Archive for March, 2009
Tax breaks, recession, and cluster development
Monday, March 30th, 2009 An intriguing article ran in The Vancouver Sun on Friday about the video game programming industry. As of the Fall of 2008, 44% of the 14,000 Canadian “Entertainment software” employees were in metro Vancouver, 37% in Montreal, and 14% in Ontario.
“Vancouver is unique in that the industry has grown up without a lot of tax […]
City politics are where it’s at
Sunday, March 29th, 2009Recently, popular interest in city-based politics and municipal government activity has grown — whether in metro Vancouver (as Frances Bula ponders) or most areas of North America. Meanwhile many city daily newspapers are failing. I think there is a connection.
Cities are becoming the engines of economic growth as the knowledge economy and urban service sectors […]
Cities Losing their Newspapers
Monday, March 16th, 2009San Francisco, Seattle, Denver. Three cities that have — or are about to — lose a daily newspaper. The list may grow as large publishers of many city dailies world wide are in financial difficulty. One thing economic downturns are good at is exposing products, companies or industries that are no longer viable.
So why are […]
Building on Richard Florida’s light-based urban measurements
Saturday, March 14th, 2009 The majority of the world economy is increasingly the aggregate production of a limited number of mega-metro regions. Meanwhile, with more than half the world’s population now living in urban areas, a large number of mega-metropolis are under-performing, whether measured economically or in the social well being of citizens.
Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander and Tim Gulden […]
Urban Chickens or Pigs Anyone?
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009It looks like barnyard animals could be making an urban comeback in North America.
The Toronto Star summarized a Dutch firm’s idea of farming pigs vertically, in multi-storey buildings. Apparently it’s more ecologically responsible:
Proposed by the Dutch architectural firm MVRDV, the argument is that it’s more efficient to raise swine in highrise farms than on the […]
Follow your nose
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009Here’s a great map of the best Chinese food restaurants in the greater Vancouver area. What’s not surprising is that they roughly mimic current and historical settlement places of Chinese immigrants. From the original Chinatown just east of downtown in the 1890s, Asian (mostly Chinese) immigrants gradually spread their businesses south along Main Street, developing […]
Cities and states of nature
Monday, March 9th, 2009Drug cartel wars in Mexico’s borderlands as well as Taliban and tribal Afghanistan heroin production can generate violence and lawlessness in individual cities thousands of kilometres away. And city governments often lack the policing and even legal means to stop the chaos and control their streets.
There are as many examples as there are cities (Toronto […]
Condo units in the downturn: vertical sprawl
Sunday, March 1st, 2009Well located, condominium units in Vancouver’s uber-chic Yaletown have become as challenging to sell these days as a generic single family home in the suburbs. As the residential real estate market has softened, it has hit some homes harder than others.
The economic principle of “scarcity” has been evident. Where there is “geographic constraint” or a […]