Toronto and Vancouver are turning into the Club of Two these days, with a pair of reform-minded, green-focused mayors who have several links between their offices, via staff and political organizers. I recommend that anyone who wants to know what Vancouver or Toronto might be doing next keep an eye on what their alter egos [...]

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It’s been a gloomy time around city hall lately, with the hiring freeze having stalled many initiatives in their tracks and hit some departments, which had always operated with a lot of temp-contract people particularly hard. Then there’s been a lot of turmoil, with people leaving or hinting that they’re open to leaving. To provide [...]

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An interesting new piece of research from BTAworks, a foundation connected with Bing Thom’s architecture firm, has finally got hold of the famous BC Hydro data on electrical use to find out how many apartments downtown show signs of no habitation. That has been seen as the smoking gun to prove the truth of Vancouver’s [...]

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Vancouver police have posted a list of police salaries — without names — on their freedom-of-information website here. Sad, really, that they only release them through an FOI. That’s a recent development, if you’ll recall. Until four years ago, all police salaries over $75,000 were routinely listed in the city’s schedule of payments, along with [...]

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A reminder to all my students, colleagues, ex-colleagues, media lovers and media-bashers that the Canadian Association of Journalists annual convention is on this weekend in Vancouver. The schedule is here. I always find something inspiring at some point in these conventions, as I realize how many people out there are still doing amazing work in [...]

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The Vancouver Public Space Network has been running a design competition for a new public square in the city that would give it a heart and gathering place that it hasn’t had until now. Vancouver’s lack of a main plaza has always been a bit of a puzzle to some. People like urban planner Lance [...]

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Influential city shaper Bob Rennie, who masquerades as a condo marketer, will be giving his annual address to the Urban Development Institute today where he analyzes the market and sales based on statistical research that he gets done for this talk every year. The speech will have lots of facts and figures, along with Bob’s [...]

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I hadn’t been paying that much attention to Metro Vancouver’s growth plan for the next 30 years. That’s partly because it’s been in the works for eight years and it’s hard to feel like it’s going anywhere. And also because there’s a temptation to believe that it will have the same impact as the livable [...]

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Arthur’s friends are calling each other around the city and the world tonight with the news that, after several months of failing health, he has died. I won’t presume to try to capture his complex and creative life here — there will be much written about him in the next few days — but it [...]

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A recent city report (and subsequent media stories) made it sound like the financing was all settled for the Olympic village, after a lot of confusion for a while. But buried in the report was a line indicating that one important part hasn’t been settled — the interest rate that Millennium will pay on the [...]

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