Urban Planning
Maybe the Province read my article on the crumbling infrastructure around this province?
For the first time, smaller British Columbia communities with populations of less than 100,000 can now access more funding for cleaner water, better waste management and flood mitigation thanks to a $272 million investment by the federal and provincial governments through the Building Canada Plan. read more »
I'm glad I'm not a planner, particularly one in Ottawa after reading this criticism...
Do not think that it is the city-employed planners who are going to negotiate with the developers a development project in the public interest," says Dimitri Roussopoulos, founder and CEO of Urban Ecology, a think-tank on sustainable urban development.
"A lot of what happens in neighbourhoods and cities is driven by very influential and powerful economic interests," he told a public meeting on intensification at City Hall last week.
"If the citizenry of the City of Ottawa is not organized to survey and to watchdog the urban planning process ... you are screwed."
Economics often drives city planning, expert warns
It's interesting to read this sort of thing, and I guess to some degree it is much more applicable in the larger cities, where things happen much faster, developers and planners are relatively anonymous in a crowd, and there are many more people to complain about things.
Relating this to what I see in smaller cities and rural centres, the development that is occurring is often tourism or amenity migration based, and can involve a great deal of gentrification. Most planners are pretty wary of any plan to change the face of their city, particularly if it's a small one and they live there.
Dimitri's point may well be valid in Ottawa, where one group of planners are determining the zoning and Official Community Plan requirements (policy planners) and another group is working at the individual site level with developers to determine an appropriate interpretation of the policy (site planners). In smaller towns and cities, the guy who wrote it is the guy who is referring to it to justify or approve developments - much less room for confusion.
Anyway - glad I'm not a planner!
I have long bemoaned the fact that there are quality sites out there that have not stepped up to the RSS challenge.
For example, Urbanism.org is an amazing site for the aggregation of all things Urban since 2003. It covers Environmental issues, New Urbanism, Architecture, Water, Food, Transportation, but it has never had an RSS or Atom Feed. Until now...
By using a site called Dapper, I created a feed for Urbansim.org. Now I no longer have to rip the site via Plucker and read it on my Palm, rather, I can read Urbanism.org in Google Reader, or in any feed reader I want for that matter.
The web address for the feed was super long, so I shrunk it down using TinyURL.
For those who love the great aggregation of Urbanism, but have been turned off by the lack of feed, fear no more!
Here's the feed address... http://tinyurl.com/63hvqd
If someone who knows the Great Minds behind Urbanism.org, I'd love to have these guys post this on the site, so that more people can share their great compilation of work.
By publishing this post, and creating the feed, I'm in no way trying to step on anyone's toes or breach copyright, I'm just trying to make updates to this content available to the masses through new technology. If the owners of Urbanism.org feel that I am breaching copyright, I will apologize and "uncreate" my feed.
As with many recreation and amenity driven municipalities around North America, Revelstoke, the home of the most recent addition to BC's improved skiing line up, is finding itself looking for infrastructure upgrades in the face of new development. And in deep contrast to areas of the states that are currently undergoing depressed housing markets and a sub-prime mortgage crunch, the predictions for Revelstoke are still bight, with over 12,000 people expected to live in the city by 2025. Read More after the jump... read more »
The next ten years will say a lot about the provincial and federal support for healthcare facilities in rural areas.
With the average age of the population increasing, something needs to be done to ensure that adequate healthcare for the elderly is available in rural communities. It is not appropriate to suggest that elderly residents should have to move away from their hometown to find a bed in a care facility or hospital that caters to common elderly issues.
The Situation in the States
A recent article from down in the states points out how much investment has been pumped into the health care system in many states. We're talking billions of dollars in upgrades and new construction. This is a massive turn around from the seventies on, where there had been a decline in many areas in healthcare infrastructure spending.
The most significant expansion and replacement of U.S. hospitals since the post-World War II building spree continues to fuel a red-hot construction market. With hundreds of additional projects in the planning stages, it’s a trend that’s expected to last through the rest of the decade.
Read more after the jump... read more »
The past two months have seen an increase in the number of media references I've seen relating to the housing bubble and resulting foreclosures down in the states. In Canada we seem to feel a little immune from the major effects of this situation, but economically, whether we like it or not, we are tied to the States for much of our national well being.
What is of interest to me is how much media coverage this is getting, compared to say the idea of sustainability or climate change. Given the long term nature of climate change, and the fact that an ex-presidential candidate even made a movie about it, wouldn't you think that Americans might have an interest in it? Certainly the media has covered it, but looking at the following graphs of search and news trends from Google Trends provides an interesting picture of the relative search-worthiness of the terms.
Looking at Trends
Comparing the following two graphs, note that the News Reference Volume, (measured on the bottom graph) shows the term "climate change" was much more active in the news than "foreclosure". However, the main differences are seen in what people in America have been searching for, compared with the whole world. The first graph shows the trend of all searches across the world for the relevant terms. The second show the trend for America. What this clearly shows is that "foreclosure" was almost exclusively an American search term in 2007, while Americans searched for the term "climate change" approximately four times less frequently. Read more after the jump... read more »
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