Planning Pool

Having made many eastbound trips along I-8 from San Diego to other locations (sometimes Phoenix, other times further), I’m fairly familiar with the subject of this week’s video…

Welcome to Fail Week here on PlanningPool! All week we will be bringing you information about bad planning, lack of planning, and planning generally gone awry.

On Twitter, people use hashtags ("#") to talk about a topic, in this case the failings of public transit.

At PlanningPool, we’re big fans of Twitter, because it’s a tool that combines the less high-tech (cell phones) with the more high tech (internet) and gets people in touch with each other. For planning, Twitter can be used as a public engagement tool, like with Portland’s @PDXplan. Twitter can also be used to mobilize people, as was famously done with the Iran elections.

One of the more complicated aspects of Twitter are hashtags. Hashtags are words preceded by the … Continue Reading

Drought-stricken farmland in Australia, between Melbourne and Sydney. Thanks to Beleobus on Flickr for the great Creative Commons photo.

Today, PlanningPool is coming to you live from the Symposium on Resilience at the University of British Columbia, where we just presented a lively panel discussion about Digital Media. (Our slides are online here.) Thanks to Karen Quinn Fung and Frances Bula for participating in the discussion!

An interdisciplinary panel of graduate students and professionals are currently discussing the critical planning issue of “Uncertain Water Supplies: Increasing the resiliency of development to water crises”. Planning graduate student Asrai Ord introduced the panel with the observation that a majority of Canadians believe in the “myth of abundance.” Unfortunately, frequent claims that Canada does not have to worry … Continue Reading

Hundreds of Edmontonians came out to City Hall last Monday to support the second reading of the new draft growth plan, The Way We Grow. Thanks to Mastermaq on flickr for the wonderful Creative Commons photo!

Thanks largely to a local alliance of citizen advocates, the City of Edmonton, Canada, is moving forward with a draft Growth Plan that gets serious about food security. The Greater Edmonton Alliance, composed mostly of churches and unions, has played a key role in shaping the draft plan, entitled The Way We Grow. (A giant PDF file lurks behind the link, but is definitely worth a read.)

Edmonton is located at the northern edge of North America’s wheat belt and is surrounded by a wealth of productive farmland, especially … Continue Reading

If you’re in Vancouver on Friday morning and have some time, drop by the University of British Columbia’s Graduate Student Society building and see us present about digital media & public engagement! Registration is $25 for students and you can find out more information here.

Hope to see you then!

Edited to add:
Our introductory slides for this panel are now available on Slideshare here. Panelist Karen Quinn Fung’s slides will also be made available on Slideshare in the next few days.

Gazing toward the future, and hopefully beyond these dismal economic times, what will cities look like? Though it’s easy to get excited about the technologies that might shape the built realities of civilization, any sociologist will tell you that cities are at least equally defined by their inhabitants…

Vancouver’s 2010 Olympic Winter Games claim to be the ‘greenest’ games ever. But are carbon offsets actually effective?

The baffling Second Shortest Cycle Path in Leeds is a top-notch example of planning Fail as seen in the World's Worst Cycle Lanes pool on Flickr. Thanks to Phill Davison for the Creative Commons photo.

Every city has at least one example. It’s the shopping area with no sidewalk, the expensive megaproject development standing empty, the misguided neighbourhood plan adopted without citizen engagement….

Now that Chicken Week is wrapped up and the urban hens are asleep on their backyard perches, we here at PlanningPool are looking ahead to our next week of themed posts. We are pleased to announce that from March 8 to 12, we will bring you Fail Week! Join us as we explore examples of terrible planning, lack of planning, and … Continue Reading

As you or may not have noticed, Planning Pool has been streamlined over the past week to improve site performance and to place greater focus on some of the features that readers enjoy most.  Additionally, we’re redoubling efforts to highlight some of the cool things about the site that fly under the radar.  One such feature is our multimedia library, where we post our own photos and video, as well as interesting things from other sites.  In order to make this content a little more accessible, Planning Pool will showcase a new video every Tuesday.

So, without further ado…

Envision Lancaster County- 2009 National Award for Smart Growth Achievement from Abby Hall on … Continue Reading

A banner in support of Insite, Vancouver's safe injection facility. Thanks to Roland Tanglao for the Creative Commons photo.

January 14 brought good news – at least for now –  for residents of the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, Canada, and more broadly for supporters of harm reduction policies. That’s when the British Columbia Court of Appeal upheld a decision made by the British Columbia Supreme Court back in 2008 which ruled that the closure of InSite would violate the Charter right of the facility’s users to “security of the person”.

Vancouver’s only supervised injection site, InSite has provided intravenous drug users with a safe place to inject drugs and access care services, including addiction counselling and treatment, since 2003. Working under the harm reduction model, InSite’s … Continue Reading