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Dresden Germany on Sept 11, 2001 – Urban Memory
The site of the former World Trade Centre towers in New York remains a hole in the ground. Controversy abounds over what to do with the space — how to remember the past and honour the dead, as well as...
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Urban vulnerability reminder
A series of fierce storms dumped record amounts of rain on the Vancouver area over the past two weeks and especially in the past two days. This resulted in strong creek and river run offs into the...
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The Minneapolis Bridge Collapse: Sign of anachronistic times?
Cities in North America and around the world face decaying infrastructure that is often controlled by other levels of government. The costs of repairing, upgrading and expanding a highway network are...
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September 11 – Remembering cities attacked
The firestorm [was] incredible, there [were] calls for help and screams from somewhere but all around [was] one single inferno… suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream[ed] and...
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5 noteworthy happenings of 2007 for cities
In no particular order… 1. The bridge collapse in Minneapolis. This tragedy illustrates the crisis in urban infrastructure funding around North America, driven by the fact that higher levels of...
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Stackable, affordable, fast — and green — housing
The first challenge in building higher density housing these days — or any housing, for that matter — it that it take so long to construct. If a city has a critical shortage of homes, faster solutions...
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Two lessons from a massive CBD power outage
Last week in downtown Vancouver a main electrical cable underground caught fire. At approximately 10 AM, Monday morning, half of the CBD lost power including the building where I work. BC Hydro...
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What the Olympics teach us about urban health
During the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, incidents of hospitalization for asthma declined by 41% according to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The air quality in Beijing...
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The wacky and weird of living in an Olympic host city
Having the Olympic Games in your city at first sounds exciting, exotic and somewhat cool. As the Vancouver Olympic Games approach there have been — and are sure to be many more– elements of that....
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Four Lessons on Emergency Preparedness in Cities
The twin tremor-induced disasters in Christchurch and Sendai, taken in contrast to hurricane Katrina and other disasters, provide at least four lessons for cities and urban residents. First, in a real...
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