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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I haven’t bothered to wade too far into the fray over whether journalism is dead, as so many people have been filling up bandwidth and killing trees to opinionate on the issue. But one issue I haven’t seen thrashed out is the argument I frequently read in (gasp – paper editions of ) journalism magazines […]

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I had a story in the Globe this morning about the Vision Vancouver council’s move to promoting open-source government, which is already generating quite a buzz in certain nerdy info-tech circles to judge by my Google alerts. Ironically, the Globe had a glitch that prevented several stories in the B.C. edition from getting posted to […]

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In case you didn’t see it, this story about a federal/provincial billion for light rail in Toronto appeared on the Globe’s website this morning. Interesting that Mayor David Miller is advocating for light rail there, in light of the ongoing debate we have here in B.C. about whether TransLink should continue to pour billions into […]

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In the steady march of the 60s generation out of city hall doors the last couple of years, two more left or are leaving this month. One was Trish French, the scarily smart senior planner who terrified more than one councillor, I am positive, with her incisive answers to their wandering questions. Her last day […]

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