One of the things I love about my new neighbourhood of Fairfield, in Victoria (BC, Canada) is the variety of "faces" presented by homes in the community. Each house, condo or apartment has a different look (no cookie cutter concepts here) but most importantly every yard reflects an individual personality.
Some yards are manicured like English gardens. Others are a charming tangle of wildflowers. Some walkways are concrete, others stone or brick. There are little picket fences and tall hedges.
Walking home the other day from an amble down to the waterfront, I passed this home. It offers even more to the neighbourhood than most - it offers flowers and trust.
The front yard sports an impressive array of carefully pruned flowers. I'll never know my flowers by name - but I'm no less impressed by the wafts of scents and the spray of colours.
The unpredictability of urban sidewalks was an attraction to Jane Jacobs. As we started our recent Jane’s Walk, we noted elements that add ‘clutter’ to the sidewalk – flower pots and standing signs. They interrupt the flow of a sidewalk and in doing so slow the movement. They are like sidewalk versions of traffic calming. People sometimes have to pause, let another person step around the standing sign or pot on the walkway.
As an urban planner on our walk noted, you have to be careful to ensure that those sidewalk amenities don’t impede wheelchairs, or the ability of a couple to walk side-by-side. But as long as those fundamentals are in place, clutter creates interest. Our eyes are constantly roaming, from a sandwich board to a window display to a doorway to people passing by. A roaming eye, looking for items of interest.
Feet on the street and eyes on the community. Two fundamentals of the work of urban thinker Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) resonate with me – the idea that an urban environment is best understood at ground level, and that observant citizens can make a difference.
On the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the late Jane Jacobs is still a presence on the urban scene. Three recent books extend and confront her legacy.
In Reconsidering Jane Jacobs, urban planners grapple with her legacy and the fact that in many ways she was anti-planning. She was certainly opposed to the big gestures of monolithic developments – whether those were government offices, overly planned parks, or commercial tracts.
There is much talk, in recent years, about the sustainability of our society, our lifestyles, our cities.
This has been a long, cold, snowy winter for much of North America. Weather has a way of humbling us, if only briefly.
Our biggest SUVs won’t navigate snow clogged or icy roadways, planes can’t take off on snowed-in runways. When the power lines come down, we shiver in poorly insulated homes that don’t have a hope of keeping us warm.
I am also struck, when the temperatures really drop, by the clouds of ice fog in our cities. Car exhaust, bus exhaust, steam shooting from office buildings and industrial sites – we pour heat and moisture into the air, where it instantly becomes crystal.
On a cold day in northern climes, we are given a very visible indication of our society – and how unsustainable it is.
At times, it’s almost impossible to see through the swirling clouds of exhaust.
The simple reminder that these scenes provide is that we can’t do this forever. That’s my definition of sustainability – can you do this forever? We can’t burn fossil fuels like this forever – they will at some point be depleted. Even if you are an optimist and think that we will replace all these fossil fuels with new energy sources, for how long can we continue to pour these levels of heat into the atmosphere?
Will we rebuild all these leaky, poorly insulated, ignorant buildings within a few years, when petroleum supplies suddenly decline?
Our northern cities seem largely oblivious to this reality. Millions of us live in climates that can not, in the long term, sustain this level of human activity.
Our weather reminds us, regularly, that it is more powerful than us. For the most part, we choose not to listen.
As the world's cities become increasingly multicultural, one wonders how smoothly - or not - they will deal with diversity.
At the recent Pathways 2 Sustainability 2011 conference, there was much consensus on the need for cities to source food closer to home, to cut carbon footprints, to offer alternatives to private car travel, and to consider balance sheets that look at more than monetary measures.
Our urban places are complex places. Cities are where, in today's digital world, the ideas and issues of our society often originate and get acted upon.
In a quickly-changing world, businesses and individuals must be nimble in order to stay ahead of, or keep up with, changes. How good are our cities at being nimble?
That's a question I asked recently on The Urban Times blog site - and I would be interested in your comments. What examples have you seen of nimble civic organizations?
We citizens of the world are increasingly citizens of cities. The places that concern us, that interest us, that engage us on a daily basis are our urban places - our streets and neighbourhoods.
For many people, urban planning is a distant and irrelevant activity until it begins to change - or prevent change - in one's own neighbourhood.
People who do get engaged in helping guide the future of their cities are often dismayed to find out that the "vision" they created in upbeat workshops fails to get implemented after professionals have had their go.
As we know, we wear these statements like badges of accomplishment in our society, in these early years of the 21st century. That's not likely to change significantly for some time.
Through the busyness, we seek clarity and direction. As I transition from defining myself primarily as a consultant to a renewed focus on the "writer" and "student of urban ideas" labels, I have written and found a few pieces that may interest you.
Walking home the other day from an amble down to the waterfront, I passed this home. It offers even more to the neighbourhood than most - it offers flowers and trust.
nother person step around the standing sign or pot on the walkway.
On the 50th anniversary of the publication of 
This has been a long, cold, snowy winter for much of North America. Weather has a way of humbling us, if only briefly.
