Big Boxes Have Failed us; Supporting Downtowns will Save us
We’ve all heard about how downtowns have failed in smaller cities while big box stores like Walmart succeed; what we don’t really talk about is why and what’s the solution.…
urban
Streetmix: Remix Your Street
Streetmix Let’s be honest, people are bad at conveying their ideas on what streets can look like. Thankfully there’s an open source project designed to help people remix their local…
Ruth Orkin, An American Girl in Italy, 1951
Iconic photograph often thought to portray the negative experience of women as they walk city streets. Yet the woman photographed, Ninalee Craig, has since said, “At no time was I…
Safer Cities Stem from Active Communities
In the 1990s former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani popularized the broken window theory which is a zero tolerance approach to getting rid of crime. At first it proved successful…
This is Systemic Street Safety
The video above demonstrates how communities can transition from an unhealthy, vehicle focused, urban design to a healthy pedestrian design. Regular readers of this site know that streets designed for…
Cyclists Obey the Law More Than Drivers
Cyclists are law disobeying maniacs! At least that’s a common and all too nasty rumour in North American cities. It turns out that car drivers are the maniacs according to…
EU Launches Urban Mining Project
The European Union’s newest mining project focuses on urban areas throughout the continent. Their ProSUM project built a database of metals, chemicals, and materials brought into the EU market over…
Walkable Towns are Economically More Productive
Any visitor to a North American city knows that a lot of the geography is designed for single occupant car-based transportation. Anybody who’s spent months in any of these places…
Some Sculptors
Subodh Gupta “Subodh Gupta (born in 1964) is an Indian Contemporary artist based in New Delhi. Trained as a painter, he went on to experiment with a variety of media.…
December 6, 1989
Lest we forget.
Election Selfie
On November 5th Montreal elected its first woman mayor, Valerie Plante. I was volunteering that day and spent a couple of hours in the De l’Eglise Metro handing out voting…
Let’s Outright Ban Cars in Large Cities
Vehicles have been used to kill a lot of people throughout 2017, sometimes it’s an act of terror and other times it’s drivers being startlingly incompetent. Either way, people who…
European Cities Announce Bans on Fossil Fuel Vehicles
It’s no shock that cars are bad for health, what is shocking is that we continue to build cities to support automobiles. This is changing in some European cities and…
Influences
There is this building on Saint Ambroise in Saint Henri that I always refer to as the “Cartier-Bresson Building” because it reminds me of this picture. And that’s the way…
Yes in my Backyard!
For too long cities have been plagued by NIMBYism – people who chant not in my backyard. People who oppose change have held back communities for too long and now…
780 Saint Remi – Then and Now.
Took this picture about 7 years ago after much of the Turcot Movement had already happened. Much on my mind at that point. This was a pretty cool building inhabited…