North America is abuzz with “gov 2.0″, an effort to use technology to make government more transparent, participatory and collaborative. All this energy is great news – it leads to innovation, new levels of transparency and public engagement, and makes government more responsive to its customers: citizens. However, most governments are so busy trying to [...]

For this final instalment of FAIL Week, we take a look at a few places that you would never want to set foot in. These cities and neighbourhoods are meant to be experienced in a bucket seat, and it shows! 1. Eagle Bend, Jacksonville, Florida (The entrance has no sidewalk.) View Larger Map According to Walkscore.com, this [...]

We all know that outdated legislation can often be one of the largest barriers change. Up until 2009, in the state of Colorado it was illegal to have a rain barrel and still is illegal for a majority of its residents. They would probably not hang you for it and it was mostly [...]

In tackling the subject of British Columbia’s meat inspection regulations, I must begin by admitting that I am not the likeliest author. For starters, I’m a vegetarian. Secondly, although someday I would love to keep urban chickens, my agricultural experience is pretty much limited to growing herbs and tomatoes on my apartment patio. However, the [...]

Planning fails are often the physical manifestation of misguided perceptions. Though well-intentioned, perpetuating outdated beliefs is irresponsible; green solutions should have green outcomes. The article ‘Green solutions come from many directions,’ published in the Vancouver Sun on March 9, 2010 refers to a survey in late 2009 that lists “sustainability issues in transportation” as Vancouver, BC’s [...]

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. 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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?

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Getting the price of parking right can be more important than you think, and in Part 2 of this two-part series, we see how San Francisco has been trying to perfect their parking price, and how it can make the city more liveable.

Most people see a low price as an opportunity. But economists see prices as a way of relaying important information about the product. Find out why we may be sending the wrong information with parking rates, and why getting it right could change everything.

How much fishing is too much, and what decisions can we make to secure the health of our marine ecosystems? The answer to these and other questions about managing our marine ecosystem have confounded policy makers for decades. A new interactive scenario exploration program being developed at the University of British Columbia just might be the [...]

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 [...]

Today’s post comes to you from Toronto Chickens, the blog of an underground hen-keeper in Canada’s largest city, where urban hens are not yet legal. As (s)he notes: “Living with chickens below the radar could be stressful at times. Sadly, despite the fact that I would like to share with you my identity, I [...]