Archive for the ‘urban planning’ Category
Tuesday, September 6th, 2016
A brilliant speech to a New Orleans City Council hearing on AirBnB and short term rentals in general. As Best of New Orleans reported:
Comedian and actor Harry Shearer was among the opponents speaking against short-term rentals, calling its proponents and rental owners speaking in the first half of the meeting “a parade of happy scofflaws.”
“What other business can I start in the privacy of my home?” he joked.
…read more
Tags: AirBnB, Harry Shearer, New Orleans, Short term rental, transcript, video
Posted in cities, politics, urban planning, Vancouver | 2 Comments »
Thursday, November 12th, 2015
Sociologist Harvey Molotch
“A city and, more generally, any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite.”
Harvey Molotch‘s seminal 1976 article “The City as Growth Machine”—which is equally applicable today—just happened to be published the same year of the UN Habitat Conference on Settlements that took place in Vancouver (and is the subject of my upcoming book).
…read more
Tags: Aaron Swartz, Harvey Molotch, land elites, Stanley Park, The American Journal of Sociology, The City as Growth Machine, urbanism, Vancouver
Posted in architecture, book, cities, design, politics, urban planning, Vancouver | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 20th, 2015
“This is why we love the Tudor period so much, because it’s the age of discovery, and there’s a sense that anything was possible.”
“Discovery”? That’s one way of talking about colonialism. This BBC documentary, Hidden Killers of the Tudor Home, outlines how the sudden change in house architecture and lifestyle in the Tudor era for the middling rich—merchants and yeoman farmers—was made possible by merchant trade with conquered colonies.
…read more
Tags: colonialism, documentary, pain, sugar, tooth decay, Tudor
Posted in architecture, cities, design, film & TV, furniture, interiors, urban planning, video | No Comments »
Saturday, July 4th, 2015
Because of my research on a 1976 event, people keep bringing me things from that general era. Thanks to my friend Resi for finding this in her mother’s house and bringing it to me yesterday. Not only is this Vancouver neighbourhood nearby to me (and now gentrified many times over), the map shows the Gastown Wax Museum where I worked many a summer in Vancouver, though its sign seems to be on the wrong building.
…read more
Tags: 1960s, 1970s, gastown, map, poster, Vancouver
Posted in British Columbia, Canadian design, graphics and signage, urban planning, Vancouver | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, April 28th, 2015
Apparently this is not a renegade settler war party, it’s a new “bloodgrass” band from Sudbury in Northern Ontario called Murder Murder. You can listen to their banjo-esque non-Northern-Ontario-ish neo-bluegrass murdery numbers at the link above.
Music aside—and the imported Appalachia sound is a whole other issue—here I’m just going to look at their fashion, promotion and visuals.
…read more
Tags: cringe list, cultural appropriation, Dewshine, Enough already, entitlement, guns, heritage hipster, manifest destiny, Murder Murder, settler colonial, trappers, white settlers
Posted in British Columbia, Canadian design, fashion, politics, urban planning | 1 Comment »
Monday, April 6th, 2015
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Ha ha. Sadly, this Craigslist ad was quickly taken down, but not before lots of us took screenshots and copied the text (a friend uploaded it to her Facebook).
The ad only lasted only 23 hours. Someone must have flagged it. Considering that it only went up on Easter Sunday and was taken down Easter Monday, some City Hall employee or Vision Vancouver party functionary must be pretty vigilant.
…read more
Tags: Cayman Islands, Christy Clark, City Hall, civic government, craiglist, global elite, Gregor Robertson, property speculation, satire, Vancouver
Posted in humour, politics, urban planning, Vancouver | No Comments »
