This is a strange moment for me, but this post brings all of you news that I am going to be writing from France and Italy very temporarily. That means I’ll still be following the usual Vancouver civic dramas, thanks to the wonders of modern and technology and ongoing emails from my spies, but [...]

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It’s a difficult story to follow but the Saga of Northeast False Creek is a fascinating one and will continue to develop because there are so many interests at play in that area, the big stretch of land that faces the Olympic village across False Creek.
There’s a tussle over whether the Vancouver Art Gallery will [...]

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While trolling the Great Big Internet Sea for something else, I stumbled across this essay from the author of the recent book attracting attention in the human-psychology world, Where Am I? Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon But Get Lost in the Mall. One more take on the debate about taking space [...]

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I had a story in the Globe this morning about the Vision Vancouver council’s move to promoting open-source government, which is already generating quite a buzz in certain nerdy info-tech circles to judge by my Google alerts. Ironically, the Globe had a glitch that prevented several stories in the B.C. edition from getting posted to [...]

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Because this topic seems to be generating a lot of controversy, I will do a bit of notebook dumping here to give everyone all the evidence available before they come to a verdict.  And then we can move on to other things.

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The wheels of Freedom of Information grind slowly, slowly, but I finally got an answer last week to two questions: What record was there of meetings attended by the city’s chief financial officer, Estelle Lo, related to the Olympic Village? And what emails did she send to city hall staffers or councillors about the village?
According [...]

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A Geoff Meggs blog is sometimes like getting to wander around city hall and pick up the latest stats off department-head desks. Here’s his latest post, with info on the level of building activity in Vancouver. Up a little — though not up enough that the Vision council will be cancelling any time soon their [...]

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Vancouver’s famous view corridors have prompted more anguished howls from architects than almost anything else I can think of over the years. Now, the city is looking at re-examining them. (And, as the sharp-eyed people at skyscraper.com have noted, the posting for people to run the public consultation went up on city website Friday. You [...]

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It’s official. The Ritz-Carlton project being developed by the Holborn Company is now being cancelled, with letters going on to buyers this week, as reported by Bruce Constantineau at the Sun.
This is sure to rev up the engines of those critical of what’s happened at Little Mountain, the social-housing project that the province awarded to [...]

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Sorry, it’s taken me a while to get this up (I’ll spare you the details why), but I promised in my Twitter tweet to provide more details on Gregor Robertson’s speech to the Urban Development Institute, aka the developer crowd, Friday.
To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. It sounded [...]

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