Tag: Urban Planning
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Jane Jacobs on Toronto’s Split Personality
This isn’t a dead city. There doesn’t seem to be much creativity at the top. It seems to me that Toronto has a split personality, a civic schizophrenia. On the one level there’s the spirit of individuals and small groups who do things, what you might call the vernacular spirit. This is all very informal…
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Dying Young by Ninj
The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2680 BC and is still going strong almost five millenia later. The Parthenon was errected in 27 BC and is still keepin’ it real more than 20 centuries later. Notre Dame Cathedral was completed in 1330 AD and has been doing its thing without interruption for the…
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Jane Jacobs on Old Buildings
As for new ideas of any kind – no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be – there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error, and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.…
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Fire Insurance Maps of Calgary
Back in the early days of fire insurance, when you wanted to insure a building, the insurance company would send a underwriter to view the building and gain a first hand appreciation of the risk. As cities began to expand at the turn of the century, this became less practical and a new solution came…
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Infill Housing Analysis Idea
Multi-unit infill housing is becoming very popular for developers in Calgary, but are the prices of the new individual units more or less affordable than the former residence which was bulldozed? Idea: Analyze the pre-teardown sale price and post-construction sales prices to determine if infill housing is driving inflation of prices at a housing-unit level.