Planning Pool

In case it is not yet obvious, chickens are now hip. Reacting to concerns about local food security, factory farming and dislocation between urban dwellers and their food, people who used to buy their eggs at the store are deciding instead to keep a few hens in a backyard coop. Cities around North America are changing their bylaws to allow households to keep chickens. Posh dwelling options for these urban hens abound, including stylish molded plastic Eglus imported from England.

The photo from Seattle shows children at last year’s Northwest Folklife Festival checking out the Seattle Urban Farm Co’s display. The little purple and yellow coop, built from recycled materials, illustrates the minimum amount of backyard space that residents would need to devote … Continue Reading

Over the course of a few decades, a neighbourhood’s demand for school infrastructure can change dramatically. Changes in population size or composition fuel the need for new schools or erode the viability of existing ones. The effects of these demographic changes are highly localized, since the residential catchment area of an urban elementary school is generally less than a one kilometer radius around the school site.

Cranberry School in Powell River, BC, shown above, was closed in 1983. Its playing fields are still maintained and used by local sports teams, but children from the Cranberry neighbourhood now attend school in other parts of Powell River. To the dismay of local heritage preservationists, the Cranberry School building, built in 1930, sits empty … Continue Reading

The sights and smells of street food can be one of the great experiential pleasures of a city, and every city is different. Carts sell roasted chestnuts on London’s street corners in the wintertime, while New York’s streets bristle with hot dog carts.

Portland, Oregon, shown above, is known for its array of food carts. They seem to sell every kind of food, and some even offer folding chairs to accommodate a leisurely meal.

Meanwhile, the City of Montreal, Quebec, has banned conventional street food carts for decades. While the waffle vendor shown here does technically sell street food, since it is both purchased and consumed on the sidewalk, the food is cooked inside a building and served through a window. Locally, the lack of street food is … Continue Reading

Funding public transit service and infrastructure is a challenge anywhere, but transit providers in small towns and rural areas have even fewer resources to work with. In my travels through small-town British Columbia, I’ve been continually amazed at the resourcefulness demonstrated at bus stops.

Along the Sunshine Coast Highway, where the first photo was taken, bus stops are furnished with every imaginable kind of seating by the people who use them. Lawn chairs are the most common bus stop furniture, but old kitchen chairs are also a favourite design solution. Sechelt is a District Municipality: to qualify for this designation, the incorporated area must be greater than 8 square kilometers in size and have an average population density of fewer than 5 persons per hectare. This … Continue Reading

The venerable Architectural League of New York has fostered interdisciplinary approaches to urbanism since the late 19th century, opening membership to painters and sculptors as well as to architects and other design professionals. Launched earlier this year, its online project Urban Omnibus further expands the organization’s scope by tapping into participatory media culture. It solicits and displays photography in ways that have only became possible in the last few years, and that reflect democratization of the means of producing and disseminating images of the city.

A cold beverage and urban people-watching on a summer’s day – this is the beauty of sidewalk patios. The “eyes on the street” that they bring can make for a safer and more interesting pedestrian environment. Sidewalk patios thrive in pedestrian priority streets like Copenhagen’s Strædet. The Project for Public Spaces even commends their presence overlooking children’s play areas so that parents can drink coffee and socialize while keeping an eye on their charges.

From a regulatory perspective, however, sidewalk patios can be tricky because they not only blur public and private space, but do so in a context where alcohol is served.  When patio space extends onto city property, restaurant owners must apply for a license, typically demonstrating that a proposed patio leaves sufficient … Continue Reading

Once central to urban  life, most North American public markets closed in the mid-twentieth century. Refrigeration, motordom, processed food and the rise of supermarkets all played a role in their decline.

With increasing public interest in local eating, recent years have seen a reversal of fortune for public markets. According to the American nonprofit organization Project for Public Spaces, the number of farmers markets in the United States more than doubled from 1,755 to over 3,700 in the ten years between 1994 and 2004!

Edmonton’s Old Strathcona Farmers Market was founded 25 years ago and is still going strong. Unusual among farmers’ markets, it operates Saturdays year-round in a permanent home, a large heritage building which was once a trolley depot.  Goods … Continue Reading

Oversized Shell Toe Adidas shoe sculptures are located at the corporation’s North American headquarters. For Adidas, the art is the foundation of a publicity stunt and multimedia ad campaign. (The left shoe was painted by artists from the West Coast, while a New-York-based collective provided decoration for the right shoe.) For residents and visitors of Portland, the shoes might represent conflicting meanings: love of skate shoes; East Coast-West Coast rivalry; a splash of colour in the urban environment; an irritating corporate intrusion.

Meanwhile, a huge sculpture of a drill bit looms outside a big-box power centre on the side of Vancouver’s Grandview Highway. Shavings embedded in surrounding landscaping are engraved with Canadian Tire advertising keywords like “fixing” and “driving”. The municipality required this development to include a public art component as a condition of site rezoning. Apparently, the developer’s plan promised artwork … Continue Reading