By Erick Villagomez
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Book Review – Black Public Joy: No Permit or Permission Required
Author: Jay Pitter (Penguin Random House, 2026) What is public space for? Most planners would answer with some combination of safety, accessibility...
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If We Have a Housing Shortage, Why Are We Buying Empty Condos?
Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier David Eby recently announced a plan to purchase vacant condominium units and convert them into affordable housing...
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Vancouver’s Villages Debate in Plain English
If you’ve heard people talking about Vancouver’s proposed Villages Plan and wondered what all the fuss is about, you’re not alone. The...
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Book Review – Planning the Future of Abu Dhabi: A Canadian-Emirati Collaboration for Sustainable Urbanism
Edited by Larry Beasley and Michael White (UBC Press/On Point Press, 2026) There is a version of city-building that planners often imagine, if not quietly...
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Last-Mile Urbanism
A small cube-shaped robot rolls carefully along a crowded sidewalk, weaving between patio tables, cyclists, utility poles, and pedestrians carrying...
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From Exception to Entitlement
Vancouver is once again asking a familiar question: how tall should the city grow? Framed through the City’s ongoing review of the Higher Buildings...
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Community Centres…and The Costs We Don’t See
On a weekday afternoon, a community centre in Vancouver hums in a way that rarely makes it into policy announcements. A seniors’ exercise class wraps up...
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UCS #93: Value for Money – Vancouver-Style
See our Launch and Introduction about the launch of the © Urban Cartoon Syndicate and the announcement by CityHallWatch. *** Related Readings...
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Caste, Cities, and the Hidden Architecture of Inequality
Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents offers one of the most compelling reframings of inequality in recent public discourse. Rather...
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Reconciliation as Development Strategy
In recent years, Indigenous histories, place names, and knowledge systems have moved from the margins of urban development into its foreground. Land...
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Rethinking Housing Economics
“The edifice of economic theory constructed over the last two centuries, to an extent in the shadow of physics, has been refuted time and again.” ...
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The (Ur)banality of Evil
“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are...