Your thoughts on this?

A group in Langley has been pushing to amalgamate the two Langleys (Township and City) for a few months now. Their efforts appear to be in limbo, after their 6,700-name petition was presented to both councils and went nowhere.

But I had fun talking to various mayors around the region about why they think small municipalities (combined with a region that handles sewer and water, along with school boards and police forces that sometimes cover more than one municipalty) work. My story here.

The two-day Cities Summit last week was a tweet-orgy for urban wonks, such as myself and everyone I know.

But, as I noted in my story, the real purpose of the get-together was to act as a giant flashing digital billboard for Vancouver: We’re more than just mountains and glass condos, honest! Come here and do business! Please!! We’re hip and wired!!!! Here’s our mayor to tell you!!!!!!

There were other fun moments, though. As I tweeted, Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi is a one-person story-telling quote machine. He explained useful applications of open data in a way I’ve never really heard before. Google the stories about him and you’ll see.

Apparently this is going to become an annual event. If you don’t know what open data is yet, btw, you will by the end of the decade.

One last thing I want to know: Can this blog get one of the “Made in Vancouver” widget thingies launched at the summit? I believe this is truly a local manufacturing concern of great note. There’s a reason why every newsroom I’ve ever worked in was called the Word Factory and here you have an artisan product, but with the same fine industrial principles underlying it.

Plus there are at least 5,000 visitors in a year. Unless only 10 of you are hitting the keyboard 150,000 times apiece.

There’s a lot being written about what led to the end of Brent Toderian’s time as Vancouver director of planning and, connected to that, what the next director will need to do or not do.

To sum things up briefly, 1. Developers did him in (if you believe developers control the city 2. Vision did him in (if you believe everything at the city all boils down to Vision vs the NPA) 3. He did himself in, by never finding a group besides his own department and urban-planning-conference attendees to support him. 4. Everything did him in, because he was replacing three people at a time when developments in the city got a lot more contentious as they moved into established neighbourhoods.

And … the next director will have to be 1. God 2. Superman 3. Able to suck up to Vision 4. Able to suck up to developers. And so on.

There are a few additional observations to make about all of this conversation.

One is: The attention given to the change-over in planning directors is more evidence that this city is unusually obsessed with its development. That’s not surprising. The downtown in this city has changed more than any other city I can think of in the past 30 years, as a result of a huge influx of investment and successive councils that welcomed that investment into new developments.

But it’s still unusual to see how much we talk about things that don’t even rate a mention in other cities. Toronto’s planning director, Gary Wright, is retiring in March. Haven’t seen a thing about him and his impact on Toronto in the news.

Second is: What odd judgments people come to. Something that I quoted Brent Toderian saying, three years ago, was “Good planning isn’t a popularity contest.” That quoted was repeated endlessly the last week, with some people interpreting it to mean he didn’t care about anyone’s opinion. (And their corollary: He was arrogant and no wonder he got turfed.)

Which is odd, because there’s nothing about the quote to suggest that he meant he didn’t care. Clearly, he meant, and I understood it that way, that planning is tough, there are lots of warring parties, and ultimately, someone is going to end up not happy. But a planning director has to make the best choice for the city overall, not just what’s going to make the most people happy or the loudest people happy.

When I wrote it, I didn’t even see it as a negative. I thought it illustrated his commitment to making the right decision, even if it was difficult — a good quality that people in the city would appreciate.

My third comment: I won’t attempt to duplicate the other good observations people have made about what’s needed in the next director of planning. (Bob Ransford’s column here is a nice example.)

I’ll only add my own little caveat. There’s a danger in the world of planning — and we see it here on this blog endlessly — of thinking that planners can save the world, if only people will just listen to their advice for how to build a sustainable city.

City planning has become a bit of a cult, with lots and lots of the converted talking to each other about how well-planned cities will stop climate change, eliminate greenhouse gases, and possibly revive some extinct species.

While I won’t argue that planning cities better will make a difference to environmental quality, everyone has to remember that the “best” projects, neighbourhoods and cities are going to run into trouble if the majority of people don’t actually want to live in them.

As a very smart planner once told me, you can’t make people choose how and where they live because it’s good for the planet. A small group will do it. Most just won’t. Instead, you have to make very sure that whatever you plan or design also appeals to people for all the other reasons in their lives.

They’ll choose those greener projects and neighbourhoods only if they think their kids will have great places to play and hang out, if the whole family has room to do the things it wants to do, if they get the privacy or the greenery or the quiet that they think is essential.

If not, they’ll continue to go to low-density parts of the city.

And the latest chapter on this.

Today’s story, which tries to get at what was really going on behind this abrupt ouster of city planning director Brent Toderian, along with his own observations.

By the way, I have it on good authority that, despite what the mayor’s statement made it sound like, this was NOT Dr. Ballem’s decision. I’m not saying she disagreed. There’d certainly been endless rumblings of discontent from the higher-ups at city hall. But the impetus came from elsewhere.

My news of the day, which started circulating among developers and architects last week: city planning director Brent Toderian being told his contract is being terminated.

Council is supposed to vote on it in camera today, but it’s widely known among those close to city hall.

Here’s the profile I did of Brent a few years ago, when he was already dealing with local hostilities in the first three years of his job.

As you can see from it, there are things to like about Brent and, if you were a developer with a project in front of him, potentially things not to like.

He has boundless, unsquelchable enthusiasm for his job and talking about urban design and planning. He held a steady line on resisting any efforts to remove industrial land, on promoting good urban design and more “exuberant” architecture in this somewhat bland city, and on the need for affordable housing and rental stock.

But he also, as Bob Ransford pointed out in that profile three years ago, had a hard time with the necessary political skills needed to keep developers on your side even while getting them to improve their projects or to connect with neighbourhood groups. He was happiest when he was with other urban-planner wonks and architects (or reporters), talking about urban-design ideas.

There has been some mixed reaction among the people I called. A lot have been cracking open the champagne all weekend, as one architect told me. And, unlike what some people might think, it wasn’t because Toderian didn’t approve their projects (though that’s certainly the motivation for a few).

But, said my Architect Friend, Toderian was a concern because he focused so much on policy and left the job of actually steering big projects — those physical objects that are the embodiment of policy — through the system. He, and others, worried about his ability to set out and stick to a big vision for the city.

And like many, he contrasted him with former planner Larry Beasley, who is not without his own flaws, but who set out clear rules for developers. He demanded that they give a lot back to the city, but he also would make it very clear-cut how they could get their projects approved.

On the other hand, another person in the development community said he’s saddened by Toderian’s termination and in the way others are cheering it. He says some of them were people who just resented being asked to make changes to bad projects and he didn’t like the way they piled on in criticizing Toderian. He saw Toderian growing into his job and keeping a clear focus on the city’s essential priorities.

One of the interesting facets of this story for me is that I don’t have a very clear picture of how Toderian was viewed by neighbourhood groups. All of the debate around him has come from the tight circle that works at city hall. I’d be interested to hear your experiences of him out in the real world, far far from mine.

One note before comments and anecdotes begin: Criticisms are fine, but please keep this respectful when you phrase them. This is a real person’s life.

After I did a story recently on the drop in parking at downtown commercial garages and the less-than-expected increase at meters, a Toronto editor asked me to find out what was going on with office buildings.

As I discovered, the parking requirements are dropping there too. Not without some resistance, though. The resistance isn’t coming from the builders, who are delighted at every $20,000 to $50,000 parking stall they are able to eliminate from the building plans.

But sometimes the people leasing buildings, despite their best efforts, have a hard time convincing incoming clients that they don’t need a whack of parking stalls along with their office space. Those clients discover it themselves, as they find their company’s stalls sitting empty when it turns out the majority of their employees take the bus or train or SeaBus or bike or their feet to work.

In spite of that, though, the numbers are coming down.

On a personal note, I’m looking forward to seeing the new project that Graham McGarva talks about in this building, at Granville and Cordova. I worked across the street from that incredibly dumpy parking garage for 10 years and it will be great to see it replaced with a building that he is saying is going to be a small experiment in making an office building more playful and livable.

It’s going to be a bit of a bike-station centre for that area, if I understand correctly. Details to come.

BC Place and PavCo have no idea what they walked into by putting up three digital billboards on the side of the arena when it re-opened after renovations last fall.

We’ve tended to look at the flashing signs — and the local resident complaints about it — as just some local piece of whininess or outrageous and insensitive behaviour, depending on your point of view.

But, as I discovered when I got the exceptionally fun job of checking into the issues of urban light, this is far from a Vancouver-only issue. Digital billboards and digital signs are the new frontier of urban debate in cities all around North America, as I mention in my Globe feature here. I mentioned the anti-digital billboard fight in Los Angeles, where activist Dennis Hathaway told me all about his group’s opposition to a deal that LA city council cut with CBS Outdoors and Clear Channel Outdoors to allow them to convert 840 conventional bill boards to digital.

I didn’t get to squeeze in the fact that Denver and Tacoma, among several other cities, have banned digital billboards. That Arizona went to court to prevent them along highways and, I’ve been told, won the most recent round. That people in LA are also fighting the creation of new “sign districts” — commercial strips where advertisers can put up any number of corporate logos and digital advertising signs on buildings.

So the BC Place wrangle is just the beginning of what could be more fights over digital advertising, because the outdoor-advertising people looooove these signs. They allow for much more advertising in the same space, since the ads change constantly. They can be controlled from a remote computer. And they attract more attention.

And this, as I note, is coming at a time when cities are actually trying to minimize light pollution, by putting caps on streetlights, dimming them, trying new light technologies and so on.

The media duststorm over the Rio Theatre being forced to give up showing movies because it got its liquor licence really has me puzzled.

Why? Because it was reported last October, when Vancouver city council endorsed giving the theatre a liquor licence, that it wouldn’t be able to show movies if it got the licence.

Several media outlets wrote about this. Here’s one story from the Georgia Straight and another from the Sun.

But somehow, when Rio owner Corinne Lea told everyone last week it was a “total surprise” to her that she wouldn’t be able to show movies, everyone went crazy over the story.

Just to be clear — I’d love to be able to have a drink while I’m watching a movie, so I’m not against the concept at all. My blog followers know that I wallowed in the overstuffed chairs of the Living Room Theatre in Portland last fall, swilling alcohol and watching movies I didn’t much care about, just for the pleasure of the experience.

But I don’t get why this story was a “surprise” or why it generated such media attention now, but not back in October. Is it just the fact that Councillor Heather Deal got into the act now, but she didn’t then? Or what?

I’d also love to hear an explanation for why the Rio owners didn’t just keep operating the way they had been. They were able to serve liquor at concerts by getting special-event licences for the nights they needed them. Then they were free to show movies the other nights.

I don’t know how much of a hassle it was to do it that way, but, simply as an interested neighbourhood person, I’d like to know how much of what has happened at the Rio came about because of the owner’s decision to choose a liquor licence over movies.