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

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

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