By Erick Villagomez
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When Density Meets Disgust
Walk down a crowded city street and you might marvel at its vibrancy—people brushing past each other, buildings packed like puzzle pieces, the hum of...
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Four Projections, One Crisis
What happens when four different reports give four different answers to the same housing question? Every few months, a new report is released with a...
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Who Gets to Lobby?
When most people hear the word lobbyist, they think of expensive suits, closed-door meetings, and backroom deals. In Vancouver, as in most Canadian...
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Book Review: A Moratorium on New Construction
Author: Charlotte Malterre-Barthes (Sternberg Press, 2025) In a world addicted to growth and building, a call to put the brakes on construction is to...
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The Slow Emergency, Part II: The Emergency Escalates
What began as a procedural memo has become a full-blown shift in how decisions are made. The City of Vancouver’s September 2025 rezoning...
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The Coriolis Effect, Part IV: When Viability Becomes Destiny
In my earlier Coriolis Effect series (Part I, Part II, and Part III), I argued that city planning has been quietly absorbed into the logic of the...
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Book Review – Histories of Ecological Design: An Unfinished Cyclopedia
Author: Lydia Kallipoliti (Actar, 2024) In an era when “green” is a brand and climate collapse is a backdrop, Lydia Kallipoliti’s Histories of Ecological...
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Defining “Viability”…and Who Decides What Counts?
There’s a word that shows up a lot in housing debates—one that tends to end conversations rather than deepen them: viability. I hear this word constantly...
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The Singapore Chronicles: Divergent Models
The city, we’re often told, is a model—something to be learned from, exported, improved. But what happens when models conflict? What if the city itself...
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The Singapore Chronicles: Conclusion
Singapore leaves an impression not just of a place, but of a proposition. A city built with such clarity of purpose and orchestration that it appears less...
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The Singapore Chronicles: Designing for Urban Health
In the closing days of our field school, we sat around a modest table in a conference room overlooking the city skyline. It was our final debrief, and the...
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The Singapore Chronicles: Memory in the Margins
Pulau Ubin, a small island northeast of mainland Singapore, serves as both a geographical and symbolic edge to the city-state’s narrative of modernity...