Friend Chris Demwell passed along Kai Nagata‘s personal, detailed, and insightful blog post chronicling the change of heart and realizations that prompted him to leave his position at CTV News. His post flits between the critical, large-scale, and the intimate, small-scale, in a way that really speaks to me and reminds me of what I [...]
Richard Layman linked to a recent post to a PriceWaterhouseCooper report on how Olympic or other mega-event legacy infrastructure can accelerate development by up to 30 years. He comments on how good planning is a big part of leveraging these opportunities into longer-term wins for the communities: Much of the time, events or projects for [...]
We watched. We watched on TV. A camera perched somewhere high above the street showed us the scene at the Fanzone on Georgia Street. Wall-to-wall people. We’re glad we’re not there, we murmured. It was game 5 of the Stanley Playoffs, in Vancouver. I was at the Hurricane Grill in Yaletown — the first bar [...]
Some late reflections on The Crowdsourced City, which describes two things: first, it was an event at SFU Vancouver on May 10th; I then repurposed it as the departure point for an unconference I proposed and led at Open Gov West 2011 in Portland on May 14th. CrowdSourced City: the SFU City Presentation This event [...]
I’ve been back in Vancouver for just about 48 hours now — enough time to get a little distance without being too far away from the conversations I had at this year’s American Planning Association conference. While I often look back and think that the event is really intense and overwhelming — especially since it [...]
It’s Saturday at the APA National Conference. I would be attending an interesting-looking session on walkability and GIS, but by the time I arrived to the session at its designated start time, the crowd watching the session was spilling out the doorway and I decided I didn’t want to add to the fire evacuation risk, [...]
I’m nearing the end of my layover in Chicago in the last leg of my journey to Boston. It’s been a strenuous 24 hours or so, crossing timezones and working on assignments, but I know this will all be worth it as, in but a few hours, I will be attending PlanningTech@DUSP, and in the [...]
I live near Cambie Street in Vancouver. Cambie’s taken a bit of a beating for the past while. For 2 years there was a giant trench on the roadway as the Canada Line underground subway was being built using cut and cover methods; many family-owned businesses ceased to be during those fiscally trying times, as [...]
Wherein I angst about writing, this blog, my future job prospects, and the value of failure.
What do school group projects, volunteer projects, and ongoing campaign coordination have in common? They all involve working with people where the rules are slightly different than the standard work situation. It’s one thing to think about the psychology of a group when everyone gets a paycheque; it’s quite another when the common ground is [...]
