Last weekend at a book launch party, our host, Simon Fraser University's City Program Director Gordon Price, began the evening by asking each party-goer to answer a fun and provocative question: "Tell us an urban design decision that you love." For a group of city-making wonks like us, it was...

Density can be the most controversial aspect of how cities and communities are planned. It's often nicknamed "the D-Word" because some politicians still actually try to avoid using it in a sentence, and "the third rail of municipal politics" because many prefer not to touch it.

But what I call...

New Year's Eve in Seattle (Brent Toderian)

At this time of year, most of us are thinking hard about New Year's resolutions to make our personal, family and professional lives better. But before we finalize and laminate the list of losing weight, balancing our household...

Last week in Vancouver, the city was hit by a significant (at least by our standards) and unexpected snowfall. For a city more used to being wet than white, the truth is that Vancouver has it pretty easy when it comes to winter weather — the generally mild...

Halloween is my favourite holiday for many reasons. On top of loving to dress up each year, a big reason is it's the holiday most dependent on how we design and build our communities.

In city planning and design, there's an old saying about the "Trick-or-Treat Test." It's often brought...

This week, I watched with concern Canada's largest city have a rhetoric-heavy debate about removing the relatively new separated bike lane on Jarvis Street. They even originally had the intention of using bike-lane funds to remove it!

Bike-lane debates have been going on for some time in...

A few months back, Toronto's deputy mayor started a political flap stating on the floor of city council that downtown was no place to raise kids. "Where's little Ginny? Well, she's downstairs playing in the traffic on her way to the park," he said.

Flap, indeed. Urbanists and...