charlottetown, P.E.I. decided to make their city nicer, more sustainable, and more fun by transforming one of their streets from car-dominated to people-friendly. They’ve made a great video showing what they did and hopefully it’ll inspire other communities to realize that streets are for people and we should
Continue readingThings Are Good: USA Urban Population Growth Outpaces the Suburbs
Regular readers know that in the modern world an urban lifestyle is more sustainable than a suburban lifestyle so it’s pretty good news to see that more people in the USA are moving into urban centres. America is where the suburbs started and have had the largest cultural impact and
Continue readingIlluminated By Street Lamps: Toronto: A Canvass
Toronto is a complex, beautiful city. So many different views of its diverse urban landscape have gained us refreshing insight time and time again. There is a cache of photographs and artwork that brim with hope, colour and sometimes, even pain. It’s here: toronto art (Full disclosure: I have added
Continue readingThings Are Good: Talking About Cities With People Who Don’t Live in One
When it comes to talking about the divide between urban and non-urban living there’s more differences than just who lives in a more sustainable community. People living in non-urban areas just don’t understand the positive urban living that is being espoused, and in fact, can take insult to how pro-urban
Continue readingThings Are Good: What’s in a Lot?
Here’s a challenge from Eran Ben-Joseph: name a great parking lot. Couldn’t do it, could you? Neither could I, and neither could Ben-Joseph. In a new book ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking he explores the horribleness of all that space that car drivers demand. If you
Continue readingThings Are Good: The Future of Transit: Gondolas
The Gondola Project is all about bringing fast and cheap public transit to cities by using (what else?) gondolas! Some people may think that gondolas are only for ski resorts or tourists but there’s a lot of growing interest around the world in using gondolas as an alternative to light
Continue readingIlluminated By Street Lamps: ANALYSIS: The Fallacy of Toronto’s Urban vs. Suburban Paradigm
So, about a year has now passed since the line in Toronto’s sandbox was drawn. The urban/suburban debate is now running 24/7 — social media says so, anyhow. THE NEW TORONTO Indeed, if the tweets are to be believed, a cartoonish new Toronto has emerged: one scarily angry that
Continue readingArt Threat: New old school: bringing back NYC hip-hop – The story of the Rebel Diaz Arts Collective
“We want to politicize people organically. We want to do it internally. We want to do it in the ‘hood,”
Continue readingopenalex: Montreal discovers it’s not easy going green: New Economist Green Cities Index
An article that I wrote on the new Green Cities Index (.pdf) released last week by yhe Economist Intelligence Unit is out in today’s Montreal Gazette. It was an interesting one to write. The focus of the piece was Montreal’s poor performance, and…
Continue readingopenalex: Bixi Rolling Out for 3rd Season In MTL
If you are in Montreal right now you’ve seen it: the Bixi docking stations are popping up all over the city. Sitting empty they have a strange sci-fi ghost town look. But the bikes are supposed to be back on the streets by April 15th. Ottawa has al…
Continue readingopenalex: DIrt! The Movie: Montreal Green Drinks Feb. 22
For my Montreal readers, the local Green Drinks event tomorrow will be screening the movie Dirt! I haven’t seen it yet, but the trailer looks excellent. Particularly the urban gardening and depaving section near the end. Reminds me of a project I w…
Continue readingBill Given: Cost of Community Services
One of the challenges we have is to ensure we have a good mix of different types of development in our community. Not only is important for forming a well-rounded city it also directly affects our bottom line.
Give this report (pdf download) from Red Deer County a quick once over. It looks at different land uses such as Residential, Industrial and Commercial and compares how much revenue each one brings in with how much it consumes in services.
The key concepts it outlines are; that Residential uses more in services than it provides in revenue; that Commercial roughly pays for itself and finally that Industrial basically subsidizes everything else.
Two really interesting sections:
Industrial – The Industrial land use appears to be a significant subsidizer of all other land uses. The low cost of this land use is more or less in line with other COCS studies. A sensitivity test of the “Power and Pipe” taxes, a significant source of the Industrial land use’s revenues, indicated that even without these revenues, the Industrial land use would still pay for itself in dramatic fashion.
and
It is significant to note that the Residential land use did not pay for itself in any scenario in this study, not even in the re-calculations done to make this study more comparable to previous studies. … This effectively means that other land uses are subsidizing the level of service provided to the Residential land use.
Although the specifics would be slightly different for us I’m willing to bet that the fundamentals would be largely the same for any community in the province.
It goes to show that a community like GP with a majority of it’s land used for residential development is not sustainable because we don’t have enough industrial development to subsidize the service residential development demands.
Communities with significant “Power & Pipe” or linear tax sources are much better off.
Continue readingBill Given: Cost of Community Services
One of the challenges we have is to ensure we have a good mix of different types of development in our community. Not only is important for forming a well-rounded city it also directly affects our bottom line. Give this report (pdf download) from Red Deer County a quick once
Continue reading