Every time my niece comes over for a family dinner, she watches in some disbelief as I scrape food scraps into a bucket, peel the labels off tin cans and drop the component parts into the paper recycling bag and the tin/glass/plastics box respectively, and generally act like I’m at a sorting centre. She thinks […]

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After much see-sawing back and forth over the last seven years within COPE on co-operating with Vision, the anti group turned out in force last Sunday. They elected many of their like-minded compatriots to the executive and passed a motion that the party should run a mayor candidate and a majority slate of candidate in […]

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Transportation Minister Mary Polak came out with what appears to be the Liberal position for the election campaign on transit Monday. I also included, for comparison purposes, the NDP’s. Story here. Interesting to see how relatively close they are, at least in the statements. Quite a difference with what’s happening in Ontario, when Premier Kathleen […]

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This came in through City Plumber and it seemed like a plea that deserved a little attention. So if someone at engineering/311 could take note? I have called the 311 number several times to ask that the multi-layered (and years old) grafitti at the bus turnarounds at the south end of the Granville Bridge be […]

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That’s just one of the many fascinating facts contained in a 28-page, yes, you read that right, 28-page report about snow clearing, generated by I believe Coun. George Affleck’s concerns that bike routes had been ploughed before major arterials in Vancouver during our annual snowmaggedon. You can read the whole report right here  (because really, […]

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Like most Vancouverites, I don’t usually go to Granville Street at 4 a.m. But I did a couple of months ago, to find out how things have evolved on this street with such a roller-coaster past — Great White Way, theatre row, heroin users’ hood, sex-shop central, home to some of the city’s best live-music […]

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I’ve heard any number of bureaucrats and politicians express alarm at the state of public dialogue these days, as citizen groups start social-media campaigns at the drop of a hat to oppose casinos, funeral parlours, traffic going by their front windows, and more. As a result, many are looking for new ways to talk. Surrey […]

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I bowed out from April Fool’s efforts this year, but not everyone did. There seems to be something about city planning that inspires creativity in the “plausible but not actually true” genre. Like — the condo project by Bow-Haus on Cambie that lifted up the former single-family house on the lot and put it on […]

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This was a deliberately provocative article, so I’m expecting lots of challenges. Yes, there are many other futures that can be detailed (built $23 billion in transit and had no money left for anything else, is one I’m sure will turn up here). I found out a lot more about some of the details as […]

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I had noticed a few months ago that I was starting to see a different kind of development pop up on the city’s rezoning and development-permit lists: small buildings, slivers almost, carefully shoehorned into the streetscapes of Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside. Kerry Gold wrote about one of them for the Globe back in February, […]

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