In Italy, as my trip and some voluminous reading about it revealed, people don’t see themselves as Italian. Nor do they see themselves that much as Tuscan or Umbrian or Piedmontese. Instead, their first loyalty is to their city. That’s a legacy of the hundreds of years when Italy was not a country at all, […]

[Read more →]

Sitting facing the palace of Federigo da Montefeltro in the bright afternoon sun, sipping “water with gaz” and hooking into a rare WiFi spot after my latest two-hour hit of Madonna with Child paintings, not a car in sight on this elegant cobbled street and plaza. It looks almost like La Citta Ideale, the painting […]

[Read more →]

I realize that the riot is two weeks old now and that, for lack of other news, it’s been analyzed to pieces but a small personal perspective on why young people participate. I was in a small riot in Paris many years ago, when I was a student there. It was on New Year’s Eve, […]

[Read more →]

Nothing like seeing a car barrelling towards you IN YOUR LANE to make you appreciate the differences in culture between one country or city and another. Coming up to almost three weeks now in Italy, we’ve had lots of time to do what is the best part of tourism: ponder what is the same and […]

[Read more →]

In our week in Rome, we had lunch with a friend of a friend, an Italian who works in government. He’s not originally from Rome, but has been posted there for the past two years. His assessment of Rome: A nice place to visit, but a hard place to live in. It’s a large city […]

[Read more →]

I’m in Rome, but we woke up around 7 this morning, typed in “Canucks win” in Google search and spent the next two hours, reading and listening (Twitter, all news sites, CBC livestreaming), appalled. The question all of us have to have is: How did this happen? All we heard from the police and city […]

[Read more →]

Time to rest up for the campaign season ahead. As some of you know, I’m off to Italy for four weeks, spending all of my time observing urban issues, of course. I see some posters up for some kind of referendum that was voted on Sunday and Monday. I’m on it. Just out for my […]

[Read more →]

Gregory Henriquez and his father Richard are two architects who have marked this city indelibly. There has been a lot written about their individual approaches to architecture, available for all to read. Ihstead, in this profile, I look at the personal and professional relationship between the two and its effect on Gregory. http://www.vanmag.com/News_and_Features/Profile_Gregory_Henriquez

[Read more →]

So, in what is turning out to be so far a low-energy civic campaign season, Vision Vancouver acclaimed all of its candidates on Sunday after a last-minute bail from one school board candidate. Rob Wynen, a school PAC chair as well as a long-time parks advocate, switched over from park to school to fill the […]

[Read more →]

The NPA gathered Saturday to acclaim its candidates who will form a team of 19 altogether: 11 for council, four for school board, four for park board. Since some of these mostly newcomers will likely be elected as the city swings back a little from the Vision Vancouver sweep of 2008, it behooves all of […]

[Read more →]