The Greenest City 2020 targets set forth a lofty collection of goals – from carbon neutral construction parameters to clean water and air standards. A recent reconfiguration of the goals manages to downgrade many of the parameters – bringing Vancouver slightly back to the future in 2011. Still, the city of Vancouver wants to ensure [...]
Imagine you open the newspaper tomorrow morning (or your iPhone news app) and you see your name, front-and-centre, in the obituaries. Or imagine you receive an email notification that your wife is dead while she’s sitting right next to you. Deathswitch, Dead Man’s Switch and similar websites, offer the “service” of spreading the word of [...]
With new football stadiums under construction in Vancouver and Winnipeg, two more proposed in Hamilton and Regina, and new hockey arenas on the drawing board in Edmonton, Calgary and Quebec City, a stadium boom is on the horizon for seven of Canada’s major cities. Such projects typically demand some public funding, often gathered by team [...]
Despite what the cliché tells us, sports and politics do mix, and probably more often than you’d think. So, partially as a year in review, and partially as an indicator of what this blog is about, here are five occasions from this past year when sports and politics collided in Canada. 1) Vancouver Games inspire cross-country [...]
The laneway housing bylaw passed by Vancouver city council in July 2009 sparked a heated debate that is still raging concerning Vancouver’s need for more affordable housing and the entire concept of “EcoDensity.” Many residents of Vancouver are asking where, exactly, the city hopes to find the balance between “eco” and “density” in a housing market [...]
At the struggling Olympic Village development in southeast False Creek, two 18-foot sparrows dwarf the quiet landscape. The statues were supposed to emphasize the importance of nature – to reverse the traditional roles of humans and animals. But as the site struggles to attract residents, the birds easily rule over the empty urban plaza. The City [...]
Ulya Fomina’s husband wasn’t a particularly generous or loving man. He exchanged the flowers (Russian) she got on their wedding day for money, complained if the tomatoes in his salad were cut the wrong way and forced her to buy him expensive clothes. After they divorced, he stripped their apartment of wallpaper, hauled out the [...]
When Sudarshan Shetty created “History of Loss,” a massive art installation featuring rows of three-foot-long Volkswagen Beetles stacked in clear Plexiglass boxes, he intended to draw attention to the changing reality of transportation. Shetty, an up-and-coming artist from India, cast 42 identical Beetle replicas out of aluminum before dropping them individually from a height of [...]
Walking into the UBC campus bookstore this year, I saw smartphone-equipped college students packed into seemingly endless lines at campus bookstores. Most perused the thousands of books out of sheer obligation, a few seemed keen. Everyone in the building understood one simple concept. The price of necessity. The students need the bookstore for course material [...]
In order to get God’s attention, my Polish grandmother used to cross herself. He wouldn’t listen, she said, unless she tapped the fingertips of her right hand systematically against her forehead, chest, left and right shoulders – in that order. This was the required pattern. It was God’s phone number, effectively. But nowadays it’s even [...]
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