About
About Me:
Avid traveler, recovering academic, investment strategy researcher, home owner, urban parent…and fascinated by cities and how they work.
My interest in cities is personal and professional, as well as academic. From travels abroad and exploring my own city I have become fascinated with the ways in which all cities are different, and yet the same.
I love exploring different vibrant neighborhoods and seeing how they the people are constantly incorporating new influences, blending them with the old and familiar. Buildings, streetscapes and architecture also tell something of a region’s history — and again how the old and familiar continually mixes with the new.
Unraveling the economic and social forces that make a city work — or fail — is another fascination of mine and frequently appears in blog posts.
In addition to extensive traveling, I’ve lived and worked in several different cities in the US and Canada, and hold dual citizenship. As you might guess from my url, I live in Canada - Vancouver in fact.
In my “day job” I provide research and analysis related to urban economic trends for a large Canadian real estate investment management company.
I have a Ph.D. in Comparative-World and Latin American History (Arizona 1999), with a focus on 20th century economic and transportation history.