The following CBC article confirms what we’ve always known: sports stadiums simply do not deliver on their extravagant economic promises. Just as with casinos, the millionaire proponents of stadiums always claim that these big arenas will make a city rich.

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The post Stadiums do not bring economic benefits to cities – study appeared first on Ouno Design.

Radiant City is an entertaining 2006 Canadian film written and directed by Calgary filmmaker Gary Burns  (Kitchen Party, Suburbanator, Way Downtown) and Jim Brown. The  film focus on the Moss family, who introduce us to the brand new suburb they have recently settled in.

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UPDATE: This disastrous, precedent-setting development was passed by our City Council, dominated by supposedly “green” Vision Vancouver, in a 9-1 vote.  It was not sent back to design; only vague requests to the developer to make it smaller and less ugly were uttered.

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The post On Rize (Or Forcing A Luxury Highrise On A Neighbourhood That Really Doesn’t Want It) appeared first on Ouno Design.

Geoffrey West: The surprising math of cities and corporations. How come it’s so hard to kill a city?

There is an interesting discussion of West’s idea in the NYT.

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The post Plea for low-rise density & lament for Chinatown appeared first on Ouno Design.

In the middle of fighting a mad urban planning fiasco in Vancouver, it was heartening to see this news from another city: Seoul rips out freeways and allows the sun back onto a river.

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The post Unpaving paradise – Seoul rips out a freeway to expose a river appeared first on Ouno Design.

In 1967 a group of citizens waged a fractious and clever fight against a massive freeway system that would have flattened much of  Vancouver’s downtown core and surrounding heritage districts. The fight was led by Vancouver citizens Shirley and Mary Chan, Mike Harcourt  (later mayor and then premier of the province) and many other volunteers.

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The post Vancouver urban planning fights: freeways 1967; mega-casinos 1994 & 2011 appeared first on Ouno Design.

You may have seen the work of architect Marco Casagrande here before—his Walking Barns series in Finland or his Chen House in Taiwan. He is now involved in a project in Taiwan called Ruin Academy.

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Pierre Trudeau (white suit) entering Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre, UN-Habitat Conference on Human Settlements, 1976. Courtesy CBC. All rights reserved.

Happy World Habitat Day! I bet you didn’t know that the UN has declared October 1 World Habitat Day.

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