Vancouver wasn’t the only B.C. city with plans for freeways and ‘urban renewal’ in the 1960s. Over in Victoria, they wanted to transform the decaying Inner Harbour, still largely industrial, and what came to be known as Old Town (note the “skid road hotels” on Johnson Street at the centre top of this 1967 map).
First thing [...]
Greg Hamilton sends along an article on the latest plan for St. Petersburg:
“The heart of the city quarter will be a new civic space under a unique glazed roof. “
“This unique crystalline glass tensegrity structure will imbue the space with a delicate lightness and changing light, reflecting the weather, time of day and the passing [...]
The Terrace Restaurant at the Mission Hill Family Estate Winery is, according to Travel and Leisure magazine, one of the five top winery restaurants in the world. (Imagine researching that story.)
The food is good, but the Okanagan winery itself is spectacular.
More pics and views of the surrounding sprawl here in Price Tags 85.
After a couple of years of blogging, taking the big view, writing about issues of significant import, from our urban future to climate change, what gets the most response?
A set of stairs.
At least it’s something people have an opinion on. Or a question. What, some of you wondered, is the story behind the ’stairs to nowhere’ in George [...]
A few weeks ago in the Vancouver Sun, John Mackie wrote about “What Might Have Been.”
The most mind-boggling plans were for the freeway systems in the late 1950s and 1960s….
The wackiest proposal was to build a giant trench through downtown so that cars could vroom non-stop from the Burrard Bridge to a new third crossing [...]
It looks as though we may have another capacity crowd for this Friday’s Paradise Builders’ panel, hosted by the SFU City Program:
The Challenges of Today’s Vancouver
Friday, February 1, 7 pm
While Vancouver’s urban design generally gets high praise, many are critical of its architecture. Where, they ask, are the iconic buildings? Why do our highrises all [...]
The B.C. Cycling Coalition has a great idea: a province-wide network of cycling routes, similar to La Route Verte in Quebec. Working title: Soaring Eagle Cycling Routes.
The Province has said, okay, show us what you have in mind. So BCCC is working up concepts for three routes, one on southern Vancouver Island, one through the [...]
As James Kunstler would observe (see below), you can tell a lot about a civilization by the quality of the “public realm” - the spaces jointly shared by every citizen. As opposed to the privileges of “the consumer,” who has no repsonsibilities for the commonwealth except, of course, to consume it.
Here’s a particularly nice addition to [...]
Kudos to Anthony Perl and my colleagues at SFU Urban Studies for bringing in James Kunstler (author of “The Long Emergency” 
as their first Fellow. That meant he had a week to tour the region, speak to students, staff, politicians and the public in a variety of settings (from the Carnegie to the Vancouver Club [...]
Here’s another sign that we should be thinking about how to get out of the mine shaft: a huge and sudden ice fracture in the Beaufort Sea, as documented by the Canadian Ice Service (did you even know we had one?)
Click here to go to the CIS site, and then click on the second image down [...]
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